Category Archives: the future

The end of the world

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Even if the world ends today, we still want to protect you.

Rumors of the death of the world have so far been exaggerated. Although these days, for the first time in history, we may actually have the power to make the planet go Krypton in the manner depicted above. If Stephen Hawking is wrong about some small detail in his theory of black holes – which very few humans alive understand except Hawking – then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could actually cause just such an event, where a microscopic black hole sinks to the center of the planet and eats it from the inside. It would be a spectacular sight, but we wouldn’t be around to see it.

So far, however, there is no sign of the end. I consider this a good thing. Some angsty teens may disagree. And also, evidently, a few of my fellow Christians. Or at least one old preacher who doesn’t want to die, which I can certainly understand. I’m afraid he is mistaken, though, if he thinks the experience of the Rapture as depicted in Christian tradition will be significantly different from death. There would still be a transition. It is not like you get taken in a spaceship to another terrestrial planet. Probably. There are some who think this is what happened to Enoch and Elijah, especially since Enoch wrote a book with numerous astronomical references. Or so I have been told. But that does not seem to be what is happening here. Nor is the elderly preacher putting his baby son in a rocket and sending him to a planet circling a white sun.  If you’re going to the phantom zone, you may as well die and become a phantom that way, you know.

And that, my dear reader, is what I have been thinking on today, while taking a walk and listening to Angela’s beautiful song, The End of the World. This was the song that inspired me to write my groundbreaking series of gray entries in June 2005, starting with “The Next Big Thing”, in which I proposed that the end of human history was near: Not in the form of a physical disaster, but by a total conversion of the human mind to a new and higher level, resulting in the extinction of the current way of thinking in the same way as the Neanderthals and others like them just fell by the wayside after our minds achieved symbolic thinking that we have today.

Back then, those who could not keep up – not only the Neanderthals but most branches of humanity at the time – suddenly disappeared, and we descend from those few who invented symbolic thinking and those who were able to learn it.  (For instance, almost all humans descend from the “genetic Adam” who lived 60 000 – 90 000 years ago, but the Khoisan people do not. They parted way with our ancestors at least 110 000 years ago. Of all human groups that lived up to 65 000 years ago, only they and we survive, it seems.)

The Neanderthals had larger brains than we have. The various human tribes that existed around the time of the Dawn of the Mind were for all purposes identical, as far as we can guess from the fossil record and from the traces of crude stone axes made everywhere. And yet, with the sudden outbreak of the human mind as we know it, some were endowed with it and others were… left behind.

When I wrote all that stuff on 18-23 June 2005, it was pretty vague to me still. I am not sure if I had yet found One Cosmos, it certainly had not impressed me if so. I had read a little Ken Wilber, but I think that is pretty much it. I was not sure whether it was just me and a couple others in the world who were “getting it” even at a mostly theoretical level. It seemed impossible that the Transition would happen for generations yet. And indeed, most of the New Age seems to be spiritual fog and magic in modern clothes. But there really are some people here and there, often hidden among the ordinary religious masses, who are “downloading” the higher consciousness. We are on our way. Though we are not there today, and almost certainly not in 2012.

But when the Transition comes, I hope “we” (though I may no longer be there bodily) will be able to protect as many as possible in the chaos and turmoil that follows among those “left behind”. It is not like those who ascend sit up there and laugh at the maggots who fry down below. Those who look forward to such an ascent are likely to get a very unpleasant surprise, I suspect.

 

After “peak everything”

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There will probably be trains for a long, long time. And there will always be light from above, all the more beautiful through the clouds.

It could have been a coincidence that the next two entries after “Peak everything” were a collection of pretty (?) nature pictures and an entry about religious studies. But actually I wanted to come back to this topic again, and I want to point out how these two are continuations of what I ended that entry with: There are many sources of happiness that don’t depend on having lots of oil and copper.

Of course, most people today depend on such limited resources directly or indirectly to do their job, and earn money to pay their bills, buy food and have a place to live. So to varying degree, even the simple pleasures depend on a civilization that is based on excessive consumption. However, this lifestyle is not set in stone. We can adapt sooner and be seen as weirdos, or we can adapt later and with considerable pain.

If your job depends on driving a lot, you may be in trouble. No matter how intensely you wish for cheap gas, it won’t happen, or at least not without some global disaster that makes the recent debt crisis seem like a walk in the park. On the other hand, electric cars are already available, and hybrid cars, and even gas-powered cars that use much less fuel than average.  So it is not obvious that you will have to change your job. However, you will probably have less money left by payday no matter what. And if you plan to change your job or plan to move, travel cost should definitely be on your mind. There is no reason to react with stunned surprise when the gas price doubles again, which you will definitely experience unless you die an untimely death.

Again, it is not like you wake up one day to a post-apocalyptic dystopia from a horror movie. It is a gradual change, where you have to pinch more pennies than last month, where you have to consider things you did not consider before. At some point you may want to make drastic lifestyle changes. Or you may wait for the government to fix it all for you so everything goes back to “normal”, in which case I hope your sanity gets better soon. But by and large, the end of the golden age is like the end of a spring day here in Norway and the onset of night: So slow and gradual that you can never quite say when the day ends and the night begins, but it still comes eventually.

There are those who say you should grow your own food, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is feasible. It is probably good for you and the planet both. There are those who say you should look for a way to work from home, and that is certainly a good idea if your education and skills allow it. But that won’t be possible for all people, certainly not right away. It will gain wider acceptance over time, no doubt, but if you’re a nurse you can’t work over the Internet any time soon.

What is important at this time is to gain a broad insight in the nature and scale of the changes we face. To not blindly believe that the future will be like the past, only more so. That has never been the case, but it will be even less true now.

Barring some global disaster, electricity will still be widely available at an affordable price. Perhaps not as cheap as today, and perhaps the prices will fluctuate very rapidly, with the price twice as high at some times of the day, but overall it should be widely available. So there should be no reason to prepare for a life without electricity.  Silicon is also one of the most common elements on the planet, so it seems likely that computers and similar electronics will be widely available. They may get slightly less efficient as certain rare metals become scarce, but there may also be new inventions that offset this and then some.

Transportation by car and plane are among the things that are going to be worst hit, as peak oil is already a fact and will only get worse over time. Bulk transport by ship and train however are quite efficient in terms of energy use, so don’t expect China to stop shipping stuff across the Pacific. In fact, even if oil disappeared completely, it would still be good business to ship stuff by steamship or even sail rather than make everything locally. Railroads are also highly efficient, and largely use electricity already. Globalization is not going to fall victim to this scarcity, although I suppose it could fall victim to something else, like an actual war.

Electric cars may replace gas and diesel cars at an extra cost that most people can live with. But electric planes are highly unlikely. If you are young, I would not recommend choosing a career closely associated with flight.

By and large, however, what we can expect is a gradual decline in material wealth. Expenses will increase, income stagnate. All people who depend on sales, directly or indirectly, will be affected when people have less money to spend on what they want. Since resources are more expensive, factories and farms will also give less profit. So everywhere there will be stagnation and a gentle slide toward poverty. Unemployment is likely to remain high, and even increase for a while. New jobs will be different from the old and mostly pay less.

In this situation, it is good to keep in mind that we can live happily without being rich. It is a long way from today’s first world standards down to abject poverty, and there is no reason why we should ever hit the bottom if we as a society live with even a little wisdom. If I am alive ten years from now, it is not certain that I can afford to live alone in a house in the countryside anymore. But I can still find sources of happiness, Light willing. Whether it is potted plants, drawing with crayons or reading again books that deserve a second or twentieth reading, it does not require a lot of money to enjoy oneself. Think back to when you were a child, how little it took to bring you joy!  If anything, you should be better at it now, after decades of living and learning. Start thinking this way before need forces you. That way your happiness will be without interruption.

The aliens are coming! Oh dear.

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Illustration not from the book, but from the movie “Rebirth of Buddha”, also by Ryuho Okawa. As usual it was a hit in Japan, but in the West… not so much. More or less “members only” here. With the very occasional exception. *whistles innocently*

Ryuho Okawa has really pulled out the stops. He is publishing “The Next Great Awakening” in the USA. It stands out from most of his books translated so far by having a substantial section on space aliens. According to Mr Okawa, there have been several waves of these in the past, and there are several new alien races living among us today. His plan is for Earth to become an interstellar Planet of Love. (One may remember his foretelling, already in one of his first books, that Jesus will return to preach the message of love for the galactic age, in a future where tensions between earthlings and aliens will be running high.)

This is unlikely to do much good for Happy Science’s public image in the West, where people are far more skeptical to aliens than in Japan.

I’ll give the requisite thought to loving my alien neighbors as myself once I actually meet them. Until then, I shall have to work on my relationship to you Earthlings. That may well be enough for this lifetime, I fear.

At least this goes a long way toward putting to rest my fears that Ryuho Okawa might be the Antichrist (with a capital A). I cannot imagine the capital A making a PR blunder like that.

Of course, the book is not all about aliens. But I have a feeling that they are going to get most of the attention. That is kind of sad, because Mr Okawa usually has lots of useful advice. He is known to read 1000 books a year, and have distilled from them some of the most useful advice given to mankind through the ages. I have found similar advice in books of religion and philosophy, often decades or centuries old, and more often than not hard to read unless you are an intellectual. It would be a loss if people rejected all of that just because of a few UFOs.

Unimaginably much information

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You may well stare: The rise and fall of entire civilizations could be contained within that computer!

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”

Few people in the world are better placed to feel the pulse of information flow than Schmidt, so I’ll take him on face value regarding the facts.  When he uses the expression “dawn of civilization”, it means he is not just talking about the Internet.  From clay tablets to newspapers and advertising fliers, everything is in there. Presumably also music cassettes, CD’s, movie reels and DVDs as well. Exabytes are unbelievably large: One quintillion bytes, or about 50 000 years of DVD-quality video.

Most of the new information is probably irrelevant or erroneous. For instance, over 90% of e-mail traffic is spam. (Microsoft says 97%, most other sources are lower though.) But Google is pretty good at filtering those:  Looking over the spam folder, which contains 30 days of spam, I found only one legitimate message, and it was a rather unimportant one, from a mailing list I’m on.  Likewise, I have had one spam-mail delivered in my inbox over the last month. Not perfect, but nearly so.

Twitter is a good example of the next level of “random” data: Even after you have subtracted the spammers, the relevance of what is left varies, to say the least. On my Twitter feed I get words of wisdom that will be valid and valuable as long as humans are humans. I also get product launches, and friends griping about their computer games and telling me what they have for dinner. Twitter is badly in need of tagging, but does not have it.

Modern blogs, on the other hand, have tagging.  However, it is often only available for those who write the blog, and their concepts may be different from yours.  Most notably, one person’s religion is another person’s superstition. In America in particular, one person’s political view is another person’s clinical insanity.

Even without using tags, though, Eric Schmidt boasts: “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are.” That is an average, obviously. But more and more of the online content is photographs or even movies. Schmidt’s comment also puts Google Street View is a slightly different light…

Much of the new content is neither text nor pictures nor sound, but abstract data like information from cash registers, car counting devices etc. These seem utterly impersonal at the moment, but it may not always remain so. As the net of data grows ever finer, it becomes possible to track the individual whether he wants it or not. In fact, I would say that trying to retain anonymity in this age is like walking into a bank wearing a mask and gloves.  You will stand out as a shadow on the data:  This customer always pays with cash, does not wear a connected mobile phone, avoids buildings with video surveillance… there may already be government agencies looking out for such a pattern.

Now – what will YOU do with the world’s information when Google puts it in your hand and says “Here, take this!”?

***

(I picked up the quote from an article on ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Schmidt: “People aren’t ready for the technology revolution”. They have some interesting information on that site, by the way. You may want to bookmark it for a rainy day.)

100 times stronger

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No, it won’t break, unless you also have grown 100 times stronger over the last decade. But a decade from now, it may break your mind…

No, this is not a spiritual entry, although I hope that one day I may be able to write such an entry with that title… Rather it is about a more down to earth science. 100 times is how much more powerful a computer is today than 10 years ago.

Moore’s Law implies that the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. That might sound impressive, but perhaps not astounding. To astonishment comes when we realize that the doubling is doubling again after another year and a half, and so on. This amounts to approximately an order on magnitude — a factor of 10 — every five years. And five years is a period of time most of us can remember pretty well, if we set our minds to it.

In other words, the average computer five years ago was 10 times weaker than today. So, what difference has this made in our lives?

At first, you probably think like I did: “Nothing at all.” I mean, five years ago I was writing my journal, surfing the web, and playing City of Heroes and The Sims 2. That is what I still do, so what happened to the revolution?

Well, for one thing, five years ago I did not have YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. And especially not on my mobile phone.  My mobile phone had something like twenty grainy characters in its display, and was used for talking. Actually it was barely used at all, because even then I did not talk if I could avoid it, more or less. But you get the point.

So mobile phones have basically become computers. How about the computers? Well, I am still playing The Sims 2 and City of Heroes, but with much more content, faster and with more detail on a larger screen, with a cheaper computer.

Five years ago, streaming video over the Internet was still experimental, and not reliable for most of us. There were services offering such an experience, but the movies tended to be small and grainy and you might still not be able to complete them without pauses or without the whole process breaking down. Today, streaming video is trivial for many of us.. though not all, as this depends on the communications infrastructure (copper cables, fiber or wireless network) in the area.

Five years ago, speech recognition was still not something I could recommend unless you were seriously disabled. I used it occasionally because of the wrist pain, but not for long, because of the high error rate.  Today, it is only marginally worse than dictating to a well educated human. But it still requires a fairly strong computer. It is not like you can dictate reliably to your netbook or mobile phone (although Google’s Nexus One made a decent attempt).

Your computing experience will vary:  A friend of mine is using the same computer and mobile phone as five years ago.  On the other hand of the spectrum, if I had bought a high-end video card, I would be able to run even modern games like Age of Conan at full tilt.  (This online game is not recommended due to its evil atmosphere, but as a demonstration of what computers can do in terms of lifelike video, it is possibly second only to Crysis.)

If I go another five years back in my journal archive, I come to the age of The Sims 1 and the tail end of the life of Daggerfall.  Both of these games look decidedly long in the tooth.  For Daggerfall this is to be expected, as it was released in August 1996.  But The Sims was the hit game of the year 2000, and I made comments about how it caused my computer to grow hot. The amazingly lifelike pictures and behavior of the small people in the game was a marvel.  Yet today they strike us as simplistic in body and mind, merely a prelude to the more realistic later iterations.

Back in 2000, I was still waiting for the broadband, and had to pay “through the nose” or “an arm and a leg” (not literally) for slow dial-up access to the Internet.  Going online was not something to undertake trivially: One time I got into one of the earliest online games, I ended up with a bill I just barely was able to work off without hurting my credit.

The grainy Japanese cartoons I downloaded occasionally back then took overnight to download, if I succeeded at all. Still, I was impressed at the time that it was even possible. From across the globe, at that! This newfangled “Internet” thing sure was amazing!

***

I don’t really think we are getting 100 times more effect out of our computers than in the year 2000.  Some of the raw power is lost in sloppy programming. It is a fact that programming is still more of an art than just plain production, and a good programmer can still run rings around a large team of mediocre programmers. In fact, if the team gets large enough, it may start performing worse and worse.  But thanks to ever faster computer, it is no longer necessary to optimize your code. As long as it does what you want, even if it uses an ineffective way to get there, you are good to go. After all, in a year and a half it will run twice as fast again.

But a lot really has happened, and some of it is like science fiction come true:  A computer taking dictation like a secretary, or a cell phone performing the functions that had required a computer only a few years ago. Actually, the ability to stream music from the sky with a choice between millions of tracks, is literally taken from one of my science fiction novel attempts approximately 20 years ago. Today I can do this on my cell phone, at high quality and barely noticeable cost.

So what will the computers of 2015 or 2020 bring, if we manage to not blow up the planet before that?

My best guess today would be that computing will go further mobile over the next five years. The cell phone of 2015 will probably take dictation much like my home computer does today. The screen resolution will also be much higher than today, although I don’t think it is practical to have a screen resolution comparable to today’s home computers. It will likely have handwriting recognition for those situations where you don’t want to speak out loud, although on-screen keyboards will be more popular since they will be pretty much typo proof.

I honestly cannot predict the computer of 2020. I believe computers will be embedded in most everyday things, so if will be perfectly normal to talk to your stereo or your TV and expect them to react accordingly. Not to mention your car, which may or may not drive on its own for the most part. Mobile phones will likely be able to translate between most of the world’s national languages, written or spoken.

But when it comes to computer games, online or off-line (if such a distinction is even meaningful anymore)… I have no idea what the future will bring, when computers are 100 times stronger than today.

Why public libraries?

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di090404

That was perhaps not what he expected her to show him, but even so, there are many good things to see in the library.

No, I am not trying to make an end to them, although I suppose that is what would happen if people started thinking. (Because when people start thinking, they usually stop soon.) Every civilized country has public libraries, even that bastion of capitalism where you are otherwise supposed to earn your own way through life and where copyrights just go on and on for generations after the author’s passing. So why?

“Why” can mean “what was the cause” or “what is the purpose”. For the current libraries, the cause is probably that there have always been libraries, or at least for so long that people have forgotten their purpose. But the purpose certainly seems to be to let people read books for free.

Now there are two ways of reading library books: Either at the library, or you can borrow them home with you. If you borrow them, you have to return them after a few weeks. But there is nothing to stop you from coming to the library every single day and read the same book, unless someone else has got to it first. So clearly the purpose of returning the books is not to limit access to reading, but simply to keep the costs down by letting many people read the same book.

Enter the Internet. I know I have written about this before, but it is so long ago that perhaps I am saying this in a different way. Or at the very least, since then Google has continued to scan millions of books from around the world. But I know I said the same thing then as now: If libraries had been invented now, they would have been forbidden. If we had known the value of reading today as we did when it was new, they would be freely available on the Internet.

Now you may argue that if people can afford Internet access, then they can also afford to buy their own books. This is less and less true for each passing years, as computer and internet access become cheaper and cheater and more and more fundamentally necessary for a normal life – while books become more expensive if anything. But it is also a moot point from the “Internet=library” point of view. In all the years I used public libraries, I never had to present documentation of my poverty. It was probably assumed that if I really loved a book and had the money to buy it, I would.

Certainly this is the assumption of Baen Free Library. In fact, they claim on the very first page that they expect to make money of it, both the publishing house itself and the authors who participate. Ironically, such a transparent self-interest may deter some who would otherwise have acted in sympathy, but it is the more commendable for honesty. As Flint – himself an accomplished writer – says, what author would not be happy to see someone checking his book out of a public library? There may be such cretins, says Flint, but their books probably would get little love from those who got a chance to break them open before buying them.

(Incidentally, the music “pirates” have argued along the same line for years, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Seriously, how many CDs have you bought without having heard at least one of the tracks beforehand? The notion that radio stations should pay to play music rather than getting paid for it is utterly, clinically insane. It is as if newspapers should pay to print advertisements. Of course, with modern file sharing technology, the advertisement IS the product. A golden age of opportunity has passed for the recording labels. But if the experience of Baen is anything to go by, the recording companies are still shooting themselves in the foot. Or, as a Norwegian commenter put it, shooting their prosthesis, as the foot is shot to pieces long ago.

Then again, perhaps books are different, appealing to the more intellectual in particular. (Although, if you randomly sample a bookstore, it is hard to give credit to that theory.) In any case, if free books in the library are a good thing, then free books on the Internet should also be a good thing. In fact, since most people still find reading paper easier than reading computer screens, people are unlikely to commit the crime of reading books just to taunt the authors or publishers. Their motivations are probably at least as good as (or at least stronger than) the average library visitor.

It is no big surprise that the US government prefers to let Google do the job. But it is rather amusing (in a scornful way) that the social democrat countries of Europe are unwilling to build good public libraries on the Net. Especially if you have a language different from the emerging World Language, your only realistic hope of delaying its death is to throw at your public every word and sentence available in the local tongue. In fact, you should probably pay them to read if you value your national heritage so much.

Anyway, I’ve already mentioned Baen, a pretty limited initiative. I’ll also remind you of Questia which is a partly free and partly paid library, with a particular angle toward students and the academia. But the tidal wave that may eventually absorb the phenomenon of books into the bitstream is Google Book Search. Despite the unassuming name, Google has scanned and stored literally millions of books, some of which can be read in their entirety or even printed out. (Please, think of the trees!)

I can’t say I mind too much that governments make themselves less relevant. The time is drawing near when governments as we know them will come to an end. The next level of consciousness will have no need for such structures, but will cooperate seamlessly like members of one loving family. It will probably not be in my time, more’s the pity. But all things will either change or end, most likely within this century. The age of books is also coming to an end, but not because we throw them away. Rather, they become drawn into the noosphere, and like ourselves they become gradually less physical, less confined in space and time. Our fates are linked, for without the books, our cultural evolution would have been incredibly hard or perhaps even impossible. The world we know, we owe to the book. In some form, it will always be with us, until the end of the world as we know it.

After the recession

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di090306

“We were downsized, so we’ve got nothin’ to do but drink.” It need not be that way – there is enough for everyone. As long as we think new, that is. Otherwise not.

It is widely agreed that the recession will end someday, somehow. Things may get horribly much worse before they get better, but we assume that in the end, everything will gradually return to how it was. I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen.

That is not because I like to see people suffer. It is because our economy –  our way of life, actually –  was not sustainable. That is to say, it could not continue this way. And it must not. When we emerge on the other side in some way, we must go in a different direction.

To take the purely economic first, we had a flood of fantasy money. Money is not really a thing but a measurement, like inches or megahertz. Money is a measure for value, and our measurements were way off. We counted with future incomes that were not realistic, and then we used them.

Then there is the small question of the environment: Pollution, limited resources, ecosystem extinction, and climate change. Luckily, some of these are opposing forces. For instance, there is no need to worry about what happens to the climate when the entire world uses as much gas as the USA: There is not that much gas. There was barely enough last year, as you may remember. And that was mainly China. Most of the developing world is still developing fairly slowly. But even one billion people having their income grow by 10% a year for some years was enough to make many resources scarce. There are still several billion people left in relative poverty.

And that is another part of it. For much of my lifetime, the economic growth was mainly in the rich world. Our consumption was gradually changing more and more toward luxury. The developing world was not expected to actually develop. That came as a bit of a shock. “Oh no, what will happen if they do the same things as we do?”  Perhaps we should have thought of that before we set a bad example, instead of hoping that they will fail.

Meanwhile we have reached a standard of living where more luxury does not really make us happier. Rather, we have to spend like crazy to keep up with the neighbors, so they won’t think we are losers. It is not the hope of improvement but the fear of shame that powers so much of modern consumption. This may seem reasonable there and then, but it is not reasonable when you compare with the developing world and its very real needs. People who want shoes that fit them, instead of having to wear too large or too small shoes. People who want a bike and a road to connect their village to the nearest town. People who want a separate shed for the chickens so they don’t need to sleep in the same room. People who want clean waters so their kids don’t get sick. And we are worried about being rejected for picking the wrong brand of soft drink??

I heard a news story on the radio Monday morning. Economists had calculated that a normal two-income family in Norway would get around kroner 60 000 more this year (close enough to $10 000) –  if they stayed employed, that is. Even in Norway, unemployment is expected to rise. Luckily for the unemployed, the benefits are generous enough that you can normally keep your house while you are unemployed, unless you divorce (which is common during unemployment) or eventually become disabled. In some other countries, losing your job can be a much more drastic change. From having plenty to fighting for your existence, in some cases. (I am looking at you, Americans. You sure don’t like sharing, do you?)

The truth is that a number of unemployed Norwegians earn more in unemployment benefits than I earn in salary. This is because my income is only around ½ of what is common for men my age in Norway. I can’t say it bothers me, since I have more than I need of all things most of the time. (The exception being the botched move a couple years ago, when I had to pay rent 3 places at once for a while. That was harsh.) I don’t keep up with the neighbors, don’t even pretend to. Since I am not reproducing, I need to impress the local humans about as much as I need to impress their cats.

Obviously that is an extreme example, but seriously: You don’t need to live in luxury to be happy. There are many fairly low-cost things that are a lot of fun. We used to do those things only a short time ago. Playing board games, go skiing (in cold climates) or swimming (in hot climates), paint, cook our own food. We don’t really need as much money as most people make today in the richest countries of the world. And the resources are better used elsewhere, where people have more real needs.

(Of course, a new computer twice a year is a human right. But apart from that, I mean…)

So what I propose is that we should not recover from this recession. Instead, we should adapt to it. We should get used to consuming a good deal less. And we should look for ways to share so we don’t have some people wallowing in luxury while their neighbors are starving, just because of luck of the draw. Those who don’t want to work shall not eat, as the old proverb says (it is actually from the Bible), but there are many who would not mind working but just aren’t needed now. It does not need to be the government that shares our wealth with the poor –  if we had done it ourselves, there would have been no need for the government to step in. But people are not very eager to share, even those of us who like to pretend that we believe in something higher than money. And so in the end a greedy people is punished with a greedy government, what we call socialism or more vaguely “the Left”. Think of it as collective karma.

There are some wild-eyed people who want us to go back to the Middle Ages, or the Stone Age in the worst cases. That is not what I’m thinking of. Actually I am thinking about something vaguely futuristic: Using our most advanced technology to create a sustainable lifestyle, and our most advanced psychology to create a happiness-centered rather than wealth-centered society.

For instance, it is commendable to use electric cars instead of gas-powered cars, and it may even become a dire necessity because the world’s oil runs out. But even better is to reduce driving overall. By enabling people to work from home or from neighborhood centers, and to do most of their shopping in the neighborhood as well, most of the daily driving is eliminated. This is becoming more common, but oh so slowly. People cling to the old forms out of habit and fear. “This is how we have always done things here”,  as you will hear if you propose some improvement in any workplace, church or even family.

We need a revolution of the hearts and minds. Not the old style of revolutions where the oppressed become oppressors, but one where we throw off the oppression of our collective and personal mind parasites and concentrate on what we really want. What we really want is not money, but such things as happiness, safety, acceptance and purpose. The way we go about getting these things is often roundabout and even ridiculous: In order to save time, we get various time-saving devices, which we then have to work overtime to pay for. Unless we love our job, we have basically made our own hamster wheel where we run to stay in the same place.

Well, this is already moving into “too long, didn’t read”  territory. More later, Light willing.