I don't read books one at a time. I read several books at once. I let these books have a conevrsation. What does this have to say to that? The books are normally not too similar, because that would be boring. I enjoy seeing the connections between books a little further a field.
What does Sudhir Venkatesh's "Gang Leader for a Day" have to say to A.J. Jacobs' "My Year of Living Biblically"? Quite a lot actually.
What does "Man's Search for Meaning" have to say that can enlighten "The Long Emergency"? More than you might think.
Currently I am reading "You are Now Less Dumb" and "The Five Stages of Collapse", and the result is enlightening. Reading a book about common errors in thinking and common methods of self deception while also reading a book that essentially points out that the modern international economy is a Ponzi scheme, allowed me to gain insight into the questions "How did we let this happen? And why is nobody sounding the alarm?"
The domesticated human is afraid of death and more precisely- afraid of decomposition. Dead human bodies are sealed in boxes before they are allowed to enter the earth, safe now from every remixing with the land that birthed and sustained them, safe now from ever returning and being part of the next cycle of life. The domesticated human removes themselves from the landscape, from the eco-system. They take food, they take air and they take in minerals and nutrients, but never return them- as is the bargain life makes with itself.
The domesticated human is a thief and a parasite. The domesticated humans takes and takes and does not give back. So the question arises- why not?
The domesticated human is afraid to die, afraid to rot, afraid to give back, afraid to return. Do they fear retribution, angry vengeance from the rest of the earthy community if they allow their body and perhaps their spirit to rejoin the earth from which it was composed?
Every day you will see or hear or think of clever new ideas, and work-arounds and short cuts and innovations. And every day you will likely abandon them for fear of what the neighbors or the family or your coworkers will think. You can hear the whispers and the lectures before they begin.
And so you do nothing.
William Kamkwamba built a windmill from scrap and scavenged material using engineering manuals written not in his native language. His neighbors thought he was crazy, or hiding in the junk yard to smoke marijuana. When it worked, and he was able to light light bulbs and charge cell phones people were impressed, until the rains were late and people began accusing him of using witchcraft to steal the wind. William's windmill can irrigate his family's fields even if the rains don't come allowing his family to survive droughts.
The problem is that modern life holds people hostage by deliberately withholding the skillset and knowledge necessary to be self-sufficient, forcing people to ransom their labor and time in exchange for food and shelter.
People are not in a position to negotiate fairly and on equal footing.
People are stuck using majority rule to obtain any decent deals from those who control the use of force.
What is the solution?
People need the ability to walk away from a bad deal, and need the ability to exist without the deal. If you are not allowed to refuse to play, you cannot have agency.
We are setting our children up to be helpless in the face of adversity. We are training our children to be helpless when the economy goes bad, to be helpless when employees screw them over, to be helpless before the banker and the credit card company and the politician.
When a politician lies to our children, how will they cope when we have left them without the critical thinking skills to dissect the double talk?
When times get tough and companies downsize, how will your children manage when they have no job to bring in cash without the abilities to make their way without somebody to pay them?
When an employer bullies them or a spouse abuses them, how will your children defend themselves when you have taught them to always run back to a figure of authority rather than learn how to defend themselves in an appropriate manner?
It's more difficult to talk to a son or a daughter whom you've taught to catch your BS. It's more difficult to punish a son or daughter who doesn't depend upon you for spending money. It's more difficult to abuse or intimidate a son or a daughter whom you've taught to defend themselves from verbal, social, mental or even physical abuse.
We are setting out children up for failure because too many parents are afraid of the leverage that they would lose if they gave their children the real tools of adulthood. These parents are hobbling their children to make the job of parenting less taxing. Don't be those parents.
Every time a parent says "Because I said so." they fail as a parent. Not permanently of course, life is rarely that critical. But every time a parent resorts to authority with no other justification, they harm the development of their child and leave that child a little less able to cope with the ambiguity of adulthood.
We are attempting to rule our children, when we should be teaching them. It is a poor teacher whose students do not surpass them.
If you teach a fact, you are planting a twig. If you teach a skill, you are planting a seed.
They have stolen our glory. I've heard many people comment about how recent generations, typically meaning my generation and the ones that have come after my generation, are less motivated, less mature, somehow failing to live up to their potential like other previous generations (generally the generations of those making the snarky comments). This didn't make sense to me. Our biology hasn't changed in a hundred years, not enough to make a difference.
And therefore if there is a change, then it comes from the environment that we were raised in, culturally and physically and socially etc. In which case, if there is a problem with my generation and the successive generations after me, then it has been foisted upon us by the generations that raised us.
Now this is obviously a facile and shallow argument, and would be akin to arguing original sin. Every generation could blame the previous one all the way back to some lobe finned fish in our distant past.
But there is something interesting here. In the case of my generation and the generations born after me, somebody is actively sabotaging us. In the last century people have figured out how humans tick far better than ever in their history. Following World War Two: The Milgram Experiment showed how to motivate people to do morally reprehensible things they wouldn't normally do. Skinner and his box deconstructed how to training and motivate and shape the behavior of everything from pigeons to people. Marketers figured out how to convince us to buy things we didn't need. And video games took all of this and transformed itself into a hermetically sealed virtual world that would satisfy all of our needs. In the eight years since the Matrix depicted a virtual prison for humanity, huge swathes of humans have willingly chosen precisely those sorts of prisons. And within those prisons, designed by marketers and B.F. Skinner and Stanley Migram's disciples, humanity has diverted huge amounts of resources to virtual efforts and achievements and trials and triumphs that would previously have manifested in the real world.
We must steal the sense of mission and the sense of epic scale. We must steal the sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves. We must steal the sense of contribution and show people how they are contributing to the end of the Ten Thousand years of Darkness.
Willpower is a fungible depletable resource. If we use willpower on one thing, we don't have it for a later thing until we replenish our store of willpower.
Willpower is key to our success in life.
But calling it willpower makes it easy to understand that it is like calories, something we need to replenish and something that we burn.
