Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and WTO by Richard Peet

If you want to become a quick expert on these three global economic institutions, this is the book for you. But if you want to become knowledgeable about these three institutions and understand how they undermine Third World and Developing nations for the profit of First World nations, you’ll be highly bored and disappointed. This book goes way too far into the weeds without providing substantial arguments against these three institutions. Perhaps for sake of objectivity, but you can make huge cases and still be objective. For instance, there is a small part where they talk about World Bank funds being used to rape the Brazilian rainforest, “The big early case was the Polonoroeste project, involving five World Bank loans to the Brazilian government in the early 1980s to construct a 1500-km highway and feeder roads into the northwest Amazon region.” I would much rather have preferred a book to provide a general, overall picture of what these three institutions are and do, but then go into detail about the programs where they exploited countries to help extract their natural resources or undermine their domestic agriculture to create dependence on American corn leading to famines.

I am still blown away by the commonly unknown fact that the US Forest Service has built 378K miles of roads to help loggers get access to forests, “eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate system” as Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, A Walk in the Woods. So not only does the US government use taxpayer money to build roads to rape our forests, but they provide loans to other governments to help them build roads to destroy their forests, and the debt schemes and foreign currency devaluation inevitably mean they’re selling raw materials to the US for a bargain. This is called neo-Imperialism, all the exploitation and oppression with none of the costly overhead and bad PR that sunk the British Empire.

This book starts off with a rather biased historical summary of modern economic thought or theory. Keynesian economics, the idea of the government spending and growing to stimulate the economy, became hugely popular and seemed to be vindicated by World War II where government in collusion with the private sector created gigantic industrial gains, namely war supplies and weapons, resulting in economic growth in the 50’s. Of course, interpretation is everything. America’s economic boom in the 50’s was actually the result of Europe self-destructing, transferring wealth to America, and as a result, there was no economic competition for American industry. America was living high on the hog, not because government and big business worked together to make America great, but rather the rest of the world just fucked up and bought US supplies to kill one another. Let us never forget that the Japanese bought US oil which helped it invade China. The book asserts that Keynesian economics went out of style and something called neoliberalism took over, a combination of the free market thought of Friederich Hayek and the Monetarism of Milton Friedman. Not quite so. I don’t think there has been any kind of movement as far as unrigging the rigged market and making it any more freer. And Monetarism has nothing to do with classical liberalism but rather is just another form of government-private sector collusion allowing for banking cartels, AKA central banking. The book would have you think that anti-authoritarian, pro-liberty is bad and benefits the rich and that authority is still needed and beloved for containing the rich and powerful. Pure fantasy. If you truly believed in free markets, you would enforce anti-trust laws and get rid of any banking cartels, AKA the Federal Reserve. Let’s start there. I can’t stand it when people argue against the free market by saying, we have a free market today, look where it’s getting us. Um no, we don’t have a free market, we have a rigged market full of government-big business collusions and cartels.

It is absolutely critical that people understand the scam here. These global economic organizations say they promote privatization and free market economics, just like they claim to promote it in America. They allude to Hayek and other free market economists and thinkers. This is like an Islamist proclaiming their allegiance to Mohammed but actually all being Jews. There is nothing free market about what they’re doing. When they privatized and created “free” markets in Russia, what they basically did was take national property and utilities and gave them to a bunch of oligarchs who dismantled them all and sold off the capital for profit. This destroyed the Russian economy. The same thing is happening throughout the world. The unholy trinity is nothing but a cover for powerful banks and rich people who want to expose nationalized utilities and assets to their rigged market so they can rape them blind, raise prices for everyone and walk away with huge profits while the infected host nation collapses into greater poverty, famine, disease, and political chaos. Radicals and terrorists arise from this political chaos, and then the US Freedom Police jumps in to the rescue to kill a bunch of innocent people, set up a military base, and engage in a perpetual war.

The more and more I learn about how the largest and most powerful nations and global organizations work, the more and more they resemble organized crime cartels, mobs, and syndicates. It’s all theft, extortion, protection money, racketeering, intimidation killings, and occasional false charity. It’s all a racket. The unholy trinity engages in charity causes just like the mob will give out free turkeys on Christmas, but in the meantime, they are the cause of poverty in the first place that necessitates them giving out free food as theatrical and mostly useless mitigation.

What kills me, however, is that people who protest these global organizations and America are protesting the lie, the idea that these organizations and America are engaged in free market economics. They portray their rigged markets as free markets, so the world incorrectly opposes free markets, and what else is there but a rigged market. The protestors are doing nothing but throwing more fuel on the fire, giving government more and more power supposedly to regulate and control (rig) the free market, but the government just turns around and rigs it more in favor of the banks and big business. Can’t anyone see this? It’s like if I wore a turban and told people I’m Muslim and started going around shooting people, and people go around saying, “Look, Muslims are dangerous, let’s lock up all the Muslims.” I’m not fucking Muslim! I’m just pretending to be Muslim so you’ll kill all the Muslims.

Likewise, if I’m a rigged market, and go around telling everyone I’m a free market, and then I rob Third World countries blind, don’t run around screaming, “Look, free markets are destroying Third World countries, let’s destroy the free market!” It’s not a FUCKING free market Einstein, it’s rigged, and all you want to do is rig it some more so the banks and rich can rob you blind some more! It absolutely kills me that this author and his academic team are so fucking stupid as to believe these people truly support a free market as described by Hayek when in reality, it’s all a criminal syndicate rigged market. How could they be so fucking stupid? It’s such a simple thing to see. I hate to inform these jackasses that a bunch of white men sitting around colluding and determining the monetary and trade policies of foreign nations is not a free market but a rigged market controlled by criminal banking and trade cartels. They’re so deep in the weeds trying to understand the manufactured complexities of these organizations that they completely miss the obvious scam hiding in plain sight.

* * *

One argument I have against free trade is that it’s not really free trade so long as there are national borders and currencies. Let’s say you’re Liberian and you have a free trade arrangement with England. England has huge advantages and a long history of stealing global resources, so naturally, they make a lot of products cheaper and better than Liberia. If Liberians freely chose what products to buy, they would buy English products, and Liberia would eventually lose all their wealth and become impoverished. Now look at California and Ohio. California and Ohio have no national borders or currencies; they’re just states and people can freely travel between the two states. When factory jobs went to China, Ohioans faced unemployment. Had Ohio been a nation, it’s currency would have crashed, and it would have difficulty feeding all its inhabitants, and it would have turned into a Third World country probably with some psycho white militia elements trying to blow up some more buildings. But Ohioans moved to California or other states like Texas that was enjoying an oil boom. You can’t say there is free trade between Liberia and England like you can for Ohio and California, because Liberians can’t just all move to England. If you allowed Liberians to all move to England, then I would be for free trade, but until that happens, it’s not free trade, it’s just Liberia opening its markets to be destroyed and raped by England.

If you really look into free markets, what you discover is something that you may not like. In a truly free global marketplace, there are no borders. People are free to move wherever they please, and as such, there would be only one currency as people would just choose to freely transact in the most powerful currency around. What you would experience is a huge migration to America and Europe, its populations more than doubling, and there would be people willing and able to do your job for half the price. I’m fine with this, because quite frankly, at least half my wages are the result of America having stolen wealth and labor and then closing its borders to consolidate all this stolen wealth. Are you willing to take a 50% pay cut to create a truly free global market place where poor Third World country people are free to move and work anywhere in the world they want and most likely First World countries?

I honestly think people who oppose free markets would be afraid of what a truly free market means and would be unwilling in their First World comfort to sacrifice their high living standards to create a truly equal and free world. But that 50% pay cut wouldn’t last long, because a truly free market means you get to open your own business, do your own thing, possess and sell drugs, whatever you want, and with all this freedom, I honestly believe, the world economy would get a huge injection of innovation, productivity, and creativity lifting all boats. Also, with a free healthcare system instead of the existing cartel, our healthcare costs would be cut in half at least. That initial 50% pay cut wouldn’t seem so bad after all in the long term, and you would also have the freedom to not pay taxes, to no longer fund the military-industrial complex, which makes up for weeks of your annual paycheck. And with a borderless free global market, we wouldn’t need large militaries for each country. If you were making $100K a year and suddenly made $50K a year, because some Indian dude lowered the wages for your job, you actually wouldn’t feel that $50K drop in income, because you wouldn’t be paying $50K in taxes, fees, fines, levies, and other forms of state extortion.

Finally, if all the Third World people wanted to move to the First World to get higher paying jobs, there would be countless geniuses who simply say, let’s build factories and cities in the Third World where real estate and labor is considerably cheaper and its cheaper to open and run your business? They would have you believe the world is a dog-eat-dog zero-sum game, because they want you to think scarcity and pay higher prices for everything. In reality, it’s a dog-help-dog, positive-sum game where left to our own devices, we’d make each other rich and wouldn’t be so dependent on our plutocratic rulers.

* * *

Upon reading about the Bretton-Woods new world banking order, it seems that early on America largely disregarded Russia, and I’m thinking is it possible that they fired the first shot of the Cold War by excluding Russia from the head of the table?

https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/books/the-cold-war-what-russia-wanted-what-the-us-did-and-who-got-in-the-way-20180506-h0zp9u

Out of curiosity, I did some Googling around and came upon the above link. One of the most shocking parts of this article is as follows:

“Two countries came out of the war with more industrial capacity than when they entered it. One was the United States, and the other – astonishingly – was Germany. Steil writes that a remarkable 80 per cent of the country’s industrial plant capacity remained intact. Germany exited the war with a greater functioning machine tool stock than it had on entering it – much of it new (one-third of industrial equipment was less than five years old, up from one-tenth in 1939).

The gigantic Allied air offensive, in other words, had left the working population starving, cold and homeless, but had largely preserved the factories.”

This is absolutely shocking. History books would lead you to believe that the US targeted factories and civilians were unfortunate collateral damage, but this suggests that, quite the contrary, the US were targeting civilians and trying to avoid factories! Did America strategically avoid bombing German factories in preparation of using Germany as an economic ally against Russia? Was America’s Cold War premeditated?

* * *

The book is highly cultivated but ultimately sterile, because like most academics, it gets lost in the weeds, and the reader is so busy trying to understand the complexities, history, and trivial details of these three organizations that their fundamental weaknesses and biases are lost in the mix. The reader comes away simply confused more than well-armed with arguments against these organizations. I skimmed most of it. This is ultimately the weakness of modern academics and how it is actually encouraged to exacerbate and proliferate unnecessary complexity, to obfuscate, to manufacture complexity in order to further confuse the public and justify their existence as experts of rather obtuse, complex, and detailed social issues and policies far beyond the critical eye of the common person.

It’s all a scam. It’s like a con-artist trying to promote a pyramid scheme by selling the simple point that it will make you rich, and then when you want details, he hires some Economist from MIT to show you quantitative formulas, figures, tables, advanced math, acronyms galore, and copious amounts of data to confuse the hell out of you. Wall Street actually created a whole new field of Finance called Quantitative Analysis using some of the most talented mathematicians from prestigious nerd schools to do nothing but obfuscate and confuse investors. The public and investors both walk away feeling inadequate and stupid, not even knowing where to begin questioning the analysis. The big degrees from prestigious universities overwhelms them. They think, these guys are so much smarter than me, how could I possibly doubt or begin to question their logic and analysis? All the while, they simply fail to realize, it’s all a scam.

Most people who get big degrees from prestigious universities are just being exploited and used as part of a scam to sell a policy, idea, investment, law to the public. The Ph.D. is so lost in the woods with the details of his field, so blinded by the righteousness and brand name power of his school, that he can’t take a simple step back to realize his hard work is being used as nothing but fodder for confusing and exploiting a mark, usually an unsophisticated retirement or insurance investment manager, an unsophisticated politician who graduated from a state university, or the general public that no longer reads books and relies on late night talk shows for news.

These so-called social “science” experts will argue that you cannot possibly debate us unless you learn all our acronyms, understand all our math, find errors in our formulas, and debate the validity of every chart, figure, table, and formula. This is a simple trick. By the time you’ve wasted all your time trying to do this, some other social “scientist” will have come out with another paper or study that you will need to refute in order to claim legitimate criticism of their idea. And oddly enough, unless you have one of their fancy degrees, thereby proving you’re already brainwashed, your criticism is dismissed as provincial. (In case you’re wondering, I actually do have an Ivy League degree in Economics, but I actually didn’t drink enough Koolaid to play their con to make a living.) They’re always one step ahead of you, because they’re all getting paid by big business or government grants, and there’s more of them than you, and you’ll never win.

Fact is, you don’t have to play their stupid games. You can formulate arguments against their ideas without refuting every single stupid trick they’ve conceived to obfuscate. You don’t have to be a fake social “scientist” with a bullshit Ph.D. from Elitist WASP College to understand and debate social or economic policies. Anyone who says so is brainwashed and delusional and an utter servant to a ruling class protected by “law enforcing” henchman and intellectually validating (rationalizing) social “scientists.” I imagine they may have been concerned about opening up all their secrets to nonwhites, but alas, so many nonwhites applauded themselves for their elitist WASPy degrees and the accompanying academic accolades and perks that they gave them even more credibility by supporting their corrupt ideas with a bunch of nonwhite lackeys. They do the exact same thing putting nonwhites in charge of these global organizations as theatrical proof that they’re not really super white, super elitist corrupt, criminal syndicates. And yes, they do the exact same thing with our American presidents. Look, we have a black man in charge, how could America possibly be the mostly white, elitist destroyer and rapist of Third World Africa?

https://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Trinity-IMF-World-Bank-ebook-dp-B00A76X4B4/dp/B00A76X4B4/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

Had I known this book was a fictionalized version of the actual 1999 Seattle WTO Protests I may have read it instead of skimmed it, but then again, I may not have. This is a very difficult novel to read, not in that it uses obscure language or words but rather it’s just poorly written and as dispersive and chaotic as a concussion grenade. Even worse, it gives you the point of view of two fascist pigs who have no qualms about beating the crap out of unarmed, nonviolent protesters. I’m sure someone could have done a much better job of covering the protests in a novel with better writing skills. The only redeemable part of this novel comes at pages 226 and 227 of the paperback where it actually explains what the protesters were protesting about.

Surprisingly enough, I don’t have much recollection of the Seattle protests. I’m sure I read about it in the newspaper, and I’m sure my immature brain simply considered the protesters a bunch of reactionary malcontents who were afraid of progress and free trade which I always considered to be a good thing. These days, my mind has changed almost 180. The argument in favor of globalization is quite similar to the argument in favor of science. It’s virtually a no brainer on the surface. Opening up trade to the world, allowing farmers from Guatemala to sell their whatever to consumers in Liberia is a good thing, as specialization means that if the Guatemalan can make Product A cheaper and more productively than the Liberian, the Liberian should buy Product A from Guatemala, and if the Liberian makes Product B cheaper and more productively than the Guatemalan, then the Liberian should buy Product B from the Guatemalan.

Yes, in fantasy world, this is how globalization works, but in reality, this is far from reality. In reality, the First World, and America in particular, starts light years ahead of the Third World as far as inherent economic advantages (most which were stolen) which includes a whole host of rigged advantages we experience here in America that exacerbates income inequity. If you truly understand how the Federal Reserve works, you realize that the rich who own the largest banks basically have the cheapest access to virtually free money to gamble with. How is that fair? So basically, globalization means destroying all the protections Third World countries use to protect their domestic markets and allowing the First World to conduct little more than neo-Imperialism called unfortunately, neoliberalism. It’s basically stealing and robbing the Third World blind but without the bad PR of colonizing the fucking place.

Globalization is good if every player starts out with the same advantages or disadvantages, but even then, it has its limits. Let’s say for whatever reason Liberia is the best in the world at producing Product B but nobody wants Product B, and in fact, almost everyone in the world wants Products C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, and K from America. With free trade, Liberians are free to buy Products C through K from America, but since nobody is buying Product B from Liberia, wealth exits Liberia and never enters Liberia causing mass poverty. The only way for Liberia to stop this awful vacuum is to control imports of Products C through K which forces Liberians to buy inferior Products C through K from domestic markets. Yes, inferior, but none-the-less, wealth stops exiting the country, and economic self-destruction is averted. But it wouldn’t really be inferior, because American products are so full of GMOs and additives, that Liberian products would probably be a bit more expensive but far superior and healthier.

The term Globalization is actually a misnomer. Communism in a sense was just another form of globalization as is Islamism. In these cases, the Soviet Communist Party would dictate Communist ideology throughout the world and some Middle East-based Islamist sect would dictate their version of fundamentalist Islam to the rest of the world. So Globalism or Globalization is actually a unique form of rigged, government-private sector collusive, corporate, plutocratic Capitalism where a collective of First World Capitalist pigs would dictate economic terms to the rest of the globe. People who oppose global Communism and Islamism are not anti-Globalists but rather anti-Communists and anti-Islamists. People who oppose collusive plutocratic Capitalism are not anti-Globalist but rather anti-plutocratic Capitalists.

* * *

Today’s fairy tale with science goes something like this. Science is the ONLY way to explain things and nature. If science cannot explain something, then that something just doesn’t matter, and we can ignore it, because it’s probably meaningless. Science is close to explaining everything, we’re only perhaps a few decades away. Once that happens, we will be able to solve all of our problems, poverty, hunger, crime, terrorism, war, etc. There are social scientists who use scientific ideas and processes to study human behavior. They are very sciency, very. When they discover something, like the food pyramid, we must all believe them and adopt their ideas, because they are so very sciency. We must stuff our faces with grain, subsidize grains, go carbs, just eat all the bread, pasta, and rice we can fit into our fat faces. You get where I’m going.

In reality, we have an extremely distorted and immature understanding of science, and trying to apply it to social phenomena has been an utter and complete failure and waste of time. Politicians only use social “scientists” to support their biased policies and programs that now almost always benefit their campaign contributors to the detriment of public good. We are nowhere near understanding everything, and it is quite possible that not even science will explain everything. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors did not use science but rather a more rudimentary empirical, trial-and-error way to understand nature and pass that information on through rituals, traditions, and culture. Increasingly, we are discovering that this ancient knowledge was not all superstition and nonsense, but in some cases, far superior to modern scientific knowledge. Take the case of: “Researchers analyzing soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties have discovered that it contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria which is effective against four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics…”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181227111427.htm

On top of all this is our penchant to abuse science, as in inventing a fake science called eugenics which encourages the social engineering of humans by killing or sterilizing people we consider inferior or defective. Consider our misinterpretation of evolution as competition for survival when it is more actually collaboration for survival. Consider all the stupid conclusions we have drawn from this misinterpretation of evolution as a competition and not a collaboration.

Likewise, keep in mind, the entire field of Economics, a social “science,” possesses no qualified scientists that have proven anything. And yet, the IMF, WTO, and all kinds of global economic organizations and supporters will use an army of Economists to defend their simple plan of rigging the world economy to benefit the most powerful and wealthiest people and countries on the planet.

We like to mock the religious folk who think that an intelligent designer, namely God, created everything in nature instead of the system called evolution. But then we turn around and say, a group of scientists, intelligent designers, can do a better job of creating things in nature than the system called evolution. Isn’t that kind of odd? You mean, a group of scientists pretending to be God, can do a better job than evolution? Before science, humans were actually using evolutionary methods to adapt to nature, a process of empirical trial-and-error, and now we want to ditch all that and use science, or I should say, our limited knowledge of science, to do a better job of creating things. Aren’t we basically saying that we WANT to be creationists, that instead of wanting to worship a God that created everything, we want to BE that God and become creationists ourselves and bypass evolution or evolutionary methods?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use science. We actually need science to mitigate living in unhealthy civilizations where poverty, crime, war, and pandemics thrive. What I am saying is that we need to really understand the science before applying it to everything, because empirical data shows that there are countless instances where we applied science and it backfired. We created hydrogenated oils that thickened and clogged our arteries and killed us. We created additives to tobacco that caused lung cancer. Food additives cause countless adverse health effects. Asbestos creates respiratory problems. Processed sugars cause diabetes and obesity. Cars cause traffic deaths. The problem is that the people who sell products using science reap the profits but all of society pays the costs, i.e., the costs are socialized. If individuals profited and also suffered the costs, people might be a little more cautious in selling and spreading products based on new scientific processes without sufficiently understanding the potential downsides.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what will happen with Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). Some brilliant company will create the first ASI, and before truly understanding the potential downside, because this company will never be held liable for it, the ASI goes a bit off and starts harming us. Oh well, socialized costs, individualized profits.

* * *

I love how police rationalize their job as upholding law and order. It totally exceeds their intellect that they are nothing but henchmen impoverishing the poor with traffic citations, court fees, fines, dues, administrative fees, reinstatement fees, processing fees, application fees, public defender fees, licensing fees, probation fees, etc.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/graffiti-could-bankrupt-you/576385/

The so-called laws they uphold are predicated on lies and are unlawful themselves often contradicting one another and the US Constitution. It bothers them very little that many laws defy the US Constitution, that the Executive Branch can bypass the US Constitution by calling a national emergency, that the Supreme Court can bypass the US Constitution by stating that the safety provided by DUI checkpoints are more important than the safety the US Constitution provides to the public. They forget that the laws of the America were predicated on stolen Mexican and Native American land and stolen labor from Africa. What law and order are they talking about? They love to imagine themselves the heroic guardians of order, that without them, society would collapse into chaos and anarchy. They fail to understand that actually without them, society would be liberated from its ruling class oppressors and allowed to be productive and law-abiding. We would be allowed to open our own barber shops without ridiculous licenses and training requirements. We would be allowed to possess drugs much safer than the pharmaceutical toxins that kill 15K a year. We would be allowed to feed the homeless and leave water and food out in the desert for people. They are nothing but brainwashed automatons bullying the weakest people in society while protecting the most wealthy and powerful. Whatever helps you sleep at night besides your nightly dose of Ambien.

https://www.amazon.com/Your-Heart-Muscle-Size-Fist/dp/0316386553/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Rogue Primate by John A. Livingston

I’m rather disappointed that more people don’t know about this incredible book, and it’s out of print and you have to buy it used.  When I was a kid, I always felt that something was wrong with schooling, the whole premise of grading, omnipotent authority, the notion of your entire future depending on how well you can faithfully regurgitate everything an authority tells you.  I felt like an outcast, like I just didn’t fit in, like something was wrong with me, but fact is, for most kids, there is nothing wrong with you for rebelling against this system.  It is the system that is unnatural, antisocial, and setting you up for a life of failure, misery, unhappiness, and empty goals and achievements, yes, even if you get straight A’s.  If I had only read this book in high school, I would have been relieved to discover that it wasn’t just me.  We live under an authoritarian hierarchical culture, because this is the exact same setup between a rancher and his livestock, and this is exactly what we are, human livestock serving the needs of a group of people who think they’re above and apart from us.

Some people might argue that ignorance is bliss, that if you read this book, the blindfold comes off, and you see the naked, ugly reality of our sick, diseased culture.  I would argue that being delusional does not make you blissful or happy but rather, you suffer from more cognitive dissonance.  Our culture teaches us one thing, but then we see and feel something different.  It tells us that humans are innately evil and require authoritarian supervision, but then you see small infants playing peacefully and kindly enforcing their moral codes with little supervision or teaching.  We are told America is great, but then we hear about our bombs killing civilians or unlawful long-term incarceration or murder of people without trial.  You hear about the mass incarceration of blacks.  You can try to ignore or rationalize all these odd contradictions, but you can’t ignore your mind feeling uncomfortable, and if you accept the mainstream narrative, it also encourages you to eat garbage, buy junk, and go into debt, so you don’t end up happy after all but miserable.

I like to think of books like these as mind exercise.  It’s painful and it hurts to realize how fucked up our modern society and culture is, but this pain heals, and your mind becomes stronger and more resilient and more determined to fight mainstream culture, to buy local and independent, to live with less, to be less materialistic and shallow, to vote more independent, to be more loving and kind and to work on your character.  If you’re afraid of the pain and suffering of knowing the truth, you won’t grow, you’ll never improve to become a better person, and those who profit from our ignorant servitude win.  Yes reading should be entertaining and fun, but it also should sometimes be painful and difficult just like life.  Don’t be a fragile thinker.

The novel Demian does the best job of describing our social contract in the beginning where the hero gets caught in a lie with an older kid, and that older kid hold it over him to make him his servant.  Likewise, we are told that we exist in a social hierarchy, and as we ascend, we can treat people below us with contempt, aloofness, cruelty, or indifference.  So we give it a try, but once we do, we have cursed ourselves for life.  We naturally feel regret and embarrassment for mistreating someone, and this bothers us, but since we are led to believe that it is what is expected, in despair, we try to make sense of the cognitive dissonance.  We rationalize, excuse, and scapegoat.  People below us actually enjoy being mistreated, they are truly inferior, they are truly contemptable, lazy, thuggish, and apart from me.  In other words, we double-down on the lie, and from that moment on, we are owned and possessed.  The only way forward is further down this ugly, evil path, because knowing that those above us consider us contemptable, lazy, thuggish, and different, we are left scrambling up the social hierarchy to distance ourselves from the contemptible savages who are mercilessly fed into the meat grinder.  But there is an out.  You simply abandon the big lie.  You refuse to treat anyone with contempt, cruelty, or indifference.  But keep in mind, you’ll fall off this wagon too, because you’ll view people who still believe in the lie and are not awoke as contemptable, selfish, evil, and apart from you.  You have to simply stop looking down on anyone for any reason and rather consider most everyone as victims of some evil, antisocial force.  You never improve anyone by feeling contempt for them, nor do you improve yourself.

Funny, how we have so many pets, how we have transplanted our social desires to pets, because with pets, we can easily adopt the role of authority, and so long as they are obedient, we can show them affection and release endorphins and oxytocin in us.  But the second they disobey us, we can kill them.  This is why modern people don’t like kids, you can’t send them off to be killed if they disobey and cause problems.

* * *

I recently read his other book, One Cosmic Instant.  Rogue was written 26 years later, and I think it’s much more focused and better written than Cosmic Instant.  Cosmic Instant was a rather lengthy and digressive history of life and then humanity coming around to arrogantly fuck everything up.  Rogue focuses on exactly how humanity arrogantly fucks everything up.

The author explains rather effectively how humans domesticated animals and what traits they sought or cultivated in the domesticates.  Rather poignantly, he states the need for the domesticates to be totally dependent on their handlers, to be in a state of helplessness.

“The last thing we want is our domesticates reaching social maturity, because that would mean their recovery of mutuality and interdependence, and the dissolution of their bond of dependence on us.  So we select for animals who never develop the mature social graces of wildness.”

This is so profound, because we are talking about humans too.  Arrested development and the extension of our juvenile years of play and recreation are the product of a higher standard of living and less of a need to have children to support you in old age.  But it fits perfectly into the idea of keeping us immature and dependent upon our parents or the state.  The proliferation of immature culture on the Internet and TV may well be the result of programmers simply profiting from mostly immature viewers who lacked strong parental guidance, but fact it, it keeps us all immature and juvenile.  We see middle-aged women on reality TV shows whining about each other and their petty miseries and physically fighting and clawing at each other like immature brats.  This is the perfect example of the domesticate: fragile, needy, helpless, short-sighted, impulsive, obedient, conformist, constantly afraid, and obsessed with image and appearance.

And what would such a person think politically?  Would they prefer a laissez-faire government that allows individuals to decide their fate and suffer or enjoy the consequences of their own decisions?  If they project and think everyone else is just as immature, juvenile, helpless, fragile, and needy as them, they would more likely prefer an autocratic, nanny government that is overly protective of them and claims to tend to their every need.  Unfortunately, no such government exists.  Any government empowered with such a responsibility would invariably become corrupt with power and then perpetuate the enfeeblement of the masses to remain in power.  They would do very little to protect and tend to the masses in substance but much in image and appearance, i.e., theatrically.  They would showcase a massive, powerful, high-tech military with a lot of explosive power and large, over-sized equipment and ships incapable of controlling a band of rural warlords (i.e., the Taliban) or defeating an unpopular terrorist organization (i.e., ISIS).  There would be the highly invasive and ineffective yet theatrical TSA.  There would be ubiquitous police presence constantly pulling you over to remind you that the state is ever present to protect you.  Immature, needy, helpless, and antisocial people would eat this all up as an effective use of their taxes and demonstration of what is in their mind an overly protective nanny state that can tend to their every need.  “I’m giving you this $500 ticket as theatrical demonstration that I am watching out for everyone, including those rascally people of color that frighten you ma’am.”

As much as I would like to think that there are a lot of smart people reading books like this and realizing what is necessary to fight our existing, infantilizing society and obedience cult, I also imagine there are a lot of people in positions of power who read this and realized how to further exploit and control the masses.  The US military funded most all the university psychological studies in the 60’s producing an amazing understanding of how easy it is to manipulate people.  Unfortunately, we don’t hear about the thinkers who used this knowledge to protect us from exploitation.  Rather, these psychological studies seeped into advertising, marketing, and politics and became weapons with which to further exploit and manipulate the masses.  Since it became profitable to do so, these forces became a lot more powerful than the few people who tried to use this information to help protect us.  In fact, the only people to profit from using this information to help us, in the form of self-help books and seminars, actually were misguided by focusing on the self instead of our social skills and improving our sense of social identity and purpose.

* * *

One way of looking at adaptation and nature is categorizing living things by the level of symbiosis.  The higher level of symbiosis, the more interdependence there is, the greater flexibility, dynamics, creativity, diversity, openness, exploration, and continual and new networks.  The lower level of symbiosis, the more hostility, destructiveness, rigidity, homogeneity, and success through sheer force and population.  The most dangerous cancers and viruses are low level symbiosis, but as the Matrix movie so profoundly pointed out, humans are behaving more like a disease, a cancer now.   You can’t think of humans as apart from nature.  This is the con that encourages you to adopt a low-symbiosis state.  As apart from nature, it’s humans versus nature, and humans exploiting and harming nature.  There is nothing unnatural about human behavior, however, self-destructive and vile.  This is all quite natural if you watch parasites infect animals and consume them from the inside out.

* * *

One particularly profound passage occurs at pages 78 and 79 where the author debates the notion that all social creatures are status seeking and inclined to submit or dominate others.  In experiments with chickens, if you put all the food in one pile, a pecking order arises, but this is rather a simulation of scarcity and over-crowding.  If the food is scattered all about, no hierarchy arises.  What this essentially means is that to manufacture a hierarchy, and place yourself at the top of it, you have to manufacture scarcity, false competition, overcrowding and the notion of threats to survival.  The Aztecs accomplished this through human sacrifices, while other civilizations simply used war.  If humans know their lives may be taken at any moment, they believe they live in an insecure environment and are more likely to accept a hierarchy and submit to those on top.

This points to the big lie we all live under, manufactured complexity, danger, and scarcity.  In reality, because of the technological progress in agriculture and continued advances in industrialization and computers, we are living in an incredible age of abundance.  Of course, we don’t feel or sense that, because if we did, we wouldn’t want a powerful, centralized, hierarchical order to govern us.  Instead, we feel as if we live in an over-crowded, insecure, dangerous, and divided society where it’s dog-eat-dog for dwindling resources.  We also accept the big lie that life is a constant competition, whereas in reality, it is actually more collaboration and mutualistic symbiosis, collaborating right down to the cellular level with each cell comprised of another living creature with its own DNA we call mitochondria.  Of course, if we believed that we are in fact the most social creatures around, that life is full of peaceful symbiosis with only rare occurrences of scarcity and violence, we wouldn’t see any sense in a powerful, authoritarian, centralized governing order or the need to submit to authority and a few lucky elites at the very top of the Pyramid Scheme.

Although, I believe there are too many humans and although we have an abundance of resources, we are also creating an abundance of waste and pollution, we need not be as over-crowded as we are in mega metropolitan areas.  Even in a “crowded” island like Japan, there are still vast, low-populated areas and believe it or not, free housing in more rural communities because the dying off of old people and young people moving to the crowded big cities.  So why can’t humans live in less concentrated, dense cities?  Industrialization simply encouraged factories and businesses to locate close to one another to minimize transportation costs and maximize specialization.  Although, industrialization and for that matter, agriculture, created amazing surpluses and abundance, much of the profits went to the top, and the laborers at the very bottom never enjoyed the profits of their ever more productive labor.

Deprived of resources and over-crowded, the laborers live in a world of scarcity and depravation despite the reality that society in general is becoming richer and more abundant.  Today rural white people and urban minorities and richer white people feel more divided as ever, believing that they exist in this dog-eat-dog world where they have to engage in a race war for scraps when in reality there is all the abundance in the world, but the distribution of wealth is simply disproportionate and their scarcity is completely manufactured.  If they read this book and realized that human nature is more collaborative, that nature is more collaborative, and modern civilization is wealthy and abundant and we could all live quite comfortably, possibly only working three days a week, we wouldn’t accept this centralized, hierarchical order to control and abuse us.

I’m not talking about redistributing wealth like the Communists, because this is just another example of a centralized hierarchy and the wealth was simply transferred from the old elite to a new Communist Party elite.  I’m rather talking about creating a freer society with a freer market.  It is the rigging and over-regulating of the market in favor of established businesses and wealth that exacerbates the unequal distribution of wealth.  People who go to college and grad school and make the most money for a living pay the highest taxes, but people who may not have even gone to college and just happened to inherit wealth from their parents, without doing any work, only pay 15% in capital gains taxes if that.  Many simply hide their wealth in off shore accounts.  There are many other examples of this rigged market including multi-million-dollar loans for the rich.  Despite the fact that Trump has suffered multiple business bankruptcies, he still gets a generous line of credit from lenders.  If a common person did this, nobody would lend them any money.  Not only are banks too big to fail, but the rich are too rich to be allowed to fail too.

* * *

People in the 1900s rebelled against the wrong damn thing.  They rebelled against the centralized hierarchical order of the robber barons who had consolidated their power by rigging the market.  So instead of un-consolidating their power by unrigging the market, they instead created an ever more powerful centralized hierarchical government order to further rig the market!  How absolutely and utterly stupid!  It’s centralized hierarchical orders rigging the market that were the problem!  I get the idea that a few people realized this, but the powerful rich controlled media and school textbooks and convinced the masses that even more centralized hierarchies could fix the problem of centralized hierarchies!  They even convinced everyone that nature is a centralized hierarchical order with humans governing from the very top!

When you look at rich industrialists with their centralized hierarchical order, you erroneously say, this order must work and be profitable, see how it made these men rich and powerful.  This is highly erroneous.  It’s like saying that Bill Gates became a billionaire because he got a job at IBM and climbed the corporate ladder.  The robber barons and Bill Gates became rich and powerful, because they started off in a largely unregulated new market with little competition.  Had IBM more successfully regulated and controlled the early computer industry, they would have easily kept Microsoft at bay.  It is actually freedom and the free market that rewards innovation, productivity, and industry not centralized hierarchies.  Centralized hierarchy is about protecting established wealth and unfairly eliminating competition.  A free market is about protecting all players and creating a level playing field of unrigged competition.  Look at Microsoft today.  With all that wealth and power, you would imagine they could have easily dominated the Internet and social media, but they didn’t, because their newfound centralized hierarchy was never designed to reward innovation, risk, productivity, and industry.  Perhaps a smart employee said at a meeting, let’s really jump on the social media bandwagon, but nobody listened to him, because he didn’t have sufficient rank or status at Microsoft.  Zuckerberg succeeded, because there was hardly any regulation or market rigging of social media.

We live in a highly constructed, fabricated, manufactured world, and I’m not talking about plastic products and polyester clothes.  I’m talking about our minds, mentality, values, beliefs, and thoughts.  Like blinders on a horse, our minds have been controlled, manipulated, and misguided to believe that we are not a part of nature, that we have every right to exploit it, that we are not the most social creatures ever, that nature itself is not collaborative but a life-and-death competition, that resources are scarce, that rich people deserve their wealth because they’ve been obedient and worked within the rules of society, that races are competing with one another, that we belong to a nation and should take pride in defending it by preemptively attacking potential attackers, that wealth and power lead to happiness, that status leads to happiness, that the centralized hierarchical order is the best for us.

We eat junk food, we don’t exercise, we spend over half our income paying taxes and interest on our debts, we’re depressed and anxious, and we just can’t figure out why we’re not happy when we’ve been obedient and worked within the rules of society.  At what point are we going to wake up and realize that we are not happy, because we have been domesticated by society and conned into becoming a submissive, obedient servant class to a ruling class?  That much of our happiness is derived from social interaction, giving, sharing, collaborating, and we have been duped into believing that we are not intrinsically giving and collaborative, but rather evil and selfish and the centralized hierarchical order is the only thing that keeps us safe and happy.

Perhaps one glimmer of hope is that while people can create manufactured scarcities of resources and products, they have a much harder time creating the illusion of scarcity of ideas and information.  Today, we live in a world increasingly run by ideas and information.  Why hold on to old-fashioned centralized hierarchy when there is this amazing abundance of ideas and information that require people to diversify and free their minds in order to mine it all?

* * *

I wouldn’t read the last three chapters which I think are a bit dense but also the most contentious for me, especially the one on natural rights.  We are human-centered, as we ought to be, because our DNA tells us to identify with and protect and procreate with animals like us.  Slap two eyes and a mouth on a trash can, and suddenly, we feel some sort of affection for it.  We anthropomorphize it.  The problem arises when we become imbalanced and think this means that we are at war with everything nonhuman, and must kill and exploit everything before it does the same to us.  This is siege mentality, and it only occurs in nature when resources are scarce, natural disasters, or some life-threatening situation like a cornered rat.  To adopt this siege mentality as a default, persistent state of mind is a psychopathy.  It is like patriotism.  Of course, I identify with an American over say a Uzbek, but would I gladly murder a dozen Uzbeks possibly linked to terrorism to possibly without much evidence protect a single American?  Of course not.  It is one thing to be a Raiders fan, but does this mean killing a Charger’s fan or just avoiding the Charger’s fan.  We forget that as humans, we are highly dependent on nature that lives inside us, on our skin, and constantly all around us in a rather well-orchestrated system.  Ignorantly screwing around with this system and believing there is no long-term negative side-effects is not humanistic egotism but rather remarkable stupidity and ignorance.

Regarding rights, I would agree that this is a human construct, but much like guns, they’re rather effective at compelling authority to exploit you less.  It was the identification of natural rights that gave power to the classical liberal movement that became the foundation of our Bill of Rights.  Certainly, you can argue, in nature, there is no such thing as a right to free speech.  Animals just make noises, and it isn’t a right so much as it is their means of communicating for protection, mating, or bonding.  But without identifying this is something that ought not to be controlled or taken away, it gets controlled or taken away.  Fundamentally, what we are saying is that, nature finds it effective that animals freely make noises for protection, mating, and bonding.  Therefore, to obstruct a human’s ability to freely communicate would inhibit this human’s freedom to improve itself and serve its self-interest.  Government ought not to obstruct our ability to improve ourselves and serve our self-interests (so long as it does not obstruct another person’s ability to improve themselves and serve their interests).  As such, yelling “fire” in a movie theatre when there is no fire and causing a stampede, obstructs people’s ability to live, to not be injured in a stampede, hence you should not be allowed to yell “fire” in a movie theatre when there is no fire.  I don’t see a better way of creating a legal framework around this concept other than to endow individuals with inalienable rights that are basically the freedom to improve ourselves and serve our self-interests (which never forget for a social creature means the freedom to share, give, teach, and bond.)

The author also jumps down the rabbit hole of total and absolute relativism.  He argues that we can’t really say that any animal truly competes or submits to another, because competition and submission is really a human term and idea.  I think this is a slippery semantic slope.  As such, you could also argue that you can’t really say that animals have compassion, collaborate, or love one another, because these too are human constructs.  We are doing our best to understand the dynamics between animals and have invented words to describe it.  Certainly, we should be cognizant of this, and it’s not an authoritarian scheme but rather one that should be openly debated and discussed.  For example, is pain and suffering all bad?  When you exercise, you suffer pain and suffering, and occasionally you injure yourself.  This is not a bad thing.  This is actually a good thing, but humans have erroneously defined too many instances of struggle, pain, and suffering as bad and tried to eliminate it.  As such, humans avoid exercising and being in uncomfortable and painful situations including social interaction.  In this way, society is enfeebling us.  If we were free to debate and discuss the meaning of words and things, I would argue, pain and suffering is often a good thing, that it helps us grow and develop and gain greater independence and satisfaction with life.  Of course, as this book notes, why on Earth would our rulers want us to be independent domesticates that can just walk off into the wilderness and give up our servitude to them?  Our rulers control our words and their meanings, and as such, we not only become servants to them, but we become servants to their definition of everything and their warped meaning of everything and the reality they have constructed for us.  It is like they have created this maze for our minds, and we’re so busy trying to find our way out of it, we forget that we can just throw that entire maze away and we’re much closer to our personal objectives than we can ever imagine.

https://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Primate-Exploration-Domestication-Livingston/dp/B01FIYXAEA/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1548143679&sr=1-2&keywords=rogue+primate

Sophia from Silicon Valley

This novel covers the experience of a bright, young East Asian lady who finds work in Silicon Valley first as a paralegal to a law firm that sets up dot com IPOs in the 00’s and then as a tech company Investor Relations head with a rather anti-social revered head who has many similarities to Steve Jobs.  Because her mother is so abrasive, rude, and antisocial, Sophia has no problem dealing with this difficult, introverted ass hat.  Not exactly The Devil Wears Prada but very similar. 

 One of the big problems with modern culture is that this is all seemingly normal, and more so in Silicon Valley.  I just read an article about South Korean female skaters coming out to confront rape and sexual harassment by their coaches.  Much of this can be attributed to the South Korean cultural mentality of revering and respecting your seniors, and you can imagine the disproportionate power between coaches who have brought unprecedented glory to their nation with the greatest short-track skating program in world history versus a bunch of kids, many of whom are still adolescents.  (This mirrors the US gymnastics program and their allegations of sexual harassment.)  At what point after allowing your boss to be a verbally abusive jerk, do you stop him from stepping over the line and bullying his staff or sexually harassing them?  A lot of people claim the line is more like a cliff, and they would report any form of sexual harassment, but I knew a boss that liked to take one married female employee out to lunch first, then had her work weekends, and then took her out to dinner on weekends.  Perhaps she consented and wanted to ditch her husband, but what if she felt pressured to go out with him, and he talked business so it seemed like a legit company time meeting?  On top of all this, when you train people at such a high level, the athletes are always exhausted and especially at a young age, mentally unprepared to confront an authority figure whether he is bullying or groping her.

 In The Devil Wears Prada, the boss is blatantly an antisocial bully, but perhaps more surprising is that people weren’t all that surprised by this movie.  Bully bosses are so ubiquitous that we consider it normal, and we just consider ourselves lucky if our boss is not a total jerk.  But why tolerate it?  If I’m walking down the street, and some stranger starts berating me and then follows me, we consider this abnormal and bad.  However, when a boss starts berating you, we consider this an annoying yet totally acceptable form of work motivation.  One could always argue that the employee is free to leave at any moment, to quit the job.  So, in a sense, the employee has agreed to be berated, bullied, and harassed.  Doesn’t anyone see a problem with this?

 Apologists might argue that without the harshness and toughness of a boss, workers would slack off, they might cause problems, become disruptive, steal from the company, etc.  Actually, the opposite is true.  A harsh, bullying boss actually is the cause of workers becoming lazy, disruptive, problematic, and thieves.  When a boss treats workers harshly, he is basically saying, “I don’t trust you.”  How is a worker supposed to react other than, “Well, I don’t trust you or this company either.”  If a worker doesn’t trust his boss or his company, he has no problem slacking off, causing problems, and robbing the company whenever the opportunity arises. 

 Let us look at the perfect bully boss, the drill sergeant.  In fact, arguably after both world wars where a significant percentage of the male population was exposed to drill sergeants, you can argue that many young American men copied their style not only as supervisors but fathers, in addition to suffering PTSD.  Baby Boomers may have been spoiled with riches, but many also had asshole fathers who suffered from PTSD and drill sergeants.  But why are drill sergeants so mean and tough?  The answer is quite simple.  Convincing a young man to pick up a rifle, aim it at another human being, and pull the trigger, is so unnatural, so antisocial, so sociopathic and psychopathic, that the only way to do this with most people is by instilling so much fear and anger inside them that they will do just about anything they are told.  One of the major causes of PTSD is not the horrors of war, the loud explosions, the fear of death, and chaos but the guilt from killing another human being, especially when that human being is not directly threatening your home. 

 The problem with Silicon Valley culture is twofold.  First, some of the greatest minds of Silicon Valley are basically some of the most antisocial people around who find no problem spending all day locked up in a room with a computer and not interacting directly with another person.  They fundamentally lack social skills and graces, and nobody finds this problematic, because they are revered geniuses.  In fact, the association between genius and anti-socialness is so powerful, that the more anti-social people behave, the more they get mistaken for a genius.  

 Second, the majority of leaders and big names in Silicon Valley are men.  Not only it is an overwhelmingly male culture, it’s also an overwhelmingly antisocial male culture.  What do these boys want out of life?  They’ve been locked up in their bedrooms most of their youth avoiding personal interaction.  Now, they are being glorified and revered for their genius.  What do they want now?  You can argue that with all their newfound wealth and fame, they would want what they were deprived of in their teenage years: parties, sex, female companionship, fast cars, attention, popularity, etc.  Certainly, some start to party, have sex with escorts, buy fast cars, perhaps even mature and find a wife and have kids, and this is enough for them.  But through a course of natural selection, those who continue spending all day long locked up in their office with their computers, developing their businesses and becoming even richer and more famous, don’t get their thrills from parties, sex, female companionship, families, and fast cars.  Perhaps they realize that no matter how much money they make or how famous they become, women will only want them for their money, parties still freak them out, fast cars now bore them, and no woman would ever want to marry them for true love.  They are left with one simple set of empty goals, and that is even greater wealth, power, and fame. 

 Tech leaders love to say that they want to change the world for the better, that they want to be today’s superheroes, that they want to disrupt everything that is making life hard today and make life better for everyone through technology.  It’s all a convenient distraction from the reality that the only reason they’re in it is for the money, power, and fame.  They’ve spent most of their lives ignored, perhaps bullied, cast out, dismissed, overlooked, and mocked.  What they really want is revenge and validation.  They believe they can get it through money, power, and fame.  They look at false heroes like Steve Jobs and overlook his tendency to be an asshole and focus on the idea that everyone adores and admires him.  If you need look for the capital of megalomaniacal narcissism, I suggest you look no further than Silicon Valley.

 Keep in mind, I’m not saying all Silicon Valley tech bros are in it for the money, power, and fame.  The more positive social influences they’ve experienced, the more likely they will find a work-life balance where they may start a family, spend less time at the office, and hang out with friends and do outdoorsy shit.  But by default, the less time they spend at the office, the less they are likely to move ahead faster or develop their own companies, and the more likely they are to retire earlier and simply enjoy life.  What else would motivate someone to keep working hard?  Certainly, you could argue that they love what they do, but at the end of the day, besides creating a successful business, what do they get out of it?  Frankly, a lot of wealth, power, and fame would distract you from your work with a lot of external demands: interviews, charitable causes, lawsuits, gossip, an endless stream of people wanting to take up your time, an irritable wife sending you endless distracting texts about your irritating kids.  If you truly loved what you did, you wouldn’t amass so much wealth, you wouldn’t do interviews increasing your fame, you’d just remain anonymous, working away in your office all alone, doing what you love to do.  Chances are, if you’re like this, you wouldn’t even bother moving to Silicon Valley.  People move to Silicon Valley to soak up the wealth, fame, and power associated with Silicon Valley.

 So long as isolated, solitary work is still rewarded highly, which is the case with technology today, then the wrong kind of people are being promoted and elevated to lead both industry and culture.  I would argue that there will some point at which AI will do all the solitary, isolated work programming and what not, and humans will be left to build social networks and share information face-to-face, that those humans who are better socialized and enjoy personal interaction will then thrive, get promoted, and influence culture more, that the demands on their time would not be so great that they would be encouraged to skip a meaningful social life.

 As much as tech leaders love to think they’re geniuses, their intelligence is actually rather narrow and limited.  They haven’t studied history (outside the fabricated kind manufactured by the government).  They don’t understand culture and social dynamics or psychology.  They have BS degrees not BA degrees.  They don’t even understand the culture they want to replace the existing culture with.  Their shallow understanding of culture only leads them to be easily manipulated.  The best example is how they seem to have no problem invading people’s privacy and dictating options for them instead of doing their best to protect people’s privacy and providing them with maximum opportunities to control their options.  In other words, they believe in an authoritarian culture.  The only thing that is new is that instead of industrialists and political ideologues controlling and manipulating society and culture, they are.  Just like the industrialists and political ideologues/statists before them, what they ultimately want is maximum control over people, because they think they know what is better for them than each individual acting on their own behalf.  In other words, they are elitists who think the masses are idiots in need of close supervision and guidance by an authoritarian elite class.  They think this is so new and exciting when in fact, it is all old and trite.  What antisocial people lack most is the ability to put themselves in the shoes of another person.  Hey, if I used this app, I’d want to know if my privacy is being protected, and I’d want as many options as possible and not have all these stupid defaults and hidden features controlling what I see or do using this app.  They are unable to do this.  They only see the universe from their point of view, and from their point of view, they think, if I want this level of privacy and all these specific options, then everyone will want this level of privacy and all these specific options as default.  Social interaction teaches you to compromise and see the world from the point of view of another human being and surrender some of your control to a partner or group interest or locus of focus.  Loners have very little experience with this and as such, they’re control freaks who support authoritarian culture.

 One of the greatest fallacies tech leaders make is that their superstar status is mostly all attributable to their genius and hard work.  As such, they believe that in order to be like them, people need equivalent genius and hard work.  What they fail to realize is that genius and hard work gets you to the top level of an industry, but there are a few who become superstars, and this is not attributable to their genius and hard work but rather pure and simple luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right group of people.  Had Bill Gates never been born, someone else would have developed operating software for computers, someone else would have developed office software.  It may not have been so monopolistic in fact.  Had Steve Jobs never been born, someone else would have developed mouses and icons, and in fact, someone else did; Steve Jobs actually stole the ideas of mouses and icons from Xerox.  Had Zuckerberg never been born, MySpace may well have eventually developed the news feed and dominated social media.  These giants were simply the first to show up and be prepared.  It is not like there were dozens of others waiting right behind them to jump at the same opportunity.  Like Britney Spears, a superstar has a sufficient amount of talent but mostly luck on their side.  Once enough people find them or their products desirable, there is an avalanche of followers who buy their brand just because everyone else is doing it.  Britney Spears and Steve Jobs both walk away thinking all this fame and wealth is solely because they are in fact gods with exceptional talent far beyond the people below them who never became superstars.

 Every tech leader should read the book, Super-hubs by Sandra Navidi who correctly observed that the most powerful men in finance had a sufficient level of talent but mostly luck in putting them over the top and making them super-hubs. 

 If you asked both Britney Spears and Steve Jobs what their secret to success was, they would both probably not say luck.  Instead, they would reflect on their personal habits and offer that.  “I put my left sock on before my right sock.”  “My toothbrush is on the left side of the sink and not the right.”  It’s like asking 100-year-olds what helped them live so long.  One will say, “I loved to drink wine” or “I smoked cigars to relax.”  Warren Buffet loves to eat McDonald’s breakfast each morning.  Should I do that to become super wealthy?  He has probably made that a habit, because of superstition.  It’s certainly never made him a poor man.  What they simply fail to realize is that some of their habits may have actually been a detriment.  Humans are the worst at correctly attributing simple randomness and luck into their lives.  If there was one person who survived an airplane crash, he will spend his entire life trying to figure out why he was so lucky and perhaps do his best to live an exemplary and meaningful life, never accepting the possibility that he just happened to be sitting in a seat that was randomly shielded from debris and fuel fire. 

 What everyone equally fails to appreciate is that they are not special, not a single one.  Many may be famous and lucky, but it is not because they are special but rather because just like the dude who was the sole survivor of a plane crash, they were just randomly in the right place at the right time, Seat 32F, nothing more, nothing less.  The number 32 means nothing, the letter F means nothing.  The random guy who was the sole survivor of a plane crash suffers the same mental affliction as Britney Spears and Steve Jobs.  They think they’re special, because something other than randomness must explain why they receive such special treatment.  How can you possibly go through life believing that it was just random that you receive special treatment?  Most rich who inherit all their wealth also suffer from this affliction and turn around and believe poor people deserve to be poor, so they deserve to be rich by randomly coming out of a rich uterus.

 I’ll never forget the time I heard about a man who grew up with a sister that was constantly abused by their parents while he received special treatment and kindness.  You would think the man would feel badly for his sister, but remarkably for me at the time, he sided with his parents and thought his sister deserved her ill treatment because she behaved badly all the time.  How could he possibly live with himself if he realized that his sister never deserved her bad treatment, and he never deserved his special treatment? 

 Our narrative minds are announcers after the fact.  Our greatest failure as intelligent beings is assuming our narrative voices in our heads possess causal efficacy, or make our bodies do things.  As such, it is always rationalizing after the fact, and it is so good at this, that it rationalizes our entire lives away instead of correctly attributing randomness and external social influences.

 Sophia, in the end, makes the terrible mistake of associating assholeness with masculinity and leadership in Silicon Valley, and probably thinks she’s special for working with the tech leaders of Silicon Valley, when in reality, the first job she got in the Valley was due specifically to a friend that yes, she randomly encountered in college.  Finally, it brings us to the white boys who attend a privileged Catholic school mocking Native Americans.  You would think that the white boys feel sorry for the Native Americans and all the hardships they’ve encountered from the Second Great Plague (nobody calls it a Second Great Plague because it only affected non-Europeans, and nobody cares for the real First Great Plague of China).  Just like the man whose sister was abused, the white boys are better off believing that they receive special treatment because they deserve it, not because they just randomly came out of a white uterus, that the Native Americans deserve their misery, because they’re lazy, alcoholics or poor warriors with faulty immune systems who couldn’t fight off the Europeans.  It’s just easier that way.

 Now you might think that this is all some conspiracy theory to deprive us control over our lives when I’m saying, we don’t have as much control over our lives as you might imagine, that much of our lives are controlled by sheer randomness and external social influences, that all our so-called conscious decisions are in fact illusions.  Oh no, you say, I have no freewill, I might as well go out there and eat a baby.  Obviously, you’re not going to go out and eat a baby or do anything drastically different.  In fact, what you will do differently is suffer a lot less cognitive dissonance when your narrative voice fails to alter or impact your behavior as you wish.  You may also suffer a lot less cognitive dissonance when you realize that you are not so special, and it’s okay, because being special is just an illusion.  You are unique, a never-before amalgamation of external social influences of a specific time in human history, but that’s not special; it’s just unique.  I believe that once you discover this peace, this acceptance that you are not as in control as you think, you are better off.  You suffer less stress and anxiety, and you are more comfortable in your mind and body. 

 The problem with modern society is that the numbers are growing, and accordingly, the touch of randomness in our life becomes a sledge hammer.  In a group of 150 people, if one person is murdered, it’s not random.  Most likely, the killer knew the victim, and there was a reason.  It comforts us to know that the killer had a motive, and either he will not attack us and/or the group will hold him accountable.  If one person is ten times richer than the rest of us, there is a reason.  He is most likely the most hard working or popular guy, and that’s okay, because he cannot flaunt it or else, people will gang up on him and take away his wealth.  If he’s popular, it means, he’s a kind guy and we let him keep that wealth.  If he’s hard working, of course, he deserves that wealth.  In a modern society of millions, if one person is murdered, there’s a very good chance it was totally random.  The victim was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we can’t deal with this.  We must believe that there was a motive that was not random, and the victim did something to attract the attention of the killer.  This is where we love to blame the victim.  Similarly, if someone is 1,000 times richer than the rest of us, we can’t accept that this is random.  We must believe that this person deserved it, that he is super hard working, or he is just a very, very well-liked person and deserves to keep his wealth. 

 As you can see, the more and more people we add to a society, the greater and greater randomness controls our fate and less and less our important social influences impact our fate.  We are genetically engineered for societies of around 150 people or less, and our culture and minds cannot effectively cope with anything more than that.  If we do wind up in a society of millions, we do our best to adapt our old-fashioned thoughts and culture to it, but we fail miserably, because our old-fashioned thoughts and culture do not and cannot account for the magnitude of randomness that large populations cause. 

 The social hierarchy and authoritarianism is an attempt at dealing with the sheer scale of modern society, but it is based on an old-fashioned idea and culture better suited for societies of 150 or less.  With 150 or fewer people, the leader of that group is exposed first hand to the consequences of their policies and decisions and this is what keeps them accountable and kind.  Any decision that wreaks havoc and causes great hardship for just several people would cause such turbulence that everyone would question the leader.  In a society of millions, leaders rarely ever even get a hint of the suffering caused by their policies and decisions.  They are so insulated, they are clueless, and like Taleb points out in Skin in the Game, this creates ineffectual policies and decisions.  You should check out the viral video of Bill Gates overestimating the price of cheap food products on Ellen.  Can you say out-of-teach with reality?  If Gates has no idea what common food items cost, how can he possibly have an educated opinion on the impact of inflation on certain goods and services?  Instead, Gates probably relies on doctored inflation reports from fake social “scientists” who are just as out-of-touch with reality. 

 As tech leaders ascend the heights of their warped kingdom, can you really say that they know what is best for the rest of us, for society, for culture?  What special gift do they possess except pure random luck?  Do you want a lucky person to be your leader or someone who truly understands the impact of luck on the modern world?

 If luck is becoming an increasingly powerful factor in our fate and our lives instead of social influences, then increasingly we should become a less social group of people with less freedom and free agency.  Rather, we are evolving into a group more reliant on luck and that means both bad and good luck.  We are then becoming of society of extreme winners and extreme losers, and we continue to falsely associate agency with winning and losing when in fact we should be associating pure randomness.  Fact is, I’m one of the few lucky ones on Earth, my family successfully migrating to the richest country in the world where our currency causes all other currencies to lose value and support our artificially supported standard of living.  A peasant boy born in a Palestinian refugee camp and unemployed is an unlucky one.  There is no intrinsic reason I am 100,000 times better off than him.  It is pure randomness.  Born to my circumstances and parents, he would be just as better off as me, and born to his circumstances and parents, I’d be angry as hell.

 https://www.amazon.com/Sophia-Silicon-Valley-Anna-Yen/dp/0062673017/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The Holy Man by Susan Trott

This novel is a fun read about all sorts of damaged, fucked up people who hike up a mountain 10 miles and wait in line to see a holy man.  I would assume the holy man is Buddhist.  Fittingly, each flawed person somehow either fixes their flaw by waiting in line or has some comeuppance about whatever harm they cause while trying to see the holy man.  The premise is that all it takes is some serendipitous, poetic, teachable moment to turn someone’s life around.  That’s a fairy tale.  It’s very Hollywood.  It’s like saying, all you need to do is tell someone that to lose weight, they should eat less and exercise more, and then all the sudden they eat less and exercise more.  In order to change any major habit, you need more than an aha moment.  The best way to change a major habit is simply to be around people who are doing the things you want to do.  Nothing is more motivating than mimicking behavior and trying to fit into a group you admire.  It also takes a lot of repetition and practice. 

 I think modern society is too arrogant and attached to the idea of the power of the rational, conscious mind, freewill, will power and discipline.  Perhaps in the past, we believed that pure faith would somehow miraculously answer all our questions.  During the scientific revolution, people were taught that faith is just superstition.  Instead, they went overboard the other way and said, well, all you have to do is think clearly and rationally about something, and then miraculously your body will follow you like a horse and obey you.  We place too much emphasis on freewill which may actually be just an illusion as studies have shown that your conscious mind becomes aware of your actions after they have occurred and not before or during.  Our conscious mind is like an announcer who is watching instant replay.  We seem to be confused and think our narrative mind is making the 3-pointer when in fact it is the unconscious mind that appears irrational to us (it actually is rational if we better understood its values and processes).  So here we are telling the announcer to make more 3-pointers, and the unconscious mind is not making more 3-pointers, and we get confused.  We read all the books there are about making 3-pointers thinking that if we just feed our conscious mind enough information and keep it focused and preoccupied with how to make a 3-pointer, suddenly we’ll make more 3-pointers, but all this time, we’re barking up the wrong tree.

 You can argue that the illusion or sense of freewill is necessary in order to be a moral and social being.  Again, I think we’re putting the cart in front of the horse and we think it is our conscious mind making choices that give us freewill.  No, that is just an illusion.  We’ve already determined whether we will be moral or not, and after we discover our choice, we come up with an explanation.  Aha, I knew my mother raised me right.  Or, oh no, I must have been really distracted and stressed, so I wasn’t paying full attention and my conscious mind was not fully activated, so I slipped.  Um, no. 

 There is a study where a group of people read an article about freewill and then they made more moral choices than a control group.  This does not prove that believing in freewill makes you more moral.  Again, the cart before the horse.  You are more moral, therefore, you think you have stronger or greater freewill or that freewill even exists.  If you read an article convincing you that freewill exists, because freewill and morality’s causal direction is confused, you become more moral after you think about freewill.  It’s not freewill that causes moral behavior, but rather the confusion about it.  It’s like believing that coughing causes smoke.  You cough, and there is no smoke around, so you have a tendency to want to create smoke to excuse your coughing.  If you feel a sense of freewill and there is no moral action around, you try to create the moral action to justify your sense of freewill. 

 Unfortunately, we so strongly believe in the causal backwardness of freewill and morality that to convince someone that they have no freewill is likely to make them less moral.  However, I would argue, the notion that freewill precedes morality tends to make more people less moral anyway.  We ought to fix this whole misunderstanding and the net effect should be more moral people.  When people commit an immoral action and also sense freewill, then they feel guilty and confused.  Why on earth did they freely choose to do a bad thing?  They rationalize that they just weren’t paying attention, that their conscious mind was not working properly.  This is playing the blame game.  Instead of blaming bad parenting or other negative influences, they are blaming their conscious mind (the announcer).  The announcer is befuddled.  What the hell was I supposed to do?  In fact, it’s so befuddling that the conscious mind tries not to think about it, and low and behold, another immoral act occurs and the person once again has a convenient scapegoat, the conscious mind.  It’s a Catch-22.  Our conscious mind actually does have a positive impact on moral choices, but not directly.  The conscious mind simply allows you to weigh multiple options simultaneously, but it is always the unconscious mind that makes the decisions.  However, when the conscious mind is not fully employed, the unconscious mind tends to opt for the most convenient and obvious option which may not always be the one that takes into consideration long-term consequences and social repercussions.  It’s like the player is listening to the announcer, and this helps the player’s game.  The announcer still isn’t the one making the 3-pointers. 

 Some may argue that when they’re drunk, they act more immorally, so morality does have something to do with your ability to pay attention and keep your conscious mind awake.  I disagree.  If you act immorally drunk, you’re immoral.  Alcohol is a dis-inhibitor.  It doesn’t create behavior, it unleashes it.  Then you might argue, well, I just won’t drink alcohol.  This doesn’t solve your problem.  There are many things that will dis-inhibit you like stress, fatigue, anxiety, and any kind of distracting activity.  You can’t avoid them all.  In fact, the most stressful and distracting activity is socializing.  Socializing makes people often say things they regret, because social stimulation is overwhelming.  So, you avoid drinking and socializing?  One of the greatest positive influencers of moral behavior is mimicking the moral behavior of people close to you.  How does this happen when you avoid socializing for fear of unleashing immoral behavior?  Your faith in your conscious mind is misplaced.  This is why believing that freewill comes before morality is dangerous.  Cultivating morality through the constant influence and presence of moral people makes moral behavior instinctive, so even when you’re drunk, fatigued, stressed, talking in front of a group of strangers, anxious, you automatically act morally. 

 * * *

 Another thing that bothers me is when a holy man would say, the path to enlightenment or the truth is through wisdom, humility, letting go of your ego, patience, kindness, and courage.  Again, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.  When modern culture and civilization are specifically designed to make you consume more and exercise less, you need a little bit more than sage advice and an aha moment.  You also need to realize why and how modern culture and civilization are making you consume more and exercise less, why it makes you less wise, less humble, more egotistical, more impatient, less kind, and less courageous.  I can believe that this is just all an accidental and unfortunate side-effect of modernization, but the fact that a very few people at the top are making outrageous profits from it, make me believe that they are more likely to encourage this culture or at least do nothing to stop it from proliferating. 

 So how exactly has society made you more egotistical and impatient?  The most modern examples of this is how advertisements seem to constantly harp on this notion that they can eliminate all kinds of inconvenience, problems, struggles, delayed gratification, boredom, challenges, and obstacles.  In totality, this gives you the impression that the perfect life is devoid of all these nasty things, that with a lot of hard work to earn money, you can afford to live a rather plush, comfortable life devoid of struggles, pain, inconveniences, and hardship.  What this completely ignores is the simple fact that much of our happiness and growth comes from a life full of inconveniences, hardships, pain, discomfort, delayed gratification, obstacles, and challenges.  By spending our money to insulate ourselves from all these “nasty” things, we actually enfeeble ourselves and become feeble, lazy, weak, and constantly fearful of everything. 

 Modern culture also seems to inflate our egos and convince everyone that the point of existence is to maximize their selves, their potential, their actualization, to transform themselves into something better and greater through self-help, self-improvement, self-obsession, self-gratification, self-awareness, self-expression, self-ishness, self-ies, etc.  This ignores the rather huge fact that we are the most social creatures on the planet, and much of our happiness and self-valuation (ironically) comes not from actualizing our own potential but rather helping others improve themselves, transform themselves, actualize themselves, and express themselves.  Nothing makes us feel more valued than being a valued part of someone else’s life. 

 Modern society also teaches us to over-specialize and deprives us of things we need to experience ourselves.  Certainly, I don’t mind buying my clothes from specialists.  Making my own clothes may seem fun, but there are certain specialties that make sense.  However, take cooking and cleaning for example.  I’d love to pay other people to cook and clean for me, but cooking and cleaning are an integral part of our existence, and the added effort and time it takes us to cook, often keeps us from over-eating and teaches us to value our food and its ingredients.  However, more important than all of this is helping others.  Sure, it would nice to pay others to help others, but once again, this deprives us of the enjoyment of helping others.  As social creatures, this is the most important aspect of our existence, and we derive huge self-esteem and confidence from helping others as well as enjoyment.  I don’t want to get into a debate about how much we should allow government to help others versus how much to take on ourselves, but I would argue that in modern culture, we expect government to do way too much giving, and in reality, they don’t, and more often than not, they do harm on top of creating codependent relationships with their recipients.  Faceless giving never works.  In order to improve yourself and the recipient, the giving should be personal and face-to-face. 

 Finally, let us look back at the very beginning of civilization.  Before civilization, the greatest currency was your reputation which established your character.  Strong character was like today’s version of the American Express Black Card.  It opened doors.  It endowed upon you special treatment.  People liked interacting with, helping, and befriending people of strong character.  Men desired a woman of strong character to raise kids with strong character, and women desired men of strong character well-respected and revered in the tribe or clan. 

 This all changed when people learned to domesticate animals and then by extension, domesticate humans.  You don’t domesticate humans by harping on strong character.  Humans of strong character, by definition, cannot be domesticated.  They don’t serve others out of fear or temptation.  They don’t supplicate themselves to people of weak character who believe in domesticating humans.  In fact, they would fight them.  In other words, people in charge wanted people of weak character.  How do you domesticate people of weak character?  You play the ego card.  You make them feel like worthless, useless, undesirable losers.  Then you build them up under your system of rewards where obedience, conformity, and submissiveness are rewarded.  With civilization, the rewards are the empty, eternal temptations of wealth, popularity, and power. 

 I just don’t know why holy men or wise men just don’t come out and say all this?  Why do I have to meditate for thousands of hours to come to this truth?  Why don’t you just tell me?  Of course, the most obvious answer is that holy men or wise men who actually did tell people this in the past were hunted down by those in power and dispossessed or killed.  Through a natural selection process, the more timid or at least secretive holy men and wise men proliferated, and as such, the message is hidden and unfortunately, contrives, distorted, damaged, or just lost entirely. 

 There is also a more abstract truth that I feel those in power can live with.  This abstract truth is that we are all one with nature, that we are just one line of code in a long program called evolution and the network of DNA that runs it.  They’re fine with this idea, because it doesn’t threaten them.  It just distracts us from the less abstract and real truth of subjugation, propaganda, and oppression.

 We can go full on abstract truth-seeking, and I don’t think this brings you to a good place.  It’s the place where many people who do psychedelics go.  If you go too far towards the truth, what you wind up with is nothingness.  In reality, freewill, self, time, love, hate, good, and bad are all illusions we accept in order to play this game called reality and life.  It makes us social beings.  If you really believed that there is no such thing as reality, freewill, self, good, and evil, how would you then behave?  But you’re trapped, because you exist in this reality that everyone else agrees to.  You then become this outcast trapped in other people’s realities.  In your reality, there is nothing wrong with evil acts, unkindness, supreme egotism, selfishness, and acting like you are everyone and everyone is you.  This leads to all sorts of problems.  If you are tempted to commit an evil act just out of curiosity and liberated from feelings of fear, guilt, embarrassment, remorse, or repugnance, you then commit the act, but now, you’re trapped again.  You can’t truly liberate yourself, because you were born into this reality and conditioned into it, so you will feel some degree of guilt and remorse.  It will bother and haunt you, but the only escape is to double-down on your notion that everything is an illusion, and this is where it’s quite possible you either turn into a sociopathic killing machine or you just go insane.  Either way, I would argue, it’s not healthy, and it’s not fun, and you wouldn’t really enjoy life.

 * * *

 There’s a passage in the book where some so-called enlightened person realizes, “I guess I’ve learned that trust brings peace.”  I’ve thought about this for myself, and I would have to argue that peace is not so desirable that I would sacrifice everything for it, including guilt by association.  Once again, I’ll bring up my beloved Erwin Rommel dilemma.  You can trust the system, trust humanity, trust that there are good people in powerful positions working diligently to change the world for the better.  What does this do?  It brings you peace.  But what if you’re wrong?  What if you’re Erwin Rommel, and your boss is Adolf Hitler, and there is no such desire to help anyone and quite the contrary, Hitler wants to first kill all the Jews, and then if the Germans fail to achieve world domination and fulfill his vision as the master race, then they can all go to hell too?  You’ve bought peace, but at the horrible price of aiding and abetting unadulterated evil.  I can’t say with any confidence that I believe that the most powerful people on this planet are diligently working hard to improve everyone but rather, they’re just out to improve their own kin and peers.  It’s natural.  It’s called nepotism, and we can’t divorce it as much as we can’t divorce the feeling of fear when approaching the end of a cliff or the feeling of dread when we remember embarrassing ourselves in public.  I’m okay with not being at peace, because I know there is huge suffering in the world, and undermining those in power and the establishment is what I feel is necessary to alleviate this suffering.  I don’t think being at peace is the most important thing for me, and frankly, I think much like happiness and comfort, it’s a false and dangerous goal.

 Finally, I don’t think the holy man is doing anyone any favors, and much like those martial arts masters who claim to be able to knock people down without touching them, I think it’s mostly a fraud.  If you want to help the world, change it.  Don’t act like you don’t see all the suffering and pain and you’re okay with that, because you’ve learned how to meditate and clear your mind of it.  Maybe Rommel also learned to clear his mind of all the Jews being murdered, so he could sleep at night and be fresh enough in the morning to think up genius ways of killing Allied soldiers.  I’m uncomfortable with holy people clearing their minds.  Their minds should be tormented by the evils of this world, and this anxiety should spur them to do something about it instead of providing false hope and peace to the masses who are being subjugated and oppressed and confused by their domesticated lifestyles.  I tried to think of everyone I met as holy people as the holy man prescribed, but I know it’s just a gimmick that will go away in a week, and I’ll be back to judging people and yelling at them in traffic.  The only way for me to improve myself is to go out and socialize with people who don’t judge everyone and yell at people in traffic. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Man-Book-One-Trilogy/dp/149448773X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=