“Love one another.” You hear it all the time. But while it’s nice that it’s said, people don’t do it terribly well. It’s a hard thing for them to hold in mind. They can get serious about it from time to time (and again, a good thing), but doing it consistently eludes most everyone.
I think this deserves a moment of our time… if for nothing else than to work through some hypocrisy. Continue reading “Why “Love One Another” Is Easy To Say But Hard To Do”
Recently a friend sent me a snippet of a conversation he saw in an online community. It read, Public school attendance is indoctrination in obedience. That’s a stark statement, but what struck me was not its bluntness, but that it has become common.
Not many decades ago, people dared not say such things, even if they thought them. Now there are probably millions of people who feel free to say this.
The times, they are a-changin’. Continue reading “The Times They Are A-Changin’”
Everything we do changes the world, of course, and I remain a strong advocate for kindness. Nonetheless, we need to face the fact that the children’s book version of “be kind and change the world” hasn’t worked. Wars and crime proceed as they have since the Bronze Age, and long years of promoting “be kind” hasn’t changed that a bit.
And so we need to find out why kindness hasn’t worked beyond the personal and family level. If we don’t, our efforts to cultivate it will be empty dogmas that have no effect in the real world: Our preaching on kindness won’t go much farther than making children behave. Continue reading “Why Kindness Doesn’t Change The World”
People remember Bruce Lee as a fighter or as a movie star. But as it happens, he was also a thoughtful man. Bruce had his gaps and flaws, of course, but he also left behind a lot of useful thoughts. And since so few people know about these ideas, I’ll cover them here. (I never knew Bruce, who died while I was a teenager, but a friend of mine did, and a friend of another friend knew him very well.) Continue reading “The Wisdom of Bruce Lee”
While most people missed it, there was a thriving gold economy in the early 2000s. It was centered around e-gold (a system for trading digital gold) and it involved billions of dollars per year in transactions. It was also a magnificent adventure. Continue reading “The Missing Gold Economy”
I’ve advised people to get and stay out of debt for a long time, but even so, I didn’t fully understand the affects of debt until the Covid time. As the mayhem spread, I struggled to understand the level of compliance with what would have been, at any other time, criminal medical advice.
Certainly compliance was driven by massive applications of fear. And, certainly, it was accompanied by exceptional levels of guilt, as in “You’ll be responsible for killing Grandma!” Still, there was more to it, and that extra piece, I soon enough realized, was debt. Continue reading “Debt And Compliance”
Civilization is produced by us, not by dominance hierarchies with publicity operations.
Rulership survives on human vulnerabilities. Civilization survives on human virtues. No matter how much publicity equates rulership with civilization, they are fundamentally opposed. Continue reading “Civilization Comes From Us”
Everything “normal” in the Western system trains you to be a placeholder: You are expected to attend the schools to which you’re assigned and complete the necessary programs. By doing that, you can attain a nice slot in the big machine. Then you’ll function in that general capacity, probably for many years. This is called success. Continue reading “Being A Placeholder Isn’t Enough”
Humanity is informed as never before; nothing in the historical record compares. This, unfortunately, is not a particularly good thing.
The provision of information, if it is to bless mankind, must have quality control built into it… it must have a feedback mechanism with teeth. Barring that, it can spiral out of control, as, indeed, it has.
Consider that almost everyone in the modern world is flooded with information. Even the poorest people walk around with phones beeping at them a dozen times per day, delivering little packets of it. And for active people the info-delivery is far greater. Even the delivery devices themselves, smart phones, have become status symbols. Continue reading “Information Is Broken”
