America is not a republic or a democracy or a democratic republic. It is a lie.

 Hey all, just wanted to make an observation of mine public:

What people think about when they think about America is one thing--a place of dreams where you can buy anything you want freely, where your possessions are protected, where there is stability and opportunity and jobs. A place where you have rights and the law man or the tax man can't just levy a tax and take away your things. 

And then there is what america actually is. 

In America, we have a three class system: at the top of the system is the 1%. Typically the 1% are self-made billionaires, which sounds like the American Dream, right? --Except the real path to reaching the 1% is to find a flaw in the system and exploit it until you make it on top and then close that exploit so that others can't repeat it. Many of the 1% come from wealthy families, its true, they come from the top 20% or even the top 10%, but the top 10% isn't unachievable. A hard-working and smart-investing family can rise from the bottom 5% to the top 10% during their life time and leave their children to carry the banner the rest of the way to the top 1%. So yes, in some ways, the American Dream is real, but before you settle in and feel good about things, lets focus back on the 1%. The top 1% of American society are cheaters. They are exploiters. They are liars and distorters, and they are ruthless. They put on a good show because the wealthiest of the wealthiest, Mark Zuk, Warren Buff, Elon Musk, Bill Gates--they all have a good PR. Many people love them--if not, they wouldn't be able to continue lying and cheating and getting away with things. --THAT is the American Dream. 

The next class is the politician. You're going to think this is the same old same old, so I'll spare you the details: Politicians are pigs and liars. You don't survive in politics by being a good person. If you don't accomplish something big in your first term, people forget about you and then don't vote fore you next go around unless you get lucky and your opponents are worse. Politicians get to stay in office by lying--and in a sick and twisted way they think that their lies are "For the better good" they think they are being ethical and that they're in the right, otherwise, why continue? Why be such a useless piece of shit and waste of space for society and yet continue to fill a role for society that requires you to at least listen to what the public is complaining about? --They all think they are heroes. They think that they're the only one who can push forward some idealized version of the future and they do everything they can to push for that future. It's actually quite pathetic because what we really expect a politician to be is to look after the current interests of the people in their jurisdiction, but the reality is that all politicians are looking out for future peoples who may or may not exist ever. Even when they succeed at bringing their vision for the future, the people they bring it for are too old or dead to really appreciate it. The reason for this is that you don't accomplish anything in politics without a mind for the long form. Everything a politician does is a long con in hopes of bringing a future about. The big problem is that they can't predict how people are going to be in the future and can't provide political wins for their future constituents. It sucks, but we're at least 10 or 20 years behind politically what we are socially on every front. Todays Boomers are starting to get the things they wanted 20 years ago, but now those boomers are leaving the workforce and in need to medical care--too bad they didn't care about taking care of the elderly 20 years ago, if they did, they would have elected people who would look for their retirement and make it a surety. Now, social security is a question, social trends hvae changed and their politicians are batting the wrong way and doomed to be scorned, and medical care is going to continue skyrocketing. 

LAstly, there is the working class. For all intents and purposes, the working class are really plebs. They're the 99%. The people who actually work, the people who do things for society and make sure "shit gets done." The plebs are all working for 1 of 2 things: retirement and death, or to accrue wealth to pass on to their kids and grandkids. The bottom 90% is so concerned about making it into the top 10% and the top 10% are either working to make it into the top 1% or to just make it to retirement. All this hard work that the plebs are doing just to survive causes them to forget that there is more to life than just working. They often just follow trends because they don't have time to think for themselves and develop a personality enough to set trends. Or they're so focused on the "Someday I'll retire..." and they work themselves to the bone to reach retirement only to die before they get to enjoy retirement. 

Meanwhile, our nation was founded to make the field more equal for everyone. It was supposed to do away with the ultra powerful king, the Absolute Monarch, the Dictator. Europe wasn't so bad anciently, there were many factions and the lack of centralized power made it so that someone on the outskirts could avoid the local lord's prying eye and then they could get away with things. Then monarchy progressed to where it became more stable to centralize the role and ultimately have just one king to rule the country. Then kings made alliances with other kings to protect their domains, and finally people rose up who had ambitions to rule the entire world, and the only way to do that would be to have absolute power within the nation. Thus, the Absolute Monarch was born in France. 

In the US, we started as several fractured states each with their own laws and forms of government. Eventually the states bonded together to support the idea of slavery and keep their economic power, but other states who had a conscious recognized that slave power isn't fair and isn't what the nation was founded on (remember? the idea that everyone is equal and can do whatever they want so long as they aren't hurting anyone--Liberty? Libertarianism? One of the great founding principles?). So they rallied under one leader who fought the civil war to make everyone equal again. The civil war was supposed to re-center the nation, and in many ways it did, but the politicians who pushed for it were doing so for the peoples of before the war. After the war there were more people, different people, freed people who had a different voice and different wants and needs. It took another 50+ years for those people to get hte right politicians in office who would push for their future. And then there was a counter push when those politicans finally made some ground and they restricted people again after 50 more years. And then there was a little bit more freedom and equality....

Some people describe this as the liberal pendulum or the progressive pendulum. Really, it comes down to the fact that American democracy doesn't accomplish anything quickly and by the time it accomplishes what people wanted now, the people who wanted it and had the majority and had the power--Those people--they're gone. And the new majority, the ones that are pissed off about this thing happening that htey don't agree with, then they form a movement that takes another 10-30 years and after that amount of time they get what they want. 

But I'm not the same as I was 10 years ago, or 20, or 30. 

What I want right now, I'm not sure if it will even be relevant in 30 years. 

Things I care about are climate mitigation, and in 30 years its too late. Removing the power that fossil fuels have on our nation would be great in 20 years, but I fear it might be too late. Damage will be done and we can't go back to the environment we had when I was a child. I care about personal liberty--not liberty over all but Personal Liberty. I think what I do with my personal property, my body, my toothbrush, the items in my inventory, should be completely up to me. I think anything that is connected cell-to-cell to my body should be under my jurisdiction, but me in 20 years might change my mind once people start adding circuity to their bodies to enhance their abilities so that they can become super beings and purge the earth of non-super beings. Or genetically modify themselves. --Yeah, I might change my mind in 20 years and say there are limits. That said, I don't know the future and no body does, and even if somebody could accurately see the future, no one now would understand it enough to  care to invest in it for the rest of humanity. Instead, one of the 10% would exploit it so that they could be the 1% and then close it off so that no one else could benefit from it. 

Sorry if this is classist. Sorry if this is doom-and-gloom. 

I just think America has failed. It has failed to give people what they want, which is what they want right now, not later. And when they get it later, it's contrary to what the people of the then-now want. So if you live in the present, you're getting something you don't want that someone else wanted and you'll have to wait to get the thing that you actually want and you may not live to get it. A better form of government or social structure would be one that can give you what you want right now, or one that can predict what you will want in the future and give it to you when that future occurs. 

I almost wonder if it isn't possible to design laws in a way that they are triggered by future predicted events and that we can change those laws up until they happen so that they can be modified to be exactly what we will need.  Like: a law 50 years ago would have been nice "in case" global warming surpassed an average of 1 degree C. Then suddenly fossil fuel is forced to scale down. If it was on the books, the fossil fuel industry would be prepared for it and less people would be investing in it if they saw the temperature rising 0.5C or 0.75C because they'd realize there was a limit to it.

Maybe we could write a law on how we would treat an alien species if one was discovered, and until then, we wouldn't have to do anything other than leave it on the books. 

But I digress. That's a reality I will never live in. People barely have forethought to save money for retirement, why would they have the forethought to prepare for something that might happen? 

Economics and Capitalism II

 I can sense and understand that our method of Economics and Capitalism is a problem, but I'm really struggling to wrap my head around a solution...

It seems like a pretty important thing in life, and possibly something that people wouldn't expect just one person to find a solution for, but I think many great writers and thinkers have, individually, come up with solutions for these great pressing problems of our time.

So I'm sitting here at the "why" stage--I know why it's not working, I also know THAT it's not working. But now I need to move into the stage of where do we go from here?

It's really hard to articulate this, but I'm really noticing in every conversation people have that is economics related or capitalism related just how bad those things are. Our understandings of economics is so ingrained into people that they don't realize there could be alternatives. Take for instance when people assign value to something: their first instinct is to say that the value is based on what someone will pay for it. That supply and demand is the main generator of value then. --That's not accurate, and that would put Marx's theory in some strange water because then the controlers of the means of production are those people who can create demand. It puts power in society into the hands of PR firms, Marketeers, and Sales people, which are an end product of value not a begining product. Those people sell created value, they don't create value to sell!

And capitalism. We often associate capitalism with corporate capitalism, or the public's ownership of public companies. But we have seen where that line of argument leads: corporations are treated like people rather than entities controlled by people. People use their ownership in companies as leverage for other things, even leveraging the assumed value of the corporation (although it is unrealized) to generate value. They offer up their shares are collateral to private investors who lend them money and in effect create value out of nothing. This is economic capitalism at its finest, but that doesn't mean there is actual value there. There is no real value to those deals yet people believe into them and it causes the economic engine to turn--generating increased value from nothingness! How can this be sustainable? How can this be equitable? It's no wonder there are so many huckers in the world today--so many people pitching lies to accumulate wealth--because that is in effect tapping into a limitless source of economic power: the belief of a lie that says there is value in something when there isn't! 

What's more, when we take a step back, no one has really put much thought into whether running this economic engine for the long-haul is actually beneficial to people? Is it? Is it beneficial to everyone or just a select few, because it seems to me like it is another form of propaganda, no different from religion. Economics is the new religion. Religion was the old method for controlling the masses and even, eventually, for controlling kings. The new method is economics. Kings rise and fall based on that "Economic engine," and not all kings hold geographic holdings in the same way that they did back 500 years ago. Some kings own corporations. 

What a lie this world is. What an illusion! What a waste. We humans are such a wasted species. We rely on fiction, we build our whole world on fiction, we are fiction. Is it really a human trait to look at the truth and turn away from it only to embrace a fiction that is more digestible? 

Economic Capitalism The problem of All of Us

The Climate Crisis may kill us all, and because we have already reached the tipping point--even though people don't want to admit it--humanity will be facing many changes and what society looked like 10 years ago is not what it will look like 50 years from now. It has already changed in many ways, too many ways. 

I suppose the rest of my thought pieces on this site are going to reflect the fact that we have a finite amount of years on this planet. Humanity used to change at a steady pace, but the rate of change has been exponentially growing and we are now approaching an infinite rate of change. What that means is chaos, anarchy. When we hit that point, everything is up in the air and whether we escape from it or not is dependent on whether humans are inherently good, or inherently bad; but the fact that we reached that point in the first place says that we are inherently bad. And by bad I mean, predominantly those negative traits that people think of.

Which leads me to the topic I wanted to write about:

Our current method of economics is fatally flawed and is directly tied into the flawed side of capitalism. The flawed side of capitalism is the side that over-exploits, seeks profit above all else, emphasizes and rewards greedy behavior, and leads to only a select few bubbling to the surface. 

This is flawed because it presumes that there is such a thing as "best of the best" in regards to human beings, yet anyone who studies humanity will tell you that humans greatest trait is that their weaknesses are actually strengths when pooled as a collective. The flawed capitalism concepts have been pushed throughout history, arrogantly, for centuries under different names like imperialism, or colonialism, serfdom, tributaries, and despotism. Capitalism is being wielded by greedy individuals to amass power, and unfortunately, Capitalism has done a much better job of it that its predecessors. 

As the rate of societal changes continues to press forward though, Capitalists ought to be quivering right now because social change is inevitable and just as the Rome was built and fell on the backs of the refugees it created though its wars, or how Imperialism crested and then was replaced, so too will capitalism die and be replaced and the people who it served will be forgotten.

Economics is presently a tool of capitalism. Money, currency, fiat, all representations of economics and not something tangible. Economics is founded on a principle that growth means more and loss means less. One flaw to economics-thinking is that it attempts to explain the resources of a finite world as though they are infinite. Infinite growth is impossible. In a natural system, there are a finite number of resources and the value of those resources don't go up when they run out, the value plateaus at a maximum value that I would coin "survival maximum." It is the price that one pays to survive--to live--which cannot be greater than the value of their life. Animals have a survival maximum the same as humans, yet economics undervalues them substantially. Plants, even bacteria have a survival maximum. Just because we can wipe out an organism relatively easy, doesn't mean that it's survival maximum is the same as the cost to wipe out said organism. The value of a wine culture is not the value of a campden tablet used to kill it off before bottling the wine, and yet the same approach is applied in many instances of the economics world. 

Wild animals that are often hunted for sport or sustenance do everything in their power to outwit the hunter, and yet the ecological services that these animals provide far surpass the lead and gunpowder used to kill them. How easy it is to destroy something that took so much to build, and yet, destruction or threat of destruction has been used for eons as a means to devalue resources and snatch them up well under their true economic value. 

Economics can never accurately value a living organism, and because of that inadequacy, it will always lead of false pretenses. Economics, by nature of being a faulty system, is therefore inadequate for most of the tools it has been used for. If anything, the only merit that economics serves is to deceive the unwitting into offload highly valuable tangibles and real property into the hands of master deceivers. 

After the thousands of years that money has been around--the prerequisite to economics--I think now is a good time to start developing a system to replace it. Some people have proposed cryptocurrency, but it is only a further expansion of the flaws of economics because it relies on economics for its very existence--moreso than previous currencies. Instead, we either need to latch our currency onto semi-infinite sources of energy, such as the sun, or do away with currency altogether. And yet, if we manage to harness the power of the sun and create infinite energy, there may no longer be a need for currency.

Sadly, the easiest alternative to currency is worldly power and political structures, and when society hits the chaos stage, those with amassed worldly and political power will attempt to base currency on this resource they believe they have an abundance of. "Favors" will attempt to replace "money,"  and yet that will not suffice because it has never been a stable nor a long-term solution. 

This all sounds like I am suggesting we all switch to a "wild" life, supposedly moving out into the bush to live off the land like our ancestors, but sadly we have never lived a sustainable lifestyle in the wilds. Human evolution has assured us that forming society is one of our greatest attributes as a species because it pools our weaknesses for certain traits and collaborates them with others' strengths. Living in smaller communities out in nature only gives a face-lift to the problem we are all facing--those people who live that lifestyle face the same problem, but they approach it in a different way and believe that they have evaded the "rat-race." Instead of competing with other humans over resources deemed valuable, they are competing against wild animals (who they perceive to be inferior to themselves) or Nature (who they perceive to be superior). At least in modern society, humans recognize that their greatest threats are their fellow humans--nature has been tamed as much as it can be and wild animals no longer pose a threat, but some humans are perceived as inferior and others as superior. The wild man or woman is merely avoiding facing his or her inadequacies and staring down the problem at hand and doing something about it. They are choosing to engage in selfish human behavior by focusing on their own survival and abandoning the global community at a very challenging time and I don't see that as a valid solution. 

We are all facing Nature. Nature hasn't been tamed. It is bigger than all of us and by attempting to tame it we have destroyed it. As Nature dies, it will destroy everything in its grasp, including all humans who so arrogantly thought that they could conquer it. 

Societal Perspective

 I thought I would write up some thoughts I've been having lately about society. *eye roll* another one of those posts...

Sorry if this sounds edgy:

I think American society is on a brink right now, we just haven't realized it yet. And honestly, it needs to happen. 

But hopefully it will happen in the best way possible and not the worst, because there are a lot of avenues to a bad outcome and only a few to a good one.

Sounds cryptic? 

America has become a land of capitalism solely. Our democracy (democratic republic if you will) is neither a democracy nor a republic. The wealthy control so much in government and they compete with one another for more power. The only saving grace for commercial take-over is the complexity of the system. Yes, the checks and balances work some of the time, but they are more of a check dam before the actual dam, and right now the waters of greedy capitalism are inundating politik. 

It really does stem from capitalism. I appreciate capitalism, but I think the scale has tipped too far in favor of the capitalist. People perceive money as life. At all levels. All races, all classes, all categories of people see money as the definition of life. This is not the truth, but rather it is a construct that has been implanted into our minds. It is an idea that has tainted our happiness. People perceive money to be the measure of a person's life. Wealth is all that people can talk about. But capitalism is more than money, it's about "capitalizing" which appears to be an extension of imperialism. It is the control over the production capabilities and domination. 

People seem to think that capitalism is solely about money, but in fact, when capitalists have capitalized in their field they always expand--expansion is in fact an aspect of capitalism, though they call it "diversifying". 

So lets define capitalism: Capitalism is the investment of resources in order to get a return on those resources. Currency is the exchange unit, though it isn't a universal unit because it varies regionally and across time. Energy is a more universal unit of exchange between mediums, but capitalists haven't quite figured out how to capitalize on it in a stable way or I'm sure they would use that instead.

The people, or inheritors of those people, who made daring investments a long time ago have gained the returns on those investments which has provided them with a sufficient pool of this exchange medium (currency). With currency they are able to expend those resources on whatever they want, though as they continue to be capitalists, they invest more in order to gain more, and when they have tapped as much as they can from one source they diversify to another source or another industry. And they don't stop and they assign heirs to do the job after they are gone. 

Some capitalists are corporations--or rather an organization or group of people who are all capitalists and who share in the wealth gains of the corporation, but don't share any responsibility for their capitalist decisions. If something goes great, they get praise and financial benefits and greater decision making latitude. If it goes wrong, they don't lose out financially, they don't have to personally pay any fines and worst case scenario they get fired from their position as CEO or COO or CTO or whatever executive position they held. After getting fired, they get poached onto some other board, or if they were a good capitalist they were diversified and are already sitting on other boards which tehy retain their position in. 

The American government was once founded on a different kind of ideals. There were certain human principles incorporated into the minutia of the government, but over time, capitalists realized they could even capitalize on government. They've infiltrated the election process and now it is the richest candidates who win elections. Those who invest the most money into the greatest returns and actualize those returns are the winners of government power. 

*phew*. 

This is hard for me to speak about because I understand what is occurring in a non-language. I will need to keep both a dictionary and an encyclopedia handy if I'm to even communicate this. 

Tangent: I used to believe that you could only think about and understand what you could communicate, but I think that is only true to an extent. I think our brains are fantastic and that they have a way of understanding things that they've maybe only once seen or heard and can form connections that our conscious minds didn't realize were even connected. Call it intuition, call it the subconscious, but it's really just the connection making ability of the brain.

Back to my opening statements:

I think American society is on a brink. Financially, the markets don't seem right: if businesses are supposedly struggling to hire people, yet unemployment is low, yet businesses are still operating as normal and those businesses that are up and running are making profits, right? Then is there really a problem? And yet, people are supposedly not working? Who is paying the bills? Who is earning money to pay bills? Are people offloading their savings? I Thought they didn't have savings? See. None of that makes sense. Socially, people are still distraught. Covid is still impacting our lives and the threat is still out there. People are still refusing to get vaccinated. Things have calmed down, but I don't think they are really calm. Inflation is setting in. And it almost seems like we are sitting in the eye of the storm beliving that everything will end up alright when it's only just begun. It seems something's got to give? 

Manipulation

Intro

 I want to make an argument that:

All manipulation can be broken down into 3 methods: putting people down, lying, and distorting facts or truth.

I think society has an unhealthy obsession with manipulation. They try to claim narcissism on everyone, they blame other people for tricking them or they make other people into the bad guy, but I don't think that 100% of the time that someone calls another person out for being a manipulator that they are being accurate. I've tried to stress my whole life that being accurate is very important because if you approach a problem with a person from the perspective that they are a master manipulator and they aren't, then you won't accomplish anything, you won't make headway. On the other hand, if you approach them as what they are, maybe selfish, maybe an asshole, you'll be able to work on that. 

So again, I think we should be accurate and I think there's a lot of fluff out there about manipulation. Doing a google search you'll pull up countless websites on how to determine if someone is manipulating you, but you will be hard to find any articles explaining how to tell if someone else is being manipulated. These two aren't the same thing. The signs that someone is being manipulated are different from the signs that someone is manipulating you, and the signs that someone is manipulating someone else are different from the signs that you are being manipulated. Hence why I propose this new method of thinking about manipulation.

Before I explain it, let me make a preface: I became preoccupied with manipulation a long time ago and have spent at least 10 years of my life trying to avoid being manipulative. Before that 10 years, I think I fell into the trap of toxic masculinity and in my teenage years I learned how to manipulate without realizing I was learning how to manipulate people. When I got into university, I learned through studying English how to write persuasive papers and how to twist claims in a way to always win, but I also learned that it is wrong to do this and I've read plenty of literature that explores why it is wrong to manipulate, a few good examples are Shakespeare's work, Macbeth, Othello, even King Leer. At the same time that I was learning about what are called fallacies in argument, I was taking a course on ethics and I learned the philosopher's path to being ethical, Kant, Utilitarianism, etc. The arguments presented by people like Aristotle and Plato for why we should focus on an ethical life I could not find any fallacies in them and believe them to be genuine and logically sound, so I choose to follow an ethical life and by combining the two: understanding manipulative speech and being ethical, I have spent at least 10 years of my life (since I was 18) trying not to manipulate people. 
I also served an LDS mission following my university instruction on the matter and I had some serious problems with the way the religion is spread and preached. I struggled on my mission and went home 4 months early because I had a huge "crisis of faith" or "moral dilemma" or "ethical quandary." I eventually left the religion because I believe I found too many fallacies and unexplained ethical dilemmas in the way the religion is conducted. In short, I believe 99% of the Mormon religion utilizes manipulation to get people to join, contribute, and stay in the church, and if the basis of the organization is that a solely benevolent (always good and ethical) god runs the church, then it makes no sense why even 5% of the religion would focus on manipulative tactics.

So that's my claim of why I feel I am qualified to speak about this topic. I've devoted my life to it, I have experience and have witnessed it on both ends, and the longer I devote to it the more I recognize manipulation.

The Argument

The claim I am making is that all manipulation comes down to 3 forms: 

1. Lying
2. Distorting facts and truth
3. Putting down

I have a hard time combining lying and distorting facts because I think there is enough difference between them that they should be separate.

Lying is telling falsehoods or failing to tell the truth when prompted. I feel as though there needs to be a criterion here to say that there is a difference between knowingly lying and unwittingly lying. I think it's hard to unwittingly lie, so maybe these should be thrown out, because if you don't know something is true and you act as if it is or believe that it is, I don't think you are necessarily manipulating people, I think you yourself have been deceived. If you tell someone something as if it were a fact even when you know it is not a fact, you are lying. If someone asks you a question and you knowingly tell them something else, you are lying. Most people understand lying and understand some of the problems with it. When it comes to manipulation, lying is manipulation because you can get people to act in your favor simply because they trust you. 

I should maybe take a step back and say that I believe there are two types of manipulation: manipulation that brings the manipulator benefit, and manipulation that brings someone else negative side effects. In other words, if you get a thrill from convincing people to do things contrary to what they would do, you are manipulating them because you gain from it psychologically, even if they benefit from the manipulation as well. Or, if you cause someone harm by convincing them to take certain actions, you are manipulating them. --Of course, both of these examples are prefaced by whether you are using one of the three forms of manipulation. For a good example, lets imagine you convince a friend to invest in the stock market believing that it will benefit them. You do so with no ulterior motives, you don't stand to gain from it in any way personally, and you're doing it to help them. If somehow the gamble does not pan out and they lose a lot of money, I don't think you are manipulating them because it doesn't meet one of the three form criterion, even if it meets the type criterion. 

Distorting facts is a little different from lying though if you obsess over nuances I suppose you could say it is a form of lying. Distorting facts occurs when you purposefully change past facts, or you cause another person to doubt those facts. Lawyers do this all the time, and it often does not pass ethical standards, even though they claim that it is unethical to punish an innocent person and they see letting a guilty person go free as less unethical than punishing that innocent person. We can all think of a few cases where a guilty person went free and the long-standing consequences of letting that person go free has touched so many people that I think it breaks utilitarian ethics. You don't necessarily have to lie to distort a fact, you can merely cause a person to question what they believe, or you can present them with things to think about that have no solution. A good example that comes to mind is when religions tell you to act on faith even though there is no way to prove that your faith leads to positive outcomes, they merely want you to believe and trust in hopes that one day things will work out. This is manipulative because it causes people to disregard negative outcomes in their life and in many cases it never brings positive outcomes--the understanding is that after death those positive outcomes will come, but no one can argue about what happens after death because no one has been there and come back from it--except for me, I drowned when I was a toddler and they brought me back to life in the hospital. And No, I can't tell you what it was like. 

There isn't a problem with faith based arguments, the problem is when those arguments are used to cause people to ignore problems in the present. If you convince someone that they need to break up with their partner because their partner is causing them to sin, and your argument is that they just need to have faith--then you are being manipulative (this really happened to a good friend of mine.) 

Putting down seems to be one of the ultimate means for manipulating people. I don't claim to understand completely why it works, but I do claim to know how it works. When you put someone down, it is a direct assault on their self confidence. Self confidence is what we rely on most to make decisions. If you lack self confidence, self trust, or self worth, you doubt your decision making ability. They are directly related: trusting in your self and decision making, believing you have value and decision making, and "going with your gut" or your instincts and decision making. When enough people put you down, or someone you trust immensely puts you down, you start to believe it, it impacts your self esteem, and then you struggle to make decisions. Once you are weak in that way, the manipulator can convince you to take actions. A former U.S. President was notorious for manipulating in this way. He would convince people that they were inadequate and blame it on certain oppressions by the government or by certain laws that favored minority groups. He would then build those groups up using false statements about how "beautiful" they were, or how great they are or how great they will be, that had no logical standing--it was a distortion of truth manipulation because there was no way to argue simply because they weren't specific enough or because they were opinion. He then would issue a target to these people: "The other party is trying to take away your guns!" and sometimes outright lie to do so, "These people are coming across the border and taking your jobs." And in that way he manipulated the masses into doing atrocious things that make me question my own patriotism. His method of putting down started with saying that America isn't great or wasn't great at the time, when if you look at the statistics and you look at key moments in American history, America was probably at its greatest just before he took office. But he caused us to doubt ourselves. He tore down our confidence and our trust in ourselves and in our government, and then he convinced us to act in a way that brought about a lot of negative outcomes and benefited him personally (financially*, emotionally, etc.) 

Final Thoughts

Just as a final note, I wanted to test out my argument using a common term that people agree is manipulaiton: Gaslighting. 

Gas lighting falls under the #2 form of manipulation though it usually encompasses all 3. Gas lighting is lying about facts or distorting past events and denying denying denying. It causes you to mistrust your ability to perceive and think about past events. And Yes, gas lighters knowingly lie about the past in order to manipulate you. I think there are probably a lot of manipulation terms that we use that can be applied to this framework of what manipulation is and I trust that this framework is adequate for defining manipulation in all forms.

One drawback I see to this framework of recognizing manipulation is that it doesn't speak to anything about how a manipulator can build you up with false confidence.--I think that falls more under the category of distorting the truth, or lying, but I can foresee people reading this and wanting to put that in its own category.

The benefit to this framework is that you can apply it to yourself "Am I being manipulated?" as well as other people "Is he/she being manipulated?" Just watch the suspected manipulator carefully and if they are doing any of these three things, then you merely decide if they are benefiting or if the person being manipulated is suffering negatively from those methods and if so, then yes they are being manipulated.

Sickness

I couldn't think of an immediate title for this post. It's been a long time since I've had the time to write much of anything for myself--and that's what this website is...a place for me to voice my thoughts to myself in a manner much like someone thinking outloud. The difference is that what I write can be read for years later.
I'll admit, this isn't the most sane thing to do considering people could look me up and possibly find this and some of the crazy ideas I've had and probably they could misinterpret them as though they are thoughts are currently share. I don't go back and read these very often. This is kind of a public journal, but it's funny because few people write journals to read themselves--more often their kids or family end up reading them or even their ancestors or people who want to know the dead.
I wonder if anyone will read all of these posts and come up with some grand theme or a common thread that all of them share--that would be really cool really, so if you are doing something like this, let me know, or if I'm dead then come to my grave and let me know because what you would be doing is summing up a rare part of my life throughout the years. You would essentially know me more than I know myself!
I just don't think anyone has that kind of time and although some of my ideas are extreme or cutting edge at the time, most of them are not so edgy anymore and most of them are more rants than gems. I might even feel bad for the person that takes the time to analyze these or make inferations from what I've written because there are so many more enjoyable things one could do with their life.

---There. That's all the intro you get to explain away the last several months since I've posted anything.

What I really wanted to write out was how I have that sick sick feeling again in my soul. That disgusting, creepy, black abyss that I sometimes catch a glimpse of as though this ship I call my body is about to set sail right into because I'm getting sucked further and further into it without any means of escaping. --Yet somehow I always find a way out of it, so there's also a bit of excitement to the whole thing and anticipation of when I will shift from darkness to blinding light.

What could be making me so sick to the core? What could be causing this weird hormonal imbalance?

If you HAVE been reading all of my posts up to the present then you'd understand that the thing that weighs me down is the world. Is people. Is bad people. Is people who disrupt my fun-loving, my peaceful, my cheery life.

Let's recap:
It's almost my wedding day. I've been succeeding in my schoolwork to the point that I'm sitting on a covetous GPA. I have the whole world ahead of me and truly feel as though there is nothing I can't do. I've reinforced those long known thoughts that: "If I put my mind to anything, I can accomplish everything." Things are looking up for me! Truly, they are!

Yet maybe I've been exposed to some bad pollutants and that's what's triggering me to see this sick thing and want to just crawl under the bed or hid out in the crawl space just to get away from it all.


People are disgusting.


Now that I'm old enough to say this, I think I'm going to say it: I've lived a very innocent and benevolent life. I used to think I was corrupt at times, mean, rude, selfish and all of those negative traits that people generalize about themselves. Yet, I really have not. I've never been to jail. I've only been drunk once in my life. I haven't had a speeding ticket in years. I don't lie and don't have a reason to lie--actually, let me correct myself: I lie, but it's nothing major and I'm so truthful that I actually paused and was going to correct myself but decided it was better effect to just append my statement about lying. I've never taken advantage of anyone even though it would have been sooo soooo easy to do so. I haven't done that because I have way more restraint than anyone I know. I've never stolen in my adult life--probably the last thing I've stollen in my life was my classmates tomagachi in 3rd grade. I've never done drugs, not even soft, legal drugs, never taken oxy, never been around people that take molly or ecstasy. Never even taken an ambien. I take two ibuprophen when I'm in pain and that's it, maybe some coffee to clear my head now and again. I've cut back on sugar to the point that I almost rarely eat candy. --I am a model citizen and proof that you can be good and still exist in life.

And yes, it's very easy to do it.
It's not that I haven't had opportunities. Its that I know my vice and I keep it in check, every day of my life, and all of those other things aren't appealing to me.

Wow--that was quite the backstory.


So my question is, with all that I've experienced in life, why is it so easy for other people to do these disgusting things. Why do our institutions reek of filth and corruption? Why do people get away with so many crooked things and there is no means to stop them?
I really am not okay with this.

I think one thing that hit me hard this week is the wages of nurses--RNs in particular.
They have a minimum of an associates degree and 1 year of experience and yet they make $25/hr starting pay. Yet you can be a janitor, cleaning up not just the shit people leave in the toilets but also the disgusting behaviors of people who purposely wipe their feces all over the bathroom just to give you more work. We've got so-called "essential" employees working behind cash registers that could easily catch disease from the creeps that purposely try to get people sick and they get paid $9/hr where I live. How about being a skyrise welder, wearing a harness and messing with both flames and high voltage just to weld a beam 100 ft in the air--those guys make around $25/hr in the height of their career and also have to go through about 18 months of training plus a year of experience or more. Compare that to the pay of government scientists with master's or doctor's degrees--they get $28/hr starting pay and know a hell of a lot more.
I just don't see the value here. I'm not sure if that part of my brain that is able to gage the value of something is just turned off or what, but I really don't see the value that RNs provide to society. Most RNs are working in a vanity industry trying to prolong the life of an individual who isn't able to support the community. I think people have an obsession with long life and that disturbs me, it disgusts me. I just don't think nurses are worth what they get paid.
Then again, I don't think doctors are worth what they are paid either, I think doctors are paid more based on the risk they take rather than the value they generate, and I think there's some degree of hyperinflation based on the fact that people will pay anything just to live longer, which to me is an ethical concern that doctors really should think long and hard about instead of settling on "That's just the way it is." But do nurses really have to take risks? Maybe physical risks and mental/emotional risks, but the magnitude of those risks really don't seem like enough to constitute being paid so highly.

I've also recently found out the nuances of hiring federal government positions: veterans, former federal employees, they all get privileged status for jobs over regular civilians. Is that ethical? does it really promote the best person working in these important federal jobs? What about on the local level--in many counties and cities, the community's taxes go to supporting cornies--friends and family of current managers of these places or political appointees.

Why do people garner power and then instantly abuse that power? Where have ethics gone?
I'm really disturbed by this and I am honestly starting to think that our civilization will fall apart in my lifetime because of these very bad bad things.

I really do not want to live in this world.

Ethics of Terraforming our planet and beyond

I read an interesting article about terraforming Mars, which has peaked the interest of the philosophy world. I won't get into that particular article but suffice it to say that there is a debate between whether it is ethical or not to alter the surface of a planet. The particular article I read summarized some other views and then presented that so long as there are no living organisms on the planet they contended that it was ethical to alter the planet because it would bring about greater knowledge of our own planet.

I guess that conversation is very far removed from the world we live in (earth), but it got me thinking about our planet...

Humans aren't the first living creatures on Earth. One theory submits that the original life on earth wasn't developed on earth but rather escaped some other planet and survived on an asteroid that impacted earth.

Another unique aspect of Earth is that it is in fact unique--the more that astronomers look out into the universe, the more they find rocks that are nothing like our own and those rocks appear to be common, yet our Earth, a pale blue dot, has an abundance of water. Lots of rapid change from weathering and from life(ok that's a cheat because we're the only planet we know with life :P) . A unique atmosphere. Basically, the more astronomers look into space the more they realize that our planet is uniquely suited to house life and yet those other planets and asteroids and moons are inhospitable.

So that gets me thinking. If these other planets aren't suited for life at the present moment, what good are they? Are they nothing more than intergalactic monuments? Nature's art? Points in space that are good for nothing more than to look at for a brief moment and then to look away to something more interesting?

The universe is vast and incomprehensible in it's entirety. If a person had the ability to spend a day on one celestial body per day and then travel to another body in mere moments and on that new hunk of rock they could explore and enjoy and exist, they would still only experience a tiny speck of what is actually out there, and yet if you look at life as a sensory experience that you are limited in how many experiences you have, then the universe is irrelevant because it is so large that you could never experience it all.

My point is, I think from a utilitarian point of view, there is not a lot of utility out there that we know of in outer space. Our planet is very much usable in its present state for whatever we wish, and it appears to have the capacity to heal itself given enough time.

The great fear that most people have is that what we are doing to the Earth is altering it in a way that will destroy all life on the planet. I guess there is a fear that we will ruin this great gem we have and make it unusable and then it will become just like all the other planets in the universe.

Thinking of it in that manner, I return to my original statement: Humans weren't the first living organism on earth. Though some people might say "we have as much a claim to this earth as any other living organism", I disagree. --It is difficult to explain in words here a concept I am trying to explain, so try to take this next part for its bigger meaning than the base words I will use.--I believe that we have as much of a claim on the earth as we can wage war with other living organisms to take it.
In a cubic yard of soil there are many many organisms, and above that soil there may be many many more organisms, all living and existing in very close proximity to one another--some even on top of one another. Those organisms appear to work in concert with one another, where one produces more wastes, another comes in to get rid of those wastes. There is a sort of market economy of life existing in this very small area.
That said, humans come along and they alter their surroundings for themselves. Much like the earthworm or the ant moves debris from the surface and feeds on it, thereby altering its surroundings, the human exists as one component of a bigger part of this planet.
Do you think the earthworm knows of the presence of the human working the surface of the field above it? Do you think the human knows of the presence of whatever force is shaping above it?

Cue Pocahontas music: "You can own the Earth and still all you'll own is earth until you can paint with all the colors of the wind."

What if the universe was moving in a direction that we cannot comprehend just yet because we are so tiny? What if we--and all life--play a role in the universe on a grander scale of time that we cannot see because we don't live long enough?


I think the Earth is inherently balanced.
I think it would be difficult for us as a species to go extinct because we know too much about the workings of our Earth and other life on it and can utilize that knowledge to remain alive. --Maybe not all of us, but some of us will always persevere.
However, what part could a resource hogging human being that severely alters the environment, destroys other species play?