A sadness that fills the sky. Any half decent governance of this planet could make a paradise of it in a generation.
But the minds are so confused and contaminated that the material resources cannot be organised. We lost insight and cohesion.
To fix it we need to tell the truth
My @Mattereum seeks to burn a clean spot, to make an easily accessible kind of knowing that can pierce the veil of lies and provide the strong assurances people need.
Ok, we start small. Precious things, things people own for fun. Practice. Build systems, technology, expertise.
On a planet this corrupt and deceiving, the truth is a deadly weapon. Gandhi's Satyagraha needed immense application of non-violence to be stable. The alternative was war.
We are now deep into the hysteria about climate change. Intelligent people are beginning to panic. Be not afraid. I was here 25 years ago when @peaksurfer woke me up in 1995 and told me this was my problem.
Long path since then. A great one
You need a steady hand to accept that we have all become monsters.
Careful with that. It hits so hard it changes lives. And yet this is the world we live in: ecocide and greed to support a lifestyle which makes nobody happy.
I've met the rich. They are bloody miserable. I've never met a happy one. Middle class, sometimes, but the truly rich are alone in ways we cannot really imagine.
NOBODY IS WINNING THIS GAME.
Think about that. Even the rich, the winners, are losers in this game.
Spiritual issue
How did nine billion people wind up in a lose-lose game?
I tell you why. Something went wrong in our minds. A developmental defect. Different ways in different cultures: militarism in Christianity and Islam. Caste in India. Racism everywhere. The eating of meat at scale. Badmind
Badmind is nuclear weapons. It's the inability to see and act on climate change. It's murder in the name of peace. It's war built on lies.
Badmind can be cured.
Meditation will do it. It'll break you out of the prison this society has made of itself, fractal layers of jailors.
Badmind is the war between oppressed groups for room at the bottom of the pile. It's slaves hating each other and secretly wishing to be masters - I'm looking at you, Social Justice Warrior.
Badmind is priests hidden behind a church which knows exactly what their sins are.
Badmind can be cured. It's a procedure files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_20… here is one version. Buddhism, Hinduism, has others. It all works *if you do it.*
Eventually your goodmind grows strong enough to ask the questions which tear badmind apart by revealing it is all built on giant lies.
Over and over again our revolution fails because one form of badmind simply overcomes another.
Goodmind is hidden and marginalized.
If you want to see this, ask your friends to come with you to feed some homeless people.
Watch the excuses that they make. The utter discomfort.
If you stumble, if you fall, will the people who will not help you feed the homeless help you recover your status?
Badmind plants this fear at the centre of each of us: can we *really* count on anybody? Does anyone truly love us?
Human culture broke somewhere back there, badly.
Once you identify badmind as a developmental defect, you ca. repair the badmind in yourself.
Say badmind is the place where you lie about the impact your actions have on others.
It probably starts with hunting. Evolved to harm animals to eat, can't let empathy become starvation
If you practice, if you work really hard, you can start to see where you hurt people. You can start to say "I am harming this one just by existing." You become aware of systemic badmind.
Why do these people starve?
I don't mind the rich being rich, after the poor have been fed.
But this sense that things have to be this way, that the order of the world is in some way just or natural? 100% purest badmind, concentrated essence.
They don't have to be this way. The physical resources are all here. There is literally no need for any of this suffering now.
The inability to organise our material resources to create general welfare is badmind. Don't tell me about capitalism vs communism, neither one works. What happiness exists is largely accidental.
Rather than being, say, an explicit goal.
Goodmind has goals. Badmind just reacts.
"Explain to me why these people are living in cages?" is a simple test.
"We do not know how else to stop them hurting other people" is maybe the only acceptable answer. All the other answers are badmind: "illegal immigrants" or whatever.
Maybe send people home. No cages please.
My friend @iwelsh talks about this as *cruelty*. He's got a comprehensive theory. I think it's good.
I think whatever it is, evolutionary defect or viral memes, the important thing is that it is in invariably cured by doing lots of meditation
Very few serious meditators are ill
I used to say "meditation is social action" before I seriously involved myself in business affairs. I'm now convinced 100% that having a lot more people meditating is a thing we should all want.
Badmind is unforgiving. It's a subset of avidya or dukkha. It's a specific cultural evolved blindspot into which our culture has fallen.
Meditation will let you see into your blindspot and eliminate the needless suffering you cause by being blind to the suffering you cause
Easy
I don't know how else to address badmind. It's just everywhere, and all social improvement programs seem to fall prey to it in much the same ways. Including religion.
Meditation builds goodmind and slowly eliminates badmind. This is not the same as enlightenment. Much more basic
Becoming beneficent takes work. Freeing your nature from cruelty takes work. Stopping enjoying suffering takes work.
Not enough of us are doing the work of repairing our minds. Wherever badmind comes from, know that it is curable.
Many have done so. Not enough. Why not you?
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Pathological risk blindness will be the end of us.
* covid is mass-crippling people
* H5N1 has irrevocably contaminated the US food system
* climate change is "entering a new phase" as Nature stops absorbing our carbon output, accelerating warming
* is AI waking up?
now what?
At some point either we have a series of miraculous escapes or we get *completely* walloped.
Let me give you an example: AIDS in America.
In 1985 we understood HIV caused AIDS, and had an HIV blood test.
In 1985 10k Americans are infected.
700,000 more go on to die.
Why 70x?
Answer's pretty simple: the government doesn't mandate HIV testing.
Culture doesn't shift to do enough HIV testing.
700,000 more people go on to die. 1.2 million Americans are currently infected. Any Pharma disruption and they'll die at 1980s rates.
1) D&D's "murderhobo" problem has always been there: it's baked into the game's DNA and indeed much of the source material.
2) But _everybody on earth_ is human by D&D standards. Nobody has _ever_ said "Germans are dark elves" or whatever. It's never been a vehicle for racism.
The real problem here is trying to fix the "murderehobo" set up with "woke."
The D&D set up is that these critters are absolutely inhuman monsters who will wipe out the human race: it's a zero-sum them-or-us situation. Real humans have only been that way in genocides & frontiers
So I *think* I'm relatively politically sophisticated –– worked with/for a couple of very senior defense bureaucrats, lifelong cypherpunk, watched 90s crypto and 2000s crypto get nuked by the Feds etc.
I have some thoughts on this, but they're a wee bit subtle. It'll need detail
FOSS software went through a similar political hell period: "Free as in beer" ripped off the development methodology of "Free as in Freedom" and stripped the value out of the Free Software ecosystem replacing it with Open Source.
Yes, "Free" and "Open" were at war.
"Crypto" now
So this lays out some of the Free Software vs. Open Source debate.
Note: "human rights" based reasoning from the Free side, and "pragmatism" from the Open side. In practice neither side won: Google ate both of them, nobody got paid, the system is fragile. web.archive.org/web/2004021319…