There’s a Whole Lot of Crazy to go Around

I was giving myself another double dose of punishment today at the gym.  Keeping this body healthy sometimes feels like a full-time job because time passes slowly when I’m wrestling with some free weights.  My self-flagellation is compounded by the inane rhetoric I am subjected to.  One guy’s hot air is used up glorifying the free market.  Another guy is inciting fear in his conversation victim about the work of the devil.

As a “socio-economic sustainability activist,” I tend to focus my attention on disabusing people of the first guy’s beliefs since I’m convinced that disillusionment is usually the first step to a transformation in worldview.  Free Market religion is much more widespread and less contested, in my estimation, so it needs a counter narrative in the media and person-to-person discourse. 

As I was washing away the sweat, I started thinking about these two conversations, and I wondered if these two seemingly disparate belief systems were actually related.  The religious person believes the world is a place that needs a controlling and judging force.  Humans need religion to control their wild forces because without religion, chaos and evil will dominate life, which will lead to suffering.  Since this force is external to humanity, it is believed to be trustworthy.  Compare this to the idea that the free market is free of any one individual’s control.  Free market believers contrast their belief with—the only alternative—dictatorship.  Of course, it is childish to assume that a dictatorship is the only alternative, but I’m not making this up!  Free market believers have been indoctrinated into the power of the invisible hand, which will fairly regulate life and minimize suffering.  Notice how the invisible hand is viewed as an external force, one which is more trustworthy because of this “independence.”

The irony is that the bibles, qurans, bhagavad gitas, and other holy books have been written and passed down by humans.  Children aren’t gifted these texts by heavenly deities on their 3^rd birthdays.  (Probably not even Santa bothers to leave these books under freshly slaughtered trees moved indoors and dressed with skirts and other regalia.)  Many children don’t even read these books because they are spoon-fed just enough to keep them in fear.  Likewise, children are not given the freedom to explore different socio-economic designs.  They are not even given technical simulations to measure and evaluate how different designs lead to different outcomes, and which they prefer.  Rather, they are taught that “this is the way things are” and that they need to adapt.  They are also told “this is the best system there is.”  Most of them have minimal exposure to economics, sociology, psychology, and resource sustainability, which makes them ill-equipped to assess the validity and worth of our current socio-economic design.  Children of these two seemingly separate beliefs grow up and become proponents of those beliefs.  They have identified with them.  Those beliefs are part of their cultural heritage, and while that is true, they have not learned the skills to de-identify with that cultural heritage so that they can take in a larger view of life, which is necessary for raising sustainability-minded global citizens.

While the leaders of religions decide which snippets of text are important to promulgate, and exhort their followers to abide by, leaders of large companies decide which products will be produced no matter the damage to the environment and the people that assemble them.  Executive editors decide which topics and opinions are newsworthy, with a faith that they will be wise enough to represent people’s interests and needs for information.  But, it’s okay, because it was the “invisible hand” that made these decisions, just like the god that works in mysterious ways by letting kids be born into starvation or abuse.  We can all rest easy because it’s out of our hands.  We are not responsible.  The billions of people suffering is just a natural result of god’s the invisible hand’s work.  Björk said it best, “It’s in our hands, it always was…look no further.”

You Aren't Free Without Me

An exercise in personification

Hi, my name is Freem.  Nice to meet you.  Well, I’m not sure it’s nice to meet you yet, but I’m going to find out.  I want to learn about you.   To be honest, I just want to learn enough about you so that I can figure out what you can do for me.  I would really like to know how you can help me in my mission of self-aggrandizement.  I like being able to do what I want without restriction. 

For example, just the other day, I went to this charming little town along the river.  Who knew a place could be so beautiful?!  It was impressive to see all of the tiny fish struggling against the currents of the crystal clear waters.  The birds would noisily alert their friends to this buffet below, as though it was a stroke of good luck (luck that happened every day…no wonder they are called “birdbrain”).  When the sun would tiptoe below the height of the ancestral trees, bursts of color shot through their leaves, as though one were standing in a hallway of stained-glass masterpieces.  The air was so pure, the whole of one’s body felt cleansed, not just of stale air, but of restless thoughts too.  In this magnificent place, I set out to enjoy myself. 

I had to move on a year later.  The place was trashed!  When I party, I can’t let anything get in my way.  The rivers now gurgle with a black sludge obscuring any life that might have survived below the surface.  The trees that had survived for centuries were swiftly chopped down—I needed the space.  The people who once wore welcoming smiles and gladly fed me (“Mr. Arket, try this dish,” they would say) when I arrived had become stressed and half-dead.  It’s probably because I didn’t give them enough time to rest and recuperate.  Or maybe it was the unrelenting labor I forced them to submit to.  In any case, they are not my concern.  The weaker individuals ended up getting sick from the particulates I expelled into the air.  I don’t know if they survived.  A few brave folks tried to stop me from having my fun, but I crushed them before they could present any real challenge to my influence. A small group tried not to join my party, but I helped them bring near their expiration date.  It’s not that I intentionally killed them; I just didn’t give them what they needed.  There is a difference between killing someone and not giving away my stuff, even if it produces the same result.  Isn’t that right?  After all, I know how to throw a party so I’m very popular with most people.  They will pretty much do anything I say.  I have been around for quite some time, and let’s face it, I’m pretty much a legend.  When I show up, people kiss my feet, unless I make them lick my boots clean.  They know who’s boss, and they want to get on my good side.  It’s either that, or they fear my punishments, which I dole out generously.

It’s not important to me how I get what I want, so I needn’t unnecessarily burden myself with “responsibilities.”  The coolest thing is that people rarely notice my role in the transformation of their environment or culture.  Instead, they blame each other and fight each other.  They think their problems are from the people on the other side of town, so they are constantly asking me for guns and other weapons (which I gladly provide) to assassinate key personalities.  Where you see despair, I see opportunity.  Seriously! [chuckle of self-righteousness] Do you know how much my power grows when I give them these weapons?  I’m pretty much untouchable.

So, enough about me.  Tell me about you.  How can you make yourself useful to me? I’m not being rude, I’m just cutting to the chase.  I know, I’ve heard it all before from fools like you…[sigh]...”Mr, Freem Arket, you’re so callous, cruel, conniving.”  These may be true characterizations, but don’t you see?  None of that matters.  My responsibility is to myself and my development.  It’s my nature.  And baby, this is what I call freedom.  It's right there in the word: I'm FREE to DOMinate. Say it with me now, “FREEDOM!” [repeat as necessary] If you try to trespass on my freedom, I will mobilize my disciples against you.  I’m part of the people’s mythos now, a cultural god, and we will resist you and your countercultural absurdity.  My disciples will sacrifice themselves for my purposes.  Your ridiculous psychobabble diagnosis suggesting a sociopathic disposition is something my adherents won’t swallow.  They believe that I am the one who has given them a better standard of living.  They believe I’m the source of their innovation.  And best of all, they believe I AM their freedom.  Like the gods of yesteryear whose moods brought lightning, tempests, and sunshine, I am the god of freedom.  That is my power; and as long as people believe in me, I will constantly seek new lovely towns, beaches, forests, and cities to dominate and set ablaze.  There are always more places to exploit. I cannot be wrong about that, can I?  It is not a corruption of my nature, it is my nature.  With new technology, I am now crafting plans to expand to the moon!  What can I say?  I’m a badass!

I understand how you feel, but here’s my card.  Keep it handy for when you feel hungry and are ready to submit.   

Stop Waiting For Superman

I just finished watching Waiting for Superman, an emotionally evocative documentary about students in American schools.  A large part of the film focuses on the dilemma of educational reform in an environment of ironclad tenures that are vigilantly defended by teachers’ unions.  The documentary briefly mentions that these teachers unions arose decades ago because of mistreatment of educators (as is the history of most unions).  Now, those unions have become very politically powerful and they work to protect teachers, even if that protection comes at the cost of student success.

But wait! What is meant by “protect teachers?” Are teachers who just sit in class waiting for the day to go by because they can’t stand their jobs actually “protected?” I had one of those teachers who said we didn’t even need to talk to him because our assignments were written on the chalkboard.  He would spend the class time reading his newspaper with the soles of his shoes staring at us.  Maybe he had his eyes down there because he was definitely sitting on his head. 

Are hating kids and feeling miserable about the classrooms and hallways teachers inhabit 5 days a week something to be preserved and protected?  No, the real meaning is that their salaries are protected.  Or more to the point, their access to a means of living protected.  No wonder.  In an economy where every person must sell themselves on the labor market as their ONLY means of earning a living (unfortunately, there’s no alternative economy in which people are provided free access to life’s resources in our wonderful FREE market), it only makes sense for them to defend their tenures/salaries/means of living.  So, teachers, who have a decent degree of social respect for their professions, and sufficient incomes to fight for their means of life, are able to “protect” their livelihoods.  Students, and particularly students of non-wealthy parents, are not able to access a meaningful education.  They suffer the consequences of this broken system throughout their lives.

The film tries to end on a high-note with a review of the KIPP school program, which has had undeniable success in producing students with better test scores.  I’m not sure how the schools function in terms of student well being, but let me leave that aside for the moment.  These KIPP schools are scarce, and because they receive public funding, they must use a lottery system to determine who gets admitted.  The film follows five kids and it shows them anxiously waiting to hear if their number gets called.  You can also see the other parents and children in the background nail-bitingly attending each utterance from the announcers hoping the next name or number called is theirs.  As the number of names called grows and the available seats reduce, the sense of desperation on their young faces makes you want to rush in and rescue them all.  You hold on to hope to the last number, because that’s how all movies resolve the climax—at the last minute, and in the favor of the protagonist.  Not in this case.  It’s real life and most of the featured kids don’t get called.  The shattering of hope for the kids makes it difficult to hold back the tears.  Then, the realization on the parents’ faces that not only have their children missed an important opportunity to improve their lives been lost, but that they, the parents, have let their kids down.  Mommy can’t make it better.  She can’t throw money at the problem and make it disappear.  Their daily fight with the cruel market world, against which they try to insulate their kids, is a losing battle.  The system is king, and they are the pawns.  Somehow, they must summon all remaining strength not to let their sense of defeat, worry, and despair spill over onto their kids.  They have to console their children because it is their pain that takes priority at that time.  Despite every Herculean effort to shield their kids from the continuous battle to provide a better life, their kids know.  The kids know that their parents can’t protect them from the harsh world.  They know that the impact of this lottery is not just about where to go to school, but a lottery about how their lives will turn out, and it’s looking less and less favorable. 

These are the unsparing sacrifices we make to perpetuate our outdated, insufficient, and barely-above-savage social system.  All those people who work so hard to critique a resource-based economic model to find any unpleasantry, any objection, any difficult challenge that would be faced in an RBE amaze me in that they seem to overlook all the heartache of our current system.  It’s like they measure an RBE against a fictional utopian standard, in which everyone gets everything they want and problems are extinct.  They use that to argue against an RBE, without noticing that their measurement should be against our current system.  Proponents of an RBE do not expect utopia, just a life and planet a lot better off than what we have now.   With all the road kill caused by our current system, it feels like there must be a thousand better options, which is all we need—better!  And it sure is time for better, unless we want to continue to watch lives hinge on the outcome of lotteries.  

Bad Decisions

A few years ago, a nameless couple signed a contract with pages of purgatorial fine print that committed them to decades of debt so they could own a home.  The economy crashed, their house value plummeted, one half of the couple was laid off, and making ends meet became impossible.  Those who were not so unfortunate blame these victims and sum it up to “they signed the contract, so they made a bad decision.” 

Let’s roll back the clock a bit and look at the perspective of pre-crash days:

Just a couple of years ago, those of us attempting to warn friends against taking out questionable mortgages were ridiculed as conspiracy theorists.  Didn’t we understand that real estate always goes up?  Or that home ownership was the only way to guarantee one’s retirement?  That the longer you wait to buy a house, the further out of reach that house was going to get? The question of whether to become a home owner gave way to the much more presumptive “How are we going to get you in?” While government promised to encourage home ownership as a way of improving participation by poor people in the economy, banks came up with increasingly clever mortgage products that postponed the real cost of buying a house well into the future…

“What if interest rates are higher in five years?” I asked.“The increase in the home’s value will offset it,” the mortgage broker responded.“What if the house—for some reason—doesn’t go up in value? I asked.“Houses always go up in value,” she responded.“But what if the mortgage resets to a rate I can’t pay?”“Everybody has these mortgages, now.  Banks can’t set the rate so high that everyone defaults.  They won’t make anything that way.”...

Because these borrowers were generally less educated and less experienced with complex banking products, they were also less likely to fully grasp the implications of adjustable rates—often buried deep in mortgage documents only presented at closing, when there’s no time to read through them.  Other high-risk mortgage candidates included homeowners who could be induced to “move up” to bigger properties, and “flippers”—who bought houses with almost no money down hoping to resell them at a profit before the first payments came due. 

---  Life Inc., Douglas Rushkoff

People have limited powers to predict the future, even the experts among us.  Potential homeowners were thinking that houses were a solid investment, the economy was stable, and that they were getting fair and accurate information from their mortgage brokers and realtors.  Is it stupid to trust someone to give you true information?  Yes, in this economic paradigm!  Everyone is forced to make a buck off of your ignorance or lack of skill.  The more ignorant and the less skillful, even more profit can be made.  But, we can’t really function in a society where we have a paranoid distrust of all workers we transact with.  Imagine that at every single transaction you run through the scenarios of suspicion:  Do these noodles I’m about to eat have a tummy-upsetting ingredient that will drive me over to the adjacent pharmacy that is well stocked with gastro-drugs?  Is the noodle owner getting kickbacks from the pharmacy owner and from the gastro-drug manufacturer?  Will my iPhone combust so I have to buy a new one and pay for the burn on my hand? (http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/red-hot-smoking-iphone-selfcombusts-on-airliner-20111129-1o3zn.html) Does this shirt have non-toxic fibers so I won’t get a rash?  When my dentist tells me I have five cavities that need fillings, is she just trying to make a sale?  (This actually happened to me and I was thankful I had a convenient opportunity to get a free second opinion that indicated my teeth had no cavities, which is what I expected since I’ve had pretty good dental hygiene.)

It’s so easy to make a bad decision, even when you have good information like picking the tastiest sandwich on the menu.  It’s a lot easier to make a bad decision when factors around you conspire to get you to make that bad decision.  There’s a lot of money to be made in bad decisions. 

There is the other issue of how a bad decision is arrived at.  When I lived in Thailand, I was aghast upon hearing impoverished people spend two to three months of their total salary (via debt) to buy a new mobile phone.  Why would they make such an irrational purchase?  I used to sum it up with, “Idiots!”  Calling them idiots helped relieve my discomfort over figuring out why such a bad decision was made.

Someone declaring that a “bad decision was made” is a sign of a lazy thinker.  It’s a bit like a child shoving the mess under their bed and declaring victory over the Untidy Monster.  No more thinking required.  No more following the chain of causality about the reasoning behind those bad decisions.  And the sad part is not so much the laziness, but the outcome: a deep lack of compassion.  Those bad decision makers should suffer for their sins bad decisions.  The Westboro Baptist Church says that dead soldiers are the natural result of bad social decisions like giving gays closer-to-equal access to citizens’ rights.  Kids get addicted to drugs or involved in mischief because they are “black sheep.”  Problem solved, case closed.  The irony is that labeling an action a bad decision is itself the bad decision because it does nothing to resolve the problem, and in fact, it enables the harmful behavior to continue.  It is a reaction to one’s frustration with oneself from a lack of skill and/or intelligence to truly resolve the underlying problem(s).  

SIDE NOTE: There should be a research study in which Libertarians people who liberally attribute someone's suffering to bad decisions should get offered a license to a great new software program that has in its terms agreement a statement about the right of the patent holder to procure all hardware the products of said software are housed on, including those to whom those products are distributed to (I plagiarized this idea from Monsanto).  The terms should be quite lengthy, coded in legalese, and the software should be something that is a "must have."  I would be interested to see how many people "agree" to those terms.

The roots are deep in decisions we make, and it is difficult to tease out all of the factors.  In looking more deeply at why some Thai people overextended themselves to buy a mobile phone, a few possibilities surface.  Thais have strongly interconnected social networks that advantage them (increase their access to goods/services that promote their survival and well being).  Such strong social networks come with costs that relate to maintaining their membership in a peer group.  If they fall too far behind, they may find themselves without access to that peer group and its resources.  If having a mobile phone is part of that cost, then it may be entirely rational to make that purchase.  Or what about the fact that low-income workers rarely have the opportunity to afford the things the free market is supposed to “provide:” creature comforts?  These workers live austerely day in and out (while seeing extravagance in every billboard, poster, and on TV).  They earn just enough to survive.  If having a small piece of the technological pie makes them feel a little less like life is so dreary, then the purchase is a rational decision.  This is the common advice of dieting so that the diet is sustainable.  Have your cake and eat it, just not every day!  Those who ruthlessly deprive themselves finally relent to their cravings and they abandon their diet.

Of late, there is a lot of new research into epigenetics explaining how nurture affects nature.  Nature (DNA) and nurture act together in a constant dynamic interplay that lead to physiological, physical, cognitive, and emotional output.  One day, you are full of energy and very “productive.”  The next, you can’t seem to focus and chide yourself for not being “productive.”  There doesn’t seem to be a reliable pattern to these swings in energy and mental focus.  Even if you think you have learned how your body systems work, there could be an unpredicted environmental upset that challenges this “reliability.”

In this study, the environment at young ages affected gene expression much later in life. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/living-conditions-child-may-imprint-themselves-your-dna-life  Does the child born to a stressed-out parent who then has their “delayed gratification” genes turned off and battles this problem throughout life deserve to be convicted as a bad decision maker?  This is oversimplified extrapolation, but the basic issue remains the same.  Most humans born today are just “bad decisions” made by impoverished and/or uneducated people.  Those kids are punished for simply being the product of that bad decision and now they must pay the price, which is a debt that lasts a lifetime.

Protect the Xinane!

Two dozen officers tracked down and arrested one man, named as Joaquim Fadista. Mr. Fadista had already been detained in Brazil on trafficking charges and extradited to Peru. Officials believe Fadista was involved with a group trying to carve out new cross-border cocaine routes, or was working for loggers who covet the timber growing in the untouched forests where the group, called the Xinane, live. They are particularly worried at finding an arrow head in one of the trafficker’s abandoned backpacks.
Original Article

So here's a guy (Fadista) trying to do international trade and he doesn't care who gets exploited or who gets sacrificed in the process of maximizing his profits.  Doesn't that sound familiar?  Indeed, it should.  The only difference between this guy and sanctioned corporations is that corporations have permission to sell their goods.  And their goods don't have any "life-ground" litmus test.  For example,  people in the US think they are doing a great thing by recycling their old electronics. "These [recycling companies] typically go for the cheapest recycler to dispose of their collections and do not question, what exactly these firms do with the waste." (Article) But, this e-waste is shipped overseas and the wage slaves who sort through the "used goods" are exposed to toxins.  Does anyone measure the effects this exposure has on them?  Probably not, because very few actually care.

Pharmaceutical companies get to sell Oxycontin, perhaps the most infamous narcotic, and heaps of patients become addicted to them.  Is cocaine really that much more harmful?

Are junk food, fast food, and sodas any better?  That stuff is sold globally with few restrictions.  Loans are bought and sold.  Is that for the well-being of society?  We say cocaine can't be sold, but people still want it, so Fadista took up the cause of the free market and began selling his product to willing customers.  It just seems a bit self-serving to limit goods, not on the basis of what's healthy to society, but on the basis of who can extract profit.  And when I read the article about people and governments being so concerned about the Xinane, it screams of hypocrisy.  Are the poor people in a poor nation any less deserving of protection than people who use bows and arrows?  Apparently, the answer is, "yes."