0.8
There’s a huge demand for new good times. Even the best become repetitive, and progress has the right of way. An indigenous collective has obtained a true Jungian consciousness shared by every member across space and time. This consciousness has been their trunk and each person effectively a leaf. No thought among them could be hidden. Truly linked, they are the first humans with proof of just how demented and deadly every man and woman is.
Sex itself is changing, as children in these communities become aware of it and develop it among themselves before they even become fertile, birthing all new complexes and rituals and perhaps, hopefully, ending the male-female attrition.
Any futuro who puts down roots will leave a lot of beach resorts unbooked, and may eventually wipe the genetic memory that makes travel so imperative. We’ll go all out combining this with that in an effort to stay in the good graces of our nigh sentient computers, as we’ll have quickly found that even keeping up with them is perigoso. What new markets they’ll create! How the commonwealth will grow and then be earmarked for not you. New variations will not halt old patterns, and Catos will not relax for a second. They don’t now, and they’ll ensure no one else will either in their g-glorious genetic soup.
0.9
We make custom of demands in our society because we’re used to the demands of our own bodies. The stomach is deaf. It will not listen to special cases and cares nothing for reason, akin to our controllers, who base their rule on us on the function of their bellies. Logic does not work upon the senseless. The stomach demands satiation, or else death.
People are stressed and anxious due to evolution — these were survival mechanisms on the Serengeti. Well, yes. But they need not be so acute. No one’s born wanting to die. Hunger is a boffo motivator. It’s worked so long that inertia carries it today. For all the wonderful advances in the last fifty years, society has yet to correct the biggest detriment to our well being — our only life spent toiling in wage slavery.
It does not last tear-day, and it will not last tear-morrow.
1.0
Universal basic income is our hope for the future. Things will improve upon its passing. In states that legalized cannabis, the crime rate went down, as did the number of teens using it. Likewise, watch alcoholism and heart disease collapse with the passage of UBI. Watch families grow stronger, petty crime lessen, shootings lessen — all societal disorders without the constant threat of work or die. Child abuse will lessen, hard drug abuse will lessen. Poaching endangered species will decrease once the economic imperative is gone. Maybe even factory farm atrocities will lessen too.
UBI will have unintended consequences, as does everything within this monkey’s paw existence. But basic income paves over the pits so many fall in, where they’re trapped ruined, by what we have today. Studies of Singer’s effective altruism show that giving folks the choice of how to spend their charity works best, has the most positive results. But UBI is not a charity — it is a dividend.
The people must incorporate. Then we can meet the international conglomerates on our terms. We need not just accept we’re born to toil. Our controllers, with whom we share a species, love to say the world does not owe you a living. Ask then why. They have no good reason beyond their control, which they will not willingly surrender. We question their pathology at threatening to nuke the world to keep it.
The human spirit, striving, maximizing one’s abilities, can all be done within the safety net of UBI. Watch how we’ll abandon political barricades when the people have the money not to starve.
1.1
Note how many in the world have the instinct and the urge to do policework. Numbers approaching half of any group or gathering happily police the rest, without asking to be paid. Movements, even etiquettes, are policed. The greatest number of unpaid cops is right now patrolling the streets, conforming to their idol judging shows. Who has not turned into a cop behind the wheel? Every time somebody cuts us off, goes too slow in the fast lane, or disregards our right of way, our inner cop comes out. It’s another flaw of evolution — controllers make us dance to any tune. Power knows that it can make us accept its awful music, and it does.
With the still growing gap between the people and the billionaires, causing such problems for families regardless of their political beliefs, the billionaires strike back by seeding memes. Every time one reads a critique of billionaires that starts out, “I don’t mind the rich making as much money as they can, but…” one can be sure this is a plant. It attempts to define the debate through propaganda. It immejiately nukes the New Deal platforms that would correct our crises. Whether the quote was written by a think tank, marketer, D student conservative, or a bot, the clause serves power as it is, and tries to preserve it for all time.
Never forget that the bankers in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s went to jail. This is the norm. They made sure that could not happen again, so no one but a couple peons went to jail in ’08. The law breakers in charge paid themselves million-dollar bonuses for almost taking down the world. The foundation of this madness is a problem with our brains.
Note the studies that showed differences in the brains between those who call themselves conservative or liberal. The conservatives consistently show a greater fear response to laboratory stimuli than liberals. So what we are dealing with are masses who resist progress because they are afraid.
And they keep making more copies of themselves than we do.
1.2
How about the least empathetic party gets absorbed into history? Progress nonetheless continues where it can. The early Drydens wrote too often and too long. The Barrett-Brownings, completing their stanzas after dinner, with warm liquid in their gut, flew off to where we could not follow. Death and critics put them out of reach. The street eyes we employed, which kept us aware and safe, were used to stone the dipshits who keep amorality in power. We went outside because the man demanded it. We trusted full his judgment. He took power over someone else we liked. He got a few things right, which kept us defeatedly quiet while he skirted the law, generating extra income for himself. Of course that meant we went with less.
To protest is to risk our lives, since our employers do not like it. We have children and our elderly to think of. What we choose not to think about’s the world we’re leaving to our children, with the same corruption and macro-stupidity, by not doing much to change it now. We have them, try to protect them and raise them right, meanwhile damning them to suffer worse than we, by making the world worse, by not doing much to dash the system ‘pon the rocks, when we know precisely how to make a better, more efficient, more benevolent one with UBI.
It’s what won’t line up with how it used to be that drives the people mad. Deluded shooters see the present and try to square it with the past in a bullet-ridden way. It does not work. It has all the lasting resonance of the video game cut scene that inspired it.
1.3
When looked back on from the future, the first comment is how chintzy it all seems. It’s easy to tell which way the people pointed — just find out what’s in back of them. The type who’d “Bravo!” pain is the type who’d try to cause it. One thing this country’s good at is making millions of those types. They run loose with alcohol. It’s a credit to our prison system that these millions do not murder every day. Yes, it is a shining beacon for the earth. Other lands approach us nervously, if they deign come to us at all. We listen, impatiently inside, then teach instead how they can make a bigger buck. And they gotta let controllers in, if they want in on this action.
They must not be nervous. We’re only the director. Every picture has one. They said before we came that they would be a star. We can make that happen for them. Let us make that happen. Their faces fall, they sit. Now they understand. We give them jobs on this production. Some of them are happy. Their families are. Now everything is better for a few. And that is our forté.
It’s not like we had to kill someone directly. We hardly ever pull the trigger ourselves — only when we’re placed in an untenable position. Even then we can have a local do it. There’s always one malformed who will. We make a lot of desperadoes wherever we show up. They’re handy. And all of this, it will accrue.
We have two things on offer: a threat and its solution. Those agents without agency had best jack up the engine of their populace and let us poke under the hood. A couple of our patent mods and it will output more power. Dig that growling when it revs. Can’t hear cries of expiration over that. The fun part driving it isn’t how it removes rights and all, but the unusual ways it does so. Everyone gets off on brand new entertainment.
1.4
We’re the ones who dashed the shaking few. We never pile their bodies in the night. We just destroy their arguments, because we have the proof they’re wrong. We don’t want to hide the proof. Indeed we’ve shown it to them. We’ve lent it to them for their study. Some of us have tried to drum it in their brains. We’re sharing all the evidence. If we’ve erred, we want to be corrected. We’re not married to these dire conclusions. It would be a better future were we wrong.
They haven’t demonstrated that we are, though. Oh they argue against us, but their arguments are fallacies. They do not study rhetoric, which makes them amateurs pitching to professionals. The pros will light them up. They do not realize when they’ve lost, like the amateur who refuses to leave the mound when the inning ends. They stand there stubborn and oblivious, as the opposing batters take the field. The opposing pitcher tries to talk them off the mound, back into their clubhouse, until their turn to swing. The stubborn and oblivious snap back, loud in voice, at a volume inversely proportional to their intellect. They just refuse to let the game continue peaceably. Now imagine the opposing pitcher had to talk the stubborn down every inning of the season. How long until he becomes a total misanthrope?
This is what it is like to be born book-smart in this world.
1.5
Now set aside the top of these professionals. Look at the folks who process information just .05% faster than average, who makes mistakes but can draw the right conclusions that bit faster too. How long til they beat their foreheads bloody on every wall they see? Even at that level, almost every conversation will be tiresome. They will need the patience only grandmothers possess. They will need the bonheur of the highest buddhist monk, just to let their conversation partner finish a sentence where he’s wrong, to keep from blotting out her eyes with chopsticks at this repetitive lunacy, masking their intellect with smiles and nods, repressing their being for the sake of social harmony. And we know what becomes of the repressed. Gays fought for decades, were injured, killed, or sent to jail, just to not have to repress their beings anymore. What then of the book-smart? When will they demand their day?
This is a plea echoed by every marginalized person in history: listen to us. Test our conclusions with the tools of science and philosophy. Show us where we’re wrong and if we are, we’ll change our minds. (Because we were born with that ability, contra half of the country.) Yes there will be unintended consequences. There always are. But we can establish a new baseline of progress for all people.