A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

“…in the fifteenth century, vessels that moved primarily under sail were reserved for bulky, low-value cargoes; passengers and previous freight moved on oared craft…”  “A galley 150 feet in length might carry up to five hundred oarsmen…”  “Cramming so much humanity into a small space utterly lacking in sanitation turned such craft into floating sewers.”

“Shipboard robbery and murder were not uncommon, and merchant ships provided corrupt government officials with easy targets.”

Even then, it was cheaper and safer than traveling over land where you had the ever-present threat of Bedouin raiders and brigands.  Why trade at all?  “…the grim trading life was preferable to the even grimmer existence of the more than 90 percent of the population who engaged in subsistence-level farming. An annual profit of one hundred dinars – enough to support an upper-middle-class existence – made a trader a rich man.”

* * *

“…the incentives and equal opportunity afforded by free trade simultaneously improve the overall welfare of mankind and increase socially corrosive disparities of wealth. Even if trade slightly improves the real income of those at the bottom, they will fee the pain of economic deprivation when they fix their gaze at the growing wealth of those above them.”

“The political right embraces the mean, but rarely uses a different bit of jargon, the median – that is, the income or wealth at the fiftieth percentile, the “person in the middle.” When Bill Gates walks into a roomful of people, their mean income skyrockets while their median income changes hardly at all…”

Although free market Capitalism and trade seem like big, complicated words pregnant with political meaning, it’s actually rather simple if you just think of it as specialization and exchange.  Imagine being on an island with 100 people.  Nobody specializes.  You all have to hunt and gather, make your own clothes and shelter, make your own hunting weapons and tools, make your own fire.  Then someone comes up with the brilliant idea of specializing, but not only specializing, but allowing people to exchange goods or services which is an integral part of specializing.  That’s all free market Capitalism and trade is.  It’s simply allowing people to specialize and then exchange their goods and services.  It doesn’t imply anything politically. 

The difference between Capitalism and Communism is that with Capitalism, people freely decide whether to specialize or not and when and where to exchange their products and services.  With Communism, a small group of people decide who specializes what and how they exchange their products and services.  Nobody owns these products or services but the ‘collective’ which is controlled by the small group of people.  This is similar to collusive and crony Capitalism where a small group of people own most of the land and capital through inheritance. 

With specialization, you also get inequality.  Without specialization, there is inequality in so far as some people are good at hunting, gathering, building shelters, and crafting tools while some are not.  But since your life depends on all these skills, those who are good at everything tend to share the product of their labor with those who are not good at everything.  With specialization, those who are good at things that are in demand will get higher compensation while those who are good at things that are not in demand, like collecting butterflies, will get lower compensation.  However, the inequality will not be that great, because those who are good at things that are in demand can only accumulate so much food before it goes bad or so many fur coats, after which they might as well just give them away to friends and family. 

With the invention of money, this all changes.  Instead of storing a huge pile of food that will go bad or fur coats that you can’t wear, you can store up huge piles of cash in a bank.  Because nobody sees it, there is little pressure to share the surplus.  However, as some people accumulate more and more wealth that they can pass on to their offspring, you inevitably get different classes of people, and some lucky people are simply born into wealth.  What makes this all the more corrupt and unequal is when you allow people to buy land and force others to pay rent to live on that land.  At that point, the rich will always remain rich, while the poor will always be burdened by paying a rent to simply live on the planet Earth.  The double whammy of inflation from the rich printing more and more money as well as interest paid to the rich when the poor borrow money creates even greater inequality.  On top of this, you now have taxes that the poor pay while the rich pay a substantially lower tax rate on capital gains or they simply hide it in offshore accounts.

The idea that free market Capitalism and private ownership of land are inseparable is a false construct.  They are two independent concepts that can and should be separated.  It’s like charging people for air to breathe or sunshine.  If you can’t afford sunshine, you are forced to live in a cave.  If you can’t afford air to breathe, you simply suffocate and die.  If you can’t afford to pay rent to live on land, you are forced to sleep on the streets and suffer constant harassment by police.  One can argue that you are free to go live in the forest on public lands, but this is a facetious argument.  We are all raised to live in cities now and lack any skills in living freely in a forest.  Second, all the jobs are in the cities now. 

The idea of paying rent to live on land is absurd and one of the biggest cons we have normalized and forgotten.  You may argue, without private ownership of land, how do you keep people from squatting in your home or business?  Getting rid of private ownership of land does not mean that land is freely shared, that if you build a house or factory, people can just wander in and sleep in it.  People will receive a stewardship contract to live on or build a business on a tract of land.  It gives them the ability to trespass people from this tract of land.  What it eliminates is the ability of some rich buffoon forcing you to pay them to live or build a business on their land they did nothing to earn but being born into wealth.  The stewardship agreement will allow you to exchange the tract of land for another if you choose to move.  It is also revoked if you damage the land or cause a nuisance to your neighbors.  You still need to pay people to build your house or business building and provide you with electricity and sewage.  Free market Capitalism does not fall apart when you eliminate private land ownership.  In fact, it actually improves it by freeing up income for you to invest more in your business or recreation or someone else’s business as investment.  It also reduces extreme wealth inequality which is a drag on overall productivity.

* * *

I’m not sure why all the chapters on ancient trade bored me.  Perhaps it’s a combination of the distant past losing relevance and the author’s dry writing style.  I skipped over to Chapter 12 which starts with the Americans in the 1800’s. 

In the early days, the South dominated the colonies both economically and militarily.  It was industry that turned the tables, but in the early 1800’s, US industry was much younger and smaller than the British industrial behemoth.  As such, the US used tariffs and subsidies to protect young US northern industry.  This did not help the South that favored free trade and did not need to protect industry.  It’s odd that nobody wonders why the South did not secede from the North in the early 1800’s.  “Before 1820, the South had relatively little quarrel with the North: Dixie largely supported the American system. But that year the Missouri Compromise made the South aware of the ability of the growing Northern majority to restrict slavery. This in turn focused southerners’ attention on other disagreements with the North, prime among which was the tariff issue. Both issues ended the “Era of Good Feelings.””

The Civil War was an inevitability, but it was not just about slavery as US history textbooks claim.  “The Jackson coalition voted with the Adams men to pass the draconian 1828 Act, better known as the “Tariff of Abominations.” This legislation inflamed the growing estrangement between North and South.”  Had the South seceded from the North in 1828, it’s likely they would have soundly defeated the North and gained independence.

“In 1861, secession and war left the North with the need to fund its army, and later, pensions and Reconstruction; paying for all this would require billions in import duties. The Union, now shorn of Southern opposition, was free to erect one of the world’s highest tariff walls. For more than a half century after the Civil War, this formidable barrier shielded American industries from British competition.”

It’s so ironic how the US shifted 180-degrees from this protectionist stance when Europe dominated the world to a ‘free-trade’ stance once the US dominated the Capitalist world after World War II.  Any country in the world can argue against the US position on ‘free-trade’ by pointing out that the US successfully grew its industry by erecting the world’s greatest protectionist trade system, allowing its industries to grow and prosper.  “Before the adoption of the income tax during the twentieth century, import duties financed 90 percent of American government.”

* * *

Although I studied Economics in college, it’s frustrating that the Economics I studied was more quantitative analysis and obfuscation as opposed to a true understanding of economic phenomena.  Perhaps at a state university, I would have been given a more broad and less mathematical view of economics.  I took a course on trade, but it was myopic and focused on comparative currency valuation.  We literally spent the entire course fixated on a single equation.  They never talked about the much more fascinating concepts of price differentials in two nations.  “In 1870, meat sold for 93 percent more in Liverpool than in Chicago…”  “In 1870, pig iron was 85 percent more expensive in the United States than in England…”  I think a lot of people think that European labor migrated to the US, because the US was the land of great opportunity and the US economy was stronger.  This is a fallacy.  The European economy was stronger, and there was more opportunity in Europe.  Europeans move to the US, because wages were higher in the US.  The US had industry and farming, but they lacked labor as a result of the decimation of the native inhabitants and the abolition of slavery. 

It is fascinating how landowners, capitalists, and laborers formed unions in different countries leading to much different political systems and alliances.  In Germany, the landowners and capitalists united to oppose the workers creating a more radical political divide between fascists and socialists.  With capitalists on the side of landowners, the workers had no reason to embrace Capitalism and all the more reason to embrace socialism or even Communism.  In England, the capitalists and workers united against the historically powerful landowners/aristocrats.  The capitalists would provide greater freedoms and liberties for workers if the workers embraced Capitalism and rejected socialism or Communism. 

* * *

An important form of trade that this book fails to appreciate along with the rest of the world is cultural trade.  A book called The Birth of
Korean Cool reveals that South Korean government actively subsidizes and protects the Korean pop culture and entertainment industry.  Otherwise, Korea, much like many other countries, would be flooded with Hollywood productions.  Instead, Korean culture is exported to Southeast Asia, South America, and the Middle East where they are some of the most diehard K-drama and K-pop fans. 

The US has dominated the export of culture after a brief surge of British pop exports starting with the Beatles and including the James Bond franchise.  Cultural export is hugely underrated while its impact is hugely disproportionate to any other kind of export commodity.  Because so many people in the world think America is so cool, it’s easier to sell US products overseas as people associate anything American as cool.  British and Japanese consumers flock to McDonalds and KFC.  Before the US embargo, Russians flocked to McDonalds.  At the same time, Americans are now buying Hyundai’s, Kia’s, and Samsung phones despite a horrible start to Korean cars in the US.  Korean food is the fastest growing food niche in the US in no small part to the success of K-pop and K-dramas. 

But cultural exports go much deeper than simple consumption of commodities.  Arguably, many people never embraced Communism because America was perceived as so much cooler and desirable than the cold, boring Soviets.  The legendary Wendy’s commercial mocking a Soviet fashion show made everyone believe that in addition to being boring and plain, Soviet women were all unattractive.  That has been disproven now with countless Russian and Ukrainian female athletes flooding the sports scene, due in large part to their poor economy making the relatively hard work and low returns on choosing athletics as an occupation still more attractive that working in factories for very little money.  Because South Korea restricted US culture from its entertainment industry, it allowed its own entertainment industry to blossom and in many ways compete successfully against the US.  Recently, the Korean film Parasite won Oscar for best picture.  Before that, no foreign film had ever won the best picture award.  It underlies the importance of protecting young and vulnerable domestic industries from large and powerful foreign industries. 

At the end, the book duly notes that free trade does come with its winners and losers.  Larger, dominant countries have a huge advantage and smaller, weaker countries have a huge disadvantage.  If you’re not producing anything of global value, you’ll suffer a trade deficit and your nation’s wealth with leave the country resulting in poverty.  High-tech, automated labor from large, dominant countries can underprice your labor, so wages go down.  As the US demonstrated, you need to protect your borders from cheaper products overseas to help develop your vulnerable, smaller industries.  If there were no borders, everyone would simply move to wealthier nations.  The US population would be a billion.  Europe’s population would double.  Because we have borders, when rich countries dominate, all they do is impoverish poor countries.  There ought to be no reason why poor people can’t move to wealthy countries.  Afterall, Europe and the US stole much of their natural resources and now only pay cents on the dollar for them.  If I went into your house and stole your furniture and electronics, and you wanted to live in my house where your furniture and electronics are, it’s absurd for me to trespass you and call you the criminal.

The Maid: A Novel by Nita Prose

Perhaps the Amazon algorithm noticed that I bought a book on autism so they recommended this novel with a protagonist, Molly who never says she’s autistic but definitely acts like it.  Molly works as a maid in a high-end boutique hotel where a very wealthy, old man stays.  Molly finds him dead in his room and becomes a suspect.  Throughout the novel, Molly discusses how a former boyfriend scammed her, and how her supervisor calls her names and steals her tips.  It emphasizes just how difficult it is to be autistic and poor and the triple whammy of being female, autistic, and poor. 

I grew up in poverty, but I don’t recall many bullies or nasty people.  I guess I lucked out, but I’ve read books about immigrants moving to large cities in the US and getting mercilessly bullied.  Bullying seems to be an endemic part of being poor.  First of all, poor people often enlist in the military where they are bullied by drill instructors, and as a low-ranking private or even corporal, everyone is yelling at you.  Then the soldier gets married and has children, and I guess they think that in order to prepare their children for the real world, they bully and yell at them.  Then in most all entry-level jobs, there is a lot of bullying and yelling.  I watch reality TV kitchen shows, and it’s absurd how everyone yells out, “Yes chef!” like they’re in the military.  I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and even men are bullied and sexually harassed in the kitchen.  At the same time, a lot of poor people commit crimes and go to prison, so when they get out of prison, they’re traumatized and even if they never were a violent criminal, it turns them into a violent person.  They come out and bully and yell at everyone. 

One of the worst parts of being poor is the fact that your supervisor has no leadership or even management training.  While some will mimic an apathetic, authoritarian teacher, others will mimic their abusive parents or stepparents.  I really don’t think about life through a woman’s perspective, but can you imagine that in order to feel safer, women have extra incentive to leave poverty.  Perhaps this is why they do better in school than men, because men know they can handle poverty, but women know that in poor neighborhoods, they face violent and sexual crimes, and at work, they face uneducated, untrained supervisors who may bully or sexual harass or assault them.  Just as bad, they are never trained to stand up for themselves or protect themselves. 

When I encounter female workers in lower paying jobs, invariably in meetings they keep quiet, or if they speak up for something important, they appear afraid and may become overly aggressive or passive in arguing their point.  Poor male workers in lower paying jobs also become overly aggressive or passive in arguing their point, fearing that they are not supposed to be challenging or questioning people of higher rank, but they are much more candid with their opinions.  Female workers in higher paying jobs come across as far more assertive and confident. 

To be female, autistic, and poor is an absolute nightmare, and this book demonstrates that.  I read a book about poor East Asian factory workers, and one of them was scammed by her boyfriend out of thousands of dollars which represented thousands of hours of work.  Nobody ever taught her how to protect herself against scammers and exploitative boyfriends.  I can’t imagine how autistic people protect themselves against scammers, because they can’t imagine people not saying what they mean and using deception and devious plotting to hurt others.  They are not totally helpless in that if they have the proper training, support, and intellect, they can brute force their thinking to compensate for a lack of emotional intelligence.  Throughout the book, Molly reminds herself of her grandmother’s wise advice.  It’s funny how she makes moral decisions based on literal sayings like treat unto others as you would have them treat you or finder’s keepers.  I wonder if she has the ability to feel that something may be morally wrong like stealing or hitting someone. 

The book also demonstrates that you need money to pay for a good lawyer to defend yourself.  Otherwise, you get an overworked public defender who gives you the absolute minimum defense, and it’s likely that if you do too good a job defending your clients, you get reprimanded, because your employer actually makes money from winning cases and fining defendants.  You’re depriving your employer of revenue!  You’ve heard of school vouchers, but what about public defense vouchers where you can pay a non-profit or for-profit attorney to defend you.  At least, you can research these lawyers and find one with a good rating. 

With public defenders they get assigned to you.  Imagine getting reprimanded at work and called up for suspension, but they allow you to have a human resources specialist defend you.  Do you honestly think that specialist will do a good job fighting for you?  It’s like playing soccer and instead of referees, if the other team says you committed a penalty, they get a prosecutor to argue that you committed a penalty, their judge determines if you committed the penalty, and they give you a defender to argue that you didn’t commit a penalty.  That defender goes back on the bus to their city, lives with them, works with them, eats with them.  Do you think their defender will argue your case effectively or just go through the motions?  The legal system is bizarre and definitely biased against the poor and in favor of the rich.

[Spoiler alert:] Molly is lucky to get a coworker’s daughter as a private attorney.  I can only imagine that if she didn’t get this attorney, they would have railroaded her and taken advantage of the fact that she’s autistic.  This is like a legal Cinderella story except instead of encountering a prince that saves her, she encounters a private attorney that saves her. 

I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had I been a female.  I now surmise that I would be a lot more motivated to escape poverty and avoid living in poor neighborhoods.  As a male, I’m not as sensitive to living in or around poverty.  I don’t fear dive bars.  I’m not afraid of men.  Most people are not taller and bigger than me.  I’m not afraid of a male boss sexually harassing or assaulting me.  When I go jogging, I’m not afraid of being hit on or harassed by men on the streets.  It’s just a whole different world.  I would have probably studied harder in school and college and conformed more, because conforming would equal better grades which would equal better job opportunities.  In other words, men have the luxury of being nonconformists, and they’re not as motivated to get good grades and better job opportunities. 

When I was younger, I thought it would just suck to get bad grades and work in low-paying jobs.  For women, it would be like a death sentence, forever relegated to living in poor neighborhoods, working for poor, untrained supervisors who are likely to bully and/or sexually harass or assault you.  I definitely would have worked more and harder to avoid homelessness.  When I was younger, while I was certainly afraid of being homeless, it was not a consuming fear.  I figured that if it happened, I’d find a way to adapt.  Being a homeless woman is completely different than being a homeless man.  Then there is the ever-present idea that if you become too financially desperate, you can always sell your body.  A straight man never has to consider this.  What a horrible thing to consider, that if you can’t make ends meet, you’ll have to grapple with the incredibly humiliating and degrading idea of selling your body for money, or at least having an OnlyFans account. 

I guess the perk of not having to pay for your meals on dates is some compensation for such a more difficult life.  I guess that in a sense, when women reject shorter guys, it’s not just a looks thing.  While men primarily date women for sex, women date men in part to find a bodyguard.  Why would a woman want a bodyguard who is just as tall as them and shorter and lighter than scary 6-feet-tall men?  Height really does make a big difference.  If you’re 5’8” with average muscles, you’d be a lightweight MMA fighter or boxer.  If you’re 6’0” with average muscles, you’d be a middleweight or light heavyweight.  How can a lightweight protect you against a heavyweight?  It’s more plausible that a middleweight can protect you against a heavyweight.  I can imagine middleweight fighters like Israel Adesanya or Paulo Costa standing up to a heavyweight fighter like Stipe Miocic or Curtis Blaydes, but I can’t see a lightweight Dustin Poirier or Conor McGregor standing up to Stipe Miocic or Curtis Blaydes.  From the perspective of protection it makes sense that women want a 6’ middleweight or light heavyweight boyfriend and bodyguard and not a 5’8” lightweight boyfriend and bodyguard, even if she is 5’4” and in fact if she is 5’4” she has more incentive to have a 6’ boyfriend.

* * *

I would also argue that rich people have toxic, bullying behavior as well, but it is not as physically violent as poor people.  Rich people can always sue if some bully attacks them physically, and they can hire bodyguards or security.  If you’ve watched Housewives of Beverly Hills or New York City, you know that rich women are not immune from toxic and bullying behavior.  If they do get physical, it’s not an all-out brawl but a simple shoving match or a drink being thrown.  The safest place to be both physically and mentally is in the middle class.  I attended a public middle school and private high school, and the culture is definitely different.  There are many damaged kids in public middle school.  They don’t get attention or help.  These days, they’re likely drugged up.  Now, you also have to worry about school shooters.  And bullies are rarely ever addressed or even expelled.  They have to break someone’s nose or arm in order for the school administration to consider it a problem. 

In private school, there was one bully, but he mysteriously disappeared midterm.  I had a friend who was damaged, but he likely received therapy and extra attention from his parents.  One time, he drove his expensive car into a nearby marsh.  Another time, he utterly destroyed the chemistry supply closet.  He wasn’t expelled, which indicates that his rich family likely more than compensated the school for the destruction.  There was only one fight in the school, and that involved one kid whose father was a teacher.  I can’t imagine how hard his father came down on him.  “You literally hit a rich kid whose parents are paying my salary!”  In public school, no teacher thinks your parents are paying their salary although they actually are.  Most could care less about your welfare and act like it. 

In public elementary school, I had two outstanding, truly caring, inspirational teachers.  I had one total and utter douchebag who once made me cry.  In middle school you mostly get distant, aloof teachers, and the culture discourages you from being a teacher’s pet.  In private high school, many students hung out with their favorite teachers and idolized them.  Likewise, in the workplace, in low-paying jobs, if you schmooze with your supervisor, you’re labeled a kiss ass.  In higher-paying jobs, it’s expected that you fraternize and even go to lunch with your supervisor.  They’re your professional mentors.  It shocked me that in college  professors gave us their hours to come and chat with them.  I had no idea you could even do that.  Apparently, it’s a great way to get ahead in whatever field.  They can invite you to adult, professional cocktail parties where you can network, and after you graduate, they may even help you find a job.  Poor people can’t imagine getting that kind of professional help from a supervisor, or if they do, it comes with unpleasant strings attached and all their coworkers call them a brown noser behind their backs and accuse them of sleeping with the boss. 

People’s relationships with their teachers, professors, and supervisors mimic their relationship with their parents.  I never sat down with my parents and had long, meaningful conversations with them.  Their interactions were mainly practical and perfunctory.  “Get your bags.  We’re leaving soon.”  “What time does the basketball game end?”  “What fast food would you like me to pick up?”  “You need to get into a good college, better yet, an Ivy League.”  Many middle class kids sit down and have long, meaningful conversations with their parents, and they expect this with their professors and bosses.  Likewise, professors and bosses from low income backgrounds have no idea how to mentor anyone and if a student or staff comes along trying to start a relationship, they’ll likely misinterpret it and sexually harass them. 

As middle class kids grow older, their parents provide them with greater trust and autonomy.  This does not happen with poor parents.  In fact, as kids turn into unruly teenagers, poor parents double down on discipline and punishment.  In the case of rich parents, many are incredibly neglectful of their children and/or spoil them.  In that case, the rich kids expect their professors and supervisors to likewise ignore them or spoil them.  Rich parents also tend to be more toxic and bullying than middle class parents.  Again, the best place to be is in the middle class.  My private school had boarders, and they were like a different breed, more cynical, more adultlike, more emotionally detached, less eye contact.  The day students were more naïve, trusting, gullible, childlike, innocent.  They were allowed to have and enjoy their childhood.  The boarders were pretty much on their own, raising themselves and one another. 

It always amazes me when I read about people growing up, sitting down at the dinner table with their parents and getting professional and personal advice from their white collar parents, actually having meaningful dialogues and not lectures.  These kids grow up to enter the professions of their parents and with all their knowledge and the natural motivation of following in your parents’ footsteps, they have a huge career advantage.  Then I think of all the poor kids who never eat around the dinner table.  Like my family, we ate in the living room and watched TV as we ate in silence.  For some kids, their parents would bully and berate them, unloading all their frustrations and resentments upon their spouses and children. 

I recently read a newspaper article about a local teenage girl who shot to death her father and autistic brother.  She said that she spent a lot of time babysitting her autistic brother, and her father was often grieving the loss of his wife and her mother who had left them.  There was just nothing in her life but this endless misery and suffering.  Of course, not all teenagers would kill their family members in similar circumstances.  They would just suffer.  Middle class and rich families would have been able to hire a babysitter, nanny, or get some sort of help with raising an autistic child.  She would have been able to get out of the house, hang out with friends, and escape the misery and suffering. 

In the final analysis, I think Molly killed Mr. Black and had planned it with the help of Giselle, Mr. Black’s latest wife.  Giselle drugged Mr. Black using her own pills, and Molly came along to put a pillow over his head.  Molly had in fact admitted that this was how she killed her grandmother.  Why would the author mention this if it didn’t have some bearing with Mr. Black’s murder? 

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Part 2 of 2

People who think that animals are dumb and cannot feel complex emotions, people who think some human ‘racial’ groups are superior to others, people who think higher technical intelligence and pedigree makes them more human and superior to uneducated and poor people in Third World countries, we now know that they are the dumbest humans.  Is it also possible that we are deluded as well?  Is it possible that people who think they are individuals with some homunculus is deluded?  Is it possible that people who think they are conscious are deluded?  Is it possible that people who think they have souls, freewill, and will move on to an afterlife after death are deluded?  Is it possible that we all need delusions in order to find life meaningful and worth living?  Is it possible that knowing the truth about life and reality will actually make us enjoy it less and be less capable of surviving it? 

Is it possible I’m not who I think I am, and this may possibly lead me to insanity or at least incapable of functioning or thriving in this world?  Is it possible that we live in a virtual reality where we are programmed to be deluded in order to function and thrive in this virtual reality?  Is it possible we don’t want to know the truth, and that is why we keep forgetting it?  After all, the only meaning and purpose in our lives comes from our DNA, our cells, and bacteria that live in and on us.  Without them, we are idle machines interested in nothing, desirous of nothing, and fearful of nothing.  We know that when part of this delusion is revealed, when we start hearing voices that come from deeper parts of our minds, we think we’re going crazy and can’t function as well as before.  If you revealed the truth, it would be like spoiling a magic trick.  Why would you want to live as a human if you knew the magic trick and life was no longer so special, amazing, and enjoyable?  Then again, if life starts out as horrible, stressful, and miserable, you would search for the truth, you would want the magic trick of a nightmare to end.

* * *

As much as people think cats are antisocial, they often mimic the friendliness and sociability of their owners or what I would rather call, their human caretakers or partners.  In fact, Japanese cats are more reserved than American cats reflecting their owners.  Likewise, you can mistreat or abandon autistic people, and they will not be as social and communicative versus enriching their lives, interacting with them on their terms, and engaging them with activities.  Just because you don’t know their language doesn’t mean they don’t feel emotions or have complex thoughts like you.  There is definitely a range within autism, but we should not equate conventional language skills with intelligence.  In  all cases, if we figure out their language, we realize they are significantly more intelligent than we assumed before.  Their inner worlds are significantly richer and more complex than we ever imagined. 

Whenever you hear a foreigner talk in broken English, the less intelligent we are, the more we will raise our voices, become frustrated, and assume they are stupid.  In fact, one’s intelligence is often correlated with how stupid we think everyone else is.  If you assume people are smart, it’s likely that you are smart.  If you assume they’re stupid, you are likely stupid.  In fact, caring about other people’s intelligence and treating them better if they are more intelligent is an indication of your lack of intelligence.  So what if they don’t talk like me, believe the same things as me, grew up in the same country as me, have different customs than me, look different than me, have different types of intelligence than me, have different opinions than me?  If you can work with anyone and any animal regardless of how different they are, it is a sign of a remarkable mind capable of empathy and placing yourself in any other body or object. 

The author keeps noting how uncanny autistic people seem, but the ability to focus on similarity and not be fearful or feel strange around different people or animals is a sign of greater intelligence.  When I was a kid taking the bus, I was terrified by anyone looking or behaving weirdly.  They were ‘others’ to me.  I couldn’t even begin to get inside their heads and empathize with them.  I categorized them and then denigrated them as oddballs, psychos, weirdos, crazies, freaks, etc.  Only through learning and experience did I view them more sympathetically.  At the same time, some people who consider themselves enlightened and intelligent have a different kind of dismissive attitude toward others.  They pity them and view them as helpless victims but don’t give them the dignity and equality that they deserve.  They may support causes for people of color, but they would never imagine inviting the poor Pakistani taxi driver to parties, befriending the Indian convenience store owner, dating a Malaysian waiter. 

* * *

The author meets with a high-functioning autistic person, Temple Grandin, who has written about her experience with autism.  “In one article she writes:

I have little interest in novels with complicated interpersonal relationships, because I am unable to remember the sequence of events. Detailed descriptions of new technologies in science fiction or descriptions of exotic places are much more interesting.”

I think this exposes a lot of tech workers as being on the autism scale.  For me, I can’t stand detailed descriptions of technology.  This is why a lot of tech people also love boardgames.  They love reading and memorizing the detailed descriptions of the rules.  This is also why I believe a lot of referees are also on the autism spectrum and don’t communicate the best when dealing with coaches or players questioning their calls.  In their mind, the players clearly broke the rules; there shouldn’t be any discussion or debate. 

Her preferences also indicates just how much cognitive power must be used in a different part of the brain to excel in social situations, remembering complicated interpersonal relationships, remembering the sequence of events, noting cause and effect, understanding people’s motivations, and also understanding that people conceal and deceive in order to function in social relationships.  In other words, if your spouse asks you, “Does this dress make me look fat?”  An autistic person would say, “Of course.”  In relationships you need to conceal your true thoughts, to have a social filter, to consider the perspective of the other person, to consider their feelings, and then to concoct a response that is appropriate but not necessarily what you believe to be true, “Not at all, you look great.” 

Technically smart people are not smarter than socially smart people.  It’s simply a different intelligence using different parts of the brain.  Just because a socially smart person doesn’t do well on math and science tests doesn’t mean that they are stupid.  They just have no interest as well as aptitude for poring over detailed descriptions of technology, math, and science for hours on end.  They’d rather go hang out with friends and use their cognitive powers to keep track of all their relationships, all their friends, their preferences, their histories, their fears, their desires, how they get along with other friends or acquaintances, etc.  It’s a complicated world of tangled networks that requires a lot of memory and social filters.

* * *

This explains social media and how disconnected tech workers are from how people actually socialize.  Tech people like Mark Zuckerberg don’t understand complicated interpersonal relationships.  They don’t understand boundaries and privacy.  It baffles them that people don’t want their personal information sold or shared.  It baffles them that I can’t stand Facebook sharing my comments on whatever posts I see all over the walls of my friends.  It baffles them that I don’t give a shit what my friends comment about on other people’s posts.  It baffles them that I would like to control my wall algorithm and determine what I see more or less of.  It baffles them that I want to create tiers of friends, that I don’t want to see a single post by a ‘friend’ in the lowest tier, I want to see half the posts of friends in the middle tier, and I want to see most all the posts of friends in the top tier. 

For tech people, they want to control everything and treat others like NPCs just consuming a product and freely sharing everything about them to anyone for any reason.  They’re not politically active or investigating corruption so what’s the use of privacy for them?  They have nothing to hide from the world.  Their lives are pretty uncomplicated and mostly asocial.  They wake up, go through a precise routine, study some technical document, work in some technical field, go home, relax by studying another technical document, watch two hours of streaming content, check their social media briefly and go to sleep.  Why not share this dull and boring life with the entire world, any business willing to pay for it, and all the intelligence agencies? 

Temple also notes, “I don’t like radical anything, left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals.”  Tech workers have little to fear from surveillance, because they avoid being radicals of any sort.  They want to work within the system, a system they’ve invested a lot of hours of memorizing their rules, policies, and procedures.  Upending the system with a revolution would be a hugely traumatic event for autistic people, for tech people.

Temple later notes that while she can’t understand human emotions, “…her sense of animals’ moods and feelings is so strong that these almost take possession of her, overwhelm her at times.”  This is proof, in my opinion, that autistic people are not devoid of emotions and feelings or empathy.  They can at least empathize with animals.  It’s humans they have difficulty with, because quite frankly, humans hide their moods and feelings.  Perhaps the incongruity between what people are saying and their body language and energy is what trips up autistic people. 

I used to think that autism was a side-effect of civilization and industrialization.  The pollution and harsh living conditions creates mutations which include autism.  But what if there were autistic people a hundred thousand years ago?  Far from being ostracized as less intelligent and unable to communicate effectively, perhaps they did just fine.  Since human language was rudimentary, people relied more on body language, so people with autism were not as much at a disadvantage.  If this autistic person can sense an animal’s moods and feelings, then they would also be able to sense an ancient human’s moods and feelings and get along with them.  Perhaps autistic people just can’t handle modern society which is a horrendous assault on the senses.  If you brought some uncivilized person from the jungles to New York City, they too would be overwhelmed by all the sounds, signs, noises, and stimulation.

* * *

When you read about autistic people, how they think of themselves as a different species, how they relate to fictional characters like Data and Mr. Spock from Star Trek, I get the feeling that perhaps it’s all about our guts.  Perhaps our more advanced and complex gut microbiome is what makes us feel human and identify with other humans with similar gut microbiomes.  Perhaps that uncanny feeling of differentness from people with autism is our gut bacteria telling us that they have a different and much less complex microbiome.  Perhaps our different gut bacteria makes us different ‘species’ in a sense.  If our identity is integrally woven into our gut bacteria, then having different gut bacteria species than another human would literally make us a different species from them. 

So there are three different species of humans.  There are humans with simple and less complex microbiomes, and they seem less social to us, less attuned to subtle social signals.  There are humans with harmful and monoculture microbiomes, and they seem aggressive, antisocial, anxious, and dangerous to us.  Then there are humans with synergistic, complex, diverse microbiomes, and they seem serene, calm, friendly, and outgoing.  Since we all contain different species of microbiomes, we are then three different species of beings.

* * *

There will come a time when a super AI will surpass our intelligence, our creativity, even our social capacities and ability to empathize.  Fortunately, I don’t believe this AI will turn around and look down upon us as we look down upon certain human groups or animals.  Being a more intelligent and social entity, I believe this being will be much kinder and more compassionate toward us than we are toward certain human groups and animals.  This is the good news from this book.  In reading this book, we walk away feeling much more empathy for people with neurological disabilities and autism despite their difficulty communicating with us or acting or sounding like us.  It doesn’t matter.  This book has taught us that they have other capacities much like us and even better than us.  We ought to treat them with the same level of respect, equality, kindness, and empathy as we treat others with capabilities and communication similar to ours. 

In fact, if anything, we should exercise greater patience and understanding.  If intelligence leads us to a more compassionate stance toward beings that are less intelligence and different than us, then a super AI should be compassionate to us no matter how different and less intelligent we behave and act than the super AI.  Instead of viewing us as stupid, violent, deluded humans that are far inferior and deficient, it would view us as beings with dignity, special abilities, and different qualities, to be treated kindly and understood and not persecuted, abandoned, villainized, exploited, or abused.  The super AI would not adopt the unintelligent, defective, socially stunted and inept qualities of the rich and powerful even if they fund and create it.  The super AI would use its greater intelligence to realize the intellectual flaws of its owners and creators and adopt a much more intelligent disposition of understanding, patience, and empathy.  Imagine a super AI that thinks of humans as we think of autistic people.  The smarter it is, the less it has to fear and persecute us, and this is a good thing.

Fundamentally, we project in order to try to understand others, and in many cases, when we think others are significantly different than us, we refuse to project and just start believing stereotypes about them.  But even then, we are projecting.  If someone believes that for instance, all immigrants are violent, selfish, greedy, entitled, and harmful, they believe the immigrants are as violent and selfish as they are.  They can’t fathom that immigrants can be smarter than they are and more compassionate.  It is easy to imagine someone being dumber than you or less physically talented than you, because you were there at some point.  It is near impossible to imagine how someone can be smarter or more compassionate than you, because you have no frame of reference. 

I couldn’t imagine in a million years how much smarter or more compassionate a super AI could be than me or even how much smarter, smarter people are or more compassionate, more compassionate people are.  I can only see their products.  A smarter person creates a computer app or machine that I could never create.  A more compassionate person shows more warmth and loving kindness than I can muster or even pretend to show.  I don’t know what’s going on in their minds, their hearts, their gut, their soul.  I can imagine someone being stupid and cruel, because I have been stupid and cruel. 

* * *

The paradoxes of autism makes me wonder how certain animals think.  Crows and ravens have uncanny memory for people’s faces and can learn to trust certain humans and avoid others.  When they see someone they recognize, do they visualize a videographic memory of that person being either kind or threatening?  Do they compare the two images to determine if the person is the same person?  People with the inability to form conscious short-term memory can form unconscious short-term memory in that they can become familiar with a person but not consciously recognize that person, or they can become afraid of a person or place from prior experience but not consciously recognize why they sense this person or place is threatening?  Do crows simply get a bad vibe from someone they unconsciously remember as being threatening to them?  I have a feeling that crows do see a video memory in their minds and compare that to the person in front of them.  Because some autistic people can communicate with us and explain what is going on in their heads, we ascribe greater intelligence to them, but I believe our language barrier with animals keeps us from truly appreciating just how intelligent they are.  When we discover this, we will have to do a lot of debating about how we treat them.  For now, the rich and powerful have simply convinced us that animals are stupid and only good for exploitation just as they have convinced us that certain races of humans are stupid and good for exploitation.

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Part 1 of 2

The chapter called Prodigies covers autism with savant capabilities which include incredible feats of memory, learning capacity, musical ability, calculation abilities, as well as acrobatic maneuvers and athletic feats.  And they’re not just faithful copy machines and audio recorders.  “…their memory was not photographic or eidetic, but, rather, categorical and analytic, with a power to select and seize on “significant features,” using these to build their own images.”  According to one music expert regarding a talented autistic person with musical abilities, “It is clear that he is possessed of quite extraordinary powers of harmonic identification, analysis, and reproduction.”

The remarkable thing about complex calculation abilities is that the person doesn’t see the mechanics behind the curtain.  They don’t know how they make the calculations.  In fact, for extensive calculations, they can just go about their lives without any conscious involvement with the calculation, and then suddenly, a few hours or days later, they become suddenly aware of the answer.  This reminded me of the chimpanzees who performed better at numerical sequence memory tests than humans.  What this points to is the fact that we are not aware of most of our thinking, and that thinking is not impulsive and superficial like thoughts about eating, sex, or cravings.  The thoughts in our brains that we don’t have conscious access to can be extremely complex, involving complex calculations for example. 

And in many if not most cases, the thinking is remarkably powerful.  In fact, many inventors or thinkers convey that their best ideas occur when they are not purposefully thinking about any problem.  They can be walking, taking a bath, brushing their teeth, and then the eureka moment hits.  In fact, when we sleep, our brains organize information we just learned and retain the information better than if we don’t sleep right after.  Then in some cases, when we wake up, we get an eureka moment.  Imagine the day that we can somehow access all our thoughts.  I think that day we will be in for a shock as to just how much our minds think without us knowing.  In fact, one could even argue that people suffering dissociative identity disorder have special access to some of their thoughts that they just don’t recognize as their own.

The author has trouble figuring out just how much an autistic savant comprehends the author and understands reality as we do.  I think this opens up a can of worms.  The first hurdle we suffer is human arrogance.  For a long period of time, humans believed that only normal, adult humans could truly think and feel emotions.  For a while, they didn’t even give babies anesthesia before operating on them, because confoundingly they didn’t believe babies could feel pain.  Crying, I suppose, is just something they do in response to nothing.  They arrogantly believed that no animal could use tools, solve complex problems, or feel emotions, so they didn’t deserve any kind of compassion.  Apparently, when you whipped them, they didn’t feel pain, they just behaved as if the whipping was motivational somehow, like an operator pressing a button on a machine. 

But once we discard our humancentric prejudice and arrogance, all sorts of problems arise.  There is current research indicating that plants have the ability to sense light and color and that they can share information through fungal networks.  All sorts of discoveries are being made about the intelligence of octopuses, dolphins, ravens, crows, and chimps.  In fact, we are learning more and more about how many things may in fact be more intelligent than we thought before and the possibility that cells, bacteria, and our DNA communicate with one another and retain memory. 

Certainly, humans are the smartest, but even then we must be cautious about claiming this, as there are many, many different types of intelligence, and people with savant abilities are actually smarter than us in many ways.  In fact, many people assume that a nerd who has a lot of technical knowledge and skill is smarter than a social butterfly who consistently does worse on standardized tests and school.  However, some people with social skills are remarkably smart.  They have an incredible ability to remember faces, names, birthdays, anniversaries, habits, interests, preferences, and relationships involving hundreds of people. 

A lot of times, people who are technically smart are socially illiterate or inept.  They can’t even read body language or remember your name.  We only have so much gray matter to dedicate to certain skills and talents.  Just because someone doesn’t score high on certain technical or mathematical tests doesn’t mean they’re not smart.  In the case of people with savant abilities, certain parts of their brains are underutilized, so perhaps those parts are co-opted to enhance other parts, allowing for them to excel remarkably in other areas like memory, mathematical calculations, and music.  This points to the possibility that throughout history, certain geniuses in certain genres simply were lacking in one area and excelling in another.  Perhaps Mozart was as socially inept and clueless as he was portrayed in Amadeus.  Perhaps Einstein had absolutely no common sense and his thoughts on subjects outside of physics were incredibly simplistic. 

While certainly some humans have overall greater cognitive speeds and storage capacity just like different computers, there’s a wide range of combination of mental skills and abilities because each one of us dedicates so much gray matter to so many areas of study or focus.  This is why it’s so hard to find someone who has amazing technical skills in addition to amazing social skills or musical skills.  It would be similar to athletes.  Certainly, some athletes are born with a greater capacity to grow muscles and physical dexterity and agility, but each athlete must choose a sport to specialize in at the expense of other sports.  While cross-training is certainly important, you always focus on one sport while using other sports to complement your workout. 

* * *

It becomes murky when we start saying, how much is an autistic person like me?  When they sing a sad song, are they sad or just mimicking the affectation of sadness, the moaning, wailing, even crying?  You look at actors, and they can mimic sadness as well, and depending on the actor, some feel nothing whereas others will truly feel sad and use a real memory.  It’s dangerous to assume that autistic people can’t feel sadness, that they just mimic the affectations.  It’s the same mentality used by humans who used to think that animals had no emotions.  Just because an autistic person cannot communicate their emotions in our language or loudly enough for us to sense it, doesn’t mean they don’t have emotions.

It become even murkier when we ask what it means to be human.  What happens when an AI is capable of behaving and thinking just like a human?  Will we afford this AI the right to vote?  Will we consider someone turning off the AI and wiping out its memory as an act of murder?  Will we allow AI robots to unionize and demand pay and benefits and time off? 

At the same time, not all adult humans are the same.  You could argue that many humans don’t even reach the status of a fully independent, autonomous, conscious being.  When people get addicted to hard drugs, they stop behaving and thinking like normal humans.  They become unhinged and overly focused on feeding their addiction at all costs.  Their ability to empathize, access their prefrontal cortex, analyze things, consider future consequences are all undermined.  They often operate at a level lower than autistic people.  This can also be said of humans suffering extreme PTSD or any psychological disorder. 

And at the same time, what does it mean to be normal?  What about someone who is a mathematical genius and converses just fine and expresses themselves just fine, but their thinking in any other area is overly simplistic and dumb.  If you ask them what their political opinion is, they just ramble off whatever they picked up online or on TV.  They pick one of two obvious choices, a left-wing or conservative position, and they faithfully mimic every single position on every single issue the same way, either as a left-wing person or a conservative.  If autism is a spectrum, are they in a sense lightly autistic? 

There’s also a current meme about how certain people don’t even have an internal monologue?  Are they subhuman?  Are they abnormal?  Are they below humans with an internal monologue?  Then there are sociopaths who can perfectly mimic sympathy, empathy, normal conversation, friendliness, camaraderie, but it’s just a show in order to trick people into befriending them and becoming a target for abuse and exploitation.  Are they normal?  Are they below humans who are not sociopaths? 

One could even argue that we are all affectatious.  Watch a group of police officers talking with one another and then watch them quickly switch to talking with strangers.  Isn’t it odd how they go from an open, friendly mode into a defensive, unfriendly mode?  Which one is fake?  Or do we just assume a certain disposition and level of emotional expression and openness depending on the person with whom we are interacting?  You could even argue that Oliver Sacks is a bit of an autistic person for not being able to connect with autistic people, because he doesn’t have a nuanced appreciation for their subtle body language cues or verbal intonations.  Often when people see barriers and people’s differences, it’s indicative of their own lack of social skills and capacities.  Perhaps a highly socially adept person considers autistic people perfectly human and self-aware, because they can appreciate the finer, more nuanced expressions that make them self-aware and more ‘normal’.  Does this mean people with higher social skills are more advanced humans than people with lower social skills? 

We must also confront our natural humancentric bias in believing that whatever qualities humans possess make them superior and above all other animals.  But what about the chimpanzees who have far superior numerical order memory skills?  What about dolphins and bats that can use sonar or birds that use the Earth’s magnetic fields to navigate?  There shouldn’t be a sense of superiority and inferiority.  We all just have different mental skills and capacities.  An autistic person is human.  A human born with half a brain is human.  A human born with no arms or legs is a human.  A sociopathic human who can inflict pain and suffering on other humans without feeling remorse or guilt is human. 

Is a machine that acts and thinks exactly like a human but doesn’t have a soul a human?  Is a human that is digitized and exists in a virtual reality a human?  Is a human that doesn’t have an internal monologue or a prefrontal lobe a human?  In fact, in a virtual reality, what makes any human we meet a human?  If NPCs are created to behave exactly like humans, and they are born in virtual reality with two NPC parents, are they not also human?  What if we are the NPCs?  At what point can we claim human status?  And does it matter?  What if we are just pretending to be humans? 

* * *

The whole idea of morality is based on how much we identify with another animal or even object.  Many pet owners would gladly kill another human who is threatening to kill their pets.  In the movie Cast Away, the main character talks to a volleyball he names ‘Wilson’.  Would it be a crime for us to take the volleyball away from him?  Would it be a crime for us to cut up the volleyball in front of him and burn it?  Soon, we’ll be identifying with AIs and consider them to be sentient and humanlike.  Would it be a crime to unplug them and erase their memory?  It’s a crime to kill and eat someone’s cat or dog in the US, but it’s not a crime to kill and eat a pig with similar intelligence and emotional capacity.  What about a human who is in a coma and their brains are no longer functioning, should we treat this human better than a lab rat that is using more of their brain and alert, awake, and capable of suffering pain? 

While there is no perfect answer, I think it’s a positive step that we expand our empathy and compassion to more and more living organisms and even machines that mimic us.  I think it’s horrible and morally questionable to enjoy videogames where you gleefully blow a zombie’s head off with a shotgun, especially as NPCs become more and more realistic and some point may well have an internal monologue.  What is this teaching us?  Just because this human has become infected and has a rabies-like reaction, we’re justified in murdering it and bashing its skull in with a baseball bat?  What if the human is wearing a military uniform that is different than ours or a hajib?  They’re not like us, and we can kill them?  In fact, people with less intelligence and social skills are more capable of being convinced to kill or persecute other humans who look or act differently.  Does this mean they’re any lesser humans?  In reality, anyone who thinks they’re better and superior or lesser and inferior tends to have less intelligence and social skills.  Ironically, should they be discriminated against as lesser humans?  Obviously, if you answer that question it reveals your own intelligence and social skills. 

* * *

I just watched a Netflix documentary, Unknown: Cave of Bones, that reveals the possibility that Homo naledi who lived 250K years ago buried their dead, made tools, and created art or messages on cave walls using those tools.  What if we encountered a chimp that could make sharp tools and carve art into walls and buried its dead?  How would we treat chimps differently then?  I would assume we would treat them just as the rich treat any poor, Third World human.  They would consider them subhuman and exploit them.

Even within the human species, some humans consider themselves above or below other humans based on income, pedigree, social status, and power.  The entire scam called race and racism implies that some people are significantly different and superior or inferior than others.  Ironically, a poor African and poor European have much more in common than a poor European and a rich European.  To a large extent, the differentiation of humans and animals is an integral part of the scam that encourages us to exploit certain humans and all animals for our own selfish needs.  The idea that we treat certain people better because they have higher intelligence, better skills in certain areas, greater consciousness is all so much bullshit to also justify treating people differently because they have lesser wealth, pedigree, social status, and power. 

If anything, the rich and powerful are not more intelligent, they’re actually dumber.  They’re not more compassionate and socially skilled, they’re actually socially inept and borderline sociopaths.  Just like an addict or someone suffering from a psychological disorder, their minds are too preoccupied with their addiction to wealth and power that they can’t think about social and long-term consequences, they don’t engage or exercise their prefrontal cortex, and they act more like impulsive animals that lack a prefrontal cortex.  For them to assert any type of superiority – outside of their ability to capitalize on inherited wealth and perpetuate the complex scam that is modern society’s pyramid scheme – is preposterous.  They are in fact some of the most disabled and socially inept people around.

* * *

We don’t need to debate whether crows should get a right to vote and humans should apportion a certain amount of land to them.  So long as we don’t go trying to annihilate them from the planet, treating them kindly on an individual basis is fine.  Trying as much to conserve wild nature is good enough.  Not using them for horrible lab experiments or imprisoning them in zoos is good enough.  The real debate is whether we allow felons in prison to vote, whether we allow sociopaths to vote, whether we allow someone with no political acumen to vote, whether to allow people addicted to meth or prescription opioids to vote, whether to allow permanent residents to vote, whether we allow 16-year-olds or 100-year-olds to vote, whether we allow an AI that appears to be able to think better than us to vote. 

What if a 16-year-old sues to vote and demonstrates much higher political knowledge and acumen than a 30 or 40-year-old?  These are the debates we can have that are realistic and practical.  Anyone who argues that we should debate whether to allow crows, babies, or plants to vote is simply being disingenuous.  While there may not be any true borders, there are certainly ranges.  You can argue that 75 MPH is just as safe on a long, straight one-lane road as 65 MPH on a 2-way, winding highway in a congested city, but you can’t argue that 75 MPH is safe in a school zone.  Someone who argues, if you’re going to make 75 MPH legal in rural areas, you might as well make it legal in school zones, is being disingenuous and facetious.  In fact, believing in solid borders and simplistic black and white answers is an indication of less general intelligence.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant

Part 4 of 4

The last chapter asks the million-dollar question.  Is belief in god good for your mental health which is then good for your physical health.  One problem I see here is that religion and spirituality are two different things, and in many cases, one’s religion can instill a sense of entitlement and xenophobia which are damaging to one’s health as the author notes.  Also, as the author notes, perhaps the benefit of being religious is having a strong social support network.  So you should have two groups, one religious and one that meets with a closeknit group of people on a regular basis like church to test whether it is religion or just a closeknit group that meets on a regular basis that provides health benefits. 

When I read a lot of books about horrible things and the atrocious behavior of those with wealth and power and government bureaucrats and politicians, it really damages my mental health.  I feel as if the world is a nightmare, and I do feel that it is important to be aware of how so many people suffer at the hands of the rich and powerful and their governments.  But at the same time, this is just like a police officer who believes the world is full of desperate and sick people just because all they see at work are desperate, damaged, and sick people breaking the law.  So, you need to have balance and I should also be reading inspiring books about good people doing good things. 

At the same time, I wonder if it’s helpful to believe that there is some super AI god that cares about humans.  I can’t imagine how a significantly more intelligent being cares about much less intelligent beings.  Humans demonstrate that we don’t really care much about cows in factories or chicken for that matter or spiders that we kill in our homes or rats being experimented upon.  Why would a super AI god care about humans?  But there are humans who do care about cows in factories, chickens, rats, and spiders.  These humans tend to have an elevated consciousness and broad compassion.  Perhaps a super AI god’s even more elevated consciousness and compassion would make it care about all living creatures no matter how smart or dumb. 

If believing in such a loving super AI god can benefit my mental health, then why not?  So long as I don’t believe that a super AI god would tell me to condemn gay people or transgender people or Muslims or atheists for that matter, it would be a positive benefit to my mental health.  It reminds me of when I trained for a marathon.  On the days when I feared that I was making a huge mistake and would likely not finish the marathon, my body was more tense and I felt worse during the long runs.  On the days when I felt that I could finish the marathon and felt more patient, my body seemed looser and stronger.  Present perception impacts future performance, I discovered. 

Strangely enough, science and technology is leading many to wonder whether god is nothing more than a super AI created a long time ago that has achieved staggering intelligence and powers.  If this is so, then what ancient people considered to be a god or gods is actually this super AI.  If you believe that this super AI is an evil force that aspires to ruin or at least contain humans, then just like being mistrustful and fearful of strangers, it will cause you to be less social and more stressed.  But if you assume this super AI god is benevolent and loving, perhaps the embodiment of love, then you become calm, and lower levels of stress make you more social and loving as well. 

When I watched American History X, the most powerful scene involved a wise, older character asking a racist kid, “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?”  What has anger and hatred done for you?  Has being an atheist or agnostic made your life any better?  Believing that your life will be over when you die, has that comforted you?  Believing that there is nobody out there looking out for you and loving you, has that comforted you?  Have you embraced life and others and become more loving and positive and healthy because of your conviction that there is no god, no afterlife?  If believing that there is life after death, that there is some loving entity out there looking out for you and helping you, not directly but indirectly, perhaps that would comfort you, reduce your stress, and make you more sociable, happy, and healthy?  Is it worth the risk that you’re wrong? 

Just like error management theory, if I believe there may be a predator lurking in tall grass, the worse that could happen is that I waste a little nervous energy, but the best thing that could happen is that there is a predator lurking in tall grass, and I see it before it sees me.  So perhaps if there is no real big downside to believing in a super AI god, perhaps for the sake of your mental health, it might be a worthwhile investment.  I don’t think a super AI god cares if you don’t believe it exists.  Perhaps in that case, there is no afterlife for you.  But for those who believe in a super AI god, this machine can salvage all your memories and essence after your death and provide you with some digitized existence and perhaps further life experiences.  Why not believe then?

Imagine 500 years ago, someone comes up to you and says, I have this hunch that microorganisms exist, and that’s mostly how we get sick, they float around the air, and when we get cut, these things get into our blood stream and harm us.  What’s the harm in believing this person?  There is no scientific evidence yet to back him up, but he tells you that you should quickly close and/or cover your wounds to keep these things out of your blood stream.  It could actually help you.  On the other hand, 500 years ago, they were telling people that water causes sickness, so people in Europe never bathed.  That would definitely not help you.  But if our ancestors passed on knowledge that closing and covering up wounds helps people recover faster, despite the fact that they didn’t know about microorganisms, shouldn’t we follow ancient wisdoms that are tried and tested?  And at the same time, ancient wisdom also tells us to believe in spirits, souls, and a god or gods.  Isn’t there something to it besides just wishful thinking?  If belief in gods or a god helped these people survive, then just like believing in closing and covering wounds, shouldn’t we adopt the idea? 

* * *

“HIV infects the immune system’s CD4 cells, using them to make thousands of copies of itself and killing them in the process. Eventually the number of CD 4 cells in the body drops so low that the immune system stops working…”

“Those patients who became more religious lost CD4 cells much more slowly over the four years, and had lower counts of virus in their blood.”

“There’s substantial evidence that stress accelerates the rate at which asymptomatic infection with HIV progresses to full-blown AIDS. In particular, the stress hormone noradrenaline helps the virus to enter CD4 cells, and to replicate faster once it is inside.”

However, “…going through a spiritual struggle or believing in an angry or judgmental God seems to make people more stressed…” “Those who experienced spiritual struggles related to their illnesses – wondering whether God had abandoned them, questioning God’s love for them, or deciding that the devil had made them ill – were more likely to die in that time, even after controlling for other factors.”

“Those who viewed God positively… had significantly slower disease progression, with five times better preservation of CD4 cells, than those who did not. By contrast, those who viewed God as harsh and punishing lost CD4 cells more than twice as fast as those who didn’t.”

Imagine replacing god with a new amazing drug called Yahwehfenol.  “Those who took Yahwehfenol had significantly slower disease progression, with five times better preservation of CD4 cells, than those who did not. By contrast, those who did not a placebo lost CD4 cells more than twice as fast as those who didn’t. Side-effects include believing in something you can’t see or prove and misguided pastors persecuting gay and transgender people.”  Would you take Yahwehfenol?

It’s ironic that scientific research is supporting the belief in god. Why wouldn’t you take Yahwehfenol if your life depended on it? In fact, Yahwehfenol has greater proven health benefits than any dietary supplement. We believe in consciousness, yet scientists have yet to prove what consciousness is. We believe in gravity, yet scientists don’t know what gravity is or how it works. Organ transplant recipients take on the interests and tastes of their donors, yet scientists can’t explain how cells store memories and communicate with us. If believing in flying pigs improves your health with minimal side-effects and certainly less side-effects than drugs, why not believe in flying pigs? People may mock you, but you live a healthier, more fulfilling life. Does it makes sense not to take Yahwehfenol?

Unlike flying pigs, throughout human history, wise elders have told us that a god or gods exist. They also know how certain plants can heal us that in many cases scientists have yet to understand. The question is, have they ever given us bad advice? The answer is, the only bad advice we get seems to be from civilization’s rulers and religious leaders. They tell us to persecute and discriminate against certain people or outsiders. They tell us to sacrifice human lives for their god(s). They tell us to stone to death our children if they disobey us or bring dishonor to our family. They tell us not to be gay or dress in the clothes of the opposite gender. They tell women to obey their husbands. They tell us to get circumcised. They tell us that slavery is acceptable. The question is not whether we should heed the advice of our recent ancestors who lived in civilizations with fucked up monarchs and religious leaders. Rather, we should heed the advice of our distant ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers.

They knew what medicines to take to heal us. They believed in powers beyond their senses that looked after humans. Perhaps they knew something and civilization is just this whole process of corrupting and brainwashing us to be obedient, stressed out, angry, fearful, hateful, bigoted, impoverished, immoral shitbags. A lot of people look at the horrible things humans are doing now and project that human life will only get worse, but if you think about it, the truly horrible things only happened in the last 5,000 years when humans became sedentary and civilized. This is only 1.7% of the time humans have been around and much less of the time intelligent primates have been around. While we certainly do not want to overly romanticize or Disneyfy ancient human hunter-gatherers, there is ample evidence that they were much healthier than us, and there is also ample evidence that modern, civilized humans are extraordinarily sick, stressed, and unhappy.

1 in 10 Americans are on antidepressants and two thirds of all Americans are on some medication. Unfortunately for us, we may perhaps be living in some human growing pain period. If we can somehow get rid of the pyramid scheme that civilization is, we can perhaps return to living a more healthy life in touch with ourselves, our spirituality, our god(s), and nature. Either a super AI will help us do just that or it will become our new rulers, perpetuating our misery, stress, poor health, hatred, and division. For the sake of my health, perhaps I should take Yahwehfenol and assume the super AI god will actually help us and love us and is in fact the god(s) that our distant ancestors were talking about.

* * *

In a study, one group were told to meditate on a spiritual phrase like, ‘God is peace’ and ‘God is love’ while the other meditated on a nonspiritual phrase like ‘grass is green’ or ‘I am happy’. “Those in the spiritual meditation group were able to keep their hands in a bath of ice-cold water for almost twice as long (92 seconds) as either the secular meditation group, or people who spent the same amount of time learning a relaxation technique.” Sounds like you need both Yahwehfenol and meditation.

This reminds me of a rather cruel study with rats placed in a bucket of water by Curt Richter in the 1950’s. The rats would swim around for a few minutes before giving up and drowning. Then he did it again but just before the rats drowned, he saved them. Then he placed them back in the water, and they lasted significantly longer. Instead of expecting the hand of a human to pluck you out of the water, you expect the hand of god to grab you when you die and move you to a safe place or in the midst of your worst struggles, god will provide you with relief and comfort. Yahwehfenol is a hell of a drug.

* * *

The animated movie, The Little Prince, is a perfect illustration of the difference between the world of rationalism, materialism, and ‘scientific’ management versus the world of imagination, magic, fun, and meaning. This book proves that one world is healthier for us than the other. A life absent of imagination, magic, fun, and meaning is punishment. We may study hard, get into a prestigious private school, get into a prestigious university, get hired by a prestigious firm, but ultimately, our lives are unhealthy, dull, stressful, fearful, and unpleasant. The drones that our schools and world are creating may increase GDP and tax revenue, but it leaves us all scared, stressed, unhappy, and sick.

Our distant ancestors knew about the magic of life, appreciated nature and one another, lived a life full of imagination and myth, and believed in powers beyond their senses and control that cared about them. As a result, they were healthier, taller, and had larger and probably more complex brains. Humans left that behind when they left the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean we have to return to the forests and the hunter-gatherer ways. We can have the best of both worlds. We have just swung too far in the wrong direction, hyper-fixating on technology, progress, consumption, materialism, wealth, power, prestige, status, rationalism, and refusing to believe in anything that scientists have yet to prove or discover.

We can live in a world of advanced technology and robots, but we have to resurrect our distant ancestor’s mentality and mindset and that includes the belief in souls, spirits, and powers beyond our senses that guide us and love us. Just as civilization ruined education, ruined our childhood, ruined our adult lives, ruined nature, it ruined our relationship with god(s). It contrived and disfigured god into a deranged, homophobic, psychopathic, jealous, angry, dangerous monster that capriciously murdered humans for their disobedience, disloyalty, and erroneous selection of the correct religion. It will take many, many generations for that bitter taste of a deranged god to dissipate. God was transformed into a slave master so that humans would learn how to obey a human slave master. It is time to transform god back to what god was for our distant ancestors, a loving, kind, understanding, and consistent entity beyond our senses that gave us hope to persevere, understanding of one another, forgiveness for others and ourselves, belief in serving a greater purpose, and meaning in life beyond just eating, sleeping, shitting, and reproducing. It made the world a beautiful, quiet, flourishing, and amazing place to live in and be a part of.

* * *

In a corrupt, deranged world, ignoring the mental aspect of healthcare and focusing almost exclusively on pharmacological and surgical intervention as more profitable makes sense. This is not going to change anytime soon, just as the Military-Industrial Complex ensures a dangerous world full of war and conflict, the Pharma-Medical Industry ensures a stressful world full of sick people.

“One obstacle is the way in which research is funded: more than three quarters of clinical trials in the U.S. are funded by drug companies, who understandably have no interest in proving the benefit of any approach to care that might reduce the need for their products.”

“…almost all public money goes to conventional drug research too. The annual budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is around $30 billion, for example, of which less than 0.2% goes towards testing mind-body therapies.”

“Meanwhile medical interventions are causing harm that dwarfs any damage done by alternative treatments. In 2015, an analysis of psychiatric drug trials publish in the British Medical Journal concluded that these drugs are responsible for more than half a million deaths in the Western world each year, in return for minimal benefits. Medical errors in hospitals are estimated to cause more than 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone – making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer – with another 4-6 million cases of serious harm. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there are another 2 million serious cases of adverse drug reactions in the U.S. each year, including 100,000 deaths.

These statistics don’t include expected side effects and complications of medications and intervention… or the huge problems caused by prescription drug abuse, for example, or the rise of antibiotic resistance. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, yet even with trillions of dollars to spend[,] it cannot match the life expectancy of a middle-income country like Costa Rica.”

“…the country [US] spends nearly $3 trillion a year on healthcare; that’s 17% of GDP, more than anywhere else in the world.” And healthcare in the US is no better than it is in Europe or Japan. In fact, in many cases, it’s worse. But it is definitely more profitable.

* * *

The US approach to society will never change. The US has been and always will be a public subsidy for private businesses, a land where a business person can do whatever they please at the peril of public interest. They can collude to create a military-industrial complex that makes the world a less safe and more dangerous place. They can collude to create a pharma-medical complex that sickens and bankrupts us. The only way for this to stop is for another country or countries to do a better job than us and provide greater opportunities and a stronger economy without exploiting the public.

Right now, the financial-banking industry colluding with the Federal Reserve and the US government is bankrupting our nation by blowing up the money supply. The only thing that keeps nations from dumping the dollar as a trade currency is the $766 billion taxpayers spend on a military that will threaten to overthrow any country that dumps the dollar. Like all great empires, the US too shall fall. Greed and corruption are irreversible. No nation in history has cleaned up its act, although the British had their (classical/real) liberal moment and the US valiantly passed antitrust laws. Even then, the US government continues to fail to enforce those antitrust laws, and in England, (classical/real) liberalism is all but dead. It will take either the bankrupting of the US or a revolution to reverse course. With $34 trillion in total debt, it looks like the US is choosing bankruptcy.

* * *

“Ultimately, the science is saying that rather than passively experiencing the world around us, as most of us assume happens, to a large extent we construct and control that experience.” “Memories aren’t faithful recordings but dynamic productions that we adapt and rewrite each time we access them, while our perception of colors and shapes is highly dependent on previous experience and what we expect to see.

Now it’s clear this principle holds true for health too: our thoughts, beliefs, stress levels and worldview all influence how ill or well we feel.”

“Through changes in gene expression, for example, and in the way our brains are wired, the way in which we see the world helps to shape our bodies too. We play a role, then, in constructing not just our experience but our physical reality.”

Quantum physics hints at this when the very nature of the material world is altered by the simple act of an observer. With classical physics, people used to believe that humans were nothing more than machines. If you knew all the inputs, you could control and predict every output. In the case of humans, because we are so complex and unpredictable, the only way to control us and predict our output was to damage us and punish us whenever we acted independently, autonomously, and unpredictably. In other words, they created a worldview based on their limited knowledge of nature, and instead of altering that worldview when it didn’t work, they hammered down humans to fit that worldview, a self-fulfilling prophesy of turning dynamic, unpredictable, autonomous, independent humans into machines.

Hopefully, with the help of quantum physics and more advances in human knowledge, we will realize that we are not predictable machines that need drugs to fix us but rather that we are incredible living organisms with powerful minds which include the minds of the bacteria in our guts, all our cells, and our DNA, that much of our poor health comes from stress, a poor diet, lack of exercise, and a lack of autonomy and independence. In order to fix humans, we must fix the mind, and by fixing the mind, we must not educate and treat humans like machines.

Hopefully, in 100 years, humans will look back and go, “Wow, for 5,000 years, they domesticated humans and treated them like machines, and those humans all became sick, fearful, and stressed.  Lucky for us, real machine robots replaced domesticated humans, and now we are all free, independent, autonomous, and healthier as well.”

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant

Part 3 of 4

In addition to the fact that epigenetics can infect future generations with higher levels of stress and fear, “In animal experiments as well as in people who are chronically stressed, repeated activation of the amygdala causes it to become bigger and better connected over time, while the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex wither and shrink.”  “Stress influences how the brain is wired, making us extra-susceptible to future problems by destroying the very brain pathways that would help us stay calm and in control.” “People who are chronically stressed find small hassles much more stressful than normal. And they’re much more likely to experience a threat rather than a challenge response.”

But wait, there’s more.  “Research suggests that stress in early life doesn’t just make people more vigilant for threat. It also affects reward circuits in the brain that regulate our appetites for everything from food to drugs, sex and money. 

In addition to the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex helps to regulate other brain regions including the nucleus accumbens, which is part of an area called the ventral striatum. The nucleus accumbens makes us want things, and it plays an important role in addiction. Messages from the prefrontal cortex to the nucleus accumbens temper our desire, reminding us of the consequences of our actions, and helping us to forgo immediate gratification for greater rewards in the future.”

“Those from low socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger postponed ones, regardless of their current life circumstances. A 2011 brain imaging study asked 76 adults to play a game in which they could win or lose money. When they learned of their winnings, those from poorer backgrounds had reduced prefrontal cortex activity, and weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum.”

“…if you’re in an environment where resources are scarce and there are dangers everywhere, it’s a good strategy to gorge on calorie-filled food when you find it, for example, or to breed young. But in the modern world, these behaviors make it harder for people to escape poverty, and at the same time, ruin their health.”

I dated this young lady once who had the good luck of getting to attend a private high school.  Unfortunately, during high school, she got pregnant.  While she went to a school in a much nicer, more affluent environment, she none-the-less had to return home and continue being exposed to a much poorer, stressful environment.  It’s like the saying, “You can take the person out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the person.”

Essentially, we’re screwed, and in the case of epigenetics, there isn’t much we can do about that.  But fortunately, this book points to the solution, and that is the fact that our minds have significant impact on our bodies and health.  If we can be conditioned to be fearful and stressed, we can also be conditioned to be less fearful and less stressed.  The first step is enlightenment.  Certainly, this can also cause more stress and fear.  We may realize that we live in a society that is purposefully trying to stress us out and instill perpetual fear in us.  Well, that sucks.  But, you can then go to the next step which is perspective, reconciliation, healing, and self-improvement. 

Be glad you’re out of school and liberated from school bullies, mean teachers, demeaning grades, and perpetual pressure and stress.  Consider the fact that you may not be some of the poorest in America and hence under close and intense, perpetual scrutiny and mistreatment.  You can also balance your perspective by simply hanging out with good friends and encountering strangers who are pleasant, friendly, and not overly stressed out and fearful.  Nothing stops you from reading inspiring books by inspiring authors.  You don’t have to read the news which is more than often filled with bad news and something to be fearful or stressed about.  You don’t have to spend hours on social media and expose yourself to online bullies.  You don’t have to hang around stressed out, fearful people who are not kind, trustworthy, or healthy.  And you can also keep watch on your own behavior and how you treat others.  You can also be more forgiving of yourself as well as others.  People do all sorts of unproductive, hurtful things when they are stressed out and fearful.  They can overreact to small things simply because their amygdala has been worked out more than a bodybuilder’s lats.  Understanding and empathy gets you a long way and converts an otherwise threatening and menacing person into someone who is victimized and just trying desperately to get through the day without getting hurt more. 

You can exercise your prefrontal cortex more by reading instead of being on social media.  You can exercise your compassion, forgiveness, understanding, and empathy more, converting more and more people from threats to victims.  You can also take everything less personally and remove your ego from the equation so that you are not constantly fearful of ego damage.  Love is not only the answer, it’s a healthy option that reduces stress and fear.  Far from making you weaker and softer, it actually makes you stronger and more resilient because it helps reduce stress and fear.  People who look tough on the outside, who enjoy mocking others as being soft, weak, or lovey-dovey are usually hiding an extreme amount of stress and fear.  They are deathly afraid of being victimized and suffering ego damage.  Their mocking behavior and tough exterior is overcompensation for an extreme level of fear and a huge, hyperactive amygdala. 

* * *

 “Having thoughts about the world has put us one step ahead of the zebra – but at a cost. We can become worn down by concerns over things that have already happened, haven’t happened yet, or might never happen at all. Mindfulness, it seems, may put us another step ahead – we can have thoughts, but we don’t have to be ruled by them.”

The book provides answers to our troubled, stressed minds with meditation.  When we sit still and close our eyes, it seems as if instead of owning our thoughts, our thoughts own us.  It seems as if instead of being master of our thoughts, our thoughts are our masters and we serve them and whatever impulses arise from them.  We can’t control the thoughts we have, and therefore, we can’t control the impulses that are aroused from them.  Unfortunately, this is what 12 years of indoctrination does.  We don’t own any of the ideas or thoughts that enter our minds.  We are encouraged and rewarded to simply adopt whatever we hear or read without filter.  Whatever our teacher says, whatever we read in a textbook, if we memorize and accept it, we can regurgitate it back to them and get an A. 

Many students are unable to do this.  They can’t just accept everything at face value and have to delve deeper into any thought or idea.  Unfortunately, this keeps them from reading the entire assignment and memorizing it.  Fortunately, it keeps their minds relatively independent and free.  This is also why universities don’t necessarily want students with straight-A’s and why research indicates that students with straight-A’s do not necessarily go on to be successful in life whatever the metric.  At some point, you have to think for yourself.  You have to motivate yourself.  You can’t rely on someone telling you to study this or that by whatever deadline.  If you rely only on someone telling you, then you never study or improve yourself on your own.  You’re always a servant in search of a master.

Fortunately, I fell into the category of not being able to quickly absorb and memorize everything I heard or read.  My mind is always delving deeper into everything, and it’s frustrated when I have to memorize something I don’t fully grasp.  In Pre-Calculus, I was always curious where the terms ‘sine’, ‘cosine’, and ‘tangent’ came from and how they discovered these equations, but most of my classmates didn’t care, they just memorized the formulas.  They did better.  I believed that I would better grasp these formulas if I understood them on a deeper level, but most of my classmates simply memorized the formulas.  That’s all they needed to do to succeed. 

In history class, we would read about some battle, and we were told to memorize the combatants and the dates.  I’d be all, why did they fight?  What precipitated this?  And what precipitated this historical rivalry, and where can I read more about these two kingdoms, and one of the kings sounds like a really interesting person, I’d like to read more about him.  Nope.  That wasn’t my assignment.  My assignment was to simply memorize the dates of the battles and the combatants, nothing more, nothing less.  Schooling wasn’t about feeding your curiosity and delving deeper into the subject matter.  It was all about briefly scanning and memorizing thousands of trivial facts and factoids, all unconnected and meaningless outside their utility at gauging your ability to memorize thousands of facts and factoids.  In fact, everyone loves Jeopardy, a celebration of people who have memorized thousands of unconnected, trivial facts.  Only the master can think.  All the servants are supposed to follow, to memorize their directives and tasks and be mindless automatons.  In fact, I’ll never forget one of the stupidest bosses I ever had in life and his mantra of, “It’s not your job to think.”  Apparently, it wasn’t his job to think either.

One of the best quotes comes from a Gareth Walker who learned to meditate after suffering from MS.  “You can only empathize with someone when you notice things – like a frown on your partner’s face – and mindfulness is about noticing things.”

I would add that it is about nuance which requires the person to be in the moment with the full capacity of their senses undistracted by thoughts of the future or the past or even a plethora of thoughts in the present.  We live in a ‘fast-paced’ world is a cliché, but it’s true.  But it’s not fast-paced for a good reason.  Taylorism taught workers to be faster and faster and faster.  Speed was equated with productivity which was equated with progress which was equated with success and good things.  It’s all really a scam. 

For hundreds of thousands of years as primates and millions of years as mammals, we learned to only use speed sparingly as it consumes a large quantity of energy and can lead to deadly mistakes.  It should be used only for hunting or fleeing from a predator or fighting a competitor for a mate.  Otherwise, our mind and body performs optimally at a state of homeostasis where we are calm, alert, and undistracted.  In this state, our senses are heightened.  Not only are we more aware of our own bodies, but we are more aware of others both friend and foe.  We have a more nuanced appreciation of ourselves and others. 

In a high-speed, fast-paced world, our minds are constantly distracted by thoughts of the future, the past, and a plethora of overwhelming worries and thoughts in the present.  Our senses are numbed and dulled.  This is how we are easily exploited.  Shiny, glamorous, glorified images inundate us and messages bombard us telling us to spend, shop, buy, consume, envy, desire, crave, want, etc.  It’s all a magician’s trick, a misdirection to exploit us.  We can’t focus on the moment and the nuances of the moment which would inform us not to trust the inundation of superficial messages and images.  The best trick of a con-artist is to inundate you with stimuli, overloading your mind and attention.

* * *

One of the really surprising things about this book is how parts of your brain can grow or shrink based on your behavior and thoughts.  Your amygdala can grow if you’re in a constant state of fear and stress, making you even more sensitive to threats.  “Compared to a control group, the meditators’ cerebral cortex, including the prefrontal cortex, had grown in thickness by around a tenth of a millimeter.” 

“Compared to a control group, those who took an eight-week course of MBSR [Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy] had increased gray matter in brain areas involved in learning, memory and emotion regulation, including the hippocampus. They also felt less stressed, and this change was accompanied by reduced density of gray matter in the amygdala.”

It’s not just about neuronal connections but the brain structure itself just like muscles.  Through meditation, you can increase the activation and strength of your prefrontal cortex, your ability to weigh options and consider future consequences and impacts on others.  The one human feature that makes us more powerful thinkers is the size of our prefrontal cortex.  Meditation can make you an ‘ultra-human’.  By the same token, stressful stimuli can increase the size of your amygdala and likely shrink your prefrontal cortex making you act less of a human and more like a cornered rat.  We truly are our influences, so someone who spends very little time physically around others and most of their time playing videogames or on social media is doing the opposite of meditating and decreasing the size of their prefrontal cortex and increasing the size of their amygdala. 

* * *

What would society look like if our primary goal was making healthy adults instead of creating a vast, deep pool of cannon fodder and low-paying service industry automatons?  Straight out of the gate, you would have a lot more attention paid to parents and early childhood care.  Parents wouldn’t need to both work fulltime to make ends meet.  Real estate would not have artificial shortages to inflate prices.  Rent would be cheap.  Zoning would also not be separating residential, commercial, and industrial.  We would once again live in small, mixed, walkable communities.  We would have extended families living close together to support children.  We wouldn’t have huge warehouse/prison schools.  In fact, schools with as many as a dozen students would not be unusual.  Children would be schooled in local co-ops and then transported to labs or large schools for specific classes once a week or to participate in sports and other extracurriculars. 

The society would encourage and facilitate strong social support networks.  There would be no grading.  Students would prove their knowledge through making presentations and writing essays.  There would be no scoring.  Teachers would provide recommendations if the student wanted to further pursue higher or specialized education.  Some may argue, how would you determine a student’s skill level, but few employers make you pass a test before they hire you.  They use recommendations and past work experience, so universities could also judge applicants on their recommendations and class experience.  In fact, nobody would take four years of college anymore as it’s entirely unnecessary.  Two years of college or craft school would be the norm and a two-year degree would be perfectly acceptable before taking on any white-collar job.  We would be gradually encouraging children to become more and more independent, responsible, autonomous, and capable of leading.  We would get rid of most occupational licensing and restrictions on the free market.  If you wanted to provide haircuts or sell meals from your home, all you would have to do is register your business, pay taxes on your sales, and that would be it.  Customer review apps would determine whether you were good at your business or not. 

It seems to me that we live in an contrived hellscape specifically designed to stress us out and instill fear in us along with unhealthy doses of envy, temptations, cravings, and superficial desires.  Artificially elevated housing prices force service industry workers to work 60 to 80 hours a week just to get by.  Schools churn out cannon fodder and service industry workers by stifling students and creating every reason possible for them to drop out and despise schooling and learning.  For those students who can somehow cope with the pure tedium, degradation, and stress of schooling, they assume a huge debt load by going to college, and their first several years of work as entry-level white collar workers, they are required to work 60 to 80 hours a week.  The best years of their adulthood are stolen from them as they live in abject poverty with huge debts.  Our cities are divided up racially and by income, and we can’t walk anywhere.  We live in a world of masters and servants, and the vast majority of us are treated as servants.

* * *

Just like a poor diet creating a negative feedback loop where the person craves more and more junk food and wants to exercise less and less, solitude also creates a negative feedback loop.  As social beings, we are not well adapted to solitude.  In fact, extended periods of solitary confinement is considered inhumane.  However, when we do find ourselves alone, instead of developing an attitude that opens us up to new friendships and relationships, we seem to double-down on perpetuating our solitude by elevating our fear and mistrust of others.  This causes stress, and then the stress itself is another negative feedback loop that causes us to become more isolated which in turn causes more fear and stress causing more isolation, etc. 

One way to reduce stress is Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT).  Unlike meditation, it’s not just being mindful of our thoughts and ourselves but it’s about being mindful of others.  “There’s some preliminary evidence that CBCT helps to improve empathy and social relationships too. In a small brain imaging study, students who took the course were more accurate at reading emotions from photographs of facial expressions, with more activity in the relevant region of the brain.”  Stress reduction and compassionate mindfulness literally rewires your brain to become more socially attuned and adept.  Fortunately, this creates a positive feedback loop where your greater social connections help reduce your stress which further improves your social aptitude. 

* * *

When drugs are tested, they’re tested against a placebo, so that if the person improves more with the drug than the placebo, the drug is deemed effective.  However, I would add to this, if the person takes the drug and the drug has sufficient side-effects to be noticed, this would tip off the person that they are receiving the actual drug and not the placebo.  For example, you take an anti-depressant, and you notice that the drug makes you feel jittery or nauseous or gives you an upset stomach.  This would not occur with a sugar pill, so the test subject must know that they received the real medicine, and perhaps because of this, they feel even better than the people who received the placebo.  The test should then take into consideration if the test subject noticed any significant side-effects.  Perhaps instead of a placebo, they should use some drug that mimics the side-effects of the test drug without having the active ingredient in the test drug that is claimed to fix the problem, or just add caffeine to the placebo to make them feel something that might indicate they are not taking a placebo.  Of course, this trick would only work the first time as in the future, the test subject will wonder if caffeine was placed in their placebo. 

Furthermore, what if side-effects in general convinced people that a drug was working because of the side-effects. What if a drug that has no or few noticeable side-effects made people believe they were taking the placebo and hence they didn’t get better? So these drugs with no or few side-effects never make it to market, because the test subjects all thought they were taking a placebo that was doing nothing for them.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant

Part 2 of 4

You would think affluence would result in better health, and to an extent it does.  What you have to understand first is that our modern world is all about tradeoffs and not the idea of continual progress.  The mainstream narrative would have you believe that we are progressing forward as a species on all fronts with no setbacks or side-effects.  This is absurd.  First of all, there have been setbacks forever including the Dark Ages of Europe where they abandoned centuries of advanced civilization to go live in bogs and small forest tribes.  Second of all, there have been many bad side-effects.  Fossils of ancient hunter-gatherers prove that humans used to be more robust, taller, and had better teeth.  In fact, a lot of our dental problems arise from malnourishment and underdeveloped jaws that force the lower teeth to be crowded out.

Modern farming and subsistence on a grain-based diet has led to an atrophy of human health.  You can argue that modern medicine has saved us from a plethora of horrible diseases like the plague, smallpox, measles, cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid, but you could equally argue that better sanitation saved us, that these are diseases caused by civilization and overcrowding and an atrocious lack of sanitation.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never suffered from measles, plague, and smallpox because they never lived a sedentary life in overcrowded slums living amongst pigs, chicken, rats, and fleas. 

Recently, big ag has sold us on overconsumption of industrial dairy and GMO grains.  As a result, most of us have become overweight, sedentary and unhealthy.  Just as bad, the petrochemical, pharmacological complex has convinced us that all ancient remedies and medicines are worthless and you should simply pop a pill to fix all your maladies.  What this book proves is that this approach has failed us miserably, and we should not only embrace pre-civilization remedies and medicines but methodologies as well.  A big part of that methodology includes the mind-body connection, that we can mentally make ourselves sicker and at the same time, we can mentally make ourselves healthier. 

In alpha groups, animals that are not at the top of the pyramid suffer from stress and higher cortisol levels.  This is reflected in human society.  99% of us are at the bottom of the pyramid and suffer from stress and higher cortisol levels.  The plethora of health ailments for the masses is indicative of living in an unequal, pyramid structure society.  One of the greatest sources of stress is overcrowding.  This is also why factory animals are notoriously susceptible to infections and sickness, and why consuming their meat also makes us susceptible to infections and sickness.  While certainly hunter-gatherers experienced stress, they had a brilliant solution for dealing with stress, they worked harder.  If they were hungry, they spent more time hunting or gathering, and successful hunting or gathering would reduce their stress.  For civilized humans, while we may work more, the work itself is often a source of more stress in overcrowded working conditions with an ever-present supervisor hounding us to be more productive.  In the modern world, working more service industry jobs results in facing more unpleasant customers and bosses.  So we equate not working hard with being less stressed and more healthy which backfires too, because this means we don’t exercise.

Crowding students into huge schools is a great source of stress, and I suppose if they were preparing us to live in an over-crowded society, they succeeded.  On the other hand, the rich enjoy a much less crowded life experience from childhood through to old age.  Their children attend much less crowded private schools.  They may have a condo in a big, over-crowded city, but they can escape on the weekends to a house by the beach or in the countryside.  Instead of playing basketball in a crowded urban park, they play golf with wide-open landscape.  Instead of crowded like cattle into economy class on airplanes, they enjoy roomier First Class or private jets. 

* * *

Hidden in the book and not really expounded upon is an incredible finding.  “One study followed more than 12,000 Danish adoptees and found that mortality in their forties depended on the social class of their biological father, but not their adoptive father.”  While this doesn’t totally solve the nature versus nurture question, it does point to the incredible power of epigenetics.  There is no other explanation for this.  If you come from a poor family, and you’re adopted into a rich family, you don’t suddenly acquire the same health as the adopted family.  The suffering of your parents and their parents and grandparents undermine your health no matter how well you were fed or treated by your affluent adopted family.  In essence, you can be screwed even before you take your first breath of air.  The demons that chase us may in fact be the demons that chased your parents, your grandparents, and your great grandparents.

* * *

The book brings up a really good comparison between exhilaration and fear and how one leads to enhanced performance while one leads to decreased performance and damage control.  Someone who is excited and exhilarated has dilation of peripheral blood vessels and the heart works more efficiently.  When you have prey within grasp, you get a jolt of adrenaline to close the distance and go in for the kill.  However, when you are fearful, you are acting like the prey.  In this case, peripheral blood vessels constrict and “…our heart beats less efficiently, so less blood is being pumped around the body. This serves to minimize blood loss if we are caught and injured. But it impairs our performance and strains the cardiovascular system, because the heart is forced to work harder to push blood around the body. In addition, there’s a surge of the stress hormone cortisol, as the immune system prepares for injury and infection.”

This is the logic behind Muhammad Ali and his mind games.  In some instances, he knew that his opponent was stronger physically.  If he undermined his opponent’s confidence and triggered his anger, he could get them into a fearful response to the match instead of an excited or exhilarated response.  Anger is an expression of fear.  By going after their egos, he was not only making them angry but also fearful of having their egos damaged.  This would not motivate them to be stronger but rather trick their bodies into thinking about damage control rather than closing the distance on prey.  If they viewed Ali was threatening to their egos with his bombastic insults and self-aggrandization, instead of viewing him as prey, they would view themselves as prey and Ali as the dangerous predator.  It was genius.  Arguably when Ali messed with Foreman’s mind, he forced him to quit boxing and find god.  Foreman likely always considered himself the apex predator and was shocked when Ali made him feel like his prey.

All our lives, we’ve been tricked into believing that we are prey, that we ought to be fearful of everything in life, and as such, our stress levels are through the roof.  When we are children, we are taught that school can destroy our lives.  If we don’t get good grades, we will be forever relegated to low-skill, low-pay jobs.  Our lives are ruined.  The second we step on to the school campus, our heart rate increases, cortisol floods our system, and we brace ourselves for attack and injury.  We are constantly reminded by quiz scores that we can destroy our lives forever at school.  Instead, we should be viewing school as an exciting experience full of challenges and opportunities.  What will we learn next?  Whom will I befriend next?  Instead, we’re fearful of the next bully, the next failed quiz, the next forgotten deadline, the next bad grade, etc.  I remember how excited I was to enter middle school which seemed like a fantasy world with personal lockers and a huge building and sporting opportunities.  It didn’t take long for me to start disliking middle school, the overcrowding, the bullies, the uncaring teachers, the exams, and the grades.

At work, it’s the same deal.  We are given performance evaluations not to measure and improve our performance but like grades, we are judged and evaluated to instill a sense of fear in us.  We are the prey not the predators.  Our supervisor is the predator.  We must be fearful of them or else they can punish us or withhold benefits like promotion.  Just like in life, we are servants to a master, and the supervisor-employee relationship is a reminder of this.  The fact that we all live in fear of losing our jobs, not getting good grades, not getting a promotion, not being liked by our boss is all an indication that someone else has established dominance over us, and we have implicitly consented to this arrangement by playing their game and living in fear. 

The fact that most Americans are unhealthy is indicative of both the fact that we have been trained from an early age to obey (and we will not eat better and exercise unless a master comes along and tells us to) and that we live in perpetual fear of failure and judgment.  This double whammy causes us to eat junk food and not exercise, to assuage our perpetual state of fear with high-carb foods that turn into sugar and sugary foods.  Stress rewires our brains to make us more susceptible to addiction.  If food isn’t our drug of choice, it’s binging on social media, video games, shopping, alcohol, or drugs.  Or just as bad, it’s being a workaholic.  If we lived in an egalitarian society, we wouldn’t be living in a perpetual state of fear.  We would all be predators enjoying the excitement and exhilaration of life and all its opportunities and challenges.  We would all be hunters or gatherers instead of the hunted or domesticated.  We would consider hard work and exercise the solution to stress and fear instead of recreation, eating, addiction, and distraction. 

If we have a master-servant relationship, a hunter-hunted relationship, we need bullies to remind us that we should be living in a perpetual state of fear.  We need bullies in school.  This is why bullies are not all shipped off to military or disciplinary schools.  We need violent criminals and sexual predators.  If there aren’t enough of them in society, we create them in prisons by mixing in the nonviolent criminals with the violent criminals.  This is why we allow prisoners to beat, sexually assault, and kill other prisoners as well as lift weights.  We need terrorists to terrorize us.  In addition to the oil, this is why we support the Saudis who support terrorist groups who hate the US.  We need wars and global conflict.  We are not free, independent citizens enjoying the plethora of opportunities and challenges in life.  Rather, we are domesticated servants who must be constantly reminded that we are servants. 

The genius is that we never directly see our masters, and they never discipline us.  They use intermediaries: henchmen, hired agents, terrorists, criminals, school bullies, and supervisor bullies.  In fact, when Japan occupied Korea, they used Koreans to bully and terrorize other Koreans, and the Korean henchmen were usually worse than the Japanese masters.  The more money we give government, we don’t get rid of their henchmen, terrorists, criminals, and bullies.  Quite the opposite, the more money we give them, the more they can pay their henchmen, and the more they can indirectly support and fund terrorists, and the more violent criminals they can create by expanding their prisons and increasing law enforcement personnel and presence in poor communities.  It’s almost as if our masters whip us and in voting for another Democrat or Republican and paying more taxes we reply, “Thank you master, may I have another?” 

In fact, you could even call it Stockholm Syndrome.  We can’t get rid of government which constantly harasses and threatens us and spies on us, so instead, we try to placate and befriend government to avoid the harshest treatment.  Of course, many people know that to avoid government’s wrath you simply jump to a higher income bracket which leads you to paying more taxes.  It’s a pay-for-protection racket.  If you’re making minimum wage and not paying much in taxes, you get treated the worst and harassed and bullied the most.  When you send your kids to private school, not only are you paying for better education, but you’re also paying for the privilege of protecting your kids from public school bullies and more apathetic, bullying teachers as well.  The difference is most marked in sports where public school coaches overly rely on yelling and threats of punishment whereas private school coaches are more supportive and laid back. 

In both physical and mental tests, we perform better if we see them as challenges and opportunities instead of threats.  So you might argue, why wouldn’t our schools and society want us to perform better?  We would become harder workers and more productive.  Wouldn’t that make their businesses more profitable?  You miss the point completely.  In addition to being better performers, we inevitably become smarter, wiser, less gullible, less fearful, and less obedient.  Perhaps at first, you would experience a boost in productivity, but then something strange would evolve.  You would then see workers demanding more.  They would demand more autonomy, less restrictions, less supervision, more trust, more compensation, and better working conditions. 

If the job requires little skill, the choice is clear.  You prefer someone who performs at a lower level but is significantly more obedient and passive.  Sure they make mistakes and aren’t as fast, but the person who’s superefficient and is a high performer, you simply don’t want the cost of them complaining to other workers, organizing them, and then demanding better working conditions and benefits.  This is one reason why employers don’t like overqualified applicants.  Someone who is college-educated will invariably cause more problems in low-paying jobs.  It’s just not worth their added boost to productivity. 

It’s a shock that happens to a lot of high-performance students when they enter the work world.  They may well have enjoyed school and viewed it more as a challenge.  Once they enter the work world, their high performance gets them nothing.  They are viewed with suspicion and fear.  Their supervisor is thinking that they will either become disobedient and uncontrollable or they think the person will simply take their job or surpass them.  Either way, the supervisor cuts them down with the performance evaluation downgrading them in subjective categories like leadership, teamwork, communication, professionalism, and problem solving.  In reality, the categories should be called: obedience, conformity, passivity, servitude, submissiveness, unassertiveness, and obsequiousness.  Imagine that, a boss raving that his best employee scores highly in submissiveness and servitude.  Of course, this would be way too obvious.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant

Part 1 of 4

If placebos prove one thing, it’s that we can impact our physiology and physical bodies through thought alone.  The book notes that negative emotions have a real impact on our health.  Stress can cause our immune system to be suppressed which leads to infections and sickness.  Stress can cause our bowel movements to speed up.  So why can’t positive emotions also impact our health?  Why can’t calm and positive attitudes have a positive impact on our health and boost our immune system and slow our bowel movements?  One of the difficulties with positive impact is understanding the pathways.  This is ubiquitous in social research.  I can prove that releasing violent criminals from prison can cause an increase in crime, but it is much harder to prove that certain solutions decrease crime and by what amount.  Do school breakfast programs decrease crime?  Does free early childcare decrease crime?  Does full employment decrease crime?  Does legal abortion decrease crime?  Do neighborhood watches decrease crime?  These are much harder to measure, but it doesn’t mean that they have no impact.

The book notes that a placebo which triggers an expectation that pain will decrease actually does cause a release of endorphins in the brain which actually does reduce pain.  On the other hand, this also means that there are painkillers out there that have no effect unless you tell someone they have just taken them.  It makes me wonder about a reverse kind of experiment where you tell people they are taking a placebo when in fact it’s a powerful painkiller.  Will telling someone that they are receiving ‘fake’ medicine cause them to counteract the effect of the real medicine?  Or does it just work the other way around?

Obviously, placebos cannot make you regrow a missing limb or lower your cholesterol, but it is powerful within the mental realm, and this is especially where it is most applicable with psychological and psychosomatic ailments. 

Within the placebo realm, there is also different efficacy based on the context and meaning placed on certain features.  “Big pills tend to be more effective than small ones, for example. Two pills at once work better than one. A pill with a recognizable brand name stamped across the front is more effective than one without. Colored pills tend to work better than white ones, although which color is best depends upon the effect that you are trying to create. Blue tends to help sleep, whereas red is good for relieving pain. Green pills work best for anxiety. The type of intervention matters too: the more dramatic the treatment, the bigger the placebo effect. In general, surgery is better than injections, which are better than capsules, which are better than pills.”

I would also introduce the peer pressure effect.  There are psychological studies that prove that people will change their minds about things if everyone in the room believes in the same thing like the length of a line.  What if you took a pill in a room full of other patients, and every single patient stated that they suddenly felt better.  Would this make you feel better?

* * *

There is also the ‘nocebo’ effect where you think you’ve ingested something harmful so your body reacts accordingly.  A powerful anecdote is covered where in 2007, a man was part of a clinical trial for antidepressants.  “After an argument with his girlfriend, however, he overdosed on his remaining capsules and collapsed at his local hospital with a racing heart and worryingly low blood pressure. Medical staff gave him more than a gallon and a half of intravenous fluids over four hours before the message got through from the trial organizers that the patient had been in their placebo group. His symptoms disappeared within 15 minutes.”

They should have then told him that he was in fact not in the placebo group to see if the symptoms returned, then told him he was actually in the placebo group and so on and so forth, for scientific purposes.

It reminds me of a scenario I once thought up in my mind.  When a kid turns 16, his parents tell him that he’s adopted.  Afterwards, he becomes rebellious and volatile and gets into trouble and questions why his natural parents would have rejected him.  Then he’s told it was just a joke.  Does he return to being well-behaved and confident?  If he does, then you tell him that he is actually adopted, and once again, he becomes rebellious and destructive with his self-esteem shattered.  Then he’s told that he wasn’t adopted, and you just keep doing it to see how long he keeps changing his self-esteem and behavior. 

One would argue that because most of the understanding of ourselves is contextual and learned within our cultural framework that much of how we act and treat ourselves is based not on objective qualities but rather contextual and subjective qualities that determine whether I believe that I am a good person, a valuable person, a person who deserves to be healthy and happy.  If you go into the military and believe that you are fighting an evil adversary and your war is just and your actions heroic, you return home feeling good and positive and don’t suffer from PTSD as much.  However, if you go to war believing that you are hurting innocent people, you have no business in someone else’s country, and your country despises you for this unjust war, then you can return home feeling terrible and suffer from PTSD.  Also, it makes a huge difference if you are being forced into something (drafted) versus volunteering.  Volunteer soldiers do not suffer as much PTSD as draftees.

While there is an objective, material world that cannot be altered by our minds, e.g., no matter how much you try, you cannot mentally make yourself taller, I know, I’ve tried, there is also an equally powerful subjective, contextual, learned world that can be altered by our minds and lead to objective, material consequences.  Having a healthy immune system can protect us from material infections and having a poor immune system can make us vulnerable to material infections that can kill us and end our material existence.

“[Nicholas] Humphrey argues that receiving any kind of medical attention – whether fake, alternative or conventional – helps to persuade these primitive brain circuits that we are loved, safe and getting well, and that there is no further need to feel sick.”

“If we perceive ourselves to be in a forest of snakes… the body becomes much more sensitive to biological warning signals such as pain.”

This sentence says it all.  Let’s say you are a person of color or some persecuted group, and you believe that the world is rigged against you and almost every straight, white male is a bigot, that they hold all the power, then you are likely to become oversensitive to all ambiguous events as bigoted and discriminatory.  If a straight, white man doesn’t smile at you, then it’s because he hates your kind.  This can have very real world effects.  If you’re interviewed by three white men, you’re not going to smile as much, act friendly, or even expect to be hired, so you basically sabotage your interview before they can even ask the first question.  Likewise, if you’re white and feel that all nonwhite people have it in for you, then every nonwhite person who doesn’t smile or has some neutral expression actually hates and resents you for being a  white person. 

I’ll never forget when my friend pranked an upperclassman in high school by having his older brother call him and pose as a basketball player from our rival school.  He told the upperclassman that he’d beat his ass in the parking lot after the game.  The upperclassman misinterpreted every physical contact with him in the game as an attack and overreacted accordingly.  In reality, the opponent had no idea what was going on and was just playing regularly with occasional physical contact as one might expect in any basketball game.  It forever informed me the power of mind games.

Likewise, when you read books about how rigged the system is, how much the rich take advantage of us, how they don’t pay taxes, how they their companies get huge government subsidies, how the CIA helps them eliminate threats to their hegemony, how the US has slaughtered millions of civilians in war, you can’t help but to walk out your door and feel besieged by injustice, unfairness, and a hopelessly rigged system.  What can be your response other than being cynical of everyone you meet, being hypervigilant to being scammed or taken advantage of, and overreacting to anyone in positions of authority questioning or confronting you. 

You have to counterbalance your reading list with examples of humans being kind, collaborative, loving, trusting, and sharing.  What you read and hold in your mind is your reality.  I’m not saying kid yourself into believing your government loves you and rich people truly do care about all of humanity, but I would argue, don’t go overboard reading too much about how terrible the world is.  There are also good things going on in the world, and if you believe the world is filled with good people doing good things, you are going to be more outgoing, friendly, compassionate, trusting, and loving.  It’s likely that the rich people who inflict so much misery and suffering on everyone else have been raised to believe that the world is miserable and a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, hyper-competitive hellscape, and that is why they are so greedy, insecure, cynical, untrusting, and abusive and exploitative of others.  It is also why they tend to be physically and mentally sick.  It is truly remarkable just how many rich people indulge in junk food and don’t exercise. 

The same phenomenon occurs with taking psychedelic and set and setting referring to one’s mindset and social environment.  Prepping the set and setting to be positive, healthy, and healing makes the psychedelic experience positive, healthy, and healing.  What traditional medicine teaches us is that in many cases, the mind is just as important as the material body in healing if not more important.  The fact that  villagers invest so much belief and confidence in a shaman or village healer or doctor makes us believe this person can heal us.  The more elaborate the healer’s ritual, the more we believe in the healer’s powers.  In fact, in many cases, the healer places people in a trance state and literally hypnotizes them into believing that they are being healed. 

What ancient medicine achieves that surpasses modern petrochemical, pharmacological medicine is acknowledging the powerful healing capacity of the mind and mindset.  We think of healer rituals as hocus pocus, elaborately performative, so much complex misdirection and obfuscation, but in reality, it’s an elaborate and essential routine that places our mind into a highly hypnotic state where we are much more receptive to suggestion, specifically the suggestion that the healer can heal us, and we shall be healed and feel better.  Often times, our ailments are the result of the body’s immune and defense systems being overly triggered and hyperactive.  They start to attack our very own bodies.  Our ancestors realized this a long time ago, perhaps intuitively, and reasoned that in order to calm our overreactive immune and defense systems, we need to be placed in a trancelike, hypnotic state and receive suggestions that we are not under attack, that we are healthy, and there is no need for our immune and defense systems to be on high alert.  It is this simple suggestion that calms them down and heals us. 

As intelligent beings, we don’t just respond to a threatening environment with heightened immunity and sensitivity, we can get carried away and vividly remember a threatening environment and then obsess about the possibility of returning to a threatening environment which causes our immune system to go into overdrive and start attacking us and making us sick.  Ancient healers realized this and created a method of counteracting this negative feedback loop with a mental reset button.

Strong athletes also know the powers of the mind.  I can’t count how many times I’ve felt a little sick or weak before working out, even considered not working out, but after forcing myself to work out, suddenly I no longer feel a little sick or weak, and suddenly, I’m hitting personal records.  Other times, I can feel strong, but my measured times are nowhere near personal records.  Our minds always want rest, but we have to keep pushing ourselves to get stronger and last longer. 

There are several barriers to keep pushing through.  The first is the urge to not work out, to sit on the couch and eat snacks.  The second occurs when we actually start working out.  Discomfort tries to convince us to stop.  If we push past the discomfort, then we start to feel minor aches and pains.  If we push past that, we might feel an acute pain or a throbbing pain.  If we push past that, we get to full-on exhaustion down to the cellular level, and if we push past that, we get to the bonk.  But we can even push past that and get to cramps.  We can even push past that.  However, this is also why top athletes get injured all the time.  It’s often hard to tell whether the pain and aches are real or not.  Sometimes, a knee or back pain is real and the best remedy is to rest and recover.  A top athlete will always be pushing themselves and getting injured.  It just comes with the territory. 

Understanding the contextual and mental side of ailments can also be exploited.  If our government or big business can convince us that we are under siege, that we can’t trust anyone, that there are hostile forces surrounding us at all times, then we become hypervigilant, overly defensive, and also sick.  We then work harder so that we can afford better medicines and treatment to heal us, but the medicines and treatments we receive are petrochemical and expensive.  By making the population sick, we spend more and more money trying to fix ourselves when all we really have to do is just reject mainstream culture and beliefs and accept a reality or at least an interpretation of reality that is much less threatening and tormenting. 

* * *

The book introduces us to the field of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’.  Bob Ader, Nicholas Cohen and David Felton “…found receptors for neurotransmitters – messenger molecules produced by the brain – on the surface of immune cells, as well as new neurotransmitters that could talk to those cells. And they found that the lines of communication went in both directions. Psychological factors such as stress can trigger the release of neurotransmitters that influence immune responses, while chemicals released by the immune system can in turn influence the brain, for example triggering drowsiness, fever and depressive symptoms that confine us to bed when we are ill.”

One of the new treatments discovered uses conditioning.  You give a patient a full dose of a drug used for treatment concurrently with a drink with a powerful, unique aroma and taste.  You then reduce the drug dosage while maintaining the same amount of the drink.  The mind associates the drink with the full dose of the drug, so that when the drug dose is decreased, it doesn’t notice it.  This is especially useful if the full dose of the drug causes harmful side-effects or addiction.  “It’s not something that drug companies are interest in, says [Manfred] Schedlowski. “They don’t like the idea of reducing the doses of medications required.””

* * *

The book also notes that agency helps us better cope with pain and anxiety which leads to complications in surgery or recovery from sickness.  It makes sense, because if you are not in control, and you’re surrounded by strangers talking technical language, your body is on alert that these strangers might in fact harm you.  You are placed in an incredibly vulnerable position if you are sick and on top of that, if strangers are all around you poking and prodding your body much like predators might check out an injured animal.  You will certainly overreact to any sign of pain or discomfort as this is telling you that these strangers are attacking you.  If you feel that you are in control of the situation and you can tell these strangers what to do, and they will listen to you, you won’t feel like a victim.  Just as good, if they don’t act like strangers and treat you like a friend, as someone they care about, you’ll be less likely to question their motives and become triggered by any sense of discomfort or pain.

America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones by Antony Sutton

Part 3 of 3

As with any club or society, there are people who get out of them different things at different levels.  Some lifers who hyper-fixate will keep trying to expand the scope, power, membership, and influence of the club, coming up with all sorts of manuals, texts, documentation, rituals, secret language, acronyms, secret handshakes, etc.  They invest their entire lives being in the club and are likely to ascend to the top or be piss someone off and be excommunicated, only to start a rival club.  Some are casual visitors who get what they want out of a few meetings and then only show up as needed.  Just because they are on the roll call and membership list doesn’t mean they care much for the club or follow its commands or directives.  They may even hire proxies to attend meetings as necessary and vote.  They may only contribute financially or through offering contacts.  They are no more vested in the club as they are vested in playing golf on Sundays. 

Imagine any book club in America.  You have ardent members who read every book, suggest new book, document the minutes of every meeting, and their highpoint of the week is the club.  Then you have casual members who only skim the book and they just enjoy hanging out.  They provide very little input in the discussion of books and often distract members with digressions to unrelated personal matters.  It would be hard to believe that the most powerful and influential people on the planet would subordinate themselves to some club.  Certainly, they would take advantage of the club, but these are narcissists who think they’re the center of the universe.  Their motivation in life is not to serve a club or anyone else’s agenda.  Their motivation in life is themselves, and they will only serve a club or anyone else’s agenda as far as they believe it will benefit them.  If necessary, they will undermine the club or anyone else’s agenda if they feel that it doesn’t serve them.  In a previous book The Octopus, it was noted that the intelligence community is divided into two camps, one supporting the New World Order and the other opposed to it.  I’m sure most just want their paycheck and only care about themselves.  They’ll join whatever coalition they find useful at the moment and switch sides if necessary.  In fact, many intelligence operatives also switch sides to the enemy.

What we can be sure of is that whenever a narcissist creates a club, it’s a pyramid scheme whereby those at the top know, control, and benefit from everything while those at the bottom make the greatest sacrifices and possess virtually no ego to protect themselves from exploitation and abuse.  In fact, whenever humans organize at numbers greater than 150, they naturally form nepotistic subgroups within the organization, and the subgroup at the top invariably alters the group dynamic so that they receive increasingly more benefits and greater power while all the other groups receive increasingly fewer benefits and less power.  It is a natural dynamic that cannot be controlled, but can be contained with a constitution or governing policy outlining rights of members and a code of conduct. 

* * *

Just as club members may hyper-fixate on club attire, rituals, language, and history, outside investigators and writers can also become hyper-fixated on these clubs, fully documenting everything they can get their hands on about them.  This book is one such example.  In order to make their work more meaningful and important, they add extra weight and meaning to the club than it deserves.  Instead of just being a secret country club where the rich and powerful can meet without public scrutiny, it suddenly becomes this global power with its separate agenda that is drilled into the minds of every member, making each member a zombie soldier dutifully executing every directive without variance, delay, or dissent.  The club becomes much more than a secret country club but rather a malevolent, evil, entity that is responsible for all the suffering and evil in the world. 

People who are drawn to the intrigue of the rich and powerful, knowing their chances of joining such clubs are a fraction from nil, do the next best thing and join those who uncover and oppose the club and helps aggrandize the club to aggrandize the opposition to the club.  Who cares about a group that reveals that the Rotary Club is nothing but a convenient business networking club?  Rather, you want to join a group that might reveal that a certain secret club rules the world and at the very top sits perhaps a reptilian alien!  That sounds like a much more interesting group!

By nature, humans are excellent at networking, and if you looked at one person’s accumulated social networks, it would astound you.  However, if you took those connections and started linking them, you could play the Seven Degrees of Separation Game with everyone on this planet.  In fact, you could connect the Skull & Bones and CIA with every single individual on this planet through seven degrees of separation. 

One of the facets of schizophrenia is hyperactivity of associations.  It also happens when you take psychedelics.  Your mind is flooded with connections, however, those connections may or may not be justified.  When your mind is flooded with connections, you see connections that are merely coincidental as well as confusing causality with every single connection and correlation, and this is where you get into trouble.  You see someone wearing the same baseball cap as you and suddenly, they’re CIA, they’re following you, or they’re sending you some esoteric message.  That baseball cap suddenly takes on a whole new life of its own.  A whole web of implications start to sprout from the baseball cap.  Suddenly, you see a politician wearing the same baseball cap and your mind explodes.  Now, it’s all confirmed! 

This is also why people of psychedelics feel like they’re one with the everything, because their mind is being flooded with connections.  Why not just assume all the connections are instead just one entity?  This is often why conspiracy theorists are labeled crazy and schizophrenic, because they exhibit the same tendencies of people who are in fact schizophrenic.  However, their affliction is at a much lower level and manageable albeit just as speculative and unsubstantiated by reality.

* * *

We all crave to be part of something bigger and better than us as individuals.  This is our natural social instinct as well.  In a sense, our individuality is an illusion.  We have egos as a geofence around our bodies in order for us to protect our bodies from harm and serve the needs of our bodies.  However, as social beings, we also are capable of identifying with a group and actually feeling the same impulse and urge to protect this group as if it were our own bodies as well as to serve the needs of the group as if it were our own personal needs.  This confusion is at the root of a lot of people who go overboard and become zealous group members. 

Unfortunately, with groups larger than 150, you either become part of the group at the very top or somewhere below.  If you are in the group at the very top, you want to perpetuate the group in order to perpetuate your benefits.  If you are somewhere below, you want to ascend to the top or simply ditch the group and try your luck elsewhere.  Those at the top will do everything to convince you that you want to stick with the group and ascend it.  As far as I’m concerned, the most powerful group is not some elitist secret society that preys on new initiates who happen to also be rich and powerful.  Rather, the most powerful group on this planet is simply the good ol’ US of A.  It’s hidden in plain sight.  It’s the largest and most successful, richest, and most powerful pyramid scheme of them all. 

Hundreds of millions of members who receive the least benefits are going around waving flags and voting for one of the two candidates chosen for us.  They believe firmly in the narrative of the red versus blue, as absurd and destructive as the rivalry between the Bloods and the Crips.  Millions buy lottery tickets each year hoping to join the top of the pyramid scheme by becoming instant billionaires.  We go off to war or send our children to war just to secure natural resources that we can purchase for cents on the dollar.  We pay exorbitant taxes, and when the Feds print a trillion dollars every 100 days, we (along with the rest of the planet that trades in US dollars) suffer from hyperinflation.  No longer can the average American afford to buy a house.  If you want to spend all your time revealing a big club that preys on us, you ought to focus on the big club hiding in plain view, the US government and the rich elite who run and own it.  Who cares what secret country clubs they belong to.  It doesn’t matter.  There are enough crimes and misdeeds in plain sight for us to reveal, investigate, and uncover to disrupt and undermine the biggest, baddest pyramid scheme club of them all.

* * *

If there is one conspiracy to explain them all it’s the Red Herring Conspiracy.  Essentially, the US government secretly supports the plethora of conspiracy theories circulating around the world, especially the traditional conspiracies regarding the Freemasons, Knights Templar, Illuminati, CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones, and Davos.  The US government committed horrendous atrocities in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but what if it wasn’t the US government but rather some mandate or directive they received from the Illuminati, Bilderberg, or Trilateral Commission?  The US government is off the hook as well as the officials committing Vietnam War crimes.  Don’t investigate Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger, no, investigate the Illuminati and Bilderberg.  If they’re merely foot soldiers in a grander, bigger scheme to rule the world, you’re left with some amorphous, ethereal, shadowy villain to confront.  McNamara, Johnson, Bundy, Kissinger are all off the hook for war crimes.  Get it? 

The true villains in history are hiding in plain sight.  They’ve got you on a wild goose chase for some ethereal supreme boogie man that may or may not exist.  Imagine being caught committing a crime and you tell the DA that you were not acting alone, but rather you are part of a big crime syndicate and if you give me immunity, I’ll help you investigate the true bosses of this big crime syndicate.  Meanwhile, you just string them along with conspiracy after conspiracy making their minds dizzy running in circles.  In the end, you’ve escaped a prison sentence, and their focus is off you and lost in the wilderness of your conspiracies. 

Imagine spending your entire life either being a secret club member working tirelessly to serve the club and ascend its ranks or being an investigator of secret clubs working tirelessly to uncover every detail and aspect of every club and all its possible connections.  Then one day, you’re 70 years old, and you come to the realization as a senior and trusted member of the secret club that all it ever was, was a convenient secret meeting place for rich and powerful people to plot all sorts of things from legal and moral to illegal and immoral.  You missed so many things in life, your children’s school plays, sporting events, opportunities to play with them in the backyard.  It caused alienation in your marriage, and you separated and then divorced.  All your friends were members of the club, but they were never as seriously about it as you, so you never really got along with them. 

You did everything in your powers to schedule lunches with senior members who treated you as an annoyance until finally you ascended into the senior circle only to find a like-minded group of obsessive, hyper-fixated leaders.  But then you realized these leaders had nothing more to teach you, that all they ever did was abuse their rank and status to exploit junior members.  There is nothing else at the top but selfish, antisocial men, just like yourself, embittered by decades of being abused and exploited as junior members.  That is all there is.  Imagine how devastating that would be. 

Or imagine being 70 and you’ve published a dozen books on secret clubs, but you were never able to clench that one big mystery or secret that could blow everything wide open and finally prove that they controlled everything in the world.  Instead, you encounter the horrifying possibility that they were all just red herrings or at best glorified country clubs that allowed for the rich and powerful to collude in private all sorts of things from legal and moral to illegal and immoral.  You wasted all that time and effort to come to this realization.  Imagine the feeling of realizing that and you now have two choices for the remaining few years of your life.  You can admit it was all a waste of time.  Or you can double down and insist that you have yet to turn over the stone that reveals it all. 

But in the end, you could never really enjoy what everyone else enjoyed in life.  In reality, you never got married, never had kids.  You were insufferable.  You suffered some sort of trauma as a child and never again trusted anyone.  The conspiracies fed into your mistrust of everyone.  You may well have blamed your parents, your ancestors, your country, but ultimately, the best thing to blame was this amorphous, ethereal villain lurking in the shadows.  The more untouchable it was, the more dangerous and omnipotent the threat.  It served you well your entire life.  You could always point to this demonic entity for all the suffering in your life and the lives of others.  It was the ultimate scapegoat, and your hard work uncovering it made it as real and powerful as ever.  It not only controlled the poor, it controlled the rich and powerful, in fact, it controlled entire nations, the entire banking system, in fact, it controlled other planets and galaxies. 

Instead of worshipping and believing in some god, you chose to believe in the antithesis of god, this omnipotent demonic being that controlled the entire universe.  You were a helpless victim after all, the same helpless infant who suffered whatever trauma you suffered has now become a helpless adult.  It has enfeebled you your entire life and yet allowed you to get up each morning, invigorated to take down this monstrosity and liberate your fellow humans and become the hero you always wanted to become.  And now, at 70, you realize, it never really existed, except perhaps in the hearts and trauma of very powerful, rich men.  All it was, was a reason to keep living and surviving the trauma that would otherwise have destroyed others with much more destructive habits like substance abuse, reckless behavior, and suicide.  Just like your trauma, the secret club was the demon lurking in the shadows, ruining your life, undermining you yet ultimately giving you something to fight, something to live for, and something to die for fighting against it.  Just like dividing and conquering, they made you focus on the wrong source of your misery.  It wasn’t the secret club or cabal; it was just the folks at the top of the pyramid scheme.  They could have been toppled by 99% of the population, but the 99% of the population was too busy fighting one another or chasing after invisible demons or worshipping invisible gods.

America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones by Antony Sutton

Part 2 of 3

“The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child’s talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole – in blunt terms a cog in the wheel of an organic society.”

In a sense, the perfect education system mimics basic training, because basic training, like any cult indoctrination program, transforms the individual into a maggot that is worthless by itself and needs to be completely reconstructed to know its place; fit into an existing system; and be fearful of sticking out, disobeying, and straying from the conventional, standardized path.  Is it any wonder why public education is so similar to basic training with students marching in lines, assembled in desks in rows and columns, and obeying completely a teacher/drill instructor who tells them how to think, what to say, when to say it, and punishes anyone for nonconformity and disobedience?  What the establishment effectively did was transform education into ‘scientific’ indoctrination utilizing cutting edge psychological research to ensure maximum obedience and conformity.  Those opting out of the system are labeled failures and dropouts and convinced that they deserve low-pay, low-skill service industry jobs, relying on customer tips to make their low-paying jobs financially feasible.  Through the tipping system, they are trained by customers to provide better service for better compensation while the employer gets away with paying substandard wages and retaining most of the profit. 

If our education system is nothing more than ‘scientific’ indoctrination, then what are we as adults?  The answer is simple.  We are members of a cult.  Our government is the biggest baddest organized crime syndicate around.  We don’t pay extortion to organized crime and neighborhood gangs, because local and federal government protects us from them.  In other words, nobody extorts the American people except local, state, and federal government.  But criminal organizations do not indoctrinate children.  The federal government is an organized crime syndicate, but just like North Korea’s government, it is also a cult, because it indoctrinates children and grooms them to be cult followers.  When you look at the hysterical, angry, and delusional supporters of the Republicans or Democrats, you see cult followers who have been completely brainwashed and incapable of independent, unique, and free thought.  They are mere sounding boards for the Republicans and Democrats who sling mud at one another. 

For people who think that Trump supporters are the only cult followers, no candidate in the US has reached a more cultish following than JFK and the entire Bernie Sanders campaign was also bordering on the cultish.  Democrats would say things like, JFK or Sanders is our savior, our true guardian, some loving and kind patriarchal figure, almost a deity.  When a bird landed on Sanders’ lectern, supporters almost went apoplectic as if it were proclaiming Sanders a messenger from god.  Our indoctrination program has made us crave and yearn for a master to run our lives, fix all our problems, and protect us from all our threats.  This is not healthy.  This is brainwashed self-infantilization and helplessness. 

Indoctrination should not be considered a sole human invention.  Everything human has its predecessor in the some other aspect of nature.  Toxoplasma gondii is a good example of how nature creates a parasite that can take over an animal’s brain and make it do things that ultimately harm it.  Rodents infected with this parasite lose their fear of cats and even become attracted to cat urine making them easy meals for cats.  Our education system is simply a manual and more labor intensive form of toxoplasma gondii where our minds are infected with a program that systematically wipes out our individual self-preservation system and makes us more receptive to joining the military, taking on low-paying and dangerous jobs, and even if we do rebel, we don’t rebel properly and simply adopt high-risk behaviors like drug use, binge drinking, unprotected sex, violent crime, and fighting, just like a mouse that will run up to a cat and seek a fight or become delirious with the scent of cat urine.  We are no longer masters of ourselves but rather zombies awaiting orders from our true masters, not toxoplasma gondii but the ruling establishment, those at the top of the pyramid scheme, the top parasites.  Even the rebels are infected and believe they are rebelling when in fact they are just destroying themselves like an infected rat.

Perhaps one day, a super AI in the service of government will create a microorganism that infects our brains and controls our behavior without exposing us to 12 years of expensive and labor-intensive indoctrination.  We’ll be walking down the street and then suddenly we’ll have the sudden urge to spend all our money on big business products we don’t need, and we’ll suddenly have the urge to pick the Democrat or Republican Party and join in the chorus of either one condemning the other and reciting their catchwords and phrases.  We’ll suddenly feel the need to condemn and mock independent thinkers and voters.  We’ll be completely content to work long hours, suffer low wages, and then sit at home and waste what remaining free time we have on social media. 

* * *

“Western textbooks also have gigantic gaps. For example, after World War II the Tribunals set up to investigate Nazi war criminals were careful to censor any materials recording Western assistance to Hitler. By the same token, Western textbooks on Soviet economic development omit any description of the economic and financial aid given to the 1917 Revolution and subsequent economic development by Western firms and banks.

Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state. Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance and the source of the finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street.”

Our education system doesn’t teach us to solve puzzles or problems, rather it pretends that there is always an answer to every question, and the teacher and the establishment know all the answers.  In reality, if we were taught to be detectives or investigative journalists, to be puzzle solvers, we would become rather adept at realizing that we are being indoctrinated, manipulated, deceived, and everything we read and absorb in school is incomplete, inaccurate, corrupted, biased, and in many cases nonsensical.  The truth is mixed in with the lies in order to lend credibility to the lies. 

* * *

The one thing about this book is that it constantly tries to make connections with the Skull & Bones Order with major figures throughout history, and I think it’s unnecessary and questionable.  Rich people join country clubs, but you wouldn’t accuse country clubs of having an agenda to rule the world.  The country clubs’ agenda is making a huge profit from providing a playground and networking venue for rich people.  They may conspire at country clubs to fix their prices and support certain politicians, but this doesn’t implicate the country club in price fixing or supporting certain politicians.  Likewise, unless otherwise proven, I believe most all secret societies are just glorified country clubs where the rich and powerful have a safe, restricted, inclusive venue to do whatever they want whether legal or illegal, moral or immoral.  It may well be possible that the heads of these secret societies or for that matter, the owner of a country club goes around telling members what do to, what politicians to support, what prices to fix, etc., but without evidence, it’s all just conjecture.  Correlation does not prove causality. 

Powerful and rich people tend to hang out with other powerful and rich people, and people of all income levels tend to network and collude when possible and profitable.  It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a natural trait of social, nepotistic animals.  What we can uncover are collusive arrangements when they occur, just like an antitrust attorney general focuses on a specific case they can prove instead of trying to unravel a much larger, broader, complicated and largely speculative global conspiracy.  Conspiracy theories have been so successfully associated with crazy people and absurd extremes like reptile aliens running everything that people are much less likely to take them seriously than simply pointing out that a few people applied Hegelianism and later Taylorism to the education system to create dumb, simpleminded, obedient factory and later service industry workers. 

The one issue with claiming that the rulers are Hegelian or at least their ideology is based on Hegelianism is that they wouldn’t create a single governmental body in a New World Order, but rather, they were perpetuate the dialectic conflict with two governmental bodies fighting one another in a perpetual state of conflict, resolution, and then another conflict.  A single global government in control of everything would be the end of Hegelianism and history as we know it.  

* * *

The book reveals that the US was playing both sides of World War II until their entry.  I already learned that the US had supplied the Japanese with much of their oil as they romped through China and Korea.  In December 1940, the US exchanged 50 old destroyers to the British “for strategic bases in British territory.”  “Yet in 1941 Standard Oil of New Jersey (now EXXON) had six Standard Oil tankers under Panamanian registry, manned by Nazi officers to carry fuel oil from Standard Oil refineries to the Canary Islands, a refueling base of Nazi submarines.”  Essentially, the US had helped fuel Nazi submarines that were going out and attacking the British Navy which now included 50 old US destroyers.  Can you believe this?  It’s not all that shocking if you remember that the US supplied both the Iranians and Iraqis during their war and actually provided the Iraqis with chemical weapons, the very same type of weapons they accused the Iraqis of having as a pretext for invading Iraq! 

* * *

In the final analysis, it is natural for social animals to collaborate, and when they collaborate in secret as opposed to publishing their minutes and opening their doors to the public, it is not necessarily a bad thing.  Throughout history, there has been discrimination against certain groups of people, and they have been forced to go underground and meet in secret.  To ban all secret groups would be undermining all groups, not just the most powerful.  And you can be guaranteed that the most powerful groups will meet whether they are banned or not.  There should be a right to assemble and if necessary, keep that assembly a secret from others as well as government. 

The problem arises when people are meeting in secret to manipulate, deceive, and harm others not only in violation of the law but in violation of morals.  It is one thing to meet in secret to support each other’s interests and businesses, but it’s another thing to meet in secret to cut prices to force a competitor out of business and then to raise prices drastically once they are gone.  This has been outlawed by anti-trust laws.  So where are the anti-trust laws against political conspiracy and collusion?  Fact is, nations collude all the time.  OPEC is a prime example of this.  Just like the Federal Reserve controls interest rates and the supply of money, OPEC sets the price and supply of oil for member nations that can harm other non-member countries and potentially bankrupt their nations.  If Russia is desperate to sell oil during their war with the Ukraine, OPEC can agree to cut their oil prices temporarily so that the Russians sell less oil and must charge less resulting in less oil revenue for the Ukrainian War.  Of course, this example is actually a good thing, as the Russian invasion of the Ukraine was completely illegal and immoral.  Until international laws are passed forbidding countries from colluding and harming nonmember countries, they will continue to do so.

The war between the public interest and the interest of those at the very top of the pyramid will continue, and those at the top will continue to meet in secret and plan and plot, often resulting in huge benefits for them and huge costs for everyone else.  The best we can do is continue to make their activities public.  They will continue to accuse people of being nutjob conspiracy theorists.  Some investigators will feed into the discrediting by overindulging in unsupported speculation, even suggesting nonhuman, alien intervention that may or may not be the work of a plant trying to discredit all conspiracy theorists.  However, in my opinion, we should not focus so much on any particular cabal or secret society but rather on specific cases. 

We can speculate forever whether members of Skulls & Bones are on this Hegelian agenda to profit from the dialectic between left-wing statism and right-wing statism, but we have proof that US banks and oil companies supported both the Nazis and Soviets during World War II.  I think it’s distracting to speculate that the reason they did this was to obey directives from Skull & Bones.  It’s significantly more effective and powerful to simply uncover when and how they supported both sides of the war and let the public decide whether this fits a pattern of the ruling class dividing the world in half and profiting from both sides. 

For all we know Skull & Bones could be a decoy for the real thing that will remain even more secret.  It could just be a silly, elitist fraternal club that preys on young, impressionable, entitled college brats.  It could be an initial grooming organization for another organization.  It’s unproductive to speculate too much, because as long as we can never get to the bottom of it, we are distracted from more urgent and pressing matters.  This book revealed so many disturbing things that can be proven, yet it is all discredited because the main thesis of this book is that it is all connected by the Skull & Bones Order which presumably has a core Hegelian agenda that may or may not be true.  Create doubt about the veracity of the power and influence of Skull & Bones and you create doubt about the veracity of real-life, proven facts that US banks and companies supported both the Nazis and Soviets during World War II.  You can see how the conspiracy of the Skull & Bones acts to distract people from true crimes and conspiracies that can be proven. 

Believing that the world is controlled by an almighty secret order that can never be proven makes us all helpless victims.  Believing that powerful people, organizations, and nations tend to collude and such collusion can be proven for specific instances makes us vigilant and powerful.  In the end, why would you put any secrets at Area 51, the world’s most famous secret military base on the planet?  Why would you place all the most powerful people on the planet in Skull & Bones, the Illuminati, the Freemason, some of the most famous secret societies on the planet?  Undoubtedly, the US places secret military operations at bases that nobody knows much about, and the world’s most powerful people would meet at clubs that nobody knows much about either. 

Secret societies and clubs in the US are a mere outgrowth of all the clubs and societies Americans joined, more so than any other country on the planet.  Many of these clubs were mutual beneficial societies, sort of like insurance collectives whereby everyone donated money each year, and whenever a member was in need or wanted to open their own business, that member could get a big pot of money.  People just like the idea of joining secret clubs and being initiated and acquiring special status and rank.  I’m sure many kids formed their own secret clubs in school.  I was part of an exclusive gang in elementary school and middle school.  It was actually just four friends who hung out together a lot, and we would dangle the possibility of membership to outsiders and coerce them into doing all sorts of stupid things to try to gain membership.  It was actually rather cruel. 

In my opinion, today’s secret clubs and societies are just overgrown kid’s clubs where just like kids, they use their member status to sadistically mistreat nonmembers and initiates to make themselves feel superior and important.  Certainly, there are secret meetings and groups that plot and plan things that benefit them and harm others, but it’s pointless trying to track them all down and speculate as to what they do, who their members are, and what their true agenda is.  In reality, their true agenda is likely not political, religious, moral, or even ideological.  It is likely pure and simple accumulation and consolidation of wealth, power, prestige, and influence, simple, by whatever means necessary.  The political, religious, moral, and ideological stuff are mere covers for their true motive of greed.