Things We Desire
2GreenEnergy mega-supporter Cameron Atwood sent me this fabulous set of suggestions on how to conduct oneself so as to optimize our chances for a happy and harmonious life.
It’s hard to read this and not examine one’s life with an eye towards an improved demeanor.
Moreover, it’s impossible to read this without thinking of the MAGA crowd and their leader, and consider how miserable their lives must be.
Jefferson observed that there is always polarity in any free society between those who trust in and strive for the people as a whole, and those who instead trust in and strive for a leader in whom they invest their faith.
We may choose to recall Italy and Germany early in the last century, but Charles Edward Coughlin’s America of that same time, and soon of Senator Joe McCarthy, remain lesser known yet perhaps more cogent examples for us today.
When average people feel their way of life is under threat, whether fearing otherness, or poverty, or justice, they don’t tend to think more deeply about things, and less noble instincts tend more to dominate.
Larger and less immediate threats – climate disruption, ethical awakening and decay, deepening economic injustice and ecological unsustainability, domestic and geopolitical instability, and War, and all sorts of things that involve exponential change – all become more difficult to grasp and to discuss with reason. For far too many, it appears simpler and more advantageous to trust in a leader who appears to share one’s views and interests.
This fact has often become a useful tool of manipulation in the hands of the elite, who in many societies have often found that fascism and capitalism are more compatible than capitalism and democracy, (the latter pair being diametrically opposed).
We might recall an observation attributed to the ancient historian and philosopher Plutarch, that the most fatal ailment in societies is an imbalance between rich and poor – and that also of Socrates, that all wars are fought for money… And then of the last century’s futurist Buckminster Fuller, who’d observed that we then already possessed the technology and the resources to ensure a free and happy life for all humans, but for greed and entrenched interests.
Want improvement? End bribery. Job one.