September 28, 2017

Dear Generation X, Please Build A Better World

By wise sloth

“Generation X” refers to people born in America between 1965-1981. That time frame obviously encompasses more than one generation. For the purpose of this letter, I’m mainly referring to the youngest members of Generation X (born 1976-1981). 

I’m a member of Generation X, and I don’t have many good things to say about the Baby Boomer generation. Suffice it to say that I blame them for most of the world’s problems, but I don’t want to dwell on things I can’t change. What I can change is myself, and I feel like my generation can listen to reason. So I want to point out to my generation that anytime we find ourselves resenting our parents’ generation for abandoning us and throwing us under the bus, we should be vividly aware of what kind of big brothers and big sisters we’ve been to Generation Y and what kind of parents we’re being to Generation Z.

As it stands, I’d say that despite all the blood, sweat and tears we’ve poured into making old people rich and fighting their wars we’re actually failing pretty miserably as a generation.  We haven’t protected Gen Y’s freedoms. We sat by while privacy became a thing of the past. We didn’t do a diligent job of raising them. We sat by and let the television warp their minds into cartoons. Generation X hasn’t done much for generation Y other than to make better apps to amuse them into not caring how unfulfilling the rest of their existence is. I’d go as far as to say that Generation X is well on its way to becoming Baby Boomers 2.0.

When Gen Z takes over the world I don’t want them to resentfully dismiss Gen X as senile old roadblocks to a rational society. When my generation passes the baton I want to get a sincere handshake and a meaningful nod. More importantly, I  want to die knowing the world is headed in a better direction because of the role my generation played in history.

But we have to earn that by doing something other than fighting old people’s wars and making old people richer. The biggest way Gen X can fail is by carrying on the Baby Boomer’s legacy of screwing their customers and workers to get obscenely rich.  We can do better than that. We are better than that, and I will be very disappointed if Gen X becomes Baby Boomers 2.0.

What can Gen X do for Gen Y and Z that the Baby Boomers didn’t do for us? Well, if you don’t know what Gen y and Z want or need you could try asking them. Their answers shouldn’t surprise you. They’re bitching about the same things you’ve been bitching about your entire life: that life sucks because we have to follow archaic ideals that nobody actually believes in and that business is war, and war is hell. The corporate culture our elders based the world economy on makes life hell for workers. Even after you leave work there is a war going on between every business in existence to get as much of your money as possible, and this problem is ubiquitous  Every time you take out your wallet to put money in or take money out someone skims off the top. You get charged for not having enough money. You get charged for having too much money. You get fined for not telling the government how much money you have. You get bills in the mail telling you that you owe money for things you don’t even understand. In this dog-eat-dog, cutthroat world the cards are so stacked against the young and poor that they’re basically just set up for failure. Life is hard because our elders gave us a system that makes life as hard as possible so the rich can get as rich as possible.

There’s no big mystery about what young people want. They want what all young people have always wanted: to not get screwed and not have to live according to irrational, archaic, obsolete ideals. If we’re currently screwing the young, then we shouldn’t be asking what we can do to help young people. The answer is to stop screwing them. Stop overcharging them for all the basic necessities of life and stop paying them barely enough to survive for working as hard as they can for the majority of their waking hours. The rest of the time, just let them be themselves.

This really isn’t profound. People have been talking about this since before “We’re Not Gonna Take It” first aired on MTV. The story of our generation has always been leading to the point where we either build a better world or sell out to the old one. If the old guard won’t let their young change the old system then all that’s left to do is stop asking for permission to build a more humanitarian, rational, sustainable world and just build it.

How do you rebuild an entire world? I don’t know, but I know if you can build one city that works properly then you can copy that pattern. So until Gen X builds the city of the future my generation can’t say it’s done everything in its power to make the world a better place. Gen X owes the world a city.

If the Baby Boomers finish the job of driving the world to apocalypse we’re going to have to rebuild a better kind of city anyway to adapt to post-apocalyptic conditions. Some young people in this country are so scared of an apocalypse they’re willing to fight to prevent that, but violence only begets violence until the only thing left to do is rebuild. If we’ve got time and resources to fight then we’ve got time and resources to skip the fighting and just get straight onto the rebuilding. You might think the idea of building a city is downright stupid, but if you hear people whispering about doing stupider things to “solve” the world’s problems you might want to try to sell them on the idea of building anyway even if you don’t personally believe in it.

This raises the question, how do you set a project of that scale in motion? The answer to that question isn’t profound either. If you need inspiration just go back and watch some of the old 80’s coming of age movies you were raised on. What did our television heroes do when they had to have a showdown with the preps from the fraternity across the lake? They threw a party. Then everybody pitched in to complete a monumental task.

Generation X needs to have its Woodstock, except instead of getting muddy, doing drugs and dancing to pop bands from major record labels, we need to get all the right nerds together to figure out how to build a city right there on that field that doesn’t treat people like shit. If we can make one good city then we can rebuild broken ones later. If we can’t make at least one then we don’t really have a leg to stand on when we complain about the ones we’ve got.

One city isn’t too much to ask from a generation that wants to live in a city that reflects its own values anyway. Most of us hate our jobs. We’d all love to escape to a place where you don’t have to constantly agonize over bills and feel insecure about the future. So I don’t know why we haven’t built X City already.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 Build a Better World
Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
Baby Boomers and The Younger Generations

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World

September 28, 2017

The World Sucks Because People Are Stupid. The Solution Is Free Online Education.

By wise sloth

This is very simple. The world sucks because people suck, and people suck because they’re stupid. If you want to save the world, the most obvious solution is free education. Once all human knowledge is completely free and accessible anywhere, anytime, then everything else will follow.

Who should pay for it? You. Everyone. If you live in the United States of America, then most of your federal income tax goes to bombing brown people. That money should be spent on giving you and everyone else free education. Any politician who doesn’t make that their number one priority is the barrier between us and utopia, but politicians choose to continue to use your money to fund an unnecessary and destructive weapons industry.

Since your elected leaders won’t spend your tax dollars to give you free education, then Hollywood should. Second only to religion, Hollywood has been the largest producer of stupidity in all of human history. The majority of all media content produced in Hollywood is stupid. It’s designed to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator. It’s brain candy, and most people in first world countries binge on brain candy most of the time they’re not at work or school, and it makes them stupid.

Hollywood owes the world free education to atone for the stupidity it has created. Who is your favorite celebrity? That person is a millionaire and has played a role in making you, your friends, your enemies and countless strangers dumber. Your favorite celebrity should pay to build a free online school that offers video classes on every subject broken down by topic.

If Hollywood won’t do it then the richest person in the world should pay for it. You know how you become the richest person in the world? You sell stuff, and you pay your workers as little as possible to produce something everyone needs and that is as cheap as possible to reproduce, and you sell it for as high a price as you can. Then you avoid paying as many taxes as possible by exploiting tax havens and loopholes.

The richest person in the world is the world’s biggest legal thief. The richest person in the world has ripped off more people than anyone else in the world. The richest person in the world owes the world a free school that offers instruction in every subject. The richest person in the world can afford to create that school and never have to sacrifice any luxury or necessity in their personal life ever.

If the richest person in the world won’t give the world free education then the smartest people should. MIT has already created a small, free online school. That’s great, but it doesn’t include elementary school lessons on the alphabet or downloadable video clips on how to build and launch a spaceship (yet). If MIT doesn’t have the money to give the world that scope of free education then MENSA should pay for it. If MENSA is so smart then the need to fund a free school should be obvious to them.

If high IQ societies won’t fund a free school then the KKK and other hate groups should. If you feel that another group of people are a burden on society then give them a free online school. Once everyone in the world has equal access to education then we can all be fully trained workers with self-actualized minds, and we’ll all be productive members of society. Plus smart people statistically have fewer children. What more could a hater want? Education is the final solution.

If haters won’t save the world, then religious groups should. Religions claim to want to help people and to not be greedy. Great. Sell all your temples and ridiculous outfits to pay for school. Or be a hypocrite and stand by and watch the world burn knowing that you have the power to save it but chose not to. Yes, the issue really is that black and white.

If religion won’t give the world free school then the people should give it to themselves. People on social networks should collaborate and fund it.

Until then stupid people will continue to destroy the world until there’s nothing left.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World, The Value of Public Education

September 28, 2017

My 1-Point Plan On How To Save The World

By wise sloth

There are rogue politicians and institutions who want to change the world for the better, but their voices are drowned out by countless other greedy and powerful politicians and institutions. Since there are so many problems of such great magnitude that need to be fixed, and there are so many people working so hard to keep them from being fixed from within the system, it’s extremely unlikely those problems can or will be fixed from within the system. Even if the system could be fixed, it would take years, possibly lifetimes for that to happen, and in the meantime, countless people will needlessly suffer and die.

The fastest, most effective way to make the fundamental changes the system needs is to build a new one from scratch. That solution might sound more difficult than fixing the old system, but I believe it’s not only realistic, but also relatively easy. You don’t even need to overthrow any existing government or ask permission to implement this solution. You just need to build a sustainable, organized village and expand it to support more and more people. This process can be started with less than one hundred thousand dollars.

One of the reasons why fixing the current system is borderline futile is because unsustainable cities are economically dependent on outside assistance to survive. Any Pacific islander can attest that dependence on outside assistance makes you the servant of those you’re dependent on. True freedom requires true independence, and that requires internal ecological and economic sustainability.

It doesn’t take much to build an economically sustainable village. All you need to get started is farmland, water and housing. If you construct your buildings with sand bags, you can make durable, well-insulated structures relatively inexpensively. Once you have a fully functioning farm that produces enough food to meet all your inhabitants’ dietary needs, then your farm will be able to support non-agricultural workers who can do anything from metallurgy to computer programming.

The farm should provide work space and living quarters to people who create vital products like clothing, household goods, medicine, and transportation. This will make the farm more sustainable and thus less dependent on outside assistance, which will make the hybrid office/farm village more independent. However, there’s no need to completely cut one’s self off from the rest of society. You still can and should trade with the outside world. The key is that a self-sufficient village doesn’t trade in order to survive. It trades in order to profit, and the more profitable it becomes, the more it can expand and build more farms and more work spaces. The more diverse types of businesses the farm supports, the more sustainable it will be.

A legally operating business that grows its own food, houses its workers on-site and produces a wide variety of goods and services will be able to provide a high quality of life for its members, and that quality of life won’t be threatened by boom and bust cycles of predatory capitalism… unless the farm exploits its work force by selling them goods and services at the highest price possible while paying them as little as possible.

This doesn’t mean the farm has to be Communist, Marxist, Leninist or Maoist though. Profits should be shared among workers. Common sense and common decency says that’s fair. Common sense and common decency also say the executives shouldn’t get to keep the majority of the company’s profits. One fair way to divide profits in this kind of environment is for the company to keep half the profits it produces. It reinvests that money into expanding the business and upgrading its living facilities. The workers don’t need to own their land they live on or the rooms they sleep in. As long as the company allows its members to live in its facilities for free and eat its food for free, then the workers can save their money for a rainy day or a retirement home somewhere else.

The rest of the company’s profits could be divided evenly between all the workers. That will upset some people who will find excuses why they should get paid more, but if everybody’s basic needs are already fulfilled, people will just be bickering about who gets paid more to buy more toys with. Personally, I believe every part in an engine is equally important to make a vehicle drive-able, and a business is like an engine. Everyone is equally important and deserves equal compensation. If you disagree with that philosophy, you can still compromise and pay your workers similar to the military, where everyone is basically paid the same, but workers are compensated for time in service, hazardous duty and other factors. You could also allocate percentages of profits to high earning departments and let the departments split their profits themselves. As long as profit sharing isn’t too unequal, everyone should be able to reasonably accommodated.

Once your city is sustainable, your workers basic needs are met, and your company is making a profit, you can expand the city indefinitely. If your city is built in the shape of a ring, you can connect every office by a single road, rail or walking path. If you build concentric rings as you expand, you can leave a certain percentage of the wilderness between the rings untouched as a nature preserve.

As long as you don’t go out of your way to control your workers with unreasonable, inhumane rules and regulations, the population will be free and happy. The rest of the world can be as brutal as an American prison, but the inhabitants of the sustainable eco-city won’t have to worry about unjust policies of world governments. The more sustainable eco-cities there are in the world, the less governments will be able to bully and exploit their citizens. Eventually those governments may simply become obsolete and crumble on their own, leaving behind fully functioning, sustainable, humane cities that can operate without excessive bureaucracies and laws.

If the entire city is effectively living in the same building with the same computer network, your entire population will be organized and accessible through the city’s intranet. This will allow the company to keep as detailed records on its employees as the military keeps on its members. This can be used for evil, but if the leaders of the city are meticulously screened, trained and controlled, then this system could be used for good. Your people could live like the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise. They would have a cradle-to-grave tracking method that maintains their medical, mental health, education and career details. With that tool, students could be steered towards their ideal career path. Employees could easily vote on policies or leaders. You could even use this information to create the world’s most efficient dating site. The potential use for good this system possesses is limitless.

Building a city is ambitious and expensive, but this whole process can be started with a small farm employing as few as twenty people. It can be expanded over time without subverting or challenging any existing power structure. It represents as social evolution, not a revolution. It doesn’t require any creepy ideologies or charismatic leaders. It’s just a smart way to do things.

These circular cities can be built from sand bags within the legal boundaries of existing nations, or they can be built on/in giant floating disks that can be launched and connected on the open ocean to create floating islands. We’ve had the technology to do this for ages, and it’s more feasible now than ever. If enough floating sustainable free island states are built, they can disgrace the old nations by offering a higher quality of life with less rules, less inequality, less stress and less violence. If everyone had a realistic chance at abandoning the country of their birth then politicians will have to do a better job at governing in order to keep tax payers in. If a country is too corrupt, inefficient and inhumane to retain enough tax payers, then their government will simply crumble without the need for a violent revolution or a charismatic revolutionary leader to rally behind.

That’s how I’d save the world if I had the money. I’d build a better system from the ground up logically and sustainably.

3-D architectural drawnings showing the stages of building and expanding circular, sustainable monasteries

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
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 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World
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Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World, Fixing the Economy

September 28, 2017

Holding Onto Our Cultures Is Holding The World Back

By wise sloth

Culture is defined as, “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”

The reason so many different civilizations have developed different cultures is largely due to environmental factors. Surviving in the desert requires different behaviors than surviving in the tundra. Likewise, living in a place where fish and fruit are abundant will lead to a different culinary culture than living in a place where tubers and livestock are abundant. A place where war has reduced the male population will create a different culture than a place where abundant food and resources mean there are plenty of mates to go around.

But what happens if the environment changes? What happens if a warm land turns cold, when once abundant resources become scarce, or when technology eliminates the sacrifices and hardships your ancestors once faced? In order to survive and thrive, your culture has to adapt to the changing environment.

That’s easy to say, but humans are cognitive misers. By default, we go through life on autopilot relying on biases, stereotypes, assumptions, and faith to allow us to survive without having to delay our actions with thoughts. In fact, that’s a large part of why culture exists: because we do the things we’ve always done without thinking about it. This is a natural survival mechanism that has served our ancestors well, but the benefit of this natural instinct becomes a liability when the environment changes because we’re naturally disinclined to change our behavior even though it would benefit us.

Well, guess what? The world is changing. Technology allows us to ship abundant resources from a country on one side of the world to another country on the other side of the world where that resource is scarce or non-existent, and we can move those resources in less than a week. You can even move people out of their environment into a totally new one in less than a day. The world is becoming more uniform. Other than learning the language and the laws you don’t have to do hardly anything different to survive in the mountains of Bavaria as you do in the plains of America. This has only been true in recent history.

In addition, information travels almost at the speed of thought. You can access the same information over the internet in Bolivia as you can in Siberia. In a world where you can take all your customs and information with you wherever you go and still survive and thrive, culture is becoming more and more obsolete.

A lot of people are afraid of this and see it as a bad thing. They feel like they’re losing their anchor to reality, that their rich heritage is being lost, that the world is becoming whitewashed. So they’re pushing back against the rising tide; little do they know this is as futile as fighting the ocean.

The fact is, the world is changing. In fact, the world is changing faster than any time in history. The old ways are becoming obsolete within a year instead of a lifetime. And no matter how you rationalize holding onto your heritage, the basic premise of culture is still the same today as it was in the Bronze Age. Culture is the sum total behavior of a group of people developed in response to the environment in order to create the best chances of survival.

Holding onto the past is the best way to survive and thrive when the environment is the same as it was in the past. When the environment changes, culture has to change with it in order to provide society with the best practices to ensure survival and prosperity.

At this point in history, the past is obsolete. The old ways won’t help you. In fact, they’re more likely to hurt you. If you want to survive and thrive you need to upgrade your culture.

But you might ask, “Isn’t that disrespectful of the past? Shouldn’t we honor the past?” To that, I ask, “Why?” What do you owe the past? Your heritage, your ancestor’s culture, what you call “the past” is just a way of doing things that worked for a different group of people in a different time and a different place. You don’t owe the past anything. In fact, your ancestors worked hard to survive in a harsh world so that you could live today. They made difficult adjustments, and they broke away from the old ways themselves in order ensure a better future for their descendants. You owe it to your ancestors to do everything you can to survive and improve your descendants’ chances of survival because life is more important than rules or habits or ideologies.  And the best thing you can do to survive is to adapt to the changing environment: to abandon your ancestors (even your parents’) obsolete culture.

The best way to honor the past is to embrace the future. Upgrade your culture.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Be Better People

September 28, 2017

The World Won’t Improve Until You Stop Being A Consumer Whore

By wise sloth

In order to understand why the world won’t get better until you stop being a consumer whore, you have to understand how the economy works: Businesses don’t make money unless they sell products. The more stuff we buy the more money businesses make. In theory, this should create jobs, and it does, but it creates as few jobs as possible, because the goal of business is to make as much money as possible for the owners and investors. They maximize their take-home pay by making as few workers as possible work as long as they can get away with, paying their workers as little as they can get away with, making as cheap of quality of products as they can get away with and selling them for as much as they can get away with.

Businesses can only sell as many products as customers are willing to buy, and people don’t have any motivation to buy things they don’t need. In order to remove this roadblock to profits, big businesses have dumped billions of dollars into studying human psychology in order to perfect the art of manipulating consumers. Today advertisements are ubiquitous and effective. We are inundated with them to the point that we accept an advertisement-saturated life as the norm. Inevitably we grow up buying crap we don’t need with money we can’t afford to spend. We’re all guilty, but for what it’s worth, we’re as much victims as we are offenders.

But make no mistake, we are offenders. Every time we buy something we don’t need, big business owners and investors take home profit that they can hoard, invest in more brainwashing advertisements, or influence politicians to pass laws that make it easier for them to screw more people harder, quicker. At the same time, every time we spend a dollar on something we don’t need we take a step away from financial independence and a step towards dependency on whoever is going to give us our next dollar. The less financially independent we are the more desperate we’ll be. The more financially desperate we are the less money and dignity we’ll demand from our employers.

Mass consumerism makes life in the present less enjoyable for everyone who gets squeezed by greedy businesses, and given enough time, it will make the planet unlivable. Our factories are tearing through the world’s resources as fast as possible in a mad dash to make cheap, barely-useful junk that will end up in a landfill within a year. The fewer resources the world has the more expensive they will become in the future, and thus the more expensive consumer goods will become, which will make economic disparity even worse. If the economy doesn’t change then eventually the majority of the population will live in polluted ghettos where there is no hope of upward mobility. In fact, this has already happened in the poorest areas of the world.

Arial photo of an endless shanty-town ghetto in a third world country

The survival and expansion of the economic system that creates inhumane slums depends on us buying mass-produced stuff we don’t need.

You might defend your purchasing habits by pointing out that if we don’t buy consumer goods, then companies won’t make money. Then they won’t have money to pay any workers or expand production to create any new jobs. This argument isn’t justification for continuing business as usual; it simply states why the current system is oppressive and unsustainable. The call to action it raises shouldn’t be to keep feeding the beast. The call to action should be to redesign our economic model so that workers and consumers aren’t caught in an inescapable downward spiral of economic oppression.

It would be a shame for people to lose their jobs and their meager livelihoods by starving the system to the breaking point, but people are living in hunger and fear now, and that’s only going to get worse the longer we continue doing what we’ve been doing. Starving the economy to the breaking point would at least allow us to start over and change directions. There is another alternative though, start building sustainable communities now and slowly transition workers from the oppressive system to a more humanitarian one. Unfortunately, it will cost a lot of money to build sustainable communities since those materials will have to be bought from companies that charge as much as possible. However, if the poor stopped being consumer whores, saved their money and worked together instead of fighting each other for the scraps that fall from their masters’ table we could build a better world.

One way or the other though, the world won’t change until you stop being a consumer whore.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World
Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Fixing the Economy

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Buy a Better World

September 28, 2017

Activism Quest Card Deck Template

By wise sloth

I was inspired to make this quest card deck after seeing multiple video games in which a computer character will give the human player a quest card, a piece of paper with instructions, rewards, and consequences on it, to give them goals to complete and incentives to motivate them. Sometimes players follow a chain of quest cards that can only be obtained by completing the lower-level quests. I thought if video game characters can walk a human through a complex quest to do something important in a virtual world, why couldn’t a real human give a real card to another real person, and guide them through accomplishing a goal that’s important in real life? What if we had quest card chain desks that organize groups of people into solving the most important problems facing humanity? There’s no reason you couldn’t. So I made a prototype.

How to use the quest card deck template:

1: Identify one serious environmental, economic, humanitarian or other problem in the world.

2: Write a description of the problem in the “Challenge Quest Chain” boxes and a general description of the quest.

3: Using the guides below, come up with thirteen quests for each problem following the prompts on the top two rows. Write the quest descriptions/instructions on the row of playing cards to the right of each quest chain.

4: Print out the cars and give them to people. Offer rewards for completing them.

Grid of playing cards with boxes of instructions on the far left and top rows

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Talk About Change

September 28, 2017

Stop Guilt-Tripping Poor People Into Saving The Environment

By wise sloth

97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and threatening the extinction of life on the planet as we know it. Even if that’s not true, as some believe, there’s no doubt pollution and urban sprawl are killing off thousands of species. On a long enough timescale, this will tip the eco-system into catastrophic failure. So there’s definitely a call to action here. It’s vital that humans change their behavior, and millions of dollars have been spent on propaganda and movies trying to convince us to do so.

This is a message we all need to hear because we’re all complicit in the destruction of the environment. Wildlife habitats were bulldozed over to make room for the cities we live in. Pollution is created from manufacturing the products we fill our houses with, and the leftover trash goes right back into the land we’re not occupying.

Even if we all reduce our consumption and only buy eco-friendly products, that will only slow the damage we’re doing to the planet. It’s still an inevitability if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, but the problem isn’t that the average person needs to be more responsible. Guilt-tripping the average person is blaming the victim.

It’s pretty much illegal to live anywhere except in a modern house. The only place you can find enough food to survive is at a grocery store where every product is mass produced, pumped full of poisonous chemicals and packaged in disposable containers. In order to make a living, you almost have to own a car that you have to keep dumping toxic chemicals into. In order to pay for all of this, you’ll have to work for a business that makes and/or uses mass-produced consumer products.

While it’s great that we’re not all living in caves and hunting wild animals, modern life is more of a grueling, soul-crushing rat race than a futuristic utopia. The only way to escape the daily grind is to make enough money to buy land and build off the grid. Even then, you’ll still be hounded by taxes. So you need a permanent source of income to keep feeding the beast, or the police will take everything you own and throw you in jail.

If you’re one of the 3 billion people who live on less than $3 per day there’s no chance of you being able to afford to move off the grid. Even if you live in a first world country, you’ll have to make at least $28k annually just to cover the cost of living, and you’ll still be eating eat cheap processed food, living in the ghetto, driving an old, unreliable car, and never seeing a doctor or dentist.

It’s no accident it’s so expensive to live or that so many people have so few options. All of these worker/consumer/taxpayers aren’t lazy. Almost all of them work full time. They’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of working just to make enough money to be broke after they’ve paid their bills because that’s how the system is designed. Everyone except the ultra-wealthy are trapped in an endless cycle of debt. We would love to escape the rat race, but all the exits have been systematically blocked. So we have no choice but to keep working, shopping and helping destroy the planet.

Money is power, and the owners of the businesses that are strip-mining the planet’s resources have taken all the money. They’re the only people who have the ability to break the cycle by investing their fortunes into building self-sufficient cities and an economy that doesn’t require the mass production/consumption of junk. They’re not taking any steps in that direction because that would mean scrapping the system that made them wealthy in the first place.  It should come as no surprise that they’re using their fortunes to make the economy even more unsustainable for the poor. The harder it is for the poor to live self-sufficiently, the more secure the revenue streams of big business are.

If you’re going to make propaganda urging people to save the environment, then you need to target the people who are most responsible for the destruction of the environment: wealthy business owners and investors. Any effort spent guilt-tripping the poor only accomplishes two things: making poor people feel bad about themselves and distracting them from the source of all the world’s problems: our unsustainable economic model.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Talk About Change

September 28, 2017

Hating White People Isn’t Logical Or Helpful

By wise sloth

There’s no debate whether or not racism negatively affects the lives of millions of Americans, particularly African-Americans, who are at least three times more likely to go to jail or be killed by police than Caucasians. While minority groups like homosexuals and atheists are making huge strides towards equality, African-Americans are still struggling with discrimination and police brutality, which is still so common that it recently inspired the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s no accident that Black Lives Matter came into existence. It grew out of the need for a revival in the national dialogue on racism. African-Americans have been suffering in silence while the rest of the country goes about their business assuming everyone is doing more or less okay. As humbling as it is to talk about racial inequality, it needs to be addressed, because if it’s not, it will lead to more suffering, which will lead to more anger, which will lead to more disunity, and eventually the tension will be released through yet another American race riot.

America needs to overcome some major hurdles to cure itself of racism. The first is the apathy that stems from people being ignorant of how hard African-Americans have it. Many affluent Americans have a hard time accepting that African-Americans don’t have every opportunity and privilege they do. Until they acknowledge that reality, they’ll go on about their lives in a daydream having no motivation to change anything.

The second, and arguably bigger, hurdle is for African-Americans to accept that white people aren’t the problem, and not all white people are majestically privileged. Until the African-American community as a whole accepts that, they will continue to live in their own racially biased day dream that misdirects them from addressing the true source of their problems.

 

I’d like to give my personal testimony of what it’s been like growing up as a white male in America. Then I’ll tie that into the bigger picture and offer another way to end systemic discrimination besides hating white people.

Every year in school as far back as I can remember, I learned in my history classes how “the white man” slaughtered the Native Americans, enslaved Africans and pillaged the planet. Outside of school, I was exposed to documentaries, movies, and books about all the evil things the white man has done to other races. From the earliest age, I was indoctrinated to feel profound shame for the sins of every white person’s ancestors.

The only reason I had to grow up coping with this baggage is because the lottery of fate gave me white skin at birth, which made me guilty by association. Unlike anyone else born with any other skin color, I was forbidden from celebrating my skin color. Every year I sat by and watched as all the other ethnicities celebrated government sanctioned heritage pride months. They even got their own magazines, television channels, and schools devoted to celebrating their race while I was taught the worst thing I could do was celebrate mine. It hurt my feelings watching shows like “Roc” and “Undercover Brother” that unambiguously mocked white people, and that was totally socially acceptable.

I’ve never asked for sympathy for carrying the white man’s burden, because nobody cares. I don’t deserve mercy because of my skin color. Society tells me I already have more privilege than anyone else. To celebrate anything about my arbitrary skin color would be disrespectful to everyone else. The most righteous thing I can do is resent the color of my skin and all the privilege it bestows on me.

As a child, this was impossibly confusing to me, because I grew up dirt poor. Before the age of 11, I lived in a trailer house in the middle of nowhere. I wore homemade clothes made from cheap curtain fabric. I threw up bile on several occasions because I was so hungry my stomach had begun digesting itself. My father and my older brother beat me so many times I stopped counting somewhere around 250. I didn’t spend my formative years in an ivory tower. I spent them in fear and pain.

I went to a predominantly Mexican elementary school, where I was the racial minority. My best friend in elementary school was a Mexican boy named Luciano whose mother wouldn’t let me come to his house because she was unapologetically prejudiced against white people. In high school, I went to a predominantly African-American school. The black students would punk me at lunch and steal my money. They’d throw basketballs at my head in gym class. I lived three blocks from the projects and couldn’t walk the streets at night because I would be beaten or killed for being white in a black neighborhood.

My parents couldn’t afford to send me through college. So I sold my soul to the military because that was the only other way I could advance my life besides going into a lifetime of debt. I had a conversation with an Asian American officer and an Asian American enlisted woman about whether or not we should try to get commissioned and become officers ourselves. The officer told the woman she should definitely apply for officer school because her minority status will guarantee quick promotions.

I left the military and got a job at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board where my boss was a Mexican woman with zero credentials other than a degree from an online diploma mill. She lied about her qualifications and ruined everything she touched, but management wouldn’t fire her, because they created her superfluous position for no other reason than to say a minority female worked in our department. I’ve worked for other minorities who got small business loans, scholarships and other opportunities that I was excluded from because I just happen to be born a white male.  All I got was told to apologize to the world for my privilege.

Picture of me, my twin and older brother (age 9, 9, and 10 respectively) and our father standing on a porch in front of a sad looking trailer house

The trailer house where my brothers and I were raised by our single-father who made $19k per year as a teacher

Growing up in Texas I got called “gringo” by Hispanics and “cracker” by African-Americans. While stationed in Europe I got overcharged by businesses on a regular basis for being American. Political activists called me a Yankee pig for being in the military. While stationed in Hawaii, I got called “Haole” by Hawaiians. I immigrated to New Zealand for a few years where I got called “Pakeha” by Maoris. Radical feminists tell me I’m nothing but a chauvinistic, rape-hungry meat dildo. Christians and Muslims tell me I’m so horrible I deserve to burn in Hell for not believing in their God. Rich customers walk all over me at work and treat me like a second-class citizen. Country folks talk down to me for dressing like a city slicker.

Far left liberals tell me I need to constantly “check my privilege” and admit that being white automatically makes me a racist who can’t comprehend what anyone else is going through. I’ve even been told I should feel guilty for feeling white guilt because white guilt is racist. Nobody has any sympathy for the fact that I was born into this bizarre, no-win situation, because I’m white, and that overshadows any hardships, sacrifices, missed opportunities or attacks I’ve had to endure. Someone reading this will label me a racist for bringing any of this up.

I’m not a racist. I’m nothing. I’m just a poor white trash kid who has spent my life struggling to pay my bills. I never murdered, enslaved or attacked anyone because of the color of their skin, and to my knowledge, neither has anyone in my family tree.

I’m nobody’s problem, and I have zero power to change the system for the better or worse because I spend all my time just trying to survive. Any time spent casting blame on me for anything is time wasted that could be used addressing the actual source of the world’s problems.

If you want to know why cops and judges are so unsympathetic to the African-American community, ask them directly. There’s no centrally orchestrated conspiracy within the justice system. Every time a cop or judge throws the book at someone, it’s a decision they made independently. The main reason a cop unholsters their gun, is if they believe there’s a threat to their life. The main factor in their decision to be hard or soft on a criminal, is whether or not they believe the person will be a repeat offender.

Imagine being a cop working the street beat in a metropolis. You’re looking around you, scanning the faces of everyone you see, looking for danger. Looking for a repeat offender with a gun. You’re not going to care about scrawny white kids who listen to Pearl Jam. You’re going to be looking for people of any color who dress like gangsta rappers, because if you walk, talk, and dress like a gangster, then you probably identify with gangster culture, which normalizes and glorifies crime, violence, arrogance, and disrespect for the law.

Not all African-Americans are dangerous or gangsters, but police are too quick to stereotype them that way. Many employers are too. You can blame them for being ignorant, but half the blame rests on the gangster culture that created this negative stereotype to begin with.

As long as gangster culture is synonymous with mainstream African-American culture, people will continue to stereotype African-Americans negatively. Gangster culture exists because it’s a response to the desperate living conditions and lack of opportunities in the ghetto. If you fix that, then the worst aspects of gangster culture will fade away. Until you fix that, no amount of social activism or hard-on-crime policies will make the problem go away.

The cause of economic oppression isn’t the skin color of the majority. The problem is the predatory nature of our economy. Blaming white people will never fix the economy. The solution lies in creating a more sustainable, equitable economy. Once everyone has unlimited access to education and doesn’t have to live in fear of being able to afford to survive, then everyone’s complaints against each other will fall to the wayside as we all just get on with celebrating life and the fellow humans we’re blessed to share this planet with.

Hopefully, that happens in my lifetime. In the meantime, I’m done apologizing for being white. If you’re not done blaming me for the color of my skin, then you’re a part of the problem.

 

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September 28, 2017

We Need To Talk About Creating Utopia

By wise sloth

Books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Anthem, The Fountainhead, Brave New World, and even movies like Demolition Man, have instilled society with an unreasonable fear of anyone positing any vision for Utopia. Over the years we’ve become more and more paranoid about openly discussing what a perfect world would be like that you can’t even whisper the idea without someone playing the 1984 card and calling you Hitler or the Unabomber or Al Qaeda.

"Don't think too much. You'll create a problem that wasn't even there in the first place."

Sure, the world isn’t completely bad, but America is pretty far down the rabbit hole. One in four Americans will go to prison at some point in their life. Too much of the federal budget is spent on wars. Politicians lie to the people about the reasons for starting wars and everybody knows it but the politicians are never held accountable. Politicians’ careers are openly sponsored by corporations, and everyone knows that those companies influence politicians to pass laws that make them money at citizens’ expense. Everyone knows the war on drugs costs more in terms of money and life than the drugs themselves, and we’ve known this for years and have done nothing about it.

The country calls itself the land of the free and yet several large (as if the size mattered) groups of people are still denied equal rights, and the people who are most vocal about denying them are religious organizations. Suburbia is environmentally unsustainable. Ghettos are rampant. Teen angst is epidemic. Half the population is taking psychoactive drugs. Illegal drugs are cheaper than books. Schools are underfunded. Health care is unaffordable. Wage slavery is not only legal but the standard business model. You can go to prison (where you’re practically guaranteed to be beaten and raped) for downloading a movie, but CEOs can embezzle billions of dollars and practically walk away with an apology from the judicial system when they’re caught. The cost of a higher education has consistently risen faster than the price of oil. The stock market is designed to fleece the populace. Businesses that went bankrupt because of fraudulent and unethical practices have been rewarded with taxpayer money while taxpayers whose lives were decimated by natural disasters were left to die in the streets, literally.

There’s a serious debate about whether or not mythology should be taught as fact in public schools. The Food and Drug Administration approves poison for human consumption; in fact, it’s almost impossible to buy food at a supermarket that isn’t poisoned. And everyone sits on their couch getting fat watching romantic comedy and action movies that glorify pettiness and anti-intellectualism while their society exploits and murders them, and if you complain about it you’re called a terrorist. And that’s the “best nation in the world.” The consumer luxuries America enjoys are all produced in sweatshops by child slaves in third world countries oppressed by the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. How much more dystopian does it need to get before we actually start calling it a dystopia and stop jeering citizens who point out the flaws of society?

Regardless of how dystopian the world is or isn’t right now, you want the world to improve. You’d like to see the world move closer to a state that we can all agree on as relatively Utopian, but we’re never going to reach that point without talking about it. The more people talk about it the faster we’ll get there. In fact, I would go as far as to say that there isn’t a more important topic that we should be talking about. If you’re not talking about it then you’re not helping. If you’re not actively helping create utopia then you’re passively allowing the world to degenerate into the very dystopia that you’re afraid of living in.

But who is to say what utopia is or isn’t? You do. You have the authority, the right, and even the moral obligation to decide what is right and wrong without asking for permission or being certified as an authority by some other self-proclaimed authority figure. We can’t live in utopia as long as we’re constantly waiting for Big Brother to take us lovingly by the hand and guide us. We have to answer these questions ourselves because if we don’t then we cede our fate to authority.

If we’re not going to do the impossible and change the world for the best, then what the hell are we doing here? Why should we just sit on the couch and watch sports and sitcoms for the rest of our lives and let the chance to be real heroes pass us by? Do any of us really have anything more important to do than the impossible? For that matter, who convinced us that we aren’t capable of accomplishing the impossible? Most of human progress was accomplished by people doing the things that society said was impossible. So we know humans can do the impossible. The only question is whether or not we’ll go down in history as the timid majority of sane, practical naysayers who did nothing except discourage anyone who tried to change the status quo for the better, or are we going to go down in history as the people who said, “You know what? I know I’m not a genius… I’m not a world leader… I’m not a prophet… I’m nobody. I come from nowhere, and I have no right to presume to be able to change the world, but I’m going to do it anyway whether I’m allowed to or not.

If nothing else, I hate to sound cliché, but think about the children, specifically your’s. You want to leave them the best possible world, right? Well, spending your life watching mindless TV will guarantee that they inherent a dystopian world, and it doesn’t matter how good of a parent you were because they’re going to spend their adult life as mindless slaves working in a system that is rigged to make them lose for the benefit of the people controlling the system. So all the sacrifices you made as a parent will be for nothing since your inaction in the greater scheme of things will have guaranteed that their chance of success will be as good as winning the lottery. And the first step doesn’t require any sacrifice. All it requires is talking about utopia, but in order to do that, we need to get over our fear of utopia.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

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September 28, 2017

A Grim Letter From A Wise Sloth Fan About The State Of The World

By wise sloth

I regularly receive E-mails from readers saying they share a lot of my views and feel relieved to hear someone else express what they were thinking because they were starting to feel alone and crazy. I enjoy getting letters like that because sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills too. So the relief of meeting a like-minded person is mutual.

"Am I the only one around here who doesn't feel like I'm living in Utopia? Because this seems pretty dystopian. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills."

I recently received an E-mail from a reader, who I’ve been corresponding with for a while. He wrote an eloquent rant that summed up many of the feelings I’ve been having and questions I’ve been asking. It resonated enough that I asked the author if I could post their words on my blog, and they agreed.

You don’t have to agree with any of the author’s opinions or conclusions, but you can probably sympathize with the frustration and exhaustion that drove the author to pen this rant:

“Hello, Travis.

It has been quite some time since we spoke, no doubt you might have forgotten my name or the subjects we discussed, but it has been a learning experience, after which, I have further progressed my world perspectives and have formed an even more grim conclusion: our lives are never going to improve and our potential will never be fully utilized, as long as this socioeconomic system is in motion. Never.

When we spoke last, on Skype, I was very saddened to see your living conditions, knowing that such an intelligent and truthful individual is not being appreciated by the corporate system designed to maximize the profits of the few at the expense of the majority.

You told me that I’ll never get as good of perks as I do in the military, and those perks provide much security at the expense of several freedoms, which I am sure does not need elaboration given your former military experience. That statement seems quite accurate. I have met geniuses in the military, but the individuals I am surrounded by have the lowest intellectual prowess I have had the displeasure of dealing with, and there is very low probability that these types of folks could thrive in the civilian environment.

Recently I have been conducting a social experiment, that is, in fact, a very easy one: silence and listening. And behold, the topics such as Will Ferrell movies, ways to torture people, worthless ESPN and media trivia and other pop-culture nonsense is in never-ending supply during the 12-hour shifts which we now stand, thanks to the boss wanting to look better on paper. And now all 12 people, save me, pay grades E3 to E8 are gathered around Google Images to see which celebrity each person resembles, while no free education that could be accessed 24/7 is being regarded.

George Carlin could write dozens of books about people like these, unfortunately, he is not in this material world to call wasteful people out on their bullshit. Like many others before him, he has perished at an earlier age than the life expectancy of the people in that country at that time, and it just seems the intelligence attribute is inversely proportional to longevity. Perhaps because the more intellectually inclined folks are appalled and saddened by the depressing reality of this world and declining social functionalities, and this stress manifests in terms of immune damage, disregard for health conservation and substance abuse. But maybe those individuals have long foreseen the irreparable damage coming, where most people are enslaved to be a cog in the wheel and spend most of their lives doing things they do not want to do.

Like you said, the rich cannot exist without the poor. The 1% does not exist without the 99% and as such, to create this expanding socioeconomic inequality, products are overpriced despite being made with cheapest resources and workers are being remarkably underpaid despite ever-increasing working hours of repetitive jobs, many with little productive merit. So you are forced to spend 40+ hours per week to make the minimum salary that the business owners can spare, and end up having little free time for yourself with little entertainment you can afford.

The promise of going to college in order to make more money would hold some water if education was easily accessible, professionally applicable and free. But as it stands, right now the college loan debts in the States exceed those of credit card and auto loans, and the companies who hire new employees do not care for the intellectual potential of the candidates unless a piece of paper says so. Certainly you have met some brilliant people without a college degree, unfortunately the employer also seeks someone who has credentials and incentive to pay back the expensive education that could be obtained for free on the Internet and public libraries, and as such the people without a degree are considered an inferior human being regardless of the actual values they represent.

So now, some poor blue collared workers, some of them with families, also try to attend college part-time, and have even less time to sleep, feed (and of course the food is mass-produced with damaging chemicals and overpriced)  and of course be covered from natural elements with reliable shelter and clothing. As far as air and water quality, many times those attributes have to be accepted at the expense of having the opportunity to live in a populated area where a job can be obtained.

All of this leads to health degradation in the long run, and as such, your potential is forever hindered unless you have a very high paying job that can produce enough monetary influx to not only have the needs covered, but the material wants as well. Not a very common occurrence, and so you see how most of our lives we devote to doing what is against our immediate wishes, even though resources, technology, and knowledge to create an intelligent and cooperative utopia are very real, albeit not mass propagated.

Trying to explain such ideas to the public is often unsuccessful, as the majority of people are conditioned to be ignorant, primitive and materialistic. Not entirely their individual fault, as many variables are responsible for shaping public attributes, whether it be teachers, parents, or the media. But one thing is for certain: resisting this system is going to be a losing battle, even if thousands of people exert public pressure, the special force like police is ever ready to crush any resistance to defend the standing of the corporate owners. Numerous riots today have the same after effect, and the rich continue to thrive.

Meanwhile, my wife and daughter have me to protect them, and even though I can stay in the military until l I retire safely and comfortably, I feel like there is no great achievement on the horizon anytime soon, that I’ll still blend in with the gray crown of unfortunate middle-class people and that any contribution to this world will be drowned out by the system that offers minimal securities at the maximum loss of freedoms.

Please tell me, what is the best course of action I can take to help propel humanity to socioeconomic equality and efficiency? Thank you for your intellectual content and politically incorrect, but technically correct explanation of reality. Hope to stay in touch.”

I don’t believe anyone has to die to make the world a better place. We don’t even need to agree on a Utopian philosophy. My current theory is that best course of action one can take to help propel humanity to socioeconomic equality and efficiency is to invest in sustainable infrastructure and free education. I explain why in the posts below:

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Talk About Change