Better, Faster, Stronger

I ask myself this question often, it has been more present these last few weeks.

How far would you go to protect something or someone important? What would you sacrifice, risk, and lose? But of even more significance to that mission; what would you achieve to ensure that all resources are available when needed?

My misguided view of necessity has led me to conflate this act of protection with complete loss.

Yes, we must ensure survival and remove all obstacles to our progress. And survival has one imperative: that we become stronger than whatever threatens us and that important something or someone.

Faith

It is in our human natures to become mislead - really all you can do is spread your own word and hope that you can influence even one person. There is an ultimate and profound understanding that we are all heading towards, but distractions and temptations can take up an entire lifetime. If you can help one person reject these distractions you have indeed lead a benevolent life and will be rewarded with eternal peace; I like to think. A hard realization in this material world we live in. Even the wisest man feels a sense of overall failure at times, either individually or on a global scale - but true wisdom comes with acceptance of harsh realities. As it once was, so forever it shall be, right? But if we all do our small part this may not be the actual case.

Faith. It's a beautiful thing.

I believe some have the ability to ask the right questions, but even fewer realize that sometimes there is simply no answer - and if an answer exists it is far in time from where we are now. Ask not what you can fix in your lifetime but what you contribute to future lives. The most benevolent men and women often don't receive recognition in their lives, only after. They realize this while alive and don't even want recognition - only to carry on with their purpose - greater than fortune or fame.

10 Commandments of Logic

Forward

Life is an arduous, uphill journey but at a certain point, the view becomes fantastic.

Got A Secret

Scientific documentation tells us that at any given time the average person is keping somewhere in the vicinity of 13 secrets.  13.  The weight of those secrets will of course be individual to all, however to the average person, the weight of even one or two secrets of tem times makes hills seem steeper, roads seem longer, and well open honest communication bringing forth actual connection damn near impossible.  

If we as collective humans are hiding so much, what does that in trn say about our commitment to honesty?  Authenticity? Transparency?  Not to mention what it says about our attitudes surrounding trust.  Seem's to me like a lot of effort without any reward or payout.  

I'll pass.   

Blind

The eyes, as it turns out, are almost useless when the mind is blind.

But its legal

So how long do you think it will be before Mandarin and other buffets have one of those "how high are you" pupil dilation charts that the police carry at the hostess stand?. "No sir, we cannot let you access the buffet, you are way too fucked up and will cost us too much in lemon chicken!". Hahahaha

Libertarian Dreams

Steven Pinker says it's no coincidence that there are zero libertarian countries on Earth; social spending is a shared value, even if the truest libertarians protest it, as the free market has no way to provide for poor children, the elderly, and other members of society who cannot contribute to the marketplace. As countries develop, they naturally initiate social spending programs. That's why libertarianism is a marginal idea, rather than a universal value—and it's likely to stay that way.


Now there is an argument that Pinker and his Brain consistently miss the mark on one major point that I think has already emerged as a power player, and will almost certainly play the bigger role en route to 2030.

The market does have solutions to providing for infants and the elderly and the impoverished, and they've been there since we had a heartbeat and a spare dollar. The market solution is affluence, and the vector is family, friends, and community.

I think many notable economists that would protest that state lead social care has not only directly nurtured dependency, but also indirectly curbed our instinctive care for those in our kin and care. The tribe has gotten a little bit social loafy. Responsibility is too diffuse when it comes to taking care of our communities.

Regardless, parents with money drive market solutions toward children with problems, and children with money drive market solutions to parents with little economic value. Their value, substantial savings and experience aside, is the concern they curate from their economically agile children; thus why we see billion dollar industries springing up to house, entertain, medicate, and pamper the [select] elderly.

Pinker seems to miss this point regularly, and it does seem to scale up to the global level. We've spent centuries stifling our quiet altruistic instincts because we loudly champion our much stronger judgmental instincts. We've shat on anybody who tried to turn a buck helping people over and over while taking for granted that exploitation was the road to riches.

We've perennially insisted that people should help each other because they're good and that anybody who does it for glory or gain is evil.

Well wouldn't you believe it we went a millennia building castles on corpses and churches on lies and New York City on exploitation, and the boldest and brighter of every graduating class at every ivy league school have been shuttled off to Coca Cola and IBM while Johnny Dreadlocks dropped our and went poor feeding starving children.

Where I'm going with this is that everything changed in the 20th century, and the changes caught fire in the 21st. Lucrative Benevolence (Bastien, 2007) has proven to be a global force for good, and with all the same stigma and misunderstanding we've ever had the market has barreled forward making people wealthy all over the world by helping the poor all over the world!

Our interconnected global market has rocket powered our interconnected global information system and the hive has spoken boldly in favour or rewarding those who solve their problems.

People are getting rich left and right providing cheap housing, cheap cars, cheap telecommunications, accessible health care, protection, entertainment, shoes, and even drinking water.

We're in the seminal phase of this shift, against all efforts, and as we catch on and redirect our best and brightest to benevolence, the wave will cascade and spread like malaria lol.

The way of the near future is everybody competing to most effectively help people because that's where the money is.

It's a beautiful future and the market is an ally!

Freewill

It is the expectation of reward for our natural behaviour, or the manifestation of our natural dispositions, that enslaves us to others. To change who you are, fundamentally, not because it makes you happy but to please another is abject servitude: submission of the highest kind. Yet, society and civilisation in general run on the principles (amongst others) of manipulation and seduction, under the illusion of "freewill".

To paraphrase a misunderstood and misrepresented master of human communication: let he, who is beyond influenced cast the first stone.


Can you see the method to this madness? It will be great.

Communication

The biggest drawback to our communication is that we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.

Music

Music turns us all into lovers or animals.

Sometimes both.

Choices

Today I have been unable to stop thinking about all the things that happen in people's lives; the million seemingly insignificant events; the "choices" that pull them together and later apart... the coincidences, the outside forces.

I know them and I understand them; I have been here before, many times before, and yet investigating them continues to appeal to me.

Carelessness is inherently human, and humans are so loud - they don't know when they are being watched - how could they possibly see what happens around them and to them? How could they see the million seemingly insignificant events that affect their lives so profoundly?

Task and Purpose

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity, which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

On the very short list of things that keep me up at night there is one question: is the human intellect sufficiently sophisticated to pose the questions it is powerful enough to answer?

Are we missing something? If the data required to perceive the mystery is missing, do we have a chance to discover the benefits (or apprehensively, its detriments) to our existence?

If the Great Filter can be applied to anything other than life elsewhere, is it possible that it's neither our answers nor our outcomes that are wrong, but that the arguments and questions we present about them that lack nobility and honesty?

And here, even here, where I surrender to my own doubts and insecurities, I worry that the questions I had hoped would lead me to find a semblance of moral and intellectual honesty are simply incomplete.

Whatsoever

Along with 'Antimatter' and 'Dark Matter' we've recently discovered the existence of "Doesn't Matter," which appears to have no effect on the universe whatsoever.

Do Better

How do we go from criticising the religious ideas of a culture to claiming that we should bomb them, or kill them all? Violence isn't the answer to any of our collective problems. We need to change the bad ideas with better, more attractive ones. We must empower education initiatives that attack the heart of the ideological frameworks promoting irreconcilable differences between human beings, religious or political. The aim is to change the way people think and feel about life and to make them more productive towards it; guns and drones cannot accomplish this.