Meet Your Meat
July 7, 2010
Yesterday I talked about the mega-farms, how they destroy the environment and the cruelty the animals must endure there. After reading my post a second time I see that I didn’t even get into a small fraction of what these animals endure. This sort of thing is best shown through video.
Beef:
Pork and Bacon:
Chicken:
This is why we have to eat organic food, or even better, become vegetarians. If you eat the normal beef, chicken, and pork found in your supermarket, you’re guilty of supporting this cruel and terrible industry. Sad thing is, without these cruel techniques a significant portion of our population would starve. Food prices would go way up and most couldn’t afford them. As David Attenborough said at the end of his Life Of Mammals series, it’s time for us to control our population to save the environment. The more humans we hatch out, the more this sort of thing will go on.
If we continue business as usual, the only species which will survive are our pets and these domesticated farm animals who endure this harsh and terrible treatment. Natural habitats are being ravaged and destroyed all to make room for farms like these and to build us more homes.
I had to turn my head when they jammed that blade into the animals’ necks as they hung there then suffocated on their own blood. I can’t imagine what that feels like. Then that pig fell to the ground squirming around, bleeding to death. At the start of the first film you see that cow being castrated, no pain killers, just whacking off its testicles. It’s trapped in those bars writhing in pain.
It’s so strange that we have animal cruelty laws regarding our pets, such as dogs and cats, but then treatment such as this is completely ignored and brushed away. This is far worse than anything most dogs and cats endure. Thing is, there’s money in beef, pork, and chicken sales. Since that’s the case, this sort of thing is ignored.
Just watch the films. They’re so gruesome I don’t even want to talk about them.
When I study neuroscience, it’s amazing that you find the same sorts of brain structures in animals as we have in humans. In us, our outer 6 mm of neo-cortex is where consciousness resides. It’s where we see, feel, taste, smell, and so on. Read my introduction to the subject here. Those pigs and cattle have the same structures. I’m not sure about chickens as I’ve never examined their brains. I assume they have some of them as well. When you’re jamming that blade in their necks, there’s consciousness residing in those animals. They’re just as alive as us humans. There’s a living being there, suffering and in pain.
Animals are just as alive as we are. It’s only our mistaken beliefs, many originating in our superstitious religious systems, that disconnect us from the true nature of life. We can’t allow this sort of treatment to continue. This is just as important an issue as torture and human rights. These are crimes against life itself.
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Mega-Farms Have To Go
July 6, 2010
Sometimes I feel like a stuck record, raving on and on about how we’re destroying the environment and need to change the way we live. Even so, I’m sorry; I just can’t help it. Only 5% of our farms in this country are “mega-farms”, which may sound like a small number, yet they produce 50% of our animal produce. So what’s a mega-farm look like?
These cows are unable to move freely, stuck in metal cages. Giant hoses spray their little concrete cages to clean out the manure. Disease can be rampant as there’s so many animals unnaturally crammed so close together. These animals have to be pumped with all kinds of antibiotics just to be able to live in these conditions. All the manure is shipped off to waste lagoons which are disease breeding grounds. Millions and millions of flies gather breeding in the nastiness.
These cows produce 23x the waste of a human being. Combined, the amount of waste involved in one mega-farm is equivalent to that of a city with 186,000+ people. Yet, unlike a city where the waste is treated in sewage plants, this waste is just thrown out onto the countryside as fertilizer.
Soil tests around the mega-farms surrounding area show dense concentrations of e. coli, salmonella, listeria, cryptosporidium, and other pathogens, all of which are disease causing pathogens.
And you want to know how they kill these cows? They herd them up in a line and then lead them into this room with a swinging iron bar, which is sort of like a pendulum. Then they bash the cow’s head against the wall, crushing its skull and splattering its brains all over the wall. It saves them the cost of a bullet.
Cows aren’t the only animals treated this way. Chickens and pigs are subjected to similar treatment.
Families who live near these places complain about the hydrogen sulphide, which is a gas given off by these places. It causes nausea, neurological damage, and unbearable odor. You’ll hear stories about families where the children keep getting sick and they visit the doctor. The doctor then tells them they need to move because the child’s immune system can’t handle living near the mega-farm. When these farms move in, everyone who lives in the area tries to move off as the air becomes unbreatheable, but they’re never able to sell their homes.
But you want to know the bigger problem? There’s too many people on this planet. Where do you think all those Hardees cheeseburgers and McDonald’s chicken nuggets come from? This is where all that cheap meat and chicken comes from. Hardly anyone buys organic food, so where does the non-organic stuff come from? The majority of it comes from mega-farms. We couldn’t even support our population without using these cruel and terrible techniques.
And you know what’s so ironic? I’ve planned never to have children because I feel ethically convicted about the Earth’s over-population. But, I was with family over the fourth of July holiday and I was talking with some family friends and relatives. One guy was talking about a distant nephew of his who has seven children. SEVEN.
Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and just yell out, “Whatever…” and walk off. Honestly, I feel like I’m living in that movie Idiocracy.
I spent today watching a series of lectures on the physics of the impossible. Some of the lectures were on chaos theory and talked about how difficult it is to predict the future. Even in a deterministic universe, just small degree of imprecision in starting condition measurements can lead to major inaccuracies in distant predictions. Predicting the future becomes impossible because we can never measure our starting conditions with infinite accuracy. You get things like the infamous ‘butterfly effect’, where a butterfly flaps its wings in a jungle somewhere in Brazil, which eventually leads to tornadoes in Texas. Other lectures were on quantum mechanical effects experienced at absolute zero. Another lecture was on statistical mechanics and the extraction of energy from heat engines and reflections on whether it’s possible to beat the efficiency of a Carnot engine.
Then I go out for a walk to exercise and listen to economics lectures and history. Then I come back inside and study some Cosmology. I feel connected and one with the universe, reflecting on it all. The problems of this world become clearer and clearer to me each day, even though I still have a lot to learn.
Then I start to get too tired to study further. I open up Firefox and start reading the news, or looking around YouTube or go out shopping. Everything around me is mindless. When you go to the store, whether it be the books or the magazines or the newspapers… it’s all dumbed down for people with an IQ of 20.
This world is absolutely insane. People are blowing each other up over religious superstition. They’re watching UFC fights on their television for entertainment. They listen to mindless propaganda, hatred and racism from the mainstream media. They go to the movies and it’s all violence and blowing things up.
Our culture is just depraved and empty and no matter how hard I try I can’t escape it. I’ll be in the waiting room someplace for an appointment, or out buying groceries and I hear music like this:
Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans)
Boots with the fur (with the fur)
The whole club was looking at her
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low
Them baggy sweat pants
And the Reebok’s with the straps (with the straps)
She turned around and gave that big booty a smack (hey)
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, lowI ain’t never seen something that’ll make me go
This crazy all night spending my doe
Had the million dollar vibe and a body to go
Them birthday cakes they stole the show
So sexual
She was flexible professional
Drinking X&O
Hold up, wait a minute, do I see what I think? Whoa….
- FLO Rida feat T-Pain, Low
I feel like a prude, but man, this music belongs in a dumpster somewhere and doesn’t need to be polluting young people’s ears. It certainly doesn’t belong in waiting rooms. Whatever happened to say John Lennon’s Stand By Me, or Fat Domino’s Blueberry Hill. What happened to popular music? It’s degenerated into mindless trash. Just compare that video to popular music not too long ago.
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by meAnd darling, darling stand by me
Oh, now, now, stand by me
Stand by me, stand by me…
John Lennon, Stand By Me
I found my thrill
On Blueberry Hill
On Blueberry Hill
When I found youThe moon stood still
On Blueberry Hill
And lingered until
My dream came trueThe wind in the willow played
Love’s sweet melody
But all of those vows you made
Were never to beThough we’re apart
You’re part of me still
For you were my thrill
On Blueberry Hill- Fats Domino, Blueberry Hill
The last movie I watched, just to try to stay somewhat in touch with society, was Iron Man. It was terrible, especially compared to a much better film like H.G. Wells The Time Machine, the 1960 adaptation. Iron Man is mindless action, no thought, and all special effects. The Time Machine delves deep into the problems mankind faces.
In The Time Machine, similar to Iron Man, the story focuses around a brilliant inventor. Unlike Iron Man however, where Tony Stark is an egotistical idiot, the main character of The Time Machine is a concerned scientist disgusted with war and the age in which he lives. The government is trying to enlist him to create weapons and he just wants to live in a world where humanity lives in peace and harmony. So he plans to build himself a time machine and warp out of there. He then warps himself 20 years into the future, to 1920. There’s more wars and destruction. He then warps to 1960. He finds atom bombs and wars. So he keeps warping further and further into the future, hoping to escape humanity’s madness. Eventually he ends up in the year 800,000 AD. I won’t ruin the plot. You’ll have to watch it for yourself.
And I can see people now, “Oh Jason, you just don’t know how to have a good time…” No. Humanity is messed up in the head. I’m not the one messed up. I entertain myself peacefully, reflecting on quantum mechanics, thinking about time travel, wormholes, the origins of the universe, and other meaningful things. I hope to help contribute toward research in clean energy and superconductors. I don’t watch violent films and don’t think about violent things. You shouldn’t either. There’s better ways to entertain yourself that don’t require violence.
I did see one film which had a good theme behind it – Avatar. It was pretty good. I just saw it the other day. It actually somewhat reflected on the things modern neuroscience is pointing to. I think nervous systems of animals can be linked together, just like in that film.
I really get depressed thinking on all of this. I’ve had a lot of ambitions in my life, wanting to accomplish this and that, but nowadays my primary concern is advancing science and just helping bring awareness of the dangers we face in the future. These mega-farms just being one of many things we need to change, not to mention a restoration of decency and basic morality.
We must disarm nuclear missiles. We have to stop using these pesticides on our crops. We can’t keep using these antibiotics and other chemicals which we’re pumping into our livestock. CO2 emissions have to cut back dramatically or we’ll be facing massive crop failures with climate change. We have to stop deforestation of the Earth, and stop burning coal, which acidifies the oceans killing the plankton. Well, that’s not the only thing killing the plankton. They also face increased UV exposure with decreased ozone and oil spills. Without the greenery, the trees and the plankton we all suffocate. Keep that in mind guys.
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Is It True We Only Use 10% Of Our Brain?
July 4, 2010
I’ve had people tell me many times that the average person only uses 10% of their brain’s full capacity. Is this true? No, it’s nonsense. Quoting from a Biological Anthropology textbook of mine:
We have all heard the myth that we humans use only 10% of our brains. Indeed, it is apparent that not only have many people heard it but they believe it. Psychologist Barry Beyerstein (1999) has spent many years researching the origins of this mistaken idea. Although he cannot pinpoint its origins with precision, he has shown that it has been around for quite some time. One of the first groups that latched onto and spread the myth was the early self-improvement (“positive thinking”) industry. For example, a 1929 advertisement states that “scientists and psychologists tell us that we use only about TEN PERCENT of our brain power” and that by enrolling in the course being advertised, a person might tap some of that brain that is not being used. The advertisement uses the 10% figure as though it were common knowledge. This indicates that the origins of the myth must date to significantly earlier than 1929. Although Beyerstein has tried to identify the “scientists and psychologists” who may have said something like this, he has so far failed to find any specific reference to it in the literature.
Even if the 10% figure came from a scientist working at the turn of the twentieth century, the state of the art of neuroscience was not particularly advanced at that time. Most people would agree that any sweeping scientific pronouncement, based on little empirical research, is eventually due for some reconsideration. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence from neurology and psychology that the 10% figure is wholly untenable; it is basically neuro-nonsense.
One of the most compelling arguments against the 10% myth comes from the perspective of energy and evolution. The brain uses a lot of energy. In humans, it accounts for about 2% of the body mass but uses about 10-20% of the total energy and oxygen consumed by the body. It is an “expensive tissue” (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). The brain cannot store significant energy reserves, and is extremely vulnerable if the oxygen supply is cut off.
From an evolutionary standpoint, maintaining such an expensive organ only to use 10% of it does not make any sense. When you consider that there are other costs associated with large brain size (such as birth difficulties; see Chapter 17), if we used only 10% of the brain, there would have been substantial fitness benefits in reducing the brain to a more efficient and less costly size. This did not happen, of course, as brain expansion has characterized evolution in genus Homo.
Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler point out that the brain is not the only expensive tissue in the body. The heart, kidney, liver, and gastrointestinal tract consume at least as much energy as the brain. Human bodies use energy at about the rate that would be expected of a mammal our size. Given that our brains are much larger than would be expected for a mammal our size, how do we maintain the expected energy consumption rate? Aiello and Wheeler argue that a tradeoff with one of the other expensive tissues has occurred. Specifically, at the same time as the brain has increased in size in human evolution, it appears that the stomach and intestines have decreased in size. These size reductions presumably have been accompanied by a reduction in energy use. The smaller gastrointestinal tract also indicates a reliance on higher-quality, easier-to-digest foods (such as meat).
The complex relationship between behavior, brain size, diet, and gut size is one of the most fascinating problems in the study of human evolution. Although it is tempting to see brain size and gut size as engaged in a neat tradeoff, the situation probably was a bit more complex than that. Nonetheless, Aiello and Wheeler make clear that we have to pay for what we have: a large, energy-hungry brain. And a brain that wastes 90% of its volume could never have evolved.
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Some Thoughts On Economic Competition
July 2, 2010
Just yesterday Yamin and I were discussing some economic issues and I brought up the difficulties inherent in becoming a competitor in our modern economy. I laid out some reflections on how difficult the barriers to entry can be and related my experiences from my years as an entrepreneur.
When I woke up I laid in bed for a moment and was thinking about these problems some more. Then funny enough, as I went for my normal walk outdoors I was listening to Ludwig von Mises Human Action on my mp3 player. I just happened to come to his chapter on the market economy and within it there is a section dedicated to economic competition. I thought, “What great timing!” He discusses the same issues and makes some great points. I figured it’d be a great thing to just reproduce the contents of that chapter here and bold various important points. So, here it is.
5. Competition
In nature there prevail irreconcilable conflicts of interests. The means of subsistence are scarce. Proliferation tends to outrun subsistence. Only the fittest plants and animals survive. The antagonism between an animal starving to death and another that snatches the food away from it is implacable.
Social cooperation under the division of labor removes such antagonisms. It substitutes partnership and mutuality for hostility. The members of society are united in a common venture.
The term competition as applied to the conditions of animal life signifies the rivalry between animals which manifests itself in their search for food. We may call this phenomenon biological competition. Biological competition must not be confused with social competition, i.e., the striving of individuals to attain the most favorable position in the system of social cooperation. As there will always be positions which men value more highly than others, people will strive for them and try to outdo rivals. Social competition is consequently present in every conceivable mode of social organization. If we want to think of a state of affairs in which there is no social competition, we must construct the image of a socialist system in which the chief in his endeavors to assign to everybody his place and task in society is not aided by any ambition on the part of his subjects. The individuals are entirely indifferent and do not apply for special appointments. They behave like the stud horses which do not try to put themselves in a favorable light when the owner picks out the stallion to impregnate his best brood mare. But such people would no longer be acting men.
Catallactic competition is emulation between people who want to surpass one another. It is not a fight, although it is usual to apply to it in a metaphorical sense the terminology of war and internecine conflict, of attack and defense, of strategy and tactics. Those who fail are not annihilated; they are removed to a place in the social system that is more modest, but more adequate to their achievements than that which they had planned to attain.
In a totalitarian system, social competition manifests itself in the endeavors of people to court the favor of those in power. In the market economy, competition manifests itself in the fact that the sellers must outdo one another by offering better or cheaper goods and services, and that the buyers must outdo one another by offering higher prices. In dealing with this variety of social competition which may be called catallactic competition, we must guard ourselves against various popular fallacies.
The classical economists favored the abolition of all trade barriers preventing people from competing on the market. Such restrictive laws, they explained, result in shifting production from those places in which natural conditions of production are more favorable to places in which they are less favorable. They protect the less efficient man against his more efficient rival. They tend to perpetuate backward technological methods of production. In short they curtail production and thus lower the standard of living. In order to make all people more prosperous, the economists argued, competition should be free to everybody. In this sense they used the term free competition. There was nothing metaphysical in their employment of the term free. They advocated the nullification of privileges barring people from access to certain trades and markets. All the sophisticated lucubrations caviling at the metaphysical connotations of the adjective free as applied to competition are spurious; they have no reference whatever to the catallactic problem of competition.
As far as natural conditions come into play, competition can only be “free” with regard to those factors of production which are not scarce and therefore not objects of human action. In the catallactic field competition is always restricted by the inexorable scarcity of the economic goods and services. Even in the absence of institutional barriers erected to restrict the number of those competing, the state of affairs is never such as to enable everyone to compete in all sectors of the market. In each sector only comparatively small groups can engage in competition.
Catallactic competition, one of the characteristic features of the market economy, is a social phenomenon. It is not a right, guaranteed by the state and the laws, that would make it possible for every individual to choose ad libitum the place in the structure of the division of labor he likes best. To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual’s social position. Their supremacy is not impaired by any privileges granted to the individuals qua producers. Entrance into a definite branch of industry is virtually free to newcomers only as far as the consumers approve of this branch’s expansion or as far as the newcomers succeed in supplanting those already occupied in it by filling better or more cheaply the demands of the consumers. Additional investment is reasonable only to the extent that it fills the most urgent among the not yet satisfied needs of the consumers. If the existing plants are sufficient, it would be wasteful to invest more capital in the same industry. The structure of market prices pushes the new investors into other branches.It is necessary to emphasize this point because the failure to grasp it is at the root of many popular complaints about the impossibility of competition. Some sixty years ago people used to declare: You cannot compete with the railroad companies; it is impossible to challenge their position by starting competing lines; in the field of land transportation there is no longer competition. The truth was that at that time the already operating lines were by and large sufficient. For additional capital investment the prospects were more favorable in improving the serviceableness of the already operating lines and in other branches of business than in the construction of new railroads. However, this did not interfere with further technological progress in transportation technique. The bigness and the economic “power” of the railroad companies did not impede the emergence of the motor car and the airplane.
Today people assert the same with regard to various branches of big business: You cannot challenge their position, they are too big and too powerful. But competition does not mean that anybody can prosper by simply imitating what other people do. It means the opportunity to serve the consumers in a better or cheaper way without being restrained by privileges granted to those whose vested interests the innovation hurts. What a newcomer who wants to defy the vested interests of the old established firms needs most is brains and ideas. If his project is fit to fill the most urgent of the unsatisfied needs of the consumers or to purvey them at a cheaper price than their old purveyors, he will succeed in spite of the much talked of bigness and power of the old firms.
Catallactic competition must not be confused with prize fights and beauty contests. The purpose of such fights and contests is to discover who is the best boxer or the prettiest girl. The social function of catallactic competition is, to be sure, not to establish who is the smartest boy and to reward the winner by a title and medals. Its function is to safeguard the best satisfaction of the consumers attainable under the given state of the economic data.
Equality of opportunity is a factor neither in prize fights and beauty contests nor in any other field of competition, whether biological or social. The immense majority of people are by the physiological structure of their bodies deprived of a chance to attain the honors of a boxing champion or a beauty queen. Only very few people can compete on the labor market as opera singers and movie stars. The most favorable opportunity to compete in the field of scientific achievement is provided to the university professors. Yet, thousands and thousands of professors pass away without leaving any trace in the history of ideas and scientific progress, while many of the handicapped outsiders win glory through marvelous contributions.
It is usual to find fault with the fact that catallactic competition is not open to everybody in the same way. The start is much more difficult for a poor boy than for the son of a wealthy man. But the consumers are not concerned about the problem of whether or not the men who shall serve them start their careers under equal conditions. Their only interest is to secure the best possible satisfaction of their needs. As the system of hereditary property is more efficient in this regard, they prefer it to other less efficient systems. They look at the matter from the point of view of social expediency and social welfare, not from the point of view of an alleged, imaginary, and unrealizable “natural” right of every individual to compete with equal opportunity. The realization of such a right would require placing at a disadvantage those born with better intelligence and greater will power than the average man. It is obvious that this would be absurd.
When you look at nature, everything is always diverse and different. It’s a survival technique. For example, every one of us has a slightly different DNA sequence, slightly different immune system, different temperaments and personalities, and so on. Evolution tries out all kinds of combinations and those best suited to survival live on. I think our social system is also based around this diversity. Our species is evolving (albeit very slowly) into a complex social structure, with different people preparing for different roles; kind of like how termites have a soldier class which defends, whereas others are workers and take care of the queen. I think in time our social structure will have a biological underpinning where each person enjoys his or her role in society and wouldn’t have it any other way. Society is just such a new thing for mankind that the complex system has yet to fully evolve and develop.
Economic competition as opposed to central planning takes advantage of this same diversification strategy. If you’re living under a regime of central planning, and those plans enforced fail, all hell breaks lose. Take when the Soviets implemented unorthodox farming techniques, hoping to make their seeds survive the cold by freezing them. Some of their quackpot scientists theorized that they’d be more likely to endure harsh weather and didn’t want to believe genetic research going on at the time. This led to massive crop failures and starvation. But if they’d had a more “anarchic” farming model, with each farmer doing his own thing, that diversity would’ve protected them from this.
I think people’s personalities are different so that society can progress in this way. Adventurous types would have been willing to try the new farming model and would’ve failed. More cautious personalities would’ve looked at it all with skepticism demanding proof before attempting it. That being the case, their crops would’ve came out just fine and society could fall back on them for food. This diversity allows society to try new things yet not be destroyed when something fails.
So whatever type of person you are, embrace your uniqueness. Love who you see in the mirror, regardless of how you look, your personality type, your dreams, etc. It’s ok to be you. I think nature made us the way we are for a reason, even though most of us are too shallow minded to see beyond our own personality type.
We live in a world where everyone’s divided. You’re less of a person if you don’t hold a college degree. Anyone who doesn’t believe our religious inclinations is a “heathen” and immoral. We’re scared of people with different sexual preferences and ethnicities. We need to let go of all that.
Mises points out that the free market tends to push us into positions where we’re better suited to serve the consumer. Each of us being unique, we’re each better suited to serve one area of the economy than another. Even though in this model we’re pushed around by consumer demand, I’d far prefer this to state planning with the government telling me where to work and what to do.
As for the arguments I made about difficult barriers to entry, Mises believes this tends to push investment and capital resources into new areas which would be more productive to society. Unfortunately, as he also points out, creating something new requires “brains and ideas”.
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A Conversation With Andre
June 23, 2010
This is an email conversation I had with Mr. Andre Gaudwin.
Andre,
I’m in agreement with you that the way we’re living today is destructive both to ourselves and to our planet. Whether it be our forms of government or our philosophies toward life and the Earth, our planet is taking a serious beating.
I’ve wondered why our leaders do the terrible things that they do. Maybe it is because they primarily concern themselves with reelection and pandering to the dumbest members of society. Maybe it is because they’re just not very smart. Or maybe it’s greed and since they’re only a temporary caretaker, they try to exploit the people and the country to their own personal benefit. Whatever the reason, I wonder if we can continue on the path we’re on without killing ourselves.
With nuclear missiles pointed at every inch of civilization, I sometimes lose sleeping wondering when a missile will fall into the wrong hands and KABOOM, the Earth goes up in a mushroom cloud.
We’re currently ravaging the Earth and destroying the biosphere. Within the next century nearly half of all living species will be killed off as there’s no room for their habitats.
Global warming is a huge threat and could lead to massive crop failures in the future, not to mention massive changes to the environment.
Our views on economics are certainly bad. Unmitigated capitalism leads to large inequalities in wealth, and a class of parasitic mega-rich who sit at the top, doing nothing productive at all. Communism is politically repressive, as the central government enforces equality on a sea of diversity. Can freedom and equality go together? That seems to be the question.
Both economic systems keep people from being all they can be. When politically repressed and forced to be “equal” to their neighbor, they’re not allowed to express and fulfill their own individuality and self-passions. Yet when given freedom in our current economic systems, a small group of greedy bastards control all the money and the average person isn’t able to get his or her hands on enough money to do much of anything worthwhile. They become slaves to money until they eventually die, stuck in the rat-race. Most of them rarely get a chance to live out their true inner passions and dreams. The wealth lingers up in the stratosphere of the mega-rich and never makes it back down to Earth.
The wealthy also then have incentives to keep the status quo in order to keep bringing in their profits. They gain control over the media and stop any meaningful social reforms from taking place. They have incentives to keep the public conversations dumbed down, because a smart public would demand changes in society – changes which would ruin and destroy their power structure. They spread propaganda from all corners of the globe, confusing everyone in a sea of rigged studies and bad data. As everyone who has studied Statistics knows, statistics and data can be rigged to say anything. Percentages and data, without proper randomized controls for example, lead to misleading results. All sorts of poll numbers and “studies” are being quoted, and most of them conflict with one another. People struggle to make sense of all the information they drown in within this “information” age.
This oil spill is a disaster. This is yet another instance of the Earth taking a beating. How long is it before all our drinking water is filled with pesticides? Before all the fish are contaminated with small bits of plastic and other chemicals? Before our modified crops start to cause us all kinds of health problems?
I think we have too many people living on this planet and we’re living on borrowed time, hoping scientists will find cures to the problems we’re creating. But the more people who live on this planet, the more food we’ll need to produce, and that means more destruction of natural habitats as well as genetically modified crops to produce higher yields. And as the third world further industrializes, without clean energy sources they’ll continue burning fossil fuels contributing to massive warming on the planet. They’ll also become worse polluters as their corporations search for ways to save money, and start wrapping their products in plastic, etc.
I recently watched some films by David Attenborough and his ending to his ‘Life Of Mammals’ series was quite powerful.
I think scientists would be able to create new technology to fix these problems, but, as you said, our politicians and leaders waste money building weapons instead of helping the planet. It’s a shame that the brightest members of our society, our scientists and engineers, are subject to some of the dumbest people on our planet — elected officials. If you look at the election process in any detail you see that it’s a complete joke. They stick a few signs up in people’s yards with their name on it, and quote a few party one-liners and pit a mob of mostly uneducated common-folk against one another based on shallow political rhetoric. Also, unless you have millions of dollars for mass media exposure, you’re unlikely to win a powerful seat in our government. This leads to the rich ruling us, mostly to their own benefit. The winners of this political contest then control the funds to our scientists, and they use it for all the wrong things. They use it to build weapons to defend their empires. They use it to steal from and exploit foreigners. They use it to rig the economy further in their favor. And for those who try to fix things, most of them are unqualified and do not understand all the complications involved. They don’t know what they’re doing.
As the power of the state expands, these rather stupid and greedy elected officials are given greater and great control over our lives. In the origins of the United States the government was far less powerful, and life was more simplistic. Most people were farmers and the economy was self-regulating under a laissez-faire model. Now things are much more complicated and we have unqualified and evil people setting the rules for immigration laws, tariffs, taxes, banking regulation, currency supplies, healthcare systems, and other complex economic policies which they do not understand or will exploit nefariously.
But having a completely hands off approach, with very little government at all, doesn’t fix things either. As already mentioned, pure laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t lead to a beautiful world. Corporate greed knows little bounds and they’ll ravage the planet and exploit their workers without any thoughts of long term consequences. They’ll dump their waste in our streams. They’ll exploit their workers until they’re too weak to work and then throw them aside and hire someone else instead. And if the workers unionize to fight for better wages and better working conditions, the rich and powerful will pass new laws allowing poor immigrants into the country to work for them, or even better, they’ll just relocate to an impoverished country and exploit their citizens instead. They’ll work children in hot warehouses exposed to dangerous machinery, and when they’re injured, won’t even provide for medical costs.
Have we outgrown our political and economic systems? I think so. Technology can save us, but with our terrible social systems, it may well destroy us instead. With all these new problems brought into play by our new technology, our social systems are getting falling dangerously far behind, and that’s a serious problem.
Einstein saw these problems. Quoting him:
* The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.
* I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
* Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?
- Albert Einstein, ‘Why Socialism’ writing for the Monthly Review
http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php
I’m in agreement with Einstein that some new economic system needs to be in place. We need a system which removes all the competition among ourselves, yet still provides outlets for growth and self-determination. It needs to utilize scientific mass production techniques, and share the rewards with all. But communism, as implemented all over the world such as East Germany, Russia, and China, have not created paradises. It’s been a nightmare for a lot of people who have lived under such regimes. And liberal capitalism was implemented in India, leading to a class of rich entrepreneurs, yet the general population is still living in poverty. Some nations such as Japan have taken a “soft authoritarian” approach, using a mixture of liberal capitalism gently directed by a central authority. It’s worked well for them yet at the same time, their economy is hurting right now too. Their scholars today are debating whether they’ve outgrown their current setup.
Most scientists I meet share comments on these issues and talk about a world where we all share things and work together. Problem is, how do you actually implement a society like that? Once you get into the technical specifics it gets really difficult. I personally feel that our best bet is to somehow use the computer and the internet to distribute our resources. A lot of the problems money solved was the fact that transactions could be done and people could efficiently exchange goods with one another, yet nobody had to understand what was going on in the big picture in order to do business. Central planning has always failed because it all gets too complicated far too quickly. Things become inefficient and wasteful because the human mind is too fragile and weak to plan such a complicated system. It also falls prey to greed and corruption.
But if somehow computers could do it. If everyone was constantly inputting their situation into a computer, and it was managing the resources of society. If programmed correctly, maybe it could distribute the goods in an efficient manner, and never overlook the poor and impoverished, who are struggling. Political leaders can get too busy and overwhelmed, but a computer would have time to notice every individual.
It’s just a thought. I’ve been thinking how such a system may work, but it will take a lot of research.
I agree with you that our philosophical views on the world, going all the way back to the Greeks, have been wrong. I think we view both ourselves, and the way we relate to the planet in the wrong ways. We try to dominate nature instead of living in harmony with it. We think using our reptile brain, hoping to achieve some sort of hierarchical dominance, instead of trying to be one with nature and the universe. When we see ourselves in the mirror we don’t understand what it is we’re looking at. That’s why people even to this day believe in religions of all sorts. They’re so busy working jobs that they haven’t been educated in all the new scientific knowledge which is out there.
Not too long ago I had a Jehovah’s Witness confront me while I was out getting a pizza. She handed me a book called, ‘What Does The Bible Really Teach’, and within it it tells how when I die I will inherit my own planet, which I will populate and rule over for all eternity. It says that when I get angry, demons are flowing into my body causing me to do evil. And on and on it goes, filling people’s minds with complete nonsense.
And what about those who have learned all the science of our day? I feel they face a crisis of meaning. Everything is advancing so fast that people don’t know what direction the world is going. Where will this technology take us? They see sheep being cloned, talk of genetically modifying the human body, mixing our brain with micro-processors, nano-chips controlling DNA assemblage, the possible colonization of Mars… and it’s all too much. They see how dumb we are as humans, and yet science has given us such incredible powers. Are we even ready to handle such responsibilities?
As our science progresses we’re going to have to change how our society works. We can’t continue business as usual. And people are going to have to become aware of all the technology around them, because it’s dangerous to have stupid people living in a high-tech world. It’s fine to be stupid when all you have is a spear, running around chasing grazing animals. It’s not ok to be stupid and have control of nuclear weapons.
- Jason
From: Andre Gaudwin
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 5:20 PM
To: jason@jasonsummers.org
Subject: “YES WE CAN.”????
“YES WE CAN.”????
Of course we can, but we won’t do anything about it until we understand what is really happening to us. And we don’t, since none of the professionals in all sectors of society ―who should lead us into doing it, and who all together know everything there is to know about our particular problems― is remotely fit to understand the nature of the global problem presently affecting the whole of humanity. And this, because of a mistaken premise about their dominant status, which, when analyzed from an evolutionary psychological point of view, becomes an evident logical fallacy.
And it is not the first time that such a fundamentally false premise opens up an unbreachable space between our ability to know and our capacity to understand. In Ancient Greece, astronomers knew everything there is to know about the behavior of the stars and the planets that they were observing in the heavens. However, they were incapable of understanding their true nature and the nature of the irregularities among them, because of their belief that the earth was fixed at the center of the universe. The same is true today for our intellectual elites, who know everything there is to know to dominate their own sectors of society, but who cannot understand the true nature of our problems, because of this generally accepted logical fallacy.
If such a close parallel can be made between the Ancient Geek astronomers’ incapacity to understand the true nature of the stars, and our elites’ incapacity to understand the true nature of the problem that we are facing, it is because that the two false premises causing these limitations stem from the same fundamental natural phenomenon: inertia.
For the Greeks, it was their ignorance of physical inertia ―still today interfering with our sense of motion― that was keeping them from understanding the true nature of the Heavens. For our present day elites, it is their intellectual inertia created by the mass of knowledge that they have assiduously accumulated on a few subjects during their years of formation as specialists ―they all are― that is interfering with their sense of responsibility, and which is preventing them from understanding that they are integrated part of the global problem that they have themselves contributed to create, and which is being dramatically worsen by their ignorance of the fallacy on which their dominant behavior is grounded.
It is because of my understanding of this fallacy―which became clear to me, after forty years of independent and “single-minded” academic inquiry on the subject―that I came to perceived “them” (humanity’s elites) as “degenerated baboons,” who, in time of dangers, have forgotten how to step ahead on the first lines of defense to protect us, as dominant baboons do to protect their troupes, which initially gave them their dominant standings for this reason alone. Of course, our elites are still driven by the same urge to protect and defend, and they do it well. However, because of our assumed dominance over nature, they have to constantly create new enemies to satisfy these urges and the needs of the technologies that they are using to wage their wars from afar, “to save lives.” Ignoring the fact, thus, that the real enemies of our species are not among ourselves, but still in nature, on the forms of catastrophic events, as floods, droughts, famines, severe weather conditions, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic irruptions, and today the Oil Spill from the guts of the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. All of which we would be well equipped to overcome, if we were not using all the resources that we are presently using to wage irrelevant wars.
Simply put: Our war economy need to be “converted” into a peace economy, to defend all of us against our true enemies, the furies of the elements and the aging of the world infrastructures. If this happened, we would be able to double the “defense budgets” of the whole word and put everybody to work at the maintenance of our home planet, for the good of all.
* * *
To illustrate the ground of my argument, let me tell you what happened the other day when I met a new acquaintance of mine for the first time after the Gulf of Mexico Disaster.
During our conversation, I eventually came to tell him how offended I was to see that the “hundreds of trillions” (sic) of dollars floating around in the world markets were not used in a way or another to do something about the Spill. He look at me, stunned, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and told me: “But…but… that is “investment money.”
What he was telling me was that this money cannot be used to overcome such man-made catastrophes as the one presently threatening the whole Gulf of Mexico, but that it is money exclusively used to “make money.”
I hope to show you that this is the essence of the invalid argument made about our social power, which is the type of arguments that the market dwellers make all the time, on different forms, and which is directly based on this fallacy that I am talking about.
Regarding investment specialists, who claim to “play the role of God” in the economy, and who are the ones benefiting the most from this virtual wealth that they are “managing,” —if not ultimately the only ones benefiting— this type of reflections made about material “security” is exactly the same type of reflections that clergymen were making before the Reformation, about money to buy indulgences for “spiritual” security. Indeed, the present days investments in “security” will be as irrelevant for our survival as a species, as the investments in “indulgences” were for individual salvation.
To come back to my conversation on this subject with my new acquaintance, it stopped immediately after his mention about “investment money.” It would have taken me too long, since what I was thinking about was too much in the line of a “mobilization” of all our resources against the oil invasion’s of the Gulf of Mexico, as FDR did to counter the German invasion.
It is not our freedom that is at stake at the moment, but the health of of the North Atlantic and eventually the whole Earth, if we don’t succeed in stopping these oil leaks soon. Doesn’t it call for the mobilization of all our resources? For this, though, we need political leadership, but, as I already realized many years ago, “political leadership” has become an oxymoron, since today’s politicians have only one preoccupation, there own reelection. And, it happened that the Gulf of Mexico oil Spill has followed Murphy’s law to the letter, by happening at the worst of time, during a year of US election.
* * *
I say “single academic inquiry” above, since the only reason that kept me going for all these years was the need to find out what was this “mistake” that I have always believed we made as a rational species, somewhere in the course of our evolution. After forty years, I have finally found it. If you want to know what it is, stick with me, if you can! It won’t be an easy realization for anybody, believe me, since it has to do with a misunderstanding that happened tens of thousands of years ago, before the Ancient Greek, when we first acquired a proto-consciousness of our social nature. And, since the Greeks philosophers didn’t know about this misunderstanding, it happens that it has imbued all of our philosophies of life, and that it will be a lot tougher to accept, especially for the “high priests” of finance, than heliocentrism was for the clergy of the time.
First, though, I have to explain the context in which my findings came about. (Work in Progress)
Jason, it is done and coming after your comments on this email
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