Feeling good and bad

Reblogging this to focus on the critical part.

So we feel bad. Usually we fight to bring this round and feel good. So we perhaps go jogging, or have a sleep, or eat some chocolate, or have a drink, or phone a friend, or watch a film, or read a book etc etc etc etc. Isn't this the structure of unenlightened life?

So we are enlightened and we feel bad. We look at how to bring this round and feel good again. So we perhaps go jogging, or have a sleep, or eat some chocolate, or have a drink, or phone a friend, or watch a film, or read a book etc etc etc etc. Isn't this the structure of enlightened life?

What is the difference?

Quickly an example of unenlightened. I overheard someone on holiday calling a friend and saying that they had been for a jog, been to gym, done yoga, meditated and then said  "I should be feeling much better than I am." This is the essence of the problem and thank you to them for putting it so clearly. Who matters what the feelings are? There are just feelings! Whether there is someone there to feel them changes nothing. So note what the problem was. She wasn't complaining that the feelings were not nice, she was complaining that she shouldn't be having those feelings. Great who should have then then? Someone else? The complaint is not over the nature of the feelings, but that they are here with "me." We are happy if we can just push them away, even to someone else. And in fact a huge amount of the bad things that people do is just trying to get away from unpleasant things, and in our panic to get rid of them we dump them on other people. But things are just what they are regardless whether they happen to me or not. If we had a bad feeling happening to us and a Buddha magically stopped it happening to us, how would it be different? It wouldn't, it would still be there, just not connected to us any more - which is the exact same.

I know someone who lost a parent recently and they are suffering very badly. So we all know the sadness at loss, and it can be overwhelming. I know the start of the blog includes this. It can suck the whole meaning of life out and leave you empty. But we absolutely should not confuse this quite natural response from the struggle to get away from it and wish it was not happening. In fact things just happen, they can be as sudden as a flash of lightening, but there is no denying that they happen. The sticking point is dragging this extra thing around that they must happen "to". If we think about it: by the time we know about something it has always already happened. So what else is there to do. It has happened and we now know about it. What remains to do? Well there is the natural process of mourning that this causes as the body and mind process the loss, miss the person, realise they will never (or until death or rebirth depending upon belief) see them again (certainly not in this form), recall precious memories and make new plans. Just a lot of rethinking and processing. This is all natural. But that is it, it all kicks off a new stream of experience and not necessarily an always pleasant one. But one anyway. The problem occurs when we try and resist this. This hidden "self" (that we think things happens to) somehow doesn't want to go on the journey. In fact the possibility of not going on the journey is only possible because we think there is a secret self inside our experiences. Armed with this belief we argue with experience that we aren't doing it. And that argument distracts us from what is really going on and messes us up.**

** There is a little story possible here of a Box that we are given it by the Devil who tell us to take it unopened to a destination, and we will die if we open it before arriving. All the way along the journey we will ignore many wonderful opportunities and don't really engage in the journey. At the end when we open the box we discover it was empty all along. Or it could be the box eventually gets smashed (dies) and we don't see that it was empty all along (important: empty of a solid thing that exists unchanged through time - perhaps better we put something like a frog/unicorn in the box as a kid and when it breaks decades later we see that the thing in there is long gone - it was not a permanent self). This is the unenlightened life. The enlightened life is when we open the box early (and die?)  and realise not to worry about any thing in the box. ***

*** This is possibly not helpful cos how do we actually "open the box", what is the metaphor? That is the hard bit. Buddha taught the 8 Fold Noble Path to lead us up to the point of opening the box, but we must walk this our self, no one can do this for us. And the nature of opening the box is unlike anything we have experienced before. It is complete revelation of the most deeply seated assumptions that we never even knew we take for granted. Realising the sound of the machine in The Machine Stops, except it is the opposite: realising that something we always thought was there is not there. But because its always there we don't even notice it. So its realising that the self that we assume is everywhere, is firstly everywhere and then that it doesn't even exist (as an unchanging solid entity that is the same through time and our whole life).

Anyway, returning to the original thread: the unenlightened person sees the "bad" as part of themselves. The badness has breached the castle walls and is inside and is "their's"; it somehow affects a person called "them". It means they have no choice but to act on it. The problem stops being just about feeling bad, and becomes about "me". Bad feelings exist, no great issue there. But when it become "my" bad then we are compelled automatically to deal with it and get it away.

The enlightened person just sees the bad feeling. Its a feeling like any other. No big deal. Because the feeling does not belong to any one, its just what it is, no one is dragged into it automatically.

The result may well be the same like go and watch a movie, but the unenlightened person is running from the bad feeling to get it as far away from them self as possible. For the enlightened person because there is no one involved there is no running to do. Who is there to actually run? The bad feeling exists without reference to a centre, the universe is infinite with space for everything, rather than it all crowding in on some some centre, around some "person". We are just the air of experience, rather than a tree standing in the middle with things happening to it. If the enlightened person fixes the bad feeling by a watching film then great. If they fail and the feeling is still there then so be it. Obviously a tough emotion or problem. But so be it. Ultimately the enlightened person can just sit there and watch the feeling for what it is without there being anyone for it affect.

Its an interesting thing that the actual phenomenon is identical for both the enlightened and the unenlightened. The Buddhas experience the exact same world as the unenlightened. Things happen. And we don't have much control over those things. This is the way of the world, better deal with that as we find it cos that IS reality. The difference is only that the unenlightened put the "near world" into the Dative case so that it is happening to someone, that person being them. Its as subtle a compulsion as a tense change. Buddha says non-self (anatta) but the problem with that is it actually uses the problem in the remedy. Fixed-Self is the problem, and while saying "not that" that we have directed the listener to the problem. Buddha actually says that ALL phenomena are "not self." So we look around and we are being told that absolutely NONE of that is us. Heidegger uses the German word Dasein which means "there being" or "being over there." This over-thereness of the world is what proves its "not self" its always over there. A tree is clearly "over there" especially if someone else is standing under it. But even when we are standing under it, it is still over there but now a few centimetres rather than metres. Even the phenomenon of a feeling which we can't locate "in the world" (you can't stand under a feeling) is still "over there" just in a different not physical space. The fact we can't physically walk away from a bad feeling makes it feel closer, and people try other displacement activities to try and block out bad feelings. But it is still just a phenomenon that is coming at us and so is over there. Its important to note that even in the midst of the worst crisis that it has not been around forever, and just as it has occurred it will "unoccur" and we will be left alone again. All things comes to us, and then leave (if we let them).

Now there I am using the "coming at us" experience to illustrate Buddha's "not us" and over there. All things are coming at us. But in there lies the other problem. Because if we change the focus, even just slightly from the "coming at" experience to the "us" then we have slipped back into "atta" or fixed self. It's quite possible for a wind to blow through a landscape and be blowing in on ever point without us picking a particular point or tree in that landscape for it to be affecting. When we take our experiences and place a tree at the centre then we holding on to the notion of a "fixed self" and that is the whole problem of life.

It's a subtle thing. For the enlightened things still happen to them obviously, but the emphasis is all on the "happening". For the unenlightened the emphasis is all on the "them"

It means that other bad things that happen to other people may gain more relevance and we might invite someone to the cinema to help them just as we tried with our self.

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Here's a thought. Assume there is a fixed self. Since everything in our whole life must happen to that fixed self, and there can never be an experience without it can't we just factor it out of all experiences?

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists

The first thing to note about "Conspiracy Theories" is that they are invariably American.

Within the "Conspiracy Theory" mindset the belief is that "Conspiracy" is applied to a theory by the establishment if that theory is critical of the establishment so as to invalidate it. But that doesn't explain why this way of thinking is American.

Take UFO sightings. I have seen a UFO in Italy so not speaking from a perspective of disbelief. But there are anomalies. UFOs you might expect to show up randomly across the globe. But the vast majority of reports come from America and a secondly Europe. 

[source: https://web.archive.org/web/20051231121342/http://www.larryhatch.net/]

Even in Europe the distribution is uneven:   

UFOs (whatever they are) do not occur at random. They appear to be linked to territories. Now why that should be who knows, but it means that UFOs do obey Earthly territories which seems highly unlikely if they are Extra-terrestrials as many believe.. I mean they are "extra" terrestrial! It could be for example that exposure to the culture in certain territories makes people more likely to see them. My sighting was possibly linked to recently having seen the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

So the way we think and see does seem to show some relationship with where we are. Does being American or coming into contact with American thinking making you more susceptible to Conspiracy Theory?

Now the most important thing about America is its history especially the American Revolution. Much is said about French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions but the American Revolution came first. And it bought America its freedom from the British Empire, with the help of the French. This is why the Statue of Liberty is French. France and America were both celebrating the victory of the Americans over France's old enemy Britain and the victory of Liberty over the "ancien régimes." In fact French support for the US was a precursor to the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed without French support the US Revolution would never have happened. Its interesting from a British perspective that Napoleon and America are one and the same. And some would say they both went from aspirations of liberty to eventual dictatorship.

Anyway the US mindset follows this Revolutionary thinking and is very much one opposed to overseas government, and even after the civil war their own government. Increasingly extreme ideas of Liberty is everything. The fact that the US celebrates a 20 year period of anarchy where the Wild West escaped control by Washington says a lot about the New World.

In a nutshell all Conspiracies stem from distrust of some establishment.

But its not just normal distrust, it must be a swing from total blind acceptance to total enlightened rejection. For me it was the film JFK that did it. David Ferrie's discussion with Jim Garrison is the point for me when it goes from a cop show and a detective searching for a bad man, to realising its systemic. The system did him in. "Don't you get it" Ferrie says.. well no I didn't, not up to that point.

You get the exact same thing in Jack the Ripper realised 3 years before JFK. Sherlock Holmes is investigating the Jack the Ripper murders. Its all detective work, and you think no one can elude the famous Holmes. Well what gets him is finding out that the murders were done to protect Edward VII. In other words the very establishment that Holmes seeks to protect came together to do the murders. He is forced to drop the case.

So its not just distrust of an establishment, I mean no one is interested in the idea the Nazis were collectively bad. No revelation there. It must be that the system that you once felt part of is bad. Its that moment when a once faithful Nazi realises the system they supported and championed actually stands against everything the believe.

So Conspiracy is actually a kind of alienation where you feel you no longer belong. But unlike the psychiatric condition where the individual faces a separation from the world around them, it becomes a collective experience as people see solidarity with other alienated people. Its a togetherness in all being outsiders.

In fact its a negation of establishment. Unlike the individual facing alienation all those people previously connected by faith in an establishment, now become connected by rejecting that establishment. They are still joined by the establishment, just negative now instead of positive. This actually gives us deep insight into human feelings. We like being connected by a cause or by an establishment, so even when we reject that establishment we keep the solidarity and connection. If you want to control people you can either get them to support you, or you can get them to reject something they hold in common.

To really blow the mind of the Conspiracy Theories, one might suggest that the very collective that they have found in sharing distrust of an establishment is itself just a new establishment.

In fact that is my belief. Conspiracy Theories were created as psyops by foreign powers like Russia or China to internally rot the West, or they were created by the West to distract people from the actual truth. In either case belong to a conspiracy mindset is actually a very dangerous piece of brainwashing that strips you of your freedom.

Indeed this must be true. True freedom is not something you can gain by joining a collective to overthrow another collective. That is just war.

Now who is "The Establishment" that Conspiracy Theorists are unified against? Well its not clear. It is sufficient just to have a "them" to hate.

Take the Moon Landing Conspiracy. Its not enough just to say that the moon landing were faked. Well perhaps they were. We know the Piltdown Man was faked, but no one cares. The point is "who did the fake?", and for the Moon Landings to be faked it must be a very powerful group. And it is that powerful group this is really the interest behind suggestions of the moon landings being fakes. Who is powerful enough to do much a thing. Perhaps they are faking other things? Suddenly the certainty we had dissolves in doubt. If we throw ourselves into that doubt then we are a conspiracy theorist.

Every conspiracy theorist says the same thing. I used to trust these people, now I have no trust.

A common enemy on the web is the Democrats. Which points immediately to US sources. Other enemies are aliens, satanic paedophile cabals, Jews, foreigners, Capitalists. Anyone in fact who is different from oneself.

To be a really successful Conspiracy theory it must involve the flip from a group we once belonged to and trusted, to realising we don't. So the essence of the mental process is for example that we thought "our government" was "ours" until we realise it is overrun with Jews who are not us. Then we flip and find ourselves outside the group.

Now given the blogs recent focus on "self" we have a good insight into why this is happening more these days. If one thinks that millions of people laid their lives down for government and country in the Past without alienation and now fewer and fewer people can think like this, something has changed. And that is to do with "self."

Under recent Modern Western thinking the atom of society is the "self" and this is both indivisible and sufficient. That is a self needs no one else, and cannot be split into anything else. Thinking like this Western people have a growing strong attachment to them self as something solid in an otherwise uncertain world. As a result it is literally just a matter of time before Modern Selves cannot find any home in a group.

But its ironic. The truth obviously is that selves exist in communities. But the Modern Self cannot accept this because it contradicts the idea of the solid self-existing self. So the solution is to think we are a solid self, but also form a collective with other solid selves (who we don't need) but who share our belief in false, fake groups.

This the conspiracy theorist is not interested in any evidence or truth (I can confirm this from exploring the issue) and will not be swayed by even the most obvious evidence that they are wrong, because the goal is simply to gain solidarity with people who reject groups because they are fake, false and corrupted establishments. And all such people need to signal to each other is that the do not trust the "establishment" (whatever the "establishment" actually is).

So its an interesting phenomenon, but one very much predictable from the path of the Capitalist self.

Unfortunately Buddha noted 2600 years ago that this way of thinking is the cause of suffering. So the lives of people who believe in the solid indivisible, self reliant and existing self, are lives of growing suffering. But obviously that suffering is all due to the "establishment" and the "group" that they are united in rejecting.

And returning to the top, the reason that most conspiracy theorists are American or have been influence by America is that America is also committed to this idea of the solid self.

===

An typical example of US thinking was to be seen on EarthX TV last night. An American was presenting solutions to the environmental catastrophe in America. And he was arguing
(1) that Private Farmers were the solution.

But then also then arguing for

(2) how to incentivise them to protect the environment.

In other words he was saying that "private" farmers by themselves (1) would not protect the environment. In which case they are problem not the solution surely?

Surely all he needed to say was that farmers needed to be given financial incentives to protect the environment. Where did the "private" come into the debate?

Well its obviously this US cultural hatred and distrust of government. What he was actually saying is that the government should take over the issue and protect the environment cos farmers were not doing that. But the US brain is so unable to deal with the idea of something other than a "solid self" that it feels the need to reframe what it is saying in terms that base it upon a "solid" or "private" self. In fact this is completely irrelevant, and serves only to meet the dogmatic obsession of Americans.

In actual fact the real answer if for all farmland to privatised and run by the government and do away with private enterprise all together, but this is so anathema to American thinking they would short circuit if they ever tried to process that thought.

Neil Oliver going down the "Us vs Them" or "Social vs Individual" drain

Definitely forming an opinion here. Had issue with this video.

It seems there is this growing naïve view of individuals which ignores the way they interact. Most "individuals" for example in the West think and construct their thoughts in English. So does English belong to any individual or is it a community property that is shared by all? To even think that is to go beyond being an individual - who are you thinking it for? If you went to an alien planet and found just one person speaking you would know already there must be other people for them to talk to (this is the essence of the Private Language arguments).

Just as a wall is made of bricks, if a society had no use for walls then it wouldn't make bricks. Many societies don't. If no one ever wanted a wall then no one would ever have invented or made a brick, indeed the mother of invention is not the individual but the community need. I'm pretty sure some Neanderthal put some clay in a fire and saw it harden, but with no use for it, it was over looked. That was not yet a "brick". Bricks need walls as much as walls need bricks. They cannot exist without each other. If you landed on a distant planet and found a single brick you would already know they had walls! You find a single "individual" and you already know they came from the society.

And so it goes for individuals in societies. Most obviously without parents--to give birth to us--and our family--to give birth to them--we physically would not exist, but there are all the other people whose work makes our life possible - food producers, organisers, fuel producers. We are fundamentally connected as "One, but we are not the same" as Bono sings. Its neither Individual vs Society, nor as Americans like to argue Collectivism vs Individualism - they go together as different sides of the same coin. Americans (as a society!) like to think a coin has either a Head or a Tail side; for some reason they cannot see that it must have both at the same time. A society without individuals is nothing, and individuals without a society are nothing. You have Americans like Ayn Rand literally not understanding this, or is it that only in American Society would she have risen to prominence? She felt she was not taken seriously in her home country of Russia so she moved to America. In other parts of the world that do understand this she has not been taken seriously, much to the chagrin of Americans.

Ah ha say the Survivalists. But I can live on my own off nature without anyone. Well really? You just used English to express that. You got that from a society. So you must stop thinking in English. How did you find out what to eat? Forget all that knowledge you were given by society. You need to go around trying to eat everything again to find out what is good and not good. You need forget about fire, not just how to make it, but that it even exists. That was shown to you by other people. Forget about cooking and recipes, you are back to eating raw food until you discover it for yourself. Forget about clothes, they were invented and shown to you by other people. You need to get a bang over the head so you forget literally everything and wake up naked on a beach, dumb and clueless. You will survive a few days longer than a baby, just because you have more body mass which, note, you amassed from your society. This is how we are fundamentally linked to a society and unable to survive without it just as a fish without water or us without air. But then you owe your parents for giving birth to you, so you vanish anyway and never existed without a family, other people and society.

I spent many months in a tent thinking about this. The problem with "going it alone" in a tent, is the tent. What a remarkable object that is, combining centuries of knowledge about materials and design. Consider even the process of weaving fibres that goes back millennia. And even the "tent" idea is inspired by a culture going all the way back to Mesolithic when people first started living in makeshift animal skin shelters. And even if we did scrap the modern tent and go back to mesolithic living, even they lived in societies with knowledge on how to do all this stuff handed down generation to generation. Survivalists find it hard enough to exist on their own with all the materials and knowledge of a huge industrial society like guns and explosives. How much harder with just sticks and stones. That requires real skill and knowledge that has largely been forgotten today because that society has gone!

There is an ancient distinction between Logos and Mythos. You can read logos in a book. But cycling a bicycle is handed down in a culture, it is like mythos. No one learned riding a bicycle from a book. Many people from different cultures don't even know what a bicycle is. Some cultures don't even have the idea of a wheel, or the culture and practice to make one. So when we find books from ancient cultures, its actually impossible to make sense of all the symbols without a continuous transmission of the mythos to us as readers which gives us a chance of decoding them. We assume for example that the texts will contain references to food and food production, using what we know of that to help us interpret it.

So a human individual cannot live without a society. But there is no single society, they are all different with subcultures. So it means that "society" is not one thing, any more than an individual is one thing. You pick an individual at random and you can pretty much tell which type of society they came from.

So once we see how individuals form society, and society forms individuals then we see how leaders and the led are fundamentally linked. And now my favourite graphic:

Anyway my comment to Neil Oliver is here...

"Not sure I completely agree.

[In answer to the claim that Utopian ideologies are responsible for the greatest massacres]

1st off the greatest loss of life has been the Imperial wars of Capitalism which include WW1, WW2, Vietnam and the British Empire and the land clearances and genocides of native peoples throughout the New World to make way for Capitalist farming, including more recently for example the 1943 Bengal Famine not incomparable with the Holocaust and occurring at the same time (and perhaps for the same reasons.) And of course the 300 years of Capitalist Atlantic Slave Trade to supply slaves to build America. Capitalism has killed 100s of millions. And that ignores the impact of unscrupulous marketing for profit of harmful products like cigarettes which are responsible for a billion deaths, and cars whose pollution is responsible for millions of deaths a year. In Capitalism profit is always put before welfare. Plus worth noting that the figures banded around regarding opponents of Imperialism like Russian and Chinese Revolutions and completely made up by Washington. How did the Pentagon come up with 20 million and 45 million, or even 6 million for the Holocaust? Even the Jews realise that the full figure of 11 million was just double the 6 million minus one. All these figures are literally plucked from a hat for political propaganda. If we are playing that game then the US genocide of Native Indians was 10 million, and WW1 and 2 was 100 million. I posted a few days ago the odd fact that the Chinese population was exploding at the time of these supposed famines and mass starvation. In the world of propaganda nothing is reliable (especially Imperialist propaganda)! It can be seen here clues that Neil Oliver is not waking up to a truth, but rather has finally swapped truth for the efforts of Washington at brainwashing and whitewashing their Empire.

[In answer to incredulity about sacrifice]

Regarding sacrifice there is a pattern. I was told by a Malaysian quantity surveyor that traditionally in Malaysia they would sacrifice a builder when building a bridge and bury the head in the foundations to appease the water spirits (that is Sandy from Monkey). Obviously I enquired whether she still acquired heads for her construction projects! These head hunting spirits are blood thirsty and regularly drown people, so it makes sense if you want to control the world, you give them what they want ahead of time to protect yourself. So bridges had sacrifices built in to them to make them safer. Ancient construction safety regulations. Perfectly logical.

In a world of crippling infant mortality you might for example sacrifice your 1st born to appease the blood thirsty gods and protect your future children as was the practice in the Middle East. So child sacrifice to Baal was actually quite logical. And even in harmless Buddhism, Tibetan monks would sacrifice themselves to protect communities - perhaps to appease spirits or perhaps to become spirits or perhaps to take karma on oneself. Most famously Jesus made a self-sacrifice taking the sins of the world on his shoulders. And today we have soldiers committing self sacrifice, and leaders committing sacrifice of soldiers supposedly to protect people in the exact same way. So sacrifice makes perfect sense even within modern thinking as a way of protecting the community. Which leads to the next bit.

Communities are much more holistic than Neil Oliver suggests. For example Master/Slave Dialectic from Hegel. Kings need subjects and subjects need kings - they work together. No kings and then the subjects are in disarray, no subjects and the king does not exist. So the reason subjects adopt kings is usually like the Restoration of the Monarchy. The Nash Equilibrium, or Social Contract, where everyone gives up a bit of freedom to a king in order to stop in-fighting amongst themselves. When civil wars break out, people eventually solve it by agreeing on a leader - this is exactly how the Inca would have occurred in the 1st place. We look at violent leaders and wish they were not there, we don't see the violence that would be transferred to us if those leaders were not there

Often like with 1066 in England we see the oppression of vanquished by an invading force. Or much more famously we see a tribe like the Jews get taken into captivity as happened with the Babylonians or the Egyptians or as happened with the Africans and the Capitalists during the 300 years of Atlantic Slave Trade (which incidentally is how the US grew to be a super power, nothing to do with Adam Smith's economics). But this is all very one sided, because dig a little deeper and the boundaries blur. The Saxon invasion of Britain was actually started by a Celtic tribe enlisting the help of Saxons fighters against a neighbouring tribe. Divide & Rule is not oppressive, it works within existing fractures within society. Native conflicts and desires simple become enveloped within the culture of the invading people. Its unfair to say that colonised countries want to be rules from overseas, but the arising of powerful overseas leaders is a spontaneous product of the same forces that led to them having kings in the first place. Modern Capitalist US ideas of "freedom" really are a naïve nonsense.   

It may look brutal, but to be a stable system it can't be more brutal than the violence that would break out without a leader. We just need look at the violence that broke out in Iraq after its ruling class was brutally executed by the Americans. 1000x worse than Saddam Hussein. This is why people tolerate strong leaders. But if the leaders are more brutal than the violence of civil war then people would spontaneously just abandon their kings and the kings would not even exist, until Restoration anyway as always seems to happen when people realise that a strong leaders is preferable to civil war and mafias.

As King Cnut illustrated: he had no divine power over the waves, it was ALL invested in him by his subjects. So while individuals (particularly modern capitalist individuals) like to see everything as coming from inside themselves, they overlook how much is given to them from outside by history and culture. When we find ourselves born into a world of Inca we forget how it all started, and why we all work together to create a society structured like this.

As a hypothesis it would make sense that tribal warfare in South America must have been brutal for their societies to evolve like they did. But "brutal" also means something else because mortality rates, and the brutal side of random nature would have been much more apparent to these people. A leader making a sacrifice every week would have made perfect sense when you had already lost half your family through infant mortality and disease caused--so you can best fathom--by the harsh and angry beings of nature.

So anyway think there might be other ways to see all this?"

Structure of Good and Evil

We are shocked when "Evil" appears in such a ready formed way. It may be international like war, or a local murder, or more minor an aggressive threat or rude word.

Traditionally we just think well that person/people are bad or Evil.

In the mirror we do the same when people are Good.

But how does "evil" or "good" turn up?

Well this is a key misunderstanding. We tend to think of things as existing like a storm, or a new car, and we never stop to think of the long process by which these things come about. In the case of a storm there is a complex process of sunlight and moisture and lots of other factors that come together in the storm-- and we can't forget that we need to be there too, so we need look at all the forces that led us to be in the place where the storm happened. A lot takes place before something exists. And this is true for both good and bad. Altho it's not a mirror, there is a big difference between Good and Evil. That first.

Darkness is a lack of light. Light removes darkness in a flash. Physics will back up that darkness is not a thing, while light is a thing. Light has a wavelength and an energy. Darkness is not a thing, it is simply the lack of light. Things can be brighter or darker depending on the amount of light, not darkness.

Now the analogy doesn't quite work because Goodness is not a commodity. In fact Good pervades the whole Universe all the time. Evil is like darkness it occurs when that Good light becomes obscured. So its as though a candle lights the whole universe and its down to us whether we have our eyes open. This is what Genesis in the Bible captures when it places the nature of "Sin" within the hearts of Wo/Man and Eve and Adam.

So the question of Good/Evil is just the question of how open our eyes are.

Now in traditional thinking people just say well "open your eyes." What is stopping you? I've seen people say things like this. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the world works, and even themselves. Presumably people who criticise Evil people think they are Good. But all good people can find someone better.

As Jesus says in John 8:7

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

I believe Confucius says:

When you see a man of worth, think of how you may emulate him. When you see one who is unworthy, examine yourself.

We are neither Good nor Bad. We are a shades of illumination, and being Good is a process of cleaning to be brighter. This is the thing we misunderstand.

Jesus reminds us that we have all sinned, and sinned so deeply that we will never be pure (through our own actions, God can forgive completely). Only God is pure enough to hand out judgement fairly. All human hands are tainted so are unworthy to throw that stone or pass judgement. Likewise Confucius points out that when we see people better than us we have a guide to improve, and when we see people who are worse than us again we have a window into our own faults.

And this is the point of the post. A good person is simply someone who has taken the opportunities shown to them to improve. And a bad person is simply someone who has not done this and has either let all the dirt accumulate and obscure the brightness, or has even become so deluded as to actively start to accumulate them and obliterate the light.

Eventually once the tiny little acts of good or bad accumulate you get a sudden existence. But it hasn't suddenly occurred its the result of thousands of parts we have put together over years.

And this is the danger of the mistake. There is a thought "oh its only minor, it doesn't matter." But a lifetime of minor transgressions becomes a major transgression.

So what is a "transgression." Well this changes depending on where we are. Jesus says in Matthew 5:

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

Well that seems ridiculous to a standard western male. Its okay to have a roving eye and enjoy the "eye candy" that is on show. And women in the West play along and dress and make themselves up to look attractive, appealing and sexually pleasing to the eye. Yet women in the West will become crazy if a man actually cheats on them. This works the other way around too, how many men avoid the eye of women even married women. So most do not tolerate physical adultery, but will tolerate mental adultery. But some tolerate even physical adultery, and some do not tolerate even mental adultery. Its a sliding scale from physical to mental, and they are connected. Actions begin as thoughts. So as we become "better" we shift from actually committing adultery, to just thinking about it, to actually not even being attracted to any woman we have not made a marriage vow to. How far the West has slipped! But this applies to everything, and the whole process of moving from Evil to Good is a scale on which everyone sits. Even Confucius said he would never complete the journey. Buddha, interestingly did declare that the journey was at an end and that he had cleared out all obscuring dirt to see the light of goodness completely unobstructed.

Now why do people slip and fall down the scale from Good to Evil? Why do we not spend every moment of every day refusing the bad things and moving toward purity and goodness so our eyes are wide open and we can see the world in the full joy and bliss that it is.

So why do we not do this? The answer is Ego.

Because we believe in an actual separate entity cut off from the world around us that we link to ourselves, like taking a cup of water out of the ocean and giving it our name. Because we do this, we end up needing to know about it, and we stick labels on it. One of those is whether it is "Good" or "Bad." So we believe the water in the cup is good, and then suddenly we find we have done something bad and hurt someone. Now if its small enough we keep on with the belief that all the water is good, and carry on. But eventually, and it depends how big a cup of sea water we carry around with us, because enough bad things and we suddenly decide that the water in the cup is bad. Then we go on a drive to purify it, go some good deeds, go and fix the faults, say sorry do things to re-establish a belief that the water is good. And then we go back to what we were before. And so it ends up cycling. And if we carry a huge water tank of sea water with us those swings are going to be huge. Evil people rarely think they are evil, they have such a strong belief they are good that they can ignore all the bad things. Eventually it becomes so ridiculous to argue they are bad, that they factually admit they are bad, but not deep down. Deep down the water is so permanently labelled as "good" that the fact it is green and rotting doesn't get noticed.

This is the danger of ego. This is why it is the worst of all the poisons (the others being anger and greed, that is wishing to do harm, or wanting more than we need). With ego we hold on to an inside glass of water and close our eyes to the ocean.

So if we make that inside glass small, and instead respond to the little things that happen we can get a firm purchase on the slide from Good to Evil and actually move towards the Good. eventually we can put the ego behind us and break the glass so it joins the ocean. We nakedly face the world as it happens, seeing the ocean in its entirety all the good and bad mixed up and working to correct all the bad we find, not just keeping the good for our self and throwing the stones at the "bad people".

Protecting Assets - the root of "all" evils: case study Tobacco.

Much is said about the evil intentions of the elites and how they are out to destroy the common folk. Some say, for example, that the global vaccination campaigns are designed to reduce population.

Its on both sides of the Hegemony. Some blame the incumbent hegemony for planning world domination and the destruction and enslavement of people, and some blame our "enemies." Famously the Nazis were blamed with every evil under the sun. When we hear this we do need take in account wartime propaganda. Often accusing people of great evils is done by their enemies for political gain. But I distract from the point. 

It may or may not be true that there are great malevolent insidious plots afoot in the world, but before considering this there is one important thing to understand. Capitalism quite unintentionally creates evil.

Take tobacco. A wonder drug that gave rise to the practice of smoking in Europe after the 1500s. This burgeoned into a huge industry worth today $3/4 trillion a year.

But there was a problem. It started to become clear that smoking caused all kinds of lung conditions. As people started to live longer this became more and more apparent. So what did the heads of the tobacco industry do? Well they are run by Capitalists who invest in their company. And Capitalists demand profit else they take their money elsewhere. Indeed it is a law in the UK that companies on the stock exchange direct their efforts towards making profit. If you take investments from Capitalists then you are committed by law to return them a profit. Naturally the chiefs of the industry looked into this and ran studies to see if they could disprove the claims that tobacco made you ill. What they found was that indeed tobacco smoking was harmful to health (its kind of obvious in retrospect). So what did they do? Well perhaps naturally, given that this is Capitalism and profits are the goal, they took the shortest path and hid all the information, paid lawyers to hunt down people who made these claims to defame, threaten and discredit them and silenced the whole thing. Tobacco also worked on putting loyal people in power in regulatory boards, and government and lobbying for the industry to be protected. Having secured power they carried on as usual, kicking this can of the farm being done down the road.

Eventually the weight of evidence grew too strong and the tobacco industry was force to rethink. What did they do? They agreed a road map of gradually increasing public information on the damage that smoking does, so that the public at least had the choice. The tobacco industry knew that many people were addicted and this information alone would not do much to harm their income. But gradually the pressure mounted on people to quit smoking.

Meanwhile the industry was working on a safer form of smoking. Eventually "Vaping" was invented. It meant that the industry could carry on as before moving their customers and revenue streams over to the new technology. I assume they also have a stream from nicotine patches and other products aimed at helping people quit the very product that they themselves have been heavily marketing all along. Instead of compensation for the damage done, they get victims to pay even more.

Now that Vaping is taking over, the industry is "releasing" pressure on regulatory bodies and governments so that they can move to fully ban smoking. Its been illegal indoors for a while because of a thing called "secondary smoking" and so has advertising. Eventually it will become illegal. But only because the industry has been able to protect its assets and income through other means. And in that time some say a total of a billion people have been killed by the Tobacco industry. And people say that Capitalism is benign and Socialism is the thing we need be wary of! Actually it is Capitalism that is the thing we need be wary of. Tobacco is just one industry running out of control.

This is the model example of how Capitalism uses the structures of markets and government to protect the assets of the wealth investors. It is the customer who is the loser every time.

Now Socialism was invented to address these issues. As a result the Capitalists hate Socialism and if you look attempts at Socialism have been bombed out of existence across the globe. That is the level fo threat to the model used by the Tobacco Industry.

Now this model I will call the Tobacco Model. and it turns up everywhere.

A recent example is the aggressive marketing of OxyContin by Richard Sackler of Purdue Pharma. Because the money is stacked in Sackler's favour its actually very hard to prove anything. He has already amassed a fortune from the sales of the pain killer, which makes him very powerful. There simply is not the money on the customer side to challenge this. But its no secret really. Sackler is simply following the Tobacco Model.

Sell and addictive product, down play the risks, fund bad biased research, cover up the truth, pressure regulatory and government institutions to ignore claims and limit regulation, pay lawyers to kick everything out of court. Misuse the regulation that should be limited your practice to take out your competitors. Expand your industry unhindered and take profits. Use the profits to buy people and improve your credibility and repeat.
The Tobacco Model

Much, if not all, the controversy surrounding Vaccination is Tobacco Model. Vaccines are harmful, and they are not properly tested. During the Pandemic the Health Emergency justified cutting corners even more. You can see why profits from the two leading COVID vaccines are over $30 billion a year. With that sort of money just use the Tobacco Model. It makes more sense to steam ahead and payoff criticism, than to stop and do due diligence.

But what the anti-vax fraternity wants to discount is that vaccines work at all. Once you think they do nothing then you have argued yourself into a corner where the only possible reason to use them is to do harm. Its a bit silly. It forgets that vaccination or inoculation has been used since at least mediaeval times and the first nation wide mandatory vaccine was in Turkey in 1885 under Ottoman Rule. Perhaps the Ottoman sultans were part of the global vaccination conspiracy? There have been famous opponents to vaccination like Alfred Wallace famous for co-discovering the role of Natural Selection in Evolution with Darwin. And there is certainly debate. But its very extreme to suggest that all this surrounds a technique that has no value what-so-ever. Could you make a multi-billion dollar industry over injecting water? If not then how injecting something that is argued to be harmful. The only way around this is to believe in a powerful elite who have ordered the whole thing. Bus such an elite could order the extermination of people in much better way than this method so covert we hardly notice, if at all.

That said this does not make vaccine safe! There are 2 sides to this, and people in the West only seem to be able to do one or the other. Perhaps the influence of sports?

Vaccine companies argue that the benefits so outweigh the costs that we don't need to look at safety. But this is not due diligence. Even if you save a million people, this is no excuse to harm anyone if you can avoid it, especially with profits like that.

But it is Tobacco Model. Its cheaper to cover up problems than investigate and deal with them. But this is a long way from deliberately setting out to harm people.

Capitalism leads to harm, without anyone actually intending it. Perhaps the most famous examples of this come from Imperialism where simple trade led to power struggles and wars and the deaths of millions. Churchill was not sympathetic to the millions of Bengalis he killed, but I don't think he actually wanted to kill them. It was just a shorter path to fight his war and let them die.

Now in Buddhism "assets" comes by the name of Mara. The belief in the intrinsic existence and value of material things. Since Capitalism is based upon a demon its no surprise that it leads to harm and evil.

 

Capitalism vs Welfare : the error?

TV interview with Greta Thunberg today. Interviewer says that Capitalism has lifted billions out of Poverty.

It seems that Capitalism is linked by some to human welfare, even if it is detrimental to the environment.

Intuitively this seems wrong. If Capitalism is so essential to human welfare then how did humans survive before it? And while humans survived before Capitalism, the planet cannot survive with Capitalism.

An initial look suggests that we should get rid of Capitalism.

Everyone is agreed that Capitalism is bad for the planet. The only possible escape is that somehow Capitalism can be changed to be good for the planet. The principles of Capitalism are the opposite of the principles of environmental concern. You cannot turn a wolf into a sheep. So this looks like the least fruitful approach.

The debate remains then whether Capitalism has been good for humans.

As argued many times in this blog Wealth is Relative and this leads to a paradox. Growth actually leads to poverty. The reason is that the future makes the past look poor. And if people in the future think we are poor today then how does that feel? It feels okay.

The blog has concluded that Poverty is not absolute. Even in Auschwitz Victor Frankl observed a hierarchy of poverty so that happiness was present for the now tiniest blessings. I can't remember the details but its easy to see how a bigger bowl of soup at the end of the day "from the bottom" rather than the watery liquid that was usual would feel like a banquet.

The blog argued at one point whether there was an absolute level of poverty. But this is hard to justify. Even amongst the dying a quick painless death is a luxury compared with a painful slow death.

All things are relative.

So has Capitalism raised people out of poverty?

Yes, financially at least it has. The number of people living in "extreme poverty" has rapidly fallen in the last 40 years (mostly due to changes in China).

It is pretty impressive that "extreme poverty" has been virtually eradicated.

Firstly this is clearly the result of Machines and this leads directly into the environmental debate. Machines need fuel and the primary fuel is fossil fuel which creates CO2. The levels of CO2 are directly related to the running of machines. 

Now its more complicated than this as lots of technological advances have also happened like improved crop yields through breeding and now genetic modification.

This is all very much Science however not Capitalism. Humans have had the capability for invention forever its not just something that happens in Capitalism. So Capitalism is rather stealing something that doesn't belong to it. Again if Capitalism was needed for life then humans would never have survived the millions of years its taken to get to Capitalism.

One story to illustrate where Capitalism prospered where other systems failed was the creation of new crops. Under original socialist theory humans were the product of society. All the ills of humans could be traced to society. Especially hated was Aristocracy and Feudalism and the idea that people inherited wealth and titles. Its odd how the West has very gradually and carefully adopted these ideas so that now you can chose almost anything like Sex and Gender with no regard for your genes. But the West is reluctant to complete create a flat society free from inherited wealth and status. Not so socialist countries. But this social justice rather backfired in Russia because it meant that Stalin was ideologically opposed to funding breeding programs for better crops. He had world leading scientists on the verge of fundamental break throughs but the support was cut. This opened the door to the Capitalism who while out bombing the planet found a variety of wheat in Vietnam I think which became the basis of a new super wheat. So its very interesting how the various ideologies of the world be that Capitalism or Socialism feed into Science. But Science itself is the driver here and this is independent of Capitalism. 

The second thing is how did they get into "extreme poverty." Have humans always lived in "extreme poverty?" How can a species have evolved to be so miserable all the time? Species evolve to match their environment. How could humans be so poorly adapted? A worm is "happy" being a worm, and human should be "happy" being a human. Something is wrong here.

When you travel into the Outback of Australia or into the jungles of South America and you meet people who have evolved to love there they are happy. I remember reading an account of Afghanistan and the journalist was lamenting that the kids playing happily in the fields would have to grow up to live under the oppression of the Taliban. How strange that kids without XBoxes or iPhones or the latest highstreet fashions or even a full meal of McDonalds and fries could be happy? How odd is that.

Humans evolved to be happy. So something has gone wrong if they are not happy. And if "extreme poverty" means unhappy then something has gone wrong.

Well I suspect and I don't get know the answer for sure but if you look at History the most notable thing about the last 300 years is Capitalism/Imperialism. Imperialism is just overseas Capitalism where investors pay people to take over countries and mobilise their resources for profit. All the countries of the world with the few famous exceptions like Russia, China etc have been colonised and the people forced of the land so that Capitalists can take over industry and secure profits. The result of course was mass poverty. Famous examples of the extremes of poverty that Capitalism caused are the many Bengal Famines the most famous being the Bengal Famines of 1943 where millions of people were left by Churchill to starve to death "they deserve it for breeding like rabbits" Churchill is reported to have said. Such is the real nature of Imperialism and Capitalism.

So it seems to me that the "poverty" people are being brought out of is actually the fault of Capitalism itself. Trickle Down Economics if you like. The global Capitalists are so unbelievably wealthy today that even the crumbs that fall off the table are enough to bring the world out of poverty.

Now one interesting country is China that has not been colonised. Extreme Poverty in China has fallen from 88% in 1981 to 0.7% in 2015 (as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms). Certainly the Capitalist economics of the last 40 years has put money in people's pockets.

But this appears to conflict with other issues. I heard from a farmer who travelled regularly to China on business that the spread of Capitalism and intensive monoculture was destroying traditional farming techniques. The problem is that while yields on these farms are huge, to be profitable they only cultivate certain soils. And putting traditional farmers out of business the huge areas that were once cultivated are now falling into disuse. He thought that the overall food production had fallen, but worse instead of cultivating perhaps 100s of different plants the majority of plants in Chinese farms are now cash crop monocultures and extremely vulnerable to disease. It may be that there is more money, but on the plate how has Chinese food benefitted?

#TODO discover the actual on the ground changes that Chinese have seen rather than buying power.

The other thing to consider is these changes in the context of China. Like Russia it was a feudal system before the Communist Revolution and people lived in farms controlled by aristocrats. England was like this after the Norman Conquest if 1066 and it took centuries for England to emerge as a "modern" nation. China's evolution into a "modern" nation is still in its infancy and I'm wondering whether assuming it is just "catching up with England" is a realistic idea. How do we know whether the Industrialisation of China in the last 40 years is really "Capitalism" or is it just the use of more machines. #TODO

The other thing to look and the most important thing, is Happiness Studies. "Money cannot buy happiness" so dollars in your pocket may be of no use if you just spend them on drugs like much of the US. Is China actually better off for having more dollars? #TODO

I'm assuming here that "extreme poverty" is a meaningful measure. Many monastics chose to live in what is extreme poverty because they recognise that this is the way to true happiness. Its a complex equation.

Anyway there are many reasons to doubt that Capitalism actually makes people any better off.

And unless Capitalism can be proven to be essential to human welfare (which obviously it isn't cos humans lived without before) then its damage to the environment is the most important thing about Capitalism.

There is then the argument that Capitalism is actually bad for people and those extra dollars in the pocket have a personal cost attached to them that is not worth it.

===

From a biological perspective the ultimate measure of a countries economic and welfare status is the fertility and population. A country of famines and hardship is not a country able to grow in population. People are hungry and infant mortality is high.

It requires explaining then how the Communist Revolution in 1949 in China led to a very sudden increase in population. Much is said about famines and the failures of Communism but the complete opposite seems to be the case. People had more food and welfare and were clearly able to breed better.

===

 

Until the Eco debate shifts to Capitalism the planet and life is doomed

Yet another environmental program with not a single mention of Capitalism

BBCs latest Frozen Planet 2 while absolutely excellent how can it benefit the planet without mentioning Capitalism.

At the end of the last program there is a call for people to "do" something. But what?

Well there was a single paragraph on cutting down our consumption and choosing renewable and sustainable means of living. If we do this then problem solved it seems.

Except what actually was the problem we were trying to solve?

Why for example is the Environmental Crisis occurring in the 21st Century and not the 8th Century? And why are undeveloped countries not experiencing an Environmental Crisis? It is only the Developing Countries?

Well an initial look blames population:

There we go this is the problem. Human population remains below 1 billion for all human history until 1900 when it explodes.

So if the problem is population then stop breeding. I for example have no children. There we go simple. One child policy. Simple.

Does the BBC say this?

No.

Why?

Perhaps we don't think the environmental crisis is worth making such a great sacrifice. If you ask people to limit their family size you will lose their interest. Small steps perhaps.

But actually it doesn't matter cos this is not the problem. Take Iran. If US uses 8 ha / capita and the global average is 3.18 ha / capita note that the Iranians only use 0.1 ha / capita. And this does not make them any less happy. When speaking to people who have travelled widely the one country that stands out is Iran. Everyone I have ever met who has visited Iran says it is the best country they have visited. 

This blog is called "The Joy of Poverty" because everything in Western Thought from Plato onwards is wrong and skews the truth about Life. You cannot understand Life if you look at material things, private gain and Capital with a naïve eye. Anyway that is an aside. The point is that the BBC and the campaign for the Planet and the Ecological activists are not being given a platform to voice the actual problem.

If we all lived like Iranians then the planet would use only 3% of its current resources. 

POPULATION IS NOT THE PROBLEM.

CONSUMPTION IS THE PROBLEM.

So finally we are moving toward the actual problem.

Why do we consumer so much in the West (US 8ha/capita) compared to Iran (0.1ha/capita)? That means to get through the day an American uses 80x the resources of an Iranian. Why is this?

Well first look is that Americans are richer and happier than Iranians and its down to the Iranian government to be removed so that Iranians can become rich and live like Americans.

Now this is a very complex statement. We need only look at the attitudes of Imperialism and the idea that the natives of undeveloped countries will benefit from being controlled and exploited by modern super powers.

There is obvious some truth to this. As Monty Python jokes the Romans brought roads.

But its actually a very naïve view that fails to understand anything about life at all.

A simple thought experiment shows the fallacy. If the British Invading India made the Indians happier then who is going to invade the British to make them happier?

The answer interestingly is the British themselves. Scientific innovation means that each generation enjoys greater richest than the last. This suggests we are happier than our parents, but it means our children will be happier than us. And so ad infinitum. No one then is ever very happy then. Compared to people in 1000 years time we are actually living in poverty! Yet we are happy today so it seems poverty is not a bad thing! This leads to the great realisation: 

Wealth is Relative

If you want to feel rich then just go and live with poor people. You don't need to accumulate anything. and if you want to feel poor just go and live with rich people. Or to really blow you mind realise you are both rich and poor at the same time! Its all just down to how you reference yourself. Wealth is a purely a mental process it has nothing to do with material reality.

OK much written in this blog about all this so won't take it any further. But this is the starting essence of this blog. Wealth lies in the mind so get to know and master your mind. This is the greatest joy.

So actually no reason for the Iranians to be unhappy at all. If they have an understanding of their minds then they are happy. And that seems to be the way it is. And no reason for the Americans to be happy, its just down to whether they understand their minds.

Now the pattern here is that people involved in more material production and with a greater focus on material wealth have less time for their minds. And this is the Paradox of Capitalism. Much work is being done to dismiss this by the zealots of capitalism who have a fundamental naivete about  existence, but everything points to happiness and unhappiness being in the mind and so Capitalism actually wastes people's time and is more likely to lead them to unhappiness. Which is what the evidence shows most famously the Easterlin Paradox.

But it not only wastes their time, but it wastes the Planet also. The damage that Capitalism does to us is mirrored in the damage it does to everything else. And this is the primary cause of the Climate and Ecological Crisis.

So I jumped there from material existence naivete to Capitalism. Just unpack that.

Summary of Capitalism

So Capitalism is the system of economics that revolves around the principle of Private Capital. An individual can own things, and Capitalist economics is built around this as its unit.

Ownership can change hands by many means e.g. gifts but the primary one in Capitalism is Exchange. This can be barter where we swap items of ownership, or it can use an intermediary as a currency of exchange. This is commonly called money. Many arguments about what is the best money for example the new crypto currencies.

A Market is the system of free exchange. And this is where Adam Smith's contribution comes in.

In a market where the agents are free to trade (exchange) entirely based upon their own wishes then you will get the optimum exchange. 

I have played with computer models and indeed this seems to be true. A free market is an optimal algorithm for exchange.

The reason it is so good is that it matches supply and demand. If demand increases then prices increase and so wages increase and there is more incentive for people to work. If over-supply occurs then prices fall and while volumes may increase initially eventually with continued over-supply the returns starts to dwindle, wages fall and people reskill and work elsewhere.

Its a simple algorithm too. Each person only needs to know what they want.

It became known as the Invisible Hand.

So what is wrong with that?

A superficial glance shows one problem. What if the objects of trade are human beings? Capitalism naturally leads to a trade in humans. If the price of human beings falls below the work that they can do, then its worth while buying that human being and selling their work to make a profit. Governments have stepped in to ban slavery. And this reveals the first problem. Capitalism depends upon Government and Law. Adam Smith makes this very clear: a free market is also a legal market. People must be free to express their wishes without coercion or fear. The very idea of ownership if one thinks about it is a legal issue. If people start stealing, or a mafia starts to threaten people then the pricing in the system breaks down. A free market requires a strong government. A lot of people forget this. Capitalism implies Government.

And if we need a government in order to create the Laws that underpin Capitalism then Capitalism is not the arbiter of Truth. It is Government. Capitalism is like a computer program or function that Government uses to find the price of things. But as seen with slavery that price can be invalid.

Quickly the question of the Climate Crisis can be seen to be a government issue not a market issue. Markets needs to be controlled when they start to do damage. This is all written into Capitalism.

Take the example of over hunting. Its actually quite complex. Markets can help endangered animals or they can destroy them. I knew someone who worked in this. I forget the details but some ivory markets were sustainable through free market while the particular features of the Rhino Horn market meant that it was in the interests of poachers to kill all the rhinos and drive the price skywards.

Free markets do not guarantee welfare. And so all markets need government monitoring.

But there is a second much bigger problem. Capitalism entails Returns on Investment. If you own something you can Rent it to someone who either only wants it temporarily or who can't afford it for a fee. There are 2 problems with this.

In the latter case you have the wealthy exploiting the poor rather than helping. The wealthy can exploit the needs of the needy for personal gain. This is exploitation that lies at the heart of Capitalism and Imperialism. But far worse you create a demand for profit itself rather than the commodity and this is the real precise reason for the Ecological Catastrophe.

Consider housing. Its in the interests of the rich to buy up all the housing so raising the price, and thus making lots of poorer people homeless. The homeless must then rent housing from the rich, passing on their hard earned money to the rich in an endless stream of income from poor to rich. This is the fundamental core of the capitalist system, and I presume why it is so supported and protected by the global rich.

Obviously the rental market must return at least maintenance costs to the owners for them to rent, and very likely a profit. And once there is a profit to be made from rent then the wealthy will make the situation worse for the poor and better for the rich through new demand for buying housing. In the UK we have exactly the problem now. Few people in the UK can afford to buy a house! That is a basic requirement, and people in the UK now live in greater poverty than any of their ancestors. Even people in the most traditionally poor countries have always had their own place to live.

So once people can get a profit from renting things then there is a demand for those things that goes beyond the underlying desire for the commodity.

I may have no need for wheat. I am fully fed. But if the price of wheat is rising then I may buy wheat not to eat, but because I see future profits. People doing this gives wheat a price and demand that is not intrinsic.

Now there are fundamentals. At the end of the day wheat needs delivery, and the person who gets delivery of it who cannot make actual use of it loses money. So reality and the planet does have some role here but profit creates unnatural demands and pressures on the planet. 

But the search for profit leads to all kinds of behaviour that previously did not exist. Food companies will examine their production methods and markets to see how much profit they can extract from them. For these efficiency cuts and product modifications to return profits some thing must give. In some cases it is just inefficiency. But that is indistinguishable from damage to things outside the economy.

So what is outside the economy? Well much of Nature is outside the economy. If you switch to intensive farming you wipe out the ecosystem. This leads to short term gains, but we are waiting to see the long term effects on the global economy of wiping out life on this planet. And a very interesting part of nature is the bodies of the people in the economy. Efficiency Cuts and Product Modifications may increase profits but actually harm people. Look at the current problems being caused by high salt and sugar content in foods. A consumer is going to chose the sweeter or the more salty product without realising that this will eventually cause damage to their body.

Producers say its not our responsibility to make the consumer healthy, we just make food and seek profit for our share holders (there is the profit taking over the show). And the consumer says I don't know the details of what the producer is doing, I'm no food expert I assume they only sell food that is good for me.

Governments once again have to step in to manage Capitalism markets to make sure the demand for profit does not harm people.

Another classic example in the Health Care system. The demand for profit leads to Pharmaceutical Companies trying to sell as many medicines as possible without regard for whether they actually do any good. The contribution of Oxycontin to the epidemic of drug abuse in the West is a high profile example of this. Consumers have little medical knowledge and rely upon the industry, which in turn wipes its hands of all responsibility as it it only concerned in profits for its investors.

As can be seen the demand for Profit by Capitalist investors begins to distort markets to ignore welfare both in people and the environment. When Adam Smith says that Free-Market only works in a legal system this needs to be taken extremely seriously as the demand for Profit is always pushing markets toward the illegal.

Harm of customers, the environment and any living things should be illegal. And  huge compensation payments should be flowing through the global economy to compensate people not to damage each other and the world.

But the problem we face is the governments around the world are funded by the wealthy and their concerns are necessarily on profits to maintain and grow that wealth. True they may become Philanthropists like the Victorian Capitalists but the condition for wealth is being a Capitalist and so the bias in the rich is always for profit and exploitation. And so governments around the world are beholden to the Capitalist lobby groups that place growth of their portfolio above all other things even the welfare of people and planet.

And all this is summed up by the government's continual doctrine of Economic Growth. Its obvious why. Capitalists looking to grow their portfolio and wealth find the government and easy target to lobby and force economic growth. This leaves the government in the absurd position of both needing to grow the economy to keep Capitalists happy, and also ask us to cut down on resource use like the BBC and David Attenborough in Frozen Planet 2. It is a clear insanity caused by governments trying to meet the demands of out of control Capitalists and more the serious concerns of welfare to people and planet.

Any system built upon profit is biased towards exploitation.

Another thread here is the trap people are caught in with Capitalism. To live its not good enough to go and hunt, or farm a plot of land: all that is owned by Capitalists in a capitalist economy. We need either go to the Capitalists and ask for a job, or we need become a Capitalist our self. It's a self recruiting system. But as there is no other way to live we are forced to take part in the very system of growth and exploitation that the BBC is asking us to somehow reduce our involvement with.

How can you have Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in a system being forced to Grow? How can you have a Capitalist economy that reduces it ecological foot print while also seeking increasing profits and growth?

So Adam Smith's beautiful argument breaks down. When money starts to fund the very governments that create the Laws that are supposed to maintain the Free-Market and people are driven by profits rather than actual desire for the commodity you have a breakdown in the system.

As a result Capitalism is a liability both to mankind and the planet skewing the natural order of things.

Given that Capitalism depends on government it is fundamental to reverse the focus on Capitalism and the wealthy and return to all powerful governments again who have full uncompromised power to curtail the activity of markets.

Unfortunately this sounds like Socialism. And billions have been spent by the wealthy to demonise Socialism as it is a direct threat to the wealth of the rich. Indeed not just billions in propaganda but centuries of wars across the planet against regimes that reject Capitalism. And it must not be forgotten that Capitalism and Imperialism are the same. The very reason for the West to travel and subdue the World was funded by Capitalists looking for new markets and profits. The very start of the Western Empires was the then very lucrative Spice Trade that the West wished to control it for their investors.

So we are full cycle back to the top. The actual reason that the West wants to take over countries like Iran is not because they are poor and in need of development, but so that Western Investors can have unlimited access to that nation's resources. This indeed is the history of Iran with the West backing the Shah in return for control of the nation's oil. See Coup 53 for details on how the CIA and MI6 covertly fought to control Iran. The Iranian Revolution, like revolutions around the world most famously Vietnam, was the Iranian people kicking out the West so they could take ownership of their own resources.

So the myths of the West and Capitalism are very self serving. Iran does not need to accept the West, and it doesn't need to modernise or develop its economy. All governments must remain supreme to free markets, and whether they use the free-market algorithm is very much a political decision. What it must not be is an enforced decision so that the West can expand its own out of control markets and capitalists into other regions of the world.

And underpinning all this is the damage to the planet that the West's out of control economies have caused. It is not the rest of the world that needs revolution but the West. People need to vote for strong governments that will take control of markets and put them back into legal control along with the out of control international capitalists the now fund and distort governments.

So the Environmental Crisis all points to Capitalism and Imperialism. But the BBC does not say this.

Perhaps it is because people are not ready to live in a non-capitalist world where they are not obsessed with shopping and working and will need to think of more honest ways to spend our time. What will we--once forced into working almost our whole lives--do with the time once growth and capitalism is controlled again by government.

But probably the bigger problem is that if the BBC stood up to the Capitalists then the rich would simply petition government to close the BBC down.

Indeed all media outlets are either owned or at least controlled by Capitalists. It means that the real reasons for the environmental catastrophe will never make it into the press. And here lies the real problem for the planet.

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So how do you fix the Environmental Crisis?

(1) End Growth and manage economic deflation and contraction.
(2) Universal Credit to end the need to work. Once people don't need to work they won't apply this pressure to the environment. There are machines enough to do most of the work for us already.
(3) Government switch focus to the spiritual and mental sides of life. More focus on happiness, peace, love and satisfaction. Less focus on work, material gain, sex and struggle. Learn how to Enjoy Poverty.

Its an interesting reflection that for 7 hours over the last 7 weeks much of the UK has been sitting peacefully, doing nothing but enjoying the spectacle of nature. The only pressure on the environment has been the materials to make their TVs and the energy to run the TVs. And the minor energy to move camera crew to sites around the world and to power the editing suits and broadcast platforms. Obviously a bit more complex as a share of infrastructure needs to be added to the calculation. But the very act of learning about the crisis facing the frozen parts of the world did a lot to save the planet. This is a vision of the future. People learning and caring for the world instead of shopping and working on products that are mostly causes of unhappiness.

The problem is actually easy to fix we need only look at Iran and emulate how they live to see many people are actually already living the answer right now. But unfortunately our governments are controlled by Capitalists whose only concern is growth and profit and who are eyeing Iran as a source of profits and so want to transform that country to be like the West. Not only are the Capitalists the problem but their greed and aggression causes all the places that are good for the planet to fall and become bad for the planet themselves (also called Imperialism).

This is the real problem.