Social Engineering

Would switching to Communism work?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would Communism actually work if every nation on the planet switched to it?”

Making a switch to an entirely new system is never as simple as a change of clothes.

Every significant change to an extensive system, such as a complete switch to a new form of governance, always comes at the cost of widespread chaos and rivers of blood coloured by horrors of every shade of nightmare.

That people keep talking about switching to new or resurrecting old systems because they’re overwhelmed by how broken our current system seems to be is, on one hand, understandable in their frustration and desire to restore sanity.

On the other hand, it’s horrifying to contemplate how little people understand how our current system should be working and why it isn’t working as intended.

It’s frustrating that people can see why our system is broken, as they get slapped by those reasons every day and remain utterly blind to the simple fixes that would right the upturned ship of state we all depend upon.

It’s the same kind of broken reasoning that claims we should hedge our survival bets by creating extraterrestrial colonies instead of focusing a fraction of those resources on restoring our world to a sustainable balance for life.

The simple answer to this question is that we should stop thinking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater and fix the leaks in the tub to more quickly return to struggle-free baby bathing with far less pain and suffering.

We can borrow elements and concepts from communism (and other systems) to modify and incorporate into our current systems of democracy and capitalism. Hybridization of systems has already occurred worldwide and has proven itself a successful strategy without mass casualties.

The Social Democracies developed in the Nordic nations are prime examples of the superiority of evolving systems over replacing them wholesale.

Let’s take a moment to think about an analogy that might simplify the concept of evolution over replacement.

Redesigning and building an engine from scratch still requires a lot of after-the-fact adjustment. No new engine design is fault-free from its first iteration. There are always necessary improvements to make following its first release, if not outright fatal flaws that could end production altogether.

Software applications are generally considered immature and buggy until at least the third major release. As an analogy, software development is an excellent model for understanding how social engineering can work when deliberately planned to accomplish long-term goals.

Software applications generally begin by focusing on core functions to meet various needs for various use cases. Minor updates are made to improve operational efficiencies, while new versions expand on core functionality and incorporate new features that are usually the highest in demand.

Social systems are far more complex, while system crashes cost lives. There’s not much wiggle room for errors when hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of lives are affected by minor disruptions.

Have a look at these pictures:

Below are the same docks in L.A. that, currently, are mostly empty and without traffic. During the program this aired on (The Beat with Ari Melber — 2025.05.12), Representative Robert Garcia mentioned that before the tariff wars that Donald Trump (the deal-making artist) began, it would usually be too busy to walk where they walked without being run over by trucks due to a flurry of activity.

This is today’s result of the trade policy changes implemented three months ago. It took three months for a simple policy change to filter down to the port level. It will take a few more months before this effect trickles outward to impact every home nationwide.

It was mentioned in this report that hundreds of dock workers were out of work or had their hours cut back. The problem is much worse than a few hundred lost jobs, though, and they touched on the implications without adequately explaining what this all means.

When I see these photos and hear them speak, I see a domino effect of thousands of bankruptcies picking up steam throughout the nation, to become hundreds of thousands of lives displaced and destroyed before escalating into millions of lives by next spring.

Donald Trump’s casual dismissal of the serious concerns of real people trying to survive while working multiple jobs to raise their families and pay for their living needs showed a sociopathic disregard for their struggles. When he responded with nonsense about parents needing to cut back on buying 30-plus dolls for their kids for Christmas, while he’s raking in hundreds of millions on cryptocurrency scams and spending $3 million taxpayer dollars on every day he golfs and another $100 million on a military parade for his birthday, it’s mindboggling how people can be so frustrated with their lives and not be livid with him.

Every callously self-serving decision he makes carries implications that dramatically affect lives for years. This is the impact one person can have on hundreds of millions of people in their nation. We may currently joke about memes like this. If the U.S. becomes his latest and greatest bankruptcy, very few people will laugh — and it won’t be the millions suffering the consequences of one man’s corrupt thinking.:

People worldwide will feel its impact even if it’s contained and doesn’t erupt into a global catastrophe. Millions will die. Some people still haven’t recovered from his first term in office.

This is the impact one person can have on a system that is so complex and tightly integrated that no one escapes the effects of its disruption. Imagine how dramatic the impact on people’s lives would be if, instead of a simple tariff war and an illegal immigration round-up to concentration camps orchestrated by one leader, chaos were ramped up to a full-scale restructuring of society as a whole.

If a simple Constitutional amendment requires decades of debate and challenges by competing interests, imagine how disruptive it would be to dismantle a centuries-old system and replace it with an untested one. You can claim Communism was implemented before, but it wasn’t. Perverted forms of it were implemented by despots who killed millions as they tried to remake their nation in their image, using that system as a tool for them to leverage, like Donald Trump and several others are doing today with capitalism.

There’s no way to ensure the Communism you or anyone imagines will be the Communism that would be implemented. Marx’s vision of Communism was never implemented before, and the perverted versions of his vision were worse than failures. Meanwhile, democratic governance with a capitalist system has already transformed the world. It has become so successful that several people have and do support Donald Trump’s perversion of it to become a monstrous betrayal of what it was designed to accomplish.

Changes to any system that hundreds of millions rely on for stability require predictability in their systems more than anything else it can provide.

Without knowing what’s coming next, when people don’t know what to do, they naturally do and risk as little as possible while rationing out reserves to ensure they can survive in a repressed state over an extended period.

Completely shutting down the tariff wars and restoring trade policy to where it was only a few months ago would still take several years to return the economy to a state resembling it only a few months ago.

Replacing an entire system with another system means several decades of adjustment would be required to arrive at a state of equilibrium where people could finally feel comfortable predicting their futures and making decisions with confidence in their predictions.

Several decades of adjustment would be required to switch from the current system to a system of communism that would be stable enough, where the cost in lives could be mitigated.

In the meantime, periods of chaotic transition create incentives for the parasitic predators among us to leverage the confusion in ways that benefit them at the expense of everyone else. This is precisely the dynamic we are struggling with today. Without addressing the core problem of a corrupting influence in society, we would simply be porting a virus that weakens us today to a new system to continue infecting our society while adapting their strategies to the new system.

The flying monkeys who enable their corruption would be ported along with them because that’s the nature of power. When power is concentrated in the hands of the few, they no longer need to act directly, while their supporters do all the heavy lifting of “massaging a system” to cater to their needs.

We can see that occurring primarily within the MAGA community as they’ve been frustrated with how much they’ve had to endure and are struggling ever more over the last few decades, instead of experiencing a general improvement in their quality of life, like their parents and grandparents before them. They are righteously angry because they have been betrayed. They can’t face the truth of who has been betraying them, so they accept easy targets to vent their frustrations onto.

We have all been violated on deep and visceral levels, leading us all to take desperate action to fix what we know is broken. The problem is that far too many people leverage their anger and ignorance of how systems work to further the oppression rather than mitigate it.

The people who are selling easy solutions are the same people who are responsible for creating the problems. Donald Trump embodies that scam. Many billionaires are billionaires precisely because of that scam. There isn’t one private prison billionaire who hasn’t specifically leveraged that scam. Insurance billionaires and weapons moguls are the most popularly recognized culprits of the fraud of benefiting from the problems they create. Elon Musk’s DOGE was an abomination of a scam that many still believe was an honest attempt at addressing waste and fraud rather than facilitating it all while giving Elon and many others an escape hatch from accountability for their criminal behaviours.

We can and should be fixing the bugs in our current system by eliminating exploits, such as placing a global cap on net worth and instituting UBI. No one should have more wealth and power than a small nation. If an individual can afford a personal army, then they are a threat to global stability. However, everyone in a system that produces more than what we can consume is entitled to the basics of survival while given access to whatever means are available to improve one’s status through tools of opportunity like housing, education, and healthcare.

That IS precisely what “promote the general welfare of the people” means.

What we can do is ensure distribution systems are equitable and maximize opportunity so that everyone has an equal chance to create some form of meaningful success for themselves. No one needs more than the basic implements to carve out a modest life for themselves by applying their efforts toward achieving goals. No one should be denied these basic tools in a post-scarcity society of abundance, particularly not when we’re on the verge of becoming a fully automated society.

No one should be permitted to hook up to major arteries in a system and drain wealth from it while doing nothing else but watch their hoards grow without restraint or limits.

People like Jeff Bezos and the Walton family spend hundreds of millions to thwart unionization efforts so that their underpaid people don’t have to rely on taxpayer dollars to make up the difference in being short-changed on their income.

We must restrain greed, not rebuild a new system for greedy people to continue exploiting the desperate and the gullible.

Changing our system doesn’t solve our problems when we’re not prepared to deal directly with the cause of those problems.

We still have time to address the causes of those problems before they escalate and find ourselves repeating a bloody history of correction.

Avoiding the cause of our problems by pretending we can gloss over the obscenity of gluttony with a rebuilt system from yesteryear means we’re just lying to ourselves and begging for chaos.

If aging feels like things get worse, how can we deal with living 200 years?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If older generations tend to get fed up with the following generations, and feel that people are stupider, societal values, music, culture and everything else is worse, how could humans ever deal with living to be 150 or 200 years old?”

This question is based on a flawed presumption and a form of projection because “older generations” is a monstrously huge brush comprising hundreds of millions worldwide.

That number of humans don’t think alike, and they certainly do not all “get fed up with etcetera generations.” However, people who employ broad brushes when making judgments about people they don’t know are also exhibiting precisely the mindset that disparages people and renders broadly negative judgments about “things getting worse.”

Thinking in these negative terms and judgments is often a means of rationalizing one’s negative attitude. By believing age leads to negative judgments, one is permitting oneself to develop one’s negative judgments.

The reality, however, is that many people remain “young-minded” and optimistic throughout their old age and consequently live happier and longer lives.

Here are some examples of people who remained optimistic throughout their long lives:

George Burns 1896–1996

Grandma Mose — Anna Mary Robertson Moses — September 7th, 1860 — December 13, 1961

Jimmy Carter — October 1, 1924 — December 29, 2024

After having pissed away valuable time on another post dealing with toxic incels whining about how unfair life is that they don’t get to control the women they impregnate, I’ve arrived at this question with the attitude that people choose to believe the world is getting worse because they’re not able to control every aspect of it. That frustration wears them down over time, and they develop a negative attitude toward life and people in general.

I was a child during the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” and was a preteen during the flower power generation with love-ins, and an optimistic view of a hopeful future.

Then came the 1980s, when people’s mindsets appeared to change from an open-minded view of society to a rather cynical and dispirited view based on a self-centric model of getting what one could for oneself, even at the expense of others. It seemed the era of sharing and caring was vanishing.

Throughout it all, I still maintained my somewhat naive but hopeful view that we would recover the community spirit I remember being moved by, while reminded of it each night, as the television stations shut down their programming for the evening, with the Brotherhood of Man song, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”

Although I have perceived, throughout the last forty-five years, since the beginning of the 1980s, a general increasing separation between people, many changes have distracted my mind from it. I could sense it occurring, but I mostly ignored it as I went along with it while focusing on the developing technologies and learning to leverage skills and knowledge to carve out a sustainable career for myself. I was caught up in my optimism for a hopeful future for myself, and became increasingly introverted and isolated from interpersonal interactions and a community I could rely on.

Since that was taken from me, maintaining optimism has been quite a struggle. Still, I understand on a deeply visceral level how succumbing to negativity is quite much like drinking poison. The intensity of my experience has made it abundantly clear that a destructive mindset also harms one’s physical health. It creates a feedback loop of self-destruction, which allows one to wallow in broadly negative views toward life in general.

I believe that insight clarifies that living 150–200 years (which no human has ever done) depends on one’s frame of mind and maintaining an optimistic outlook.

If people develop such a negative perception of life that they believe everything is perpetually worsening, they don’t live as long as they otherwise could. Our attitudes toward life constitute a life-shortening way of ensuring we don’t have to cope with hopelessness.

This is part of the reason optimism has increased in importance for me, particularly since I still find myself venting against the prevalence of negativity we see every day and almost everywhere we look.

I can accept that much negativity exists in this world, but I don’t have to accept enduring it, so I get carried away with challenging it. I’ve gotten quite sick and tired of the rampant cynicism. I would like to see a resurgence of hope filling my senses like it did when naive hippy optimism of peace, love, and tree-hugging do-gooders captured public attention, even if it may have mainly been performative or just acting out against previous dark periods in human history, like the Second World War.

I want to believe we’ve arrived at a form of “peak darkness,” and a crossroads in our future as a species and a civilization where we can change course and restore hope to protect our longevity. The alternative is to allow ourselves to succumb to oblivion because we cannot survive an existence sustained by cynicism.

To that end, I do what I can to find examples of young people who give me hope for our future because, with each generation, we have both Kyle Rittenhouses and Greta Thunbergs, just like we have had for generation upon generation before them.

We must choose whether we want long lives of optimistic hope or shortened lives of cynical darkness.

Perhaps I’m just on a high from Canada’s recent election and getting the good news today about Australia following suit. Still, I think — or at least can start feeling some hope that the MAGA madness may finally reach its breaking point. It’s impossible to know if we’re experiencing a sea-change or a temporary lull in the degradation of our values. Still, I’d prefer to adopt an optimistic belief in our future than a cynical one because that’s too toxic a burden to endure. We may still require a world war to break this century’s “MAGAt fever,” or we may have learned something from our history, at least enough not to have to turn our world into a humongous bowl of ashes and regret before we finally start making hopeful and community-minded decisions to grow together instead of tearing each other apart.

At any rate, life may suck but feeling sucky about it only makes it suckier. Even if life sucks, thinking optimistically about a positive future at least makes the suckiness easier to deal with, and that’s why I equate long life with attitude and posted a few well-known examples of people who we can all learn something from.

In short, it’s not about “older generations” but about “old minds.”

Temet Nosce

Why does the Chinese government look like geniuses run it?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is that for Chinese living inside China, the Chinese government is not perfect, but for people looking at China from the outside, the Chinese government looks like it is run by geniuses who plan far ahead into the future?”

I believe it’s important to highlight a harsh truth that completely escapes MAGAt minds.

China isn’t “run by geniuses” but by ordinary minds who use “common sense” to plan “far ahead into the future.” They leverage the minds of their people, and many are geniuses, making incredible technological breakthroughs.

Nations cannot plan for the short term without missing the boat on the long term. People can prepare for the short term because the lives of individual people are short compared to the lives of nations. Nations must plan for millions of lives and not just one.

“Common sense” leadership is acknowledging one’s limitations and relying respectfully on the crowd’s wisdom to achieve a nation’s most significant potential. Authoritarian mindsets will always fail against this kind of “common sense.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.

All that’s required is not to be a stupid, short-sighted narcissist who thinks the world magically dances to the sound of one’s voice.

That’s precisely the problem fueling the self-destructive hubris sending the U.S. careening into becoming a third-world shithole and all of this is entirely due to the machinations of short-sighted bigots whose goal is the resurgence of another Reich because they continue to refuse to learn from history.

MAGAts may claim to value “common sense,” but their short-sighted and self-serving biases are not “common sense,” but an entirely “subjective and self-destructive sense.”

This period in history is teaching us once again that we must cure our species of the authoritarian virus that we have been fighting against since the dawn of human civilization.

China has had enough experience with authoritarianism to know how to handle the U.S. slide into fascism.

What strategies could eliminate extreme poverty?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are the most promising innovations or strategies today that could sustainably eliminate extreme poverty within the next generation?”

Thank you for the A2A, Faux-Bill. It is well beyond obvious that you are not the OG Bill Gates but a pretender. Whatever motivates you to disguise yourself as him and pose questions that he never would in such a forum is rationalized as a strategy for gaining attention that you believe you would not otherwise get.

I don’t believe questions like these require the kind of “celebrity boost” you’ve attached to them because I’m sure many people are thinking about these issues. Many politicians sadly believe people’s thoughts on these issues are irrelevant to their societal role. Nothing could be further from the truth because most of the world’s citizens sincerely desire an end to unnecessary strife across the globe.

Only the most psychologically scarred members of society wish harm to people on the other side of the globe or in the dingiest parts of their cities.

Even though people know this is a fake profile and that many would overlook this question based on precisely that, some people will still step forward and offer their views. Their answers support what I just said about people wanting to see change for the better, particularly when it is within our means to eliminate extreme poverty today.

Sadly, many politicians fail to comprehend that we are in this together, and that together means all of humanity must work toward common goals, such as eliminating poverty for it to happen. Even worse is that success requires our politicians to play the role of leader in society in earnest rather than as a performative lark to disguise their motivations for personal gain.

Far too few view their role beyond the boundaries of gamesmanship within the local jurisdiction of interpersonal dynamics of cliques, such as those commonly found in high school environments. They perform for each other and to the public at large. At the same time, their functional contributions are limited to shuffling game pieces in a subsection of the larger gameboard of their political community. Forget about communities elsewhere. That would constitute effort in thinking about and doing something about something elsewhere that isn’t directly connected to the influential factors governing their daily lives. Indirect connections don’t factor into their minds.

Here’s an obvious example of the complexity of dynamics that not enough people consider in their thoughts about how to improve our world and address issues like extreme poverty on the other side of the globe:

In this simple description of consequences, ten interconnected steps are outlined to arrive at the fundamental message that closing a door to a trading partner out of spite hurts oneself more than it hurts the trading partner.

China’s economy will contract briefly as it adjusts to a new reality. Americans, however, will suffer more in the long term because this attitude of bullying one’s partners closes off many doors of opportunity.

The same is true with the global tariff tirade and betraying a long-standing alliance with a supportive partner. Isolationism hurts the isolationists more than it hurts anyone they reject, and that’s where we’re at when considering issues of extreme poverty on the other side of the globe.

It is, unfortunately, too easy to rationalize how those problems “over there” are not one’s concerns here, but the reality is that poverty exists here as well. It’s just an arguable point about which is the easiest to ignore.

As you can see from the variety of answers given to this question and the variety of questions similar to this one, along with all the many other answers given to those questions, people want to solve this problem.

This brings us to the core problem at the heart of why the problem identified within this question persists.

The sad reality is that the core problem is YOU, Bill.

You and the existence of centibillionaires in today’s world are the reason why extreme poverty persists.

I understand how easy it is to rationalize your business successes as justification for having superior insights that can function like a paternalistic entity that can guide the little children of humanity toward a brighter future. I understand your rationale for the sheer capitalization required to provide the world with ecologically superior toilets. Still, you already know how you managed to distribute millions of life-saving nets in underdeveloped environments only through synergy. You relied on many people to rally behind your cause and donate whatever small amounts they could to solve a serious problem affecting millions of lives.

You made that happen, not with your capitalization but by leveraging some of your resources, connections, and celebrity status to mobilize people worldwide to provide a simple solution to a destructive problem.

Suppose you and the rest of the world sincerely desire an end to extreme poverty. In that case, there is only one solution, which begins with triage to stem the bleeding of resources that could collectively resolve the problem instead of exacerbating it, as has been the case due to extreme economic disparity.

The most successful way we have been in eliminating poverty worldwide as a society and a species has been through the massive growth of the middle class, as we experienced following the Second World War, FDR’s New Deal, and the development of unions.

By empowering the middle class with disposable income, we boosted economic performance along many vectors that were also boosted by force multipliers, which spread outward in orders of magnitude beyond what is possible today with coalesced wealth.

The existence of centibillionaires has made the goal of eliminating poverty impossible because this historically destructive concentration of wealth creates poverty through a contraction of available economic resources once wielded by hundreds of millions of people.

You know this. At least, the real Bill Gates does… as does every billionaire around the globe.

You cannot become a billionaire and be oblivious to how your concentrated wealth is a deprivation of wealth for others.

None of you is blind to this.

Since it’s taken decades of erosion of the gains that took a capitalist system decades of growth to achieve the highest level of poverty elimination, reversing that damage would mean decades of effort we don’t have the luxury of taking without experiencing a system-wide collapse.

We need bold efforts and fundamental changes to the economy and structure to meet a rapidly changing employment dynamic. We have no choice but to retool our economy before an increasingly rapid transformation toward fully automated societies where most production is performed in dark factories.

Suppose we don’t institute bold changes today. In that case, the transition will result in massive numbers of collateral damage that will be responded to with system-wide chaos because people will not shut up and die quietly as they find themselves starving for food and made homeless. When people have nothing left to live for after having their means of survival stripped from them, they become radicalized to such a degree that they are like cornered animals and will bring much destruction to the world before they exit it.

We need to reverse course on the corrosion done to our economies through the problem of wealth disparity yesterday. This should not be a debate today; if you were the real Bill Gates, you know this.

There isn’t a single billionaire who doesn’t understand this. You are all also hedging your bets while, like every cowardly politician who doesn’t want to risk their comfortable positions, none of you want to be the first to acknowledge what needs to be done. Your reticence is understandable because your community is primarily dominated by sociopathic thinking. It would behoove you to remind your peers that each passing day this nightmare of disparity remains unaddressed is a day closer to the massive unrest that brings out the guillotines.

This brings us to the core concern driving this question.

Which strategy is the most effective resource to invest your attention?

What singular and most expediently implemented solution can effectively stave off and resolve the growing pressure leading to widespread chaos?

That’s easy, and you already know the answer… if you were the real Bill Gates.

Reset capitalism like a Monopoly board.

There’s been enough testing to know this is THE solution to restore economic justice and dramatically impact poverty worldwide.

You already know this.

The only real issue at stake is the best means of implementing it.

Here’s a link introducing the various issues to consider with costing strategies that can be discussed earnestly. These are just details to work out. The result, however, is a stable economy that can eliminate poverty worldwide while eventually making performative forms of altruism moot.

However, every one-percenter should champion this solution in principle in earnest today, particularly if they want to avoid the chaos that risks them losing everything.

How to Calculate the Cost of Universal Basic Income (Hint: It’s Not As Easy As You Might Think)

Update:

Why work if you can live on benefits?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What’s the point of working if you can live through getting “benefits”?”

You’re asking the wrong question.

Instead, you should ask, “What is the point of living like a lazy slug who accomplishes nothing and does nothing to make themselves feel good about themselves or their lives?”

That’s what you’re implying with your question.

You imply a false dichotomy between living one’s life based on laziness rather than doing what motivates them or submitting themselves to an abusively dehumanizing existence as a disposable cog to make someone else rich while struggling with one’s self-respect.

Life isn’t a choice between working and not working. It’s a choice between employment as a wage slave or generating an income for oneself based on doing what matters to them and which motivates them to be excited about their lives.

Employment used to be a motivator when the income generated enough to go well beyond meeting basic needs and into enough disposable income to invest in one’s future.

That’s no longer the case.

Employment today is the equivalent of a lifetime of dog-paddling in an ocean until one gets too tired and drowns.

That’s not a life. That’s a lifetime prison sentence.

What’s the point of struggling in poverty until you die to make someone else wealthy when you can be much happier and less stressed while doing what you love?

Bonus Question:
Should there be a universal basic income to address economic inequality?

UBI doesn’t address the issue of economic inequity, and it isn’t intended to.

UBI provides economic stability and gives people room to make the best choices for themselves without having a desperate need to survive leveraged against them.

UBI frees people from the pressures of meeting basic survival needs enough to escape oppressive working conditions. The consequences of businesses losing the leverage of economic desperation to create downward pressure on wages can more easily permit upward pressure on wages.

This change in a negotiating dynamic contributes to a reduction in economic disparity, but it doesn’t address it head-on.

Would people continue to work with UBI?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would people continue to work if everyone received a universal basic income ($2,000 per month) for the rest of their lives?”

The numerous tests that have been performed bear out that they would, but that’s overlooking the problem with this question and its mindset.

The people who ask this question never bother to consider the percentage of the population that never has to work for someone else to sustain a living income.

The average net worth of the top 0.1% worldwide is around $62 million.

No one in this wealth category must work for an income at any point throughout their lives. Having their money in a low-interest-bearing account would be enough to live on the interest alone and without touching their capital.

0.1% of the population is 8 million people.

Eighty million people worldwide comprise the top 1% of the population, with an average net worth equivalent to the lifetime earnings of most reasonably upper-middle-class workers. No one in this entire group of 80 million people must be employed to survive comfortably.

Every time the question of how people will live once they are no longer forced into an (often abusive) employment relationship (in which abusive employment conditions comprise the primary reason people leave their jobs), the implication is that they will turn into lazy do-nothing slugs.

Meanwhile, 80 million people somehow find ways to keep themselves occupied daily without anyone wondering if they’re lazy layabouts. Even if they are, no one seems to care.

All of the tests performed to determine the viability of UBI involve people who would otherwise be compelled to work in soul-crushing roles while being subjected to people on power trips who should never have any power over other people.

No one who asks this question seems to consider how those 80 million people manage to make it through their lives doing absolutely nothing. No one assumes they do nothing because we see the results everywhere. In fact, without that group of 1% elites, we’d never know the upward mobility that has led to the creation of a centibillionaire class.

The reality that the misanthropes presuming people need to be herded like animals throughout their lives is that without having to piss away most of their lives on basic survival, people would invest their time in themselves and become involved in activities that bring meaning to their lives.

Whether that constitutes “work” or not is a matter of semantics. Many people who would not be required to commute to a daily dehumanizing ritual of functioning like a disposable cog would perform functions in society that many others would find valuable.

Some would devote their lives to becoming successful caretakers for their families, friends, and neighbours in need while adding positive value to their community with basic tasks such as performing chores others could not. They may choose not to devote their time to salaried activities because they would find more significant meaning in helping their community address some fundamental needs capitalists don’t care about addressing. After all, there’s no profit in providing mental health services to those in need.

(Meanwhile, we are suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting one in five people. A whopping majority — 70%-80% — of families are dysfunctional. We are a species in desperate need of focusing on our mental health issues.)

People in general would also be much more free to focus on community needs and political dynamics such that when they go to the polls to cast their ballot, they would do so from a perspective of much greater insight into the candidates and the issues than they can currently afford to focus on now while working two jobs to survive at a minimally conscious level.

(How are people supposed to find time to understand the intricacies of nuanced issues if a majority are unclear on how something as simple as how tariffs affect their lives?)

The people who ask this question also seem oblivious to how long and how much effort is required to develop a successful career. Without external resources and funding, creating a successful enterprise takes much more time than it does to create one that’s been heavily capitalized.

Let’s say, for example, you’ve created a special recipe for a unique jam that everyone in your neighbourhood loves. You can get busy and produce perhaps 1000 jars of jam per month, which earns you enough to continue making 1000 jars of product while supporting yourself, and while eventually being able to afford increasing your production slowly over time by being able to expand your operation by reinvesting into it. You can slowly add to equipment and materials and hire assistance on both a production level to increase output volume and a professional level to expand market presence.

Let’s say that your success allows you to create a one-million-dollar per year business after 10 years of effort. If you had the capitalization required to purchase all your equipment, staffing, and professional assistance up front, you could easily achieve that one-million-dollar per year revenue level within half the time.

This is how massive franchises grow from small mom-and-pop operations into national chains within a few years. Capitalization is everything in building a successful enterprise. If one has no capitalization, then time is everything to them. Time is money.

Without the wealth to propel a business into respectable success as defined by a capitalist marketplace, one still has to work hard on one’s dream to achieve it. People are not discouraged from working while collecting enough to live on in a UBI program. The opposite is true. They are free to pursue their dreams and benefit from the sweat of their brow without having to sacrifice their lives feeding a parasite that views them as disposable commodities.

People have a far greater incentive to work for themselves than they ever could working for an abusive employer.

That’s the lesson the one percent teach us about humanity.

Only misanthropic cynics believe human beings become slugs when they’re given enough money to choose not to submit themselves to making other people rich at the cost of their life satisfaction.

People don’t need to be whipped to work. Anyone with experience working with volunteers understands what it means to dedicate time and energy toward causes which matter, and the fact is that not all things which matter involve acquiring vast stores of material wealth.

Life satisfaction is worth far more than money.

The best and only way to achieve life satisfaction is to focus one’s time and energy on doing what they love and applying themselves to produce outcomes they can be proud of. Rarely does that satisfaction get defined by money… and certainly not by those in society whom we recognize as psychologically healthy individuals whom we respect and admire as human beings.

We have learned and continue to realize that those among us who worship wealth acquisition above basic human decency are the most broken and villainous threats to our social stability and progress.

People often blame money as the root of all evil, but that’s not the case; the love of money is above all else.

UBI is the freedom to pursue our higher human aspirations, not an excuse to become lazy.

If having money made people lazy, we would not now have centibillionaires walking among us in a psychotic competition to become the world’s first trillionaire.

What does calling farmers “collateral damage” mean?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What does it mean in MAGA when Musk calls US farmers as “collateral damage”?”

The term “collateral damage” was first applied by the military when assessing how many innocent casualties would be created when assaulting an enemy.

It was a way of dehumanizing those who happened to be in the vicinity — in the wrong place at the wrong time — and who may or may not have been guilty of collusion with the target but were considered expendable.

For Elon, it means that he views the farmers whose lives he destroys as enemies whom he dehumanizes while waging a war against American citizens to acquire material wealth.

For someone like Elon to use this expression, he’s letting the little people know that’s how the 1% regards the majority of the people, as acceptable casualties in their power games.

He is confirming that the 1% view us all as less than human and as disposable as they have always considered their slaves to be throughout history.

The 1% have been consistent in choosing profit over lives. Elon has admitted it’s not an either/or situation but a situation of strategic intent to destroy the lives of the many to enrich the few.

Everything about the Trump administration is a blatant act of assault against the majority, while robbing us all and killing us in the process, not out of necessity but expedience.

Bonus Question:
What do you think of Musk’s Tesla losing money and Twitter crashing?

I think it can’t happen fast enough.

The best thing we can do for society and the future of humanity is to make the wealthiest man on the planet homeless and destitute.

Why?

Because it shows two things:

  • The wealthy are not invulnerable and
  • We can defeat their corruption without bloodshed.

How can a society allow everyone to succeed?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How would you design a society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed?”

Until Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, humanity was well on its way to perfecting that democratic society in which everyone had a reasonable opportunity to achieve class mobility and a basic form of success that permitted a life of dignity with what was characterized as the “American Dream.”

A mortgage on a house with a surrounding picket fence, a vehicle, a family with 2.5 kids and an annual vacation wasn’t only possible but virtually guaranteed to anyone who made the effort to earn it.

They betrayed the entire middle class around the world to curry favour from the wealthy who have long desired a return to a barbaric age of kingdoms with rulers and disposable serfs.

We failed to modernize the one institution that has proven itself the greatest threat to the goal of an egalitarian society, industry.

Almost every other entity in society is a democratic body. Corporations, however, are holdovers from a medieval structure of rigid hierarchy fraudulently appointing members to an inner circle of power, allegedly based on merit, while elevating those who support their corrupt application of power.

We can repair this mess of corruption with only a few fixes, but one of the most important and most easily overlooked solutions will be a difficult challenge to implement. It will (and has been) meet(ing) massive resistance by those who most adamantly refuse to give up their power, as it involves restructuring how corporations exist and do business in society.

We can quickly implement numerous initiatives today, such as UBI, Universal Healthcare, and Universal access to education, that will have long-term implications leading toward much more stable societies that can guard against corruption.

Other initiatives, such as a global cap on personal net worth and restructuring industry into democratic institutions, are potentially much more disruptive to society. We are, however, fortunate to find ourselves amidst a radical transformation into full automation throughout every level of society. This transformation will allow us to restructure political systems while increasingly democratizing society and flattening global power structures.

The only way to ensure society can facilitate opportunities for everyone to succeed is to flatten power and spread it across the globe to the people. At this stage in our history, our existence faces an existential threat due to the corruption of disproportionate power running rampant throughout society. It may be the case that we will have to rely on historical inspirations to repair the damage the wealthy class has done to society and make reparations for their betrayal of the social contract.

Why don’t people realize our plutocracy causes our problems?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t people realize that it is plutocracy (our country being governed by the wealthy elite) that is causing our economic problems?”

People don’t magically “realize things.”

People must be educated, informed, and aware of circumstances and details.

They need to be walked through the information presented to them as if one functions as a guide on a tour, answering questions.

People also don’t respond to laments, particularly when entrenched in counterfactual bigotries that prevent them from apprehending reality through an objective lens.

In essence, if this is an issue of concern for you, which I’m glad to see it is, then you need to start banging drums and sharing information and details because there are at least 76 million people in the U.S. alone who are entirely so oblivious to what you’ve determined for yourself that they contribute to the problems caused by the plutocracy.

There are many reasons why many people support self-and-socially destructive agendas, and most of those reasons can generally fall into only a few camps:

  1. They benefit directly from the corruption,
  2. They interpret the economic problems of the victims of a corrupt system as personal failings,
  3. They imagine themselves as potential beneficiaries of corrupt powers by supporting them,
  4. They lack the wherewithal to do anything about the corruption, so they cope with what they don’t believe they can change by resigning to hate the more easily victimized,
  5. They support what they believe is a natural state of a zero-sum existence encapsulated as a butchered interpretation of life often referred to as the “law of the jungle,” in which there are only predators and prey in this world,
  6. They’re psychologically dysfunctional — which is an explanation that applies to all the preceding points,
  7. Their education is woefully lacking — which also applies to all preceding points and leads back to the onus placed on those who know better by providing the support necessary to make positive change while also receiving a reminder that lamenting the sad state of affairs does nothing to change them. It does, however, give the broken among us a target to jeer and mock and use as an example to justify their corrupt interpretations of life.

Now, arm yourself with the information you need to fight as a keyboard warrior and do something more productive than issue lamentations to elevate humanity from this dank pit of misanthropy.

Good luck in this war for basic human decency.

Should there be fact-checking on social media platforms?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you support Meta’s (Zuckerberg’s) decision to end third-party fact-checking on Facebook? Should there be any fact-checking at all on social media platforms? Why?”

Social media appears to be entering a stage where its profit-based model is “eating itself out of existence” as the latest in end-stage capitalism’s string of “Ouroboroses” (Ourobori?).

Along with stripping costs for an expensive venture, Mark is also adding AI bot profiles to create the appearance of engagement.

This reminds me of why I lost interest in dating sites. The easiest way to know a site’s ethics is when they create bot profiles to entice people into paying membership fees to engage with non-existent people.

As much as Zuckerberg flaps the trappings of community within Facebook and social media, none of his views are legitimately about community or supporting community development.

If social media were authentically social, its focus would be community development, not profit generation.

It is precisely the model of profit generation that puts social media into a death spiral of profit chasing to the bottom of the bottom-feeding barrel.

Their metrics for engagement are derived from a superficial analysis of what engagement means. As long as someone clicks something or posts something, that counts as “engagement,” and that interpretation of engagement counts as justification for advertising rates.

Meanwhile, no one gets anything from the deal but a massive case of blue balls.

Without a mission of serving a higher purpose of community development, social media and society, by extension, cannot but devolve into the technological equivalent of a pack of stray dogs begging strangers for treats.

We will experience social anarchy in the virtual world before it greets us in the real world. Hopefully, that will create enough pressure to do something proactive to support community development before the real-world communities devolve into chaotic monstrosities of “former civilization.”

All of this is an argument in favour of social media, on some level and in some capacity, being a publicly owned and managed enterprise that exercises its self-restraint divorced from the misanthropic profit-chasing model that dehumanizes people while pretending to serve human social needs.

As much as our dialogues focus on almost everything but community development, they all serve a community needs focus.

For example, all of the discourse surrounding AI and its replacement of human labour may be considered an economic, political, or labour issue, and it’s essentially a community response to a significant change transforming human society on a fundamental level.

All social media forms the basis of community development because all social media is public discourse. However, our problems with social media stem precisely from its growth being motivated by profit over principles.

At this stage, growths in profit that can satisfy hungry boards and investors justify cutting costs to the degree that whatever spirit was initially capitalized on that prompted the development of any particular social media site has been stripped from its operation.

The justifications for stripping costs have ironically been derived from concerns about the costs of managing social engagement. Who woulda thunk it’s too expensive to properly manage human behaviour to afford the cost of developing a media enterprise focused entirely upon squeezing profits from social engagement?

People need social media. It won’t go away, but social media proves today that profiting from human interaction is the wrong way to think about social media.

We have been watching the effects everywhere as social media has been devolving into a dynamic I remember from what I used to refer to as “usenut” — that many may be more familiar with as “Google Groups,” for example. I remember this as the gutter of human interaction — where the most extreme of the extreme was its primary denizens who were free to indulge in the most hateful of behaviours and attitudes.

I still “fondly remember” one character I used to refer to as “Grog” — which wasn’t their real name, and I’m not going to publish it because he’s still active on what shreds still exist of Usenet groups. He’s still advocating for the death penalty for gay people. It turned out that his father came out of the closet late in life, and that had a devastating impact on his psychology.

At any rate, this underground dynamic of toxic attitudes has slowly been seeping into an above-ground and public state of dialogue over time. If one had not ventured into the gutters of human detritus to discover its prevalence, one would not realize it’s an undercurrent that has always existed.

We will continue witnessing a devolution to the level of bottom-feeding slugs in human interaction characterized by social media as this trend of cost-cutting and profit-squeezing continues. It’s an inevitable characteristic of the capitalist chase for profits.

At some point, we’ll experience a confluence between the demand for social media interaction and restraint on toxic behaviours that normalize the intolerable throughout society. People will grow to hate people like Zuckerberg more than they do now, as one can already see an influx of disparaging posts about him beginning to flood the social media space everywhere.

Accountability and restraint on social media will become a widespread demand because social media fulfills a human need for interaction and dialogue that has always been present in less technologically based forms, such as letters to the editor in every newspaper that once littered the landscape.

Social media won’t disappear but will require transforming from a privately profitable industry into a public service. Nations like China are already ahead in this game by using their social media enterprises as tools for managing public dynamics through social credit scores and demerits.

If we’re not careful, social media will transform from a chaotic enterprise focused on chasing profit into a tool of oppressive control over the people in a much more pernicious way than media enterprises like Fox do now with their disinformation campaigns.