fascinating analysis as usual. I have objections to several of your generalizations. However, the overall message is spot on.
we know from the Bible that even the least influential person can make a huge difference in the world. your skill at writing can awaken the apathetic to regard seriously these big issues. you can have an impact, even if it is not the one that you pictured. A life well lived is inspiring. An intellect well developed matters. You matter.
A large amount of what is wrong with America is the money game. Money has been a trade article for millennia, but has also been used for a form of bondage as well. The wealthy have the ability to hold resources out of reach and then ask you to pay them, to have access. At a grand scale, this controls food, housing and healthcare as basic needs. What we all do, is get consumed by the need for money and that, in the ends, requires us to be identifiable as "useful" or "needed" or even just present. Money has become the be all, end all solution to all problems, because most of us are consumed with the task of getting more money and having enough money to accomplish something due to someone else "owning" a resource that we have to square, from that someone. This is, of course, how consumerism is positioning us to participate by playing the money game.
There are enough people so wound up in the game, that they are not focused on what game they are playing, and escape vector they can control, or even how silly they are acting in their participation in the game. Because they've spent time, money or even thoughts on various details, they're invested, and will do anything to justify that, because they don't want to appear to "fail" at something. This is where all of this narcissism is driving people to go. They cannot accept that they don't know everything.
The Dunning/Kruger effect is the visible sign of people supposing they have enough information to believe they are right, but not near enough information to understand that they are wrong. This again is a problem with them accepting "failure" or "ignorance" as a natural event of learning.
I mean, that just sounds like something the Bible criticized, like the parts that say if God takes care of the birds God will surely take care of you. While I think the government does have some obligations to help people, for example, Australia manages to have universal healthcare while having a lower tax rate than California, sometimes you have to ask where social programs come from. Why does Europe give people so much free stuff? Partly because there’s like an 80% and sometimes higher tax rate and partly because of what has been eloquently described as Holocaust-like activities in the third world. People should help each other out, even the government has limited obligations to help people out, but it’s not the rich’s job to help everyone. That’s just kind of like what gets called white saviorism in my opinion but it’s rich saviorism. Other things matter besides who has the most wealth. Sometimes, I Paul’s even argue most of the time, wealth doesn’t even translate to power because rich people can make stupid decisions with it. Anything Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have done is frankly just reminding me of how people act when they inherit a bunch of money but spend it on stupid sports cars, except they spent their money on buying Twitter or trying to convince people to privatize all the Māori land in New Zealand so they can build nuclear bunkers on it instead of sports cars. While I’m sure everyone would like their money, no one would like it at the cost of being as dumb as they are, or the fact that what they did to get it was literally killing Black South Africans for blood emeralds. The rich are just not that important, if everyone acts all Christlike and pools their resources together we have way more money than they do and we importantly also have some actual brains to go with it. It’s not always bad to be rich, for example, when Solomon prayed for wisdom God gave Solomon money too, but Solomon importantly didn’t ask for money, that was just an extra reward God gave him. There have clearly been more greedy and stupid rich people in the world than Solomons, so I say don’t worry about money so much, if you get it that’s great, but the rich are clearly mostly just making fools of themselves and people don’t want to see it because they think wealth is good in itself and makes you immune to making a fool of yourself when it clearly doesn’t.
I’ve heard of that book mentioned on some video before but then I went and bought Asimov’s Foundation instead because that seemed more interesting and relevant to me. Did you know that was one of Tolkien’s favorite series too? They really didn’t care about culture wars. See these articles where we were replying to each other about Tolkien and the nonexistence of culture wars back then (though that’s more relevant to your last post about Democrats and Republicans. I don’t care about Democrat vs. Republican, both can be good or bad people with good or bad ideas.) https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/the-irony-of-tolkiens-triumph
Human nature causes everyone to look for groupings to be in or out of. I've coined the phrase/term, "No Shopper" as an illustration of people who find comfort in finding ways to say no, or to find exclusion through matching up commentary, details and their own bias to arrive at "that's not me." They seem to find that they can then be content to use labels for segregations that improve their own self confidence and that they are making the right choices.
This behavior is also a reason that the Dunning/Kruger effect limits peoples opportunities. Finding just enough information to be content in your belief often means that you are holding onto something out of bias, not out of intelligence or understanding.
The bible details a lot of history that shows human nature then and now are pretty equal in faults and confusion as well as smarts and determination of ones own outcomes (freewill).
The rich don't control everything, but they are adept at acquiring resources that result in them obtaining more wealth. You might find some of the society discussions and view points of "The Commonwealth Club of California", interesting to to listen to. Today's podcast which I am listening to on the KWGS radio station in Tulsa (streaming is on http://kwgs.org), is going over all kinds of things about Musk and Trump and related Democratic vs Republican conversational positioning.
What's really going on with people is swerving all over the place because there are actually many forces in life driving behavior on a day to day basis. There's just many different ways to consider motivations, but many are not really based on Christianized considerations of what John Wesley said in "Do all the good you can, to all the people you can, in all the ways you can, all the times you can, for as long as you can". But realistically, there are people who look into their own behaviors based on this notion, and try really hard to not be the problem, but hunt for how to be a solution to or help in solving others problems. We unfortunately, all judge peoples poorest actions and worse moments, and end up being unwilling to always do the above. We hate the notion that others might see these bad moments and somehow judge our "help" as a "condoning" of the behavior, instead of understanding that we are trying to remove the pressure, conditions or situations that are resulting in these behaviors.
Feeding kids, no matter what their situation is, make it possible for them to focus on learning in school. Yet, we'd rather judge parents poor choices that result in their kids not having food as something we don't support. That makes us feel better because we can say "I do such and such, and the makes it possible for my kids to eat", why are they doing something that keeps that from happening. This is a big part of how human nature is always getting in the way of human kindness.
Have you asked why the rich are adept at acquiring more resources? Rarely it is something benevolent, like in the Bible when God gives Solomon or Job money. Usually, it’s something like apartheid blood emeralds. I’m sure you can sell your soul to Satan for wealth, but that doesn’t make you “adept” at anything worthwhile. It’s not inherently bad to be rich but it’s ridiculously stupid that people worship it to the exclusion of all else. I read an essay ages ago that pointed out most cultures have traditions of poor wise people, but America alone does not. If you really think all the rich are smart and all the smart people are rich then you are definitely part of the problem. It’s not inherently bad to be rich but being rich doesn’t make you better. Would you really rather be Batman than Superman even though those are fictional characters? Batman is a psychologically tortured guy who lives in a dump, Superman is happy and lives in a quasi-utopia. People do want to be Batman though even though he’s clearly the weakest superhero and has a ton of psychological issues in most portrayals, because people just mindlessly worship wealth.
Well there is a huge spectrum. But, money is opportunity to try to get more money. Some privileged individuals get enough money to do something that successfully allows them to acquire more money. This is part of why people create trusts for their children. If they can accumulate enough money in their life to provide their children a largish sum of money to use in their own lives, that can sometimes provide one the opportunity to escape some part of life that is restricting the choices one can make.
Money allows trade to occur without having some type of "needed" resource to trade with. If you need rocks, and have chickens to trade, if I have rocks, but don't need chickens, you have to find someone to buy your chickens to get some money to pay me to purchase rocks. But, if you already had the money, you could buy the rocks, and sell the chickens some other time in some other transaction, and get your rocks straight away. So it's not always about being rich, it's about having enough money to enable you to get things done that will better your life in some way.
People who have been held up making progress in their life, due to wealth, will develop that inherent "worship" of what they don't have, but which they see others being successful with. If people who are rich are also diligent in their use of their wealth to use it for helping others around them, we can see a lot of good things that happen when this does occur.
I want to be Ironman. I have way too many goals to accomplish, and if I could just suggest to an AI agent the things I want to work on, and it would build robotic systems, spend money, earn money as well, and accomplish the things I'd like to get done, that would be the exciting position to be in. Today, we have rich people who use their money to employ people and enter contracts for manufacturing, mining, and various forms of acquisition to accomplish what they want to achieve. When that negatively impacts society, we all get frustrated. When the positively impacts society, we all get excited and give praise and attention to such activities..
Well, that’s noble and good, except I don’t think people are deterministically forced to worship wealth just because they were held up in accomplishing their goals. People are responsible for their attitudes. If you haven’t started a company and you want to be Ironman, why haven’t you?
It's really about the environment you experience at various points in your life. If your family has enough money to feed and clothe you, and do some fun things, and have clothes that aren't worn out or tattered, you might think that is your normal. But, there are people who live more like animals in hunter-gatherer mode more often or not, because they don't live in a family with regular income or otherwise able to provide a stable, day to day, environment that allows you to not be an animal in hunter-gatherer mode, but instead, to be a human that has spare time to learn, explore and otherwise extend their learning more readily.
In China, when I was there in the 1990's, the residents of Wuhan, were visibly stuck in hunter-gatherer mode in the spaces I could see. Some were on the streets with wares wrapped up in a table cloth sized piece of fabric. They would spread this out, and sell their wares to others. Another group were at the doorways of the hotels with eager efforts to trade the Yuan currency for U.S. dollars because that's the way they could help their children escape out of China for an education in the east. The police directing traffic at roundabouts would seemingly randomly go to these people selling things, and grab their cloth and goods and carry it over and put it in their car/vehicle, and then go back to directing traffic.
You and I have it pretty good, and it's pretty easy to lose sight of the privilege we have just to be able to make so many choices for ourselves.
fascinating analysis as usual. I have objections to several of your generalizations. However, the overall message is spot on.
we know from the Bible that even the least influential person can make a huge difference in the world. your skill at writing can awaken the apathetic to regard seriously these big issues. you can have an impact, even if it is not the one that you pictured. A life well lived is inspiring. An intellect well developed matters. You matter.
A large amount of what is wrong with America is the money game. Money has been a trade article for millennia, but has also been used for a form of bondage as well. The wealthy have the ability to hold resources out of reach and then ask you to pay them, to have access. At a grand scale, this controls food, housing and healthcare as basic needs. What we all do, is get consumed by the need for money and that, in the ends, requires us to be identifiable as "useful" or "needed" or even just present. Money has become the be all, end all solution to all problems, because most of us are consumed with the task of getting more money and having enough money to accomplish something due to someone else "owning" a resource that we have to square, from that someone. This is, of course, how consumerism is positioning us to participate by playing the money game.
There are enough people so wound up in the game, that they are not focused on what game they are playing, and escape vector they can control, or even how silly they are acting in their participation in the game. Because they've spent time, money or even thoughts on various details, they're invested, and will do anything to justify that, because they don't want to appear to "fail" at something. This is where all of this narcissism is driving people to go. They cannot accept that they don't know everything.
The Dunning/Kruger effect is the visible sign of people supposing they have enough information to believe they are right, but not near enough information to understand that they are wrong. This again is a problem with them accepting "failure" or "ignorance" as a natural event of learning.
I mean, that just sounds like something the Bible criticized, like the parts that say if God takes care of the birds God will surely take care of you. While I think the government does have some obligations to help people, for example, Australia manages to have universal healthcare while having a lower tax rate than California, sometimes you have to ask where social programs come from. Why does Europe give people so much free stuff? Partly because there’s like an 80% and sometimes higher tax rate and partly because of what has been eloquently described as Holocaust-like activities in the third world. People should help each other out, even the government has limited obligations to help people out, but it’s not the rich’s job to help everyone. That’s just kind of like what gets called white saviorism in my opinion but it’s rich saviorism. Other things matter besides who has the most wealth. Sometimes, I Paul’s even argue most of the time, wealth doesn’t even translate to power because rich people can make stupid decisions with it. Anything Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have done is frankly just reminding me of how people act when they inherit a bunch of money but spend it on stupid sports cars, except they spent their money on buying Twitter or trying to convince people to privatize all the Māori land in New Zealand so they can build nuclear bunkers on it instead of sports cars. While I’m sure everyone would like their money, no one would like it at the cost of being as dumb as they are, or the fact that what they did to get it was literally killing Black South Africans for blood emeralds. The rich are just not that important, if everyone acts all Christlike and pools their resources together we have way more money than they do and we importantly also have some actual brains to go with it. It’s not always bad to be rich, for example, when Solomon prayed for wisdom God gave Solomon money too, but Solomon importantly didn’t ask for money, that was just an extra reward God gave him. There have clearly been more greedy and stupid rich people in the world than Solomons, so I say don’t worry about money so much, if you get it that’s great, but the rich are clearly mostly just making fools of themselves and people don’t want to see it because they think wealth is good in itself and makes you immune to making a fool of yourself when it clearly doesn’t.
This is the author and book being discussed on the http://commonwealthclub.com program today: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Haves_and_Have_Yachts/DktCEQAAQBAJ
I’ve heard of that book mentioned on some video before but then I went and bought Asimov’s Foundation instead because that seemed more interesting and relevant to me. Did you know that was one of Tolkien’s favorite series too? They really didn’t care about culture wars. See these articles where we were replying to each other about Tolkien and the nonexistence of culture wars back then (though that’s more relevant to your last post about Democrats and Republicans. I don’t care about Democrat vs. Republican, both can be good or bad people with good or bad ideas.) https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/the-irony-of-tolkiens-triumph
Human nature causes everyone to look for groupings to be in or out of. I've coined the phrase/term, "No Shopper" as an illustration of people who find comfort in finding ways to say no, or to find exclusion through matching up commentary, details and their own bias to arrive at "that's not me." They seem to find that they can then be content to use labels for segregations that improve their own self confidence and that they are making the right choices.
This behavior is also a reason that the Dunning/Kruger effect limits peoples opportunities. Finding just enough information to be content in your belief often means that you are holding onto something out of bias, not out of intelligence or understanding.
The bible details a lot of history that shows human nature then and now are pretty equal in faults and confusion as well as smarts and determination of ones own outcomes (freewill).
The rich don't control everything, but they are adept at acquiring resources that result in them obtaining more wealth. You might find some of the society discussions and view points of "The Commonwealth Club of California", interesting to to listen to. Today's podcast which I am listening to on the KWGS radio station in Tulsa (streaming is on http://kwgs.org), is going over all kinds of things about Musk and Trump and related Democratic vs Republican conversational positioning.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/commonwealth-club-of-california-podcast
What's really going on with people is swerving all over the place because there are actually many forces in life driving behavior on a day to day basis. There's just many different ways to consider motivations, but many are not really based on Christianized considerations of what John Wesley said in "Do all the good you can, to all the people you can, in all the ways you can, all the times you can, for as long as you can". But realistically, there are people who look into their own behaviors based on this notion, and try really hard to not be the problem, but hunt for how to be a solution to or help in solving others problems. We unfortunately, all judge peoples poorest actions and worse moments, and end up being unwilling to always do the above. We hate the notion that others might see these bad moments and somehow judge our "help" as a "condoning" of the behavior, instead of understanding that we are trying to remove the pressure, conditions or situations that are resulting in these behaviors.
Feeding kids, no matter what their situation is, make it possible for them to focus on learning in school. Yet, we'd rather judge parents poor choices that result in their kids not having food as something we don't support. That makes us feel better because we can say "I do such and such, and the makes it possible for my kids to eat", why are they doing something that keeps that from happening. This is a big part of how human nature is always getting in the way of human kindness.
Have you asked why the rich are adept at acquiring more resources? Rarely it is something benevolent, like in the Bible when God gives Solomon or Job money. Usually, it’s something like apartheid blood emeralds. I’m sure you can sell your soul to Satan for wealth, but that doesn’t make you “adept” at anything worthwhile. It’s not inherently bad to be rich but it’s ridiculously stupid that people worship it to the exclusion of all else. I read an essay ages ago that pointed out most cultures have traditions of poor wise people, but America alone does not. If you really think all the rich are smart and all the smart people are rich then you are definitely part of the problem. It’s not inherently bad to be rich but being rich doesn’t make you better. Would you really rather be Batman than Superman even though those are fictional characters? Batman is a psychologically tortured guy who lives in a dump, Superman is happy and lives in a quasi-utopia. People do want to be Batman though even though he’s clearly the weakest superhero and has a ton of psychological issues in most portrayals, because people just mindlessly worship wealth.
Well there is a huge spectrum. But, money is opportunity to try to get more money. Some privileged individuals get enough money to do something that successfully allows them to acquire more money. This is part of why people create trusts for their children. If they can accumulate enough money in their life to provide their children a largish sum of money to use in their own lives, that can sometimes provide one the opportunity to escape some part of life that is restricting the choices one can make.
Money allows trade to occur without having some type of "needed" resource to trade with. If you need rocks, and have chickens to trade, if I have rocks, but don't need chickens, you have to find someone to buy your chickens to get some money to pay me to purchase rocks. But, if you already had the money, you could buy the rocks, and sell the chickens some other time in some other transaction, and get your rocks straight away. So it's not always about being rich, it's about having enough money to enable you to get things done that will better your life in some way.
People who have been held up making progress in their life, due to wealth, will develop that inherent "worship" of what they don't have, but which they see others being successful with. If people who are rich are also diligent in their use of their wealth to use it for helping others around them, we can see a lot of good things that happen when this does occur.
I want to be Ironman. I have way too many goals to accomplish, and if I could just suggest to an AI agent the things I want to work on, and it would build robotic systems, spend money, earn money as well, and accomplish the things I'd like to get done, that would be the exciting position to be in. Today, we have rich people who use their money to employ people and enter contracts for manufacturing, mining, and various forms of acquisition to accomplish what they want to achieve. When that negatively impacts society, we all get frustrated. When the positively impacts society, we all get excited and give praise and attention to such activities..
Well, that’s noble and good, except I don’t think people are deterministically forced to worship wealth just because they were held up in accomplishing their goals. People are responsible for their attitudes. If you haven’t started a company and you want to be Ironman, why haven’t you?
It's really about the environment you experience at various points in your life. If your family has enough money to feed and clothe you, and do some fun things, and have clothes that aren't worn out or tattered, you might think that is your normal. But, there are people who live more like animals in hunter-gatherer mode more often or not, because they don't live in a family with regular income or otherwise able to provide a stable, day to day, environment that allows you to not be an animal in hunter-gatherer mode, but instead, to be a human that has spare time to learn, explore and otherwise extend their learning more readily.
In China, when I was there in the 1990's, the residents of Wuhan, were visibly stuck in hunter-gatherer mode in the spaces I could see. Some were on the streets with wares wrapped up in a table cloth sized piece of fabric. They would spread this out, and sell their wares to others. Another group were at the doorways of the hotels with eager efforts to trade the Yuan currency for U.S. dollars because that's the way they could help their children escape out of China for an education in the east. The police directing traffic at roundabouts would seemingly randomly go to these people selling things, and grab their cloth and goods and carry it over and put it in their car/vehicle, and then go back to directing traffic.
You and I have it pretty good, and it's pretty easy to lose sight of the privilege we have just to be able to make so many choices for ourselves.