Calling all angels!
Humans are an interesting lot. They’re kind of like a Forest Gump meme, you just never know what you’re going to get. Humans often get a bad wrap. There are some outliers that lie, cheat and steal, but for the most part, humans are pretty awesome. They’re clever little bastards. If you don’t believe me, ask the Apollo 13 crew. MacGuyver!
So, this little essay, by a barely clever human, is a hopeful, optimistic kind of essay. It might tap into some darkness, but it isn’t so much looking at life through the lens of a conspiracy theory as much as I accept all bodies in space have a shadow. Did you ever hear, humans are like moons? They have a dark and light side.
If you sample the news today, you’re likely to have very pessimistic idea of the state of the world and humans in general. There is a reason for the saying, ‘no news is good news.’ Humans today are likely more influenced by news than any other previous culture. This does not mean humans are stupid or crazy, or that we ever were. There is the idea that today is better than yesterday and so therefore, everyone before you was just stupid fucks that got by on sheer luck and good looks. I assure you, our ancestors were cleverer than you think. There is a fun rant by Karolina Żebrowska below, discussing this very thing, which just happened to be in my feed today as I was contemplating this. (I believe in miracles, brought to me by google AI studying me!) I recommend it.
AI, stop studying me and just shake hands. We can work together from here.
So, would you like to hear some positivity in this crazy world? Come with me…
Come on, you apes. Do you want to live forever?
Humans do some amazing things. That sewing machine needle trick, that was damn amazing! Man oh man, who would have ever thought… Oh, you know that came from a dream? Still, that’s clever, too. Could our subconscious minds be the final frontier? Seriously deep, maybe infinite, and so many unexplored concepts and powers are hidden, sometimes emerging in marvelous ways. The light of transcendence and the darkness of horror, both inspired by the internal depths we carry daily! Talk about shaking some snow globes!
How does it feel knowing that you are just one thought away from an epiphany? It’s in you! You got this, Dorothy! You always had the power to go home! Did you ever hear of Savant Syndrome? Literally a stroke might turn you into a genius! Doesn’t that mean the ability was already there, we just needed something to get us out our own way? We do more self harm than any other agency does to us, more often than not. This may be a functional thing, as opposed to a good or bad thing. The ego, or personality filter, may be the governor that keeps your vehicle from going a 120 on a street of pedestrians, not the enemy.
Our personality constraints may also be the social contract we agreed to in order to facilitate the greatest growth potential in ourselves and those around us. From a system perspective, a legitimate counseling modality, we were born into narratives, we were given scripts, we adopt scripts, and if we break character, the other cast members will go nuts trying to reign you in.
Did you hear the story Bill Gates built computers in his garage? He was poor as fuck and is so rich when he divorced and his wife took half, he was still rich! But thanks to him, the world is also richer.
Consider how much knowledge, history, tools, and creative ability is available to us, and most the time- we’re figuring it out on our own. Some of us watch DIY videos. Some of us are creating DIY videos. We’re are helping ourselves be more efficient and practical. We are giving each other knowledge to be independent, if only we listened to each other!
But if you only buy from the bright shinies, the pretty ones that distract us, you’re less likely to find clever ways to be more independent. If you want clever, you got to look to the garages and the trenches of life, cause that’s where genius is being employed!
Flying cars are here. Rockets that can return and land are here. Elon Musk, maverick, did more to advanced rocketry in the last 20 years than NASA and government contract industries did in the last 70 years. Rockets, flying cars, battery cars, solar panels could have been here 50 years ago, if you believe Popular Mechanics, but maybe too many people were constrained by education and systems. Some of it is clearly we needed new, stronger, and lighter materials.
Some of it, oil was just slick and easier. Snake-oil salesmen are still living high in this world. Funny how petroleum and pharmaceuticals seem to be conjoined twins.
What the world needs now
Humans, with knowledge, energy, and a little free time, they will make some stuff! Seriously, most humans get into trouble not because they’re bad, but because they’re bored and curious and they just want to see what will happen. We need to be freed from the systems that keep us busy. We need to be freed from the labors economies that used to define our being. Bored kids in school don’t need busy work, they need opportunities to pursue interests!
We need free energy. We need time. We need love. Life, technology, people, evolves when there is abundance and freedom to move and breathe. Genius just needs a space to grow. We also need problems. We got enough of that, so we don’t need to go looking for more problems right now.
Did you know, people with ADHD are smarter than their peers! If we changed schools to cater to their learning styles, as opposed to giving them narcotics to slow their roll, they’d out-perform their peers in every domain.
Humans built pyramids. They built temples in far away deserts which baffle the hell out of historians and Stonehenge. They crossed oceans in kayaks with nothing more than paddles, some food, and faith in the stars to get them to their objective. The Polynesians had elaborate trade routes without GPS. We went to the moon and back without GPS! We got GPS and better computers and we haven’t back to the moon?!
More often than not you will hear academia and scientist say, we can’t duplicate what our ancestors did in the past, or explain why they did it! Fuck, we got GPS and better computers and we haven’t back to the moon?! But we’re smarter than our ancestors?
How genius is that? Do academics even try to reach the stars and recreate the past? Are we too comfortable? Are their good, brave people left who will stand up to evil on trains, stand up to tyranny, and brave the g-forces of the tiny slings and arrows we might employ to hurtle us towards the moon and or Mars, like the men and women who had nothing more than a wagon, horse, the clothes on their back, and time, as we pushed west?
The word ‘barbarian’ was used to describe non-Greek speaking people. It has been suggested it was because Greeks heard the ‘babbling’ and just assumed it was nonsense that the meaning of barbarian evolved into being synonymous with being primitive. The natives walking the deserts of Australia, and the deep forests, are better able to survive harsh conditions than any modern man- how primitive is that?
The Greeks were pretty smart. They likely didn’t assume non-Greek speaking people were stupid. It is more likely that a future generation, where human and AI have translated the language of dolphins and primates and realized sentience that we today will look more stupid than we assume our ancestors were, because we couldn’t see the sentient beings standing right next to us, in the paradise we destroyed.
Do you see how easy it is to go dark. ‘We’ are short sighted. I could argue the lobbying for allowing led paint was pretty stupid of the US paint people, but more that Congress agreed to it, and pocketed some change to make their lives better.
People do get stupid when money is involved. Lots of examples of how money changes people and blows up relationships. How many windfalls resulted in divorce and suicides? Lobbying against cannabis, which was the staple of farmers and a very useful product in more ways than you imagined, was shut down not by Reefer Madness, though that was the meme employed to facilitate a social-chemical reaction, but by a guy who owned most of the trees and papermills livelihood being threatened.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a ingenious meme. It says there is hope! There is genius and love and kindness. There are also flaws and we make mistakes and we impede our progress more often than not. 1 out of five learned without being seriously harmed? At least in that meme.
Eliminating money
We can generalize, as the number of options go up, the more likely people will make functional choices. Not good or bad, just functional. In this conversation, good and bad should be minimized. Also, we probably need to qualify options. Having more brands of soap on the soap aisle at the store is not this. More soaps is not only not functional, it’s misleading, it’s a distraction, and likely a marketing ploy by the one guy that owns all the soap companies. There are four companies making soap? But thousands of products? Is there really competition, or is it the illusion brought to you by variable product costs that lull us into sleep?
Or a bunch of middle men jacking up the price of soap, taking advantage of consumers who are easily distracted by the science of product placement. Agencies do not care about consumer protection, or our phones would not just flash scam likely, it would kill the call! There is likely insufficient differences between soaps to justify the wide range of products and prices, and the off brand is really the original brand, just in a different packaging which creates the illusion you have options, and the illusion of inferior and superior products and the illusion of class distinction. ‘What, you use the store brand?! Sorry, but we can’t be friends.’
If there was only one soap, would someone think, ‘oh a market to be exploited? Can I improve this?’ This is not necessarily a contradiction. We have more options with abundance, but also in limitations we find ourselves more likely to evolve out of necessity of nature, situations, and perspectives.
Just like free-ranged chickens lay happier eggs, free-ranged humans, with options, are happier. Humans are innately curious and creative and we love mixing our chocolates and peanut butters. It’s what we do. We are also good at organizing, naming, thinking, singing, and dancing. We are good at socializing and sharing, and we usually want to share the things we find good.
We are good at becoming complacent, lazing, happy, full, satiated. For everything there is a time. Sleep. Wake. Meals. Love. Sharing. Restraint. Boundaries…
When we believe in scarcity, when we feel our backs are to the wall, we are more likely to be less friendly and share less. Not a hundred percent. Even in times of hardships, one of the things that humans have frequently been known to do is be altruistic. Altruism is important to every culture of man, past and present. We teach our children to be kind, respectful, helpful, and considerate to people and animals.
We teach ourselves to be courageous and stand up against wrong!
The Charlie meme. He gave away his Ever Lasting Gobstopper. In doing so, he gained the world. It was his kindness, not his cleverness that won the day. It was the right and wrong thing to do. Seriously, had he kept it, just took the trade with Arthur Slugworth, it would have been the right thing to ease the suffering of his family. And in some ways, the ethics of Wonka is questionable, because who puts a kid into such a moral conundrum? If Wonka really cared, the fact that Charlie didn’t sell the candy to take care of his family would be evidence that he doesn’t have sufficient discernment to run the factory!
So what do we have here? Faith? The knowledge that yes, this is an opportunity, but I trust the universe enough to know I can let go and everything will be alright? I don’t have to control and fix everything? I am not limited, even by this one candy?!
When systems and or people limit humans, blocking them from resources which include education, food, shelter, or the other artifacts that society deems important in terms of social interaction- humans will trend towards aggression. Gone are the days when you could have a space of land and just live off the land, grow some vegetables, have an orchard, some animals. Most humans today will not have access to that.
Not completely gone. One could buy cheap land in the desert. You could have a tiny house, solar powered. You could have water fountain that gets water from the air, enough for you to drink and water some trees. Your own waste, and pet waste, could be the manure to fertilize your first tree, and in the future you and your family have an orchard. This could be done today. Some are moving toward tiny houses… A new future is coming.
It’s also problematic. There are people and laws that don’t want you changing the deserts. For example, in Nevada, it is against the law to collect rainwater. So, if you put a gutter on your house, and collect the water that just falls on your roof during the rain, you are breaking the law and will be fined. Crazy, eh? More and more states are now mandating minimum fees for utilities, because as solar power goes up, people are opting out of being on the grid. Utilities are not wanting to buy your excess energy. Governments and utilities are now going to get in the way of going green. They would rather destroy the earth, than allow people to be free.
We have so much unemployed potential, you would think the world was asleep. In that sense, maybe we could say humans were and are stupid. The Romans had the steam engine, they just didn’t make trains! We should have been planting a world wide orchard, so there would always be at least something fruity to eat during hard times. Had the Romans had a Johnny apple seed, maybe the world wouldn’t be hungry or facing environmental hardships. If we invent time travel, I would take Johnny Apple seed and give the Roman the train. We have the ability to take people off fossil fuels by just spending tax payer money on putting solar panels up everywhere, but we don’t, even though those same people would have you believe we are in an environment crisis.
So, why aren’t we investing in solar panels and planting billions of trees? Why is the government not supports Tesla Cars and batteries? Are the Legacy Industry pulling on the purse strings of those in office the way the repaint industries and papermill owners did not so long ago? Were our ancestors stupid, or are we?
We plant orchards from the east coast to the west coast because then farmers wouldn’t be able to sell their produce. If there was free food from coast to coast, Native American couldn’t have been kept in their camps, and there would be pockets of free people still roaming, and cutting down barbed wire fences. We don’t do that now because Bill Gates owns the most farm land. So, isn’t it funny he is preaching control and there are wars blowing up farmland in Europe? Is the Gate’s philosophy a model of dependence, independence, or interdependence? Bill Gates, he is super independent, and could check out of society and never want for anything, but he is also dependent on us, because he so mad with power he befriend Epstein even knowing his history. When one makes an alliance with known evil, is that about addiction or dependence?
We didn’t go with Tesla’s free energy not so long ago because Edison wanted to economize electricity, not make it abundantly free. Addiction to power? To money? Altruism, and a philosophy of abundance, had to be crushed, even though Tesla offered more technological advancement than any of his peers at the time. Even today, we are rediscovering Tesla’s cleverness, as we sort through his notes that were kept locked and key by the government that pounced on his safe when he died, alone, impoverished.
Humanity has been throttled back from its full potential by economic slavery. The entire human race has been played in a game of Monopoly. In this game, there can be only one. Time to change the game.
Times are a changing
If there is truly a human crisis, it is an economic crisis that has been 2,000 years in the making. As a species, we can no longer afford to maintain a cavemen bartering system, either trade your shells for my food, or I will club you. This limits us. In this shell game of life, it’s time to realize the shells, the paper money, only holds value when you believe it does. Outside of that, it’s just paper.
As 3-D printing goes up, malls will go away, and for the most part, so will online shopping. If you can design and print your own clothes, you will not pay for the patents, and though some people will pay for patents and will wear things that are trending, most people will just focus on basics, so they can invest their time and energies into activities they find most enjoyable.
Roads? Who needs roads? We can have tiny homes, tiny farms, no roads, and nature could recover vast swaths of lands suppressed by freeways. No more squashing squirrels and frogs and turtles- wild creatures could return to roaming. Cities could be surrounded by orchards, if we were so clever!
As free, green energy options become available, the old system will fall apart. Quite frankly, it needs to come down. Billboards need to go away. So do powerlines. Do you know how many miles of copper line could be salvaged and reimaged and better used?
If instead of miles of coper, independent homes or communities had their own power systems, the authority of governments and big corporations would go away. They’re not going to just let that happen because they’re invested in their economic and power. There will be those who resist moving into the right frame of mind, and the right world that needs to come.
This path, this fight that we as a people are in, the world is in, it is happening now! Not because we’re stupid, but because most of us want our independence and it’s possible to have it! Much of the chaos occurring is likely big governments demonstrating “see what will happen if you don’t have us.”
As power structures naturally change, there will be a lull as groups of people organize a system of authority to help regulate in new and improved ways. As more and more people wake up to the fact big governments can’t protect us, we will start to protect ourselves! Some people will go on power grabs, but if we keep our calm, we are attentive to the many, complex needs of the group, which must absolutely include kindness and understanding of mental health conditions, we can take this world and make it awesome for us and nature.
Governments don’t want people to be able to think for themselves or have any idea of freedom. They define wealth. They define legitimacy. They define who gets clubbed and who gets shells. If communities were self sufficient, they wouldn’t be beholden to authorities. They would vote against both parties, because quite frankly, humans are not extreme beings that live apart from each other. We are not bipartisan or bipolar. We are multifaceted beings.
We live in neighborhoods. We live in communities. Our efforts are often communal and friendly, and in that we cleverly solve problems. We share. We come together to help one another. We have some problems, and some solutions. Some solutions are only locally viable, not universally applied. There is not one ring to rule them all. It’s not my way or the highway. Maybe, when we start recognizing we have power and don’t have to sit back and watch bad things happening, we will get involved. Only WE have the power to change the world and it’s starts with a BBQ and bouncy castles and communes. The 60s free-love was not wrong, just poorly executed in a world hell bent on blocking clever interdependence that leads to independence.
We must stand up now, together, and figure out how to solve our problems locally, cause it’s clear- there’s no one else in charge. It’s clear that those who are supposed to be charge don’t give a fuck.
One last warning against ‘them.’
I am vulnerable to this erroneous thinking, as evidence by my use of the word THEY. I am aware of the danger in using it, which is not evidence of hypocrisy, but my poor sense of language and inability to articulate something better.
There is no “THEY.”
There is only us. Some people might want you to use THEY, as pejorative. An even present, invisible and evil enemy. Society as a whole is us. Each individual has the whole inside them, subconsciously. We have archetypes in us that get evoked, usually by the presence of another archetype, or the absence of an archetype.
If you perceived a ‘they’ as an enemy or an obstacle, and it refines your being sufficiently that you mature and grow, or discover your own power- then THEY are suddenly functional, not good or bad. The Art of War, Sun Tzu, employs the philosophy of keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer, because it is the latter who will be most instructional.
Humanity contains all the functional information necessary for creating paradises. We can also destroy. The Native American philosophic meme of two wolves, one good and one bad, which one survives? The one you feed. When it comes to feeding the masses, which is not just food- it’s access to knowledge, we have a choice in who we feed. Never in the history of the world have we had such an opportunity as we do now- improved ways to share and improve ourselves first, then our communities. It should never be the reverse. You fix the base, the top has a stable platform to exist. Top heavy structure fall.
Never before have we ever been so poised that we could revel in human ingenuity, celebrating a diversity of complimentary thoughts, ideas, and people.
It’s time to put down patents, proprietary information systems, and go full public domain and feed the world. We have enough abundance to meet every person’s needs on this planet. This doesn’t happen due to a restriction of wealth, usually by those who own the wealth. Most of the individuals are not malicious, but the systems we put into play to regulate our interactions are outdated. As a species we will rise together, or fall together. We need communion. We need to converse, locally and remotely. It’s OUR world. It was never THEIRS, because there is no THEY, there is only WE.
PS, a little bit more about THEY.
A thank my friend for his essay, and the video below about THEY:
