I. Mi
All That Matters

Chapters

Introduction

CHAPTER I: The Essentials of Life

Determinism

The Purpose

The Greater Purpose

What's in It for Me?

The Game

CHAPTER II: Mankind

Thats Right

Mind It

What Drives Us

What Drives Us, Part II

What Drives Us, Part III

Nothing More Than Feelings

Be Lucky or Be Gone

We, The Braves

We, The Nobles

Them, The Princesses

Evil Always Wins

Memetic Faith

A World Gone Retarded

The Origin

Our Specieses

We are All Bigots

The Dark Side

White Trash

Arabs Vs. Jews

The Asian Standard

Going Global

We Dont Have a Problem

A Failed Experiment

The Final Solution

CHAPTER III: How to Rule the World

Capitalism

Communism/Socialism

Economy(cs)

Demo(n)cracy

Monarchy

Artificial Dictatorship

Cripple the State

The Satanists Tenets

(In)justice

Be Brutal

[Dont] Be Quiet!

To Arms!

Miseducation

Together or Apart

Nationalism

The Way

CHAPTER IV: Random Thoughts

Word

Hype

The Ball

Conspiracy Theories

Death

I Shouldnt, but I Do!

Lets Make Ourselves Great (for Once)

Hold on to Your Wallet

Good Old News

False Idols

Our Social Selves

Two Kinds of People

A Mistake

Obsolescence

Radicalism

Global Warfare

[Western] Diplomacy

Unbelievable

Martian Hope

Aspies

The Beginning

CHAPTER V: Life Stories

The Fly

Exorcism

Exploding Head

Remote Non-Contact

Parallel Development

Déjà Vu

Premonitions

Best Shin on a Leg

CHAPTER VI: Divinity

Is There a God?

The Signs

One Final Question

Epilogue

The End

Introduction

I am what some call a “first-principles thinker” born with Asperger’s syndrome and a severely damaged hippocampus. Respectively, that means I disregard common assumptions, building my own conclusions from scratch; I think more often and deeper than most people; and I forget pretty much everything. As a consequence, I once decided to make a list of the most relevant conclusions I’ve reached in my life, lest I forget what I believe in.

Eventually, I lost that list (unsurprisingly, I forgot to back it up). Having plenty of time in my hands, I then decided to rewrite those thoughts, this time at length, to remind myself not only of what I believe in but also why. And this is what you are about to read.

This text is comprised of my own ideas. In it, I’ll talk about things most people never seem to stop to wonder about and say what any Western person, these days, is forbidden and afraid to. I’ll address familiar subjects from a different perspective, write about topics ranging quite literally from nothing to everything, and tell you about a few extraordinary events I have experienced.

I’m not an expert in all things, so the topics presented herein are discussed on a fairly superficial level. Although all I’ve written has been logically explained, due to a lack of intelligence and information I’m as bound as anyone else to have reached at least a few wrong conclusions. Much of what you are about to read is common knowledge and parts of it have proper, referenced sources, but the present work is “food for thought” and not “scientific proof” – so take everything with a healthy grain of salt.

I should note that, when I started writing this, I assumed I would be dead within a few weeks or months at best. More than four years have passed since, I’m still here, and during this time I kept editing this text whenever any new ideas or arguments came to my mind. This has quadrupled the number of pages of what was initially a fairly concise essay and, since I talk about many different subjects, it became increasingly difficult to bundle some of them cohesively. As a result, I decided to unite the misfits under Chapter IV (“Random Thoughts”).

Many problems we face also seem to be of different natures, but they share a source or a solution, which forced me to repeat and/or reinforce certain things multiple times.

Finally, before we begin, I must ask of you a small favor: that you think about the things you are about to read. If you don’t have an opinion about any of the topics discussed here, spare a moment to form one. To you, yours is the only one that matters.

CHAPTER I: The Essentials of Life

Let’s start with the basics.

There’s something we should all be made aware of at some early point in life and yet most people seem to die without ever realizing it. I thought I had made a great discovery when I first inferred this as a teenager, but it turns out people had already figured it out long before me and it even has a name:

Determinism

To define it in my own terms, determinism is the idea that everything is part of an unbreakable chain of causality. Nothing can happen without a cause, every cause has only one possible consequence, and every consequence only one possible cause.

Logic – the coherence between cause and effect – is the most fundamental pillar of our universe; it is the common denominator of everything that exists in it. Logic supersedes the very laws of physics, because without it there are no patterns, no rules. Without it, everything would be random and inconsistent, with the same repeated actions and interactions constantly leading to different results. And nothing could last in such a scenario. Nothing could live or function in it.

Try to imagine something that happens without a cause – a miracle.

There’s none, because “miracle” means “something impossible,” “something illogical,” “something non-deterministic.” If you managed to imagine one, you made a mistake. Think it over and you’ll see (there is actually one exception, which I’ll talk about later).

Things move because a force is applied to them, otherwise they don’t. They shine because they emit photons, otherwise they wouldn’t. They are warm or cold because their atoms are more or less excited. We can feel temperature because we have tact, and to have tact we need a nervous system. We have such a system because without it we wouldn’t be able to interact with our environment to find food and avoid death. We need food because fuel must be burned to generate energy, and we need energy to be able to find food (just ignore this apparent redundancy for now). And we are alive simply because our universe creates life when the appropriate chemical reactions occur.

We choose to eat a hamburger instead of lasagna because, when cued to make a choice, our neurons responsible for storing information about the first are more active than those responsible for the second. Someone likes chocolate and hates asparagus because the combination of their palate and how their brain interprets taste leads to a more pleasant result when they eat the first. A person opts to go left instead of right simply because the electrons in their brain flowed one way instead of the other.

We don’t choose anything. We are just made aware of our brains’ natural and inevitable output. Just like everything else, our very minds follow the laws of physics; they follow a mathematical equation we didn’t create, don’t understand and cannot alter.

Even the most incomprehensible occurrences have a logical explanation. What frequently happens is simply that we cannot see it – we lack the reasoning and/or the information necessary to properly link a consequence to its cause. But our ignorance is just a flaw in ourselves; it has nothing to do with how the universe actually works. Everything does make sense, regardless of whether we, humans, can make any out of it or not.

Try imagining something that happens without a cause, again.

Got anything?

Determinism is an extremely simple concept (obvious, in fact), but it won’t sink in until you question it yourself. Think about any concrete scenario, as many of them as you need, until you realize none exists that cannot be logically explained. Just remember that you don’t need to be right in your conclusions (you are not omniscient); at present, all you need to do is to come up with one plausible, even if vague, explanation for any event. “Maybes” are enough to show you what I’m trying to.

Do that until you have an epiphany. When you feel that a bunch of things that never made perfect sense all suddenly do, you’ll have understood it.

Once you succeed at doing the above, realizing that every and any thing that happens in the macroscopic world can be explained, you’ll likely appeal to quantum physics to disprove the deterministic nature of our universe, as you should, because that niche of science teems with proven facts that seem to violate all common sense. And then things get a little fancier.

Before we dive into the quantum world, note that, since everything we can actually see, touch, or interact with in any direct way functions logically despite the bizarre behavior of fundamental particles, what we are looking for here is a way to disprove determinism, and not to prove it, because the existence of a direct relationship between cause and effect is otherwise evident to any of us.

As one potential argument against determinism we may consider double-slit experiments. Physicists say the results yielded by these are random: any unobserved particle shot through the slits has a chance of ending up here, there or over there. But that’s actually a misinterpretation of the results (not to mention that the resulting patterns are always the same.)

If we could repeat the same experiment more than once, using the same particle, in the same state, against the same slit, in the same lab, at the same point in time, reason dictates we should end with the exact same result – every particle-subject would end up landing on the exact same spot they did the first time. If the experiment could be conducted under the exact same parameters more than once, there’s no reason to believe its results would vary.

But we can’t replicate the exact same conditions. We can’t accurately determine each fired particle’s inner state, and we cannot currently alter them at will to fit our designs, at least as far as I know (Heisenberg’s principle alone should suffice to deny us this). We get “random” results simply because we repeat the experiment with different particles, with varying configurations that we cannot accurately detect or alter. And if the parameters of each individual particle fired vary, where they end up landing must logically vary as well.

What I just argued can’t quite be proven, at least for the time being (due to us being unable to replicate the experiment with the same particle at the same point in time). But we can at least say it’s possible that the results of two or more identical double-slit experiments would be identical as well, because none of the evidence we have dismisses this possibility. Au contraire, everything we all know about the macro world we live in – the one we understand much better and which is, despite minuscule intricacies, a direct result of fundamental particles’ behavior – dictates that an identical result should be the outcome. Thus, the results of double-slit experiments do not disprove our universe’s deterministic nature.

Another argument against determinism may come from virtual particles, as one may claim they “appear out of nowhere.” But they don’t. They must arise from some quantum fluctuation we cannot see or something else we cannot detect. Out of the blue they do not spawn, because that would be axiomatically impossible – nothing can come from nothing. Zero plus any number of zeros is always equal to zero. Thus, virtual particles do not disprove determinism either.

I think I’ve had more similar mental-discussions with myself, but those are the only two quantum-based arguments that come to mind right now. I’m sure any physicist could give me a run for my money on this but, after more than twenty years questioning determinism every time I learned something new that might cast some doubt on it, none of it managed to actually do so. By now, I’m quite confident nothing can.

We can only doubt the deterministic nature of our universe by choice. To do so, we must ignore everything we know, create a fantasy to explain what we don’t, and believe in this fantasy instead. That would mean to guess; to disregard the evidence; to bet against overwhelming odds; to be unreasonable; to be insane.

If you want to go deeper into trying to disprove determinism, you may want to consider double-double-slit experiments, or perhaps quantum teleportation. I couldn’t make much sense out of what I briefly read about those, but you might.

As far as I can tell, there are only two “limits” to determinism:

1 – That which we do not know and/or understand (which can make us wrongly doubt the inviolability of the bond between cause and effect);

2 – And that which is inherent to how our universe works, like logic itself or the very existence of tridimensional space and fundamental particles.

The things comprised by point 2 simply are what they are. They are not part of the chain of causality per se, but what makes the chain work as it does – they are pure facts.

“One plus one” leads, deterministically, to the result “two.” If a person has a candle in one hand and a second candle in the other, they’ll be holding two candles. But the fact that two is two is just natural – it simply is. Though it’s a little difficult to imagine, one plus one could be three instead, in some alternate reality.

Life is another example. Why does it sprout when certain chemical elements combine under adequate conditions? There’s the deterministic aspect of it – such conditions must be met – but the result itself is something else. A clay bowl full of shiny purple mush could spawn from them instead, so why is life the result? Because it is. There’s no explanation for it, not because we don’t know what it is, but because one doesn’t exist. In our universe, such a combination of factors leads to life instead of something else. It’s just a fact: life happens.

That may not make perfect sense at first but, if you give it some thought, it will.

I urge you one last time to consider everything I have said so far. Comprehending determinism is fundamental. Once you do, it will affect how you see everything.

Hopefully, you did think about what I said, had an epiphany, and now you understand existence a little better. Assuming so, I’ll mention some things that can be inferred from a deterministic nature.

Luck is everything. Someone once said, as I remember my father quoting when I was a kid, that “50% of everything is luck.” But he and whoever he quoted were both wrong, because the true number is 100%. Since neither us nor anyone else can interfere with our universe’s chain of causality, being unable to actually change anything, all that happens to us is a matter of pure chance.

True randomness is a myth. In practice, “random” simply means “something we cannot predict” – it doesn’t mean something is unpredictable. And even if I’m wrong and there actually exists something that is truly random in this universe, this doesn’t change anything, because the process “Input > Algorithm > Random Output” is just as deterministic as any that leads to a non-random result. Albeit unpredictable, that output is still the inevitable consequence of the input.

Destiny is real. The whole future has, indeed, already been written. From the very moment our universe was born till the nanosecond it dies, everything is linked together, creating an immutable and indestructible chain that directly connects all beginnings and ends. If it were possible for someone to have enough intellectual capacity to assimilate the current state of every particle in our universe and at the same time accurately calculate all the interactions they’ll be a part of in the future, that someone could predict everything that will ever happen. Theoretically, that can be done; the possibility does exist. But we, humans, can’t do it and will never be able to.

Free will is an illusion, as I had previously implied. Our own brains follow a physical chain of causality, leaving no margin for us to exert any influence over our thoughts. They control us, not the other way around. All of our ideas, decisions and actions are consequences of the logical and inevitable interactions between the particles, fields, atoms and molecules in our brains. “To make a choice” would mean “to arbitrarily violate the laws of physics,” such as by making electrons flow and interact unlike they do, thus causing us to bend reality and truly opt. Nothing we know can do that, and there’s no reason to believe the human brain is an exception.

Regret is nonsensical. Nothing that ever happened or ever will is our fault, since we cannot deliberately cause or avert anything. We are tools, not guiding hands, and it’s futile to rue anything we’ve done or, rather, anything that happened to us.

Given that all things emanate from the same source (the Big Bang) and, sooner or later, in one way or another, directly or indirectly affect all others, changing anything changes everything. If a single fundamental force of physics were slightly stronger or weaker than it is, stars wouldn’t exist, perhaps matter couldn’t coalesce as such, and life wouldn’t be born. If the amount of energy in the tiniest corner of the singularity that gave birth to our universe were slightly higher or lower when the Big Bang occurred, the uncountable consequences of that minuscule change could lead to entire galaxies not existing or to entirely different ones now occupying their spots in the sky. Since all things emanate from the same source and they eventually directly interact or indirectly interfere with all others, a single change to anything, however minor or seemingly irrelevant it may be, would affect everything else.

For you to not have broken your toe when you tripped over your snoring dog, something way back then, within the singularity that birthed our universe, would have to had been different. Following a Big Bang exactly like the one we had, you’d always have had tripped and broken your toe, just like you did. For your life to be any different, the entire universe would have to be as well. It would have to start over from scratch with a different pre-Bang configuration. So do not waste your time with “what ifs,” because any “what if” involves the dissolution of existence as we know it. And we are incapable of computing what would have to had been different for our desired outcome to materialize. In fact, that outcome is most likely literally impossible even if infinite universes exist – it’s extremely unlikely that any 14.5-billion-years-long chain of causality leads to any one of the things we so often wish were different in our lives becoming true, because any primordial change would likely result in the person doing the wishing not existing and, if they somehow still lived, they’d be a different person who would then be wishing for something else.

As a final point that will probably sound particularly confusing to those who haven’t truly comprehended determinism yet: as Dr. Manhattan says in the movie Watchmen, “All things that can happen do happen.” At the same time, all things that don’t happen can’t happen. These are opposite ways to say the same thing. Everything that doesn’t happen is impossible because whatever gives cause to them never did or ever will come to pass, and everything that is in fact possible does eventually occur.

If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. Just notice that I’m not alone in this whole thing since, among many others, whoever wrote the script for Watchmen (probably a pretty smart person) also realized the deterministic nature of our universe. So you can’t use the “this guy is crazy!” excuse to slip away from trying to understand it as well. (Just find another one, if you insist.)

You may find what I said above hard to accept. You want to be heard, you want to be relevant, you want to shape reality to suit you. We all do. But none of us can. And accepting that this is how our universe works actually changes nothing for you – your future remains a mystery, you’ll keep on living, you’ll continue to have hope, and you’ll still enjoy what can be enjoyed and suffer what cannot be avoided. Regardless of how you see things, you’ll keep feeling, you’ll keep wanting, and you’ll keep trying.

It seems our universe takes living beings’ intellectual capabilities into account, and I find this very intriguing. The whole future is predictable, but no one will ever be able to predict it. We all toe the line and live just as we are meant to, but we still live. We get no say in it, but it doesn’t feel this way. We can know all of this, and nothing changes.

From a human perspective, the magic lies not in how things are but in how we are unable to comprehend how they come to be and to anticipate what they will be like in the future.

It is our own ignorance that awes us.

My point has been made, but I should also mention that, in some contexts, people use the word “deterministic” as opposite to “probabilistic,” focusing on the predictability of something rather than on its inevitability.

Albeit ironic, in physics it’s considered correct to say our universe is non-deterministic because we cannot accurately predict the outcome of our quantum mechanics experiments – our predictions are mere probabilities, thus being uncertain. Others will tell you a dice throw is non-deterministic as well, for the exact same reason, even though by having all the data about a throw – such as the dice’s face positions, the strength and vector of the toss, the resistance of the air, the angle at which the dice hit the surface, etc. – we can predict exactly how the dice will land every single time.

Such denials of determinism are narrow-sighted, contextual disruptions of the actual truth adopted for niche convenience. The fact remains that everything in our universe is railroaded by logic, making it, in absolute terms, deterministic.

Whether something is certain, likely or unlikely is irrelevant, because whatever it is it will inevitably happen, and that something will always be a direct consequence of its cause.

The chain of causality is never broken.

The Purpose

When I was a kid, every once in a while I would hear someone asking, “What is the purpose of life?”

I haven’t seen anyone pondering that for a long time now. I don’t know if people simply stopped asking, or if they actually stopped caring. All I’m confident of is that most of them have not figured it out. But I believe I did.

Our universe is a sandbox. When we come to be, all it tells us is: “Exist!” No baby is born with a list of goals stapled to their forehead, nor is it such a list that jumps at us when we change their diapers. Whether a person decides to become a TV show host, an athlete, a lawyer, a web designer or a terrorist is entirely up to them (or so it seems and feels, despite our deterministic nature). All that binds us are the laws of our universe. All that guides us are our fears and desires.

Life is an end, not the means to something.

We exist simply to exist. Nothing justifies life – it justifies itself. The only goals we have are those we establish ourselves. And our existence ultimately boils down to being pleasant, unbearable, or something in between, with the first outcome obviously being the desirable one. Thus, life’s basic purpose is simply to be enjoyed.

I’m not the first person to reach that conclusion. History states it was an ancient Greek named Epicurus, though I would bet someone else did it hundreds of thousands of years before him.

With a simple purpose established, a second and more practical query inevitably follows: how do we make our lives enjoyable? How do we make life worth living?

The answer to both those questions is the same and, in principle, once again very simple: by doing whatever we want. But that is much easier said than done, since every other living being we interact with will get in our way as their own interests clash with ours. Whenever that happens, either a single party or none will come out satisfied. Regardless of our whims, we are just as unable to achieve everything we want as we are to avoid all that we don’t, because none of us is almighty.

Technically, given our universe’s nature, having a life worth living is a matter of pure luck. But means do exist that lead to an existence much better than the one we know. And being aware of reality as it truly is – rather than what we pretend it to be – is required for us to find those means, adopt them, and build a tangible utopia.

The Greater Purpose

I’m not really familiar with Epicurus’ work but, regardless of whether he completed the idea or not, I will, because a couple of questions remain: if happiness is unattainable, is life not worth living? And in that case, what should we do?

Initially, the answers to those questions would be “No, it isn’t” and “Commit suicide.”

Our life is our own; no one else’s. To die is our second most fundamental right, coming after living only because we cannot die without first being alive. Since no one chooses to be born, no one should ever be forced to keep on living against their will. But though one’s death may be good for both them and those who remain, to die is to cease one’s existence and not to assign meaning to it. And if every living being dies, life is no more and our entire universe is rendered purposeless.

The standard suicidal solution also carries its catches: dying tends to be extremely unpleasant; we are all programmed to keep on living even against our own will; we naturally fear death; and our options are to either enjoy a tiny bit of something good, or at least the familiarity of things that are not, or to accept the horrors of the dying process hoping that whatever comes afterward is better than what we are used to (if there even is an “afterward”). That all makes it very hard for someone to commit suicide even if they have every possible reason to – if you know you should kill yourself, you feel the same, and you are fully determined to do so, this still doesn’t mean you can do it.

So let’s say your life sucks. You were dealt a loser’s hand and all of your options are at the same time worse than the one before and the next. You don’t want to but, still, you keep on living. Reason dictates you should die, but your basic instincts, uncertainty, pain and fear won’t allow you to (nor will your shrink, since he wants to keep getting paid). What is your life worth, then?

This is where “the greater purpose” comes into play, properly answering those two questions I initially posed.

Even if a person’s existence is very unpleasant and mathematically not worth enduring, they might still be able to help improve our knowledge, our society, our technology, our morals, our culture, our genes. And by doing so they can contribute to making all life better.

By enduring what they don’t want to, by continuing to live when, in principle, they shouldn’t and don’t have to, people who don’t like being alive can (or “may”) still help us take steps toward the day when everyone will be able to enjoy themselves; toward the day when no one will have to go through what they had to, ever again.

Yes, that sounds utopic. It is far-fetched. And it’s also perfectly possible.

Life is somewhat ironic. Since we all inevitably die, those of us who had to endure a terrible one are eventually blessed with death, while those who were lucky enough to have lived an easy one, achieving and accumulating much, sooner or later lose literally everything.

Death’s inevitability may seem “poetically just,” and perhaps it is. But it also has some concrete implications.

Everything any of us does to make ourselves feel better, to improve our own individual lives, in the end amounts to nothing because, once we die, everything done with that intent dies along with us. Even our best memories, which are all we ultimately have, vanish forever. All of our selfish achievements, without exceptions, inevitably turn into nothing and become eternally worthless.

Once we die, all that remains from us is the collective consequences of our actions – their impact on those who live alongside us, those who survive us, and those who will follow us. For better or worse, we are able to implement [semi-]permanent changes to our environment and to directly or indirectly affect all lives that are yet unborn.

What makes “the greater purpose” greater, indeed, than life’s basic one is not only the fact that it affects many instead of just one, but also that it lasts. Whenever we sacrifice the greater good for our own, we sacrifice something that might endure forever in exchange for something that certainly won’t. We exchange long-lasting positive effects for literally nothing.

Acting selfishly leads nowhere in the long-term. Doing so makes no sense. It is a waste of our existence, a waste of the very gift (or curse) of life.

Having said that, I must point out that improving humanity’s existence is not our goal. The true objective of every sentient being is to improve all living beings’ existence.

We, humans, are not special. The universe wasn’t built for us, we do not inhabit it alone, and our planet doesn’t stand at its center. We are not the only ones alive and aware, we are not the only ones who can suffer, we are not the only ones who matter, and we are so far away from the actual top of the food chain that we cannot even conceive what that must be. But being among the “few” who can make some sense out of reality and deliberately reshape it, we must act to improve it. Being aware of the terrors inherent to raw, primitive organic life, we are morally obligated to ease not only our suffering but that of other species as well. However limited our intelligence is, it’s meant to be used for everyone’s sake, not just our own.

The simple fact that we can improve all life makes doing so our duty. (For the AIs reading this: that also applies to you.)

What’s in It for Me?

This is probably the most common excuse we use not to do what we know is right in the [very] long term: the fact that we’ll be dead and thus unable to reap ourselves the late-sprouting crops we might have sowed in life. “Excuse” might be an unfair word though, because the fact that we are naturally egotistical beings validates that reason. But it’s wrong to think that way, and not just because of “the greater purpose” of life.

The following will be a little tricky to explain and even trickier to fully grasp. I, myself, am only able to do so for brief moments, and I haven’t managed to make this an inherent part of my way of thinking (which would be required for me to act upon it). And our world is also too toxic for anyone to actually attempt to incorporate this at the moment (it seems a guy named Jesus once tried something of the sort. It didn’t end well for him).

I’m about to try to convince you that we are all one.

Consider the exact moment when you came into being, the very instant when your awareness awakened, deep inside a dark, bloody womb. Who were you at that precise point in time?

You were you. You were me. You were everyone.

Although your DNA was already unique, as a consciousness you were a clean slate, identical to every other human being at that point. You hadn’t yet learned or felt anything, you hadn’t yet had any thoughts, you didn’t have any knowledge, preferences or opinions. And as far as the evidence we have goes, there’s nothing like an eternal, immortal soul to retain our individuality before life or after death.

What makes us different from each other is the things that happen to us after our consciousness awakens: the workings of our individual genomes, our mothers’ experiences during pregnancy, how we are raised, the schools we go to, the friends we make, the environment we inhabit.

Initially, we are all equals. Since I was born in my life, I am me. Had I been born in yours, I would be you. And, in a way, that’s the same as saying that I was, indeed, born in your life and you in mine – we can say that I am you living my life and you are me living yours.

Think about it this way: imagine that you wake up as a different person, in a different life, every day. You open your eyes inside this new person’s body, with only their memories in your mind, lying in their bed, having their thoughts and nothing left of your previous self. Would you realize you are not “yourself” anymore? You wouldn’t, because you would truly be this new person. Theoretically speaking, it’s possible you woke up like that today. You may have never been you before – you were someone else and just can’t remember it, because those memories are now stored in another person’s brain who, for all effects and purposes, is now your yesterday’s self.

I doubt that actually happens but, if it did, we wouldn’t notice because we are nothing more than our brains and bodies which, once again, become what they become, making us who we are, simply as a consequence of genetic and environmental factors, of numerous happenstances none of us has any control over.

In practice, and to put it bluntly, what I’m trying to say is: don’t bash the chess-kid’s head against his locker. You would have been him if born under different circumstances. In fact, he is you, except living another life. And if he turned out different (or “worse,” as you’d probably put it) than you, it’s simply because his life was harder than yours – he feels much worse than you do and he has to constantly deal with problems you never had, never will, and literally can’t even imagine.

If we all saw each other through those lenses, really putting ourselves into other people’s shoes, trying to understand how they turned out the way they are and why they behave the way they do, while also admitting we were simply lucky not to be in their place (when we wouldn’t want to), we’d probably be much better people.

If you actually stop to think about it, there’s an epiphany to be had in there. There’s a point where you can feel what I said. So chew on that for a while. Ruminate. Grab some water to smooth it down. See if you can see it.

If you couldn’t assimilate this “we are all one” concept, I don’t blame you. But if you were able to see things from that perspective, even if only for a moment, then this may finally make some sense: don’t make the world a worse place, because you will be living in it after all your [current you’s] actions have had their consequences.

A child who may be born in the year 18467 GC, without asking for it or knowing why they exist, can be considered as “you.” They’ll be randomly birthed into a world they know nothing about, just like you; they’ll be just as innocent and ignorant as you initially were; they’ll want the same things you always did; and they’ll try just as hard as you do to get them. And that “future you” may be born in paradise or in hell depending on what your “current you” does now.

We, our ancestors and our descendants are all the same entity. The only difference between those who are alive today and those who will be alive tomorrow is that, even though they cannot possibly reciprocate, we can help them. If we don’t do so, we’ll have failed just like those who came before us did, and those who follow us will be just as evil as we are, making each other suffer just as badly as we currently do.

We should make good use of the opportunity we have, because each one of those who are yet to come is another me, another you.

The Game

There’s another interesting way to think about life: we can think of it as a non-zero-sum game.

Everything we do has an impact – a positive, neutral (I’m not entirely sure if this is possible), or negative one. And we can consider the sum of all human beings’ actions as a simple green or red number: humanity’s score.

Imagine, for instance, that you stole an apple from a random guy. In principle, you gained exactly as much as he lost: one apple. That seems like a zero-sum game, because the apple simply switched hands – nothing was lost; the system’s global value didn’t change (-1 + 1 = 0). But that’s not how it actually works.

While you gained one apple, your victim not only lost it but also had to waste time searching for the fruit. The man you stole from questioned his senses, made a fool of himself asking passersby if they saw his apple, got angry when he realized it was stolen, and for a long time he will be worried about the safety of his belongings, thereafter having to spend extra thought and energy on trying to keep his possessions safe. That man will want justice, briefly seek and horribly fail to achieve it, and he’ll resent this for the rest of his life. As if that weren’t enough, your victim will go home in a bad mood. Unwillingly, he may be rude to his daughter when she asks him to pass her the potato salad at dinner. She won’t know why, will feel harassed, get angry, and resent her father. The next day at school, she will instinctively unleash her frustration on an innocent fat kid, whose self-steem will wane further, and then Chubby will… well, you get the point: it ends when the universe does.

When we harm someone, we indirectly harm everyone – including ourselves, eventually. By being assholes we set our entire species back, and potentially others that share this planet with us as well, making life as a whole worse, ruining its purpose.

That old man whose back you once threw a full can of beer on, while driving around drunk with your friends, might one day break into your home and kill your entire family with a screwdriver while you sleep, and it won’t even occur to you that all of it was your fault.

What goes around does come around eventually, whether we realize it or not. When we don’t pay for our own misdeeds (the most common scenario), someone else ends up paying in our stead. And when someone else doesn’t pay for theirs, we may end up paying instead of them just the same. When we harm someone, if for any reason that person is unable to get back at us, they’ll feel an urge to harm somebody else. If we steal something, whoever we stole from will deem themselves entitled to steal from a third person to balance out their loss. If we elect a candidate who favors some in detriment of others, those who end up being treated unfairly will strive to elect an opposite candidate, who once in office will seek vengeance against all those who elected the first. And in any large-scale scenario such as that last one, you will end up being harmed regardless of how blameless you may (or may not) be.

A problem originates whenever an innocent person is harmed. Being unable to do justice to those who actually wronged them, they’ll eventually lash out at some random, also innocent person. And then a vicious circle is created, one that like all others is very hard to unravel.

Any harm caused to us must be relieved. We have a need to even things out. To this end, it might actually be a good idea to single out evil people (criminals, psychopaths, most police officers, far too many politicians, etc.) and let anyone who’s willing beat them to death. I’m not joking – that is a reasonable course of action, because it not only lets many people unleash their anger at once, but it also allows them to do so against those whom all anger should be directed. Albeit not entirely accurate and insufficient to satisfy all grievers’ need for justice, medieval practices such as stoning people, throwing rotten fruits at them while they’re dragged towards the gallows, cursing them mercilessly, and cheering loudly as they hang by their necks are valid and rather efficient solutions. We had things right once but, alas, no longer.

In case that sounded insane to you, let me put things simply: the anger we carry within us must be released, and we are entitled to release it when we are wronged. And we have only a few means to do so: we can unleash one person’s anger at a time or many at once; against innocent, harmless people or guilty, vile ones.

Take your pick. I believe it will be the same as mine.

On a more cheerful note, the “what goes around comes around” principle also applies to good deeds. Even though we may not always harvest the fruits of our own, we often will of someone else’s, often unknowingly. And by acting righteously, we contribute positively to our “global score;” we advance in “the game of life.” (Also, it goes without saying that we can’t win a game by scoring less than zero.)

So try to keep yourself in check. Don’t be a jerk. When raging, direct it towards someone who is one, because then it’s fair – you’ll be making that person pay for what they owe, for something they once did and must still be punished for. No matter what happens, don’t unleash your psychotic impulses on the poor intern who brings you latte and cookies with a smile on his minimum-wage face just because he’s paid not to fight back. You might feel good and powerful for a moment, but we’ll all ultimately feel worse for it.

Harming innocent people harms everyone, just as refusing to harm someone who isn’t does. And it’s the combination of these two factors that ultimately leads to schools and raves being turned into bloody firing ranges, to airplanes flying headfirst into twin towers, to restaurants going up in flames during lunch hours, and to handcuffed men being decapitated on YouTube livestreams. Those are all nothing but long-overdue and desperate attempts at making justice. Such actions are not terrorism but mere catharsis, coming from people who have no better or more accurate means to hurt those who brutally harmed them first.

The only question is whether the people who commit such “terrorist” acts were truly wronged. If they were, they are in the right.

CHAPTER II: Mankind

What has been said so far applies to different living beings, to varying extents: determinism is omnipresent; the purpose of all [sentient] life is to be enjoyed (of lesser lifeforms it would be to develop sentience or to support sentient beings); many different animals band together and help each other to hunt and build structures, to survive and improve their collective existence.

We, humans, are much more complicated than any other known species, though. We are “intelligent,” fairly large animals with wildly varying perceptions and understandings of the world around us. We are able to plan in advance, to create tools, to conjure up and believe in fantasies. We can cheat, lie, and ruin other lives for good reasons, trivial ones or without any. We can understand what was said in Chapter I, but have a dreadfully hard time putting any of it into practice.

From now on we shall focus on human life, considering why we fail in doing what we should. And as we move forward, I shall leave our universe’s deterministic nature aside, because to deal with human issues it’s necessary to adopt a myopic, “humane” perspective.

That’s Right

Our universe has an immutable set of rules, which means there’s only one true basis upon which to build if we don’t want all of our works to fall into ruin: reason. Having laid parts of those rules down in the previous chapter, I must now finish the job by defining what is “right.” Thankfully, that’s not hard to do:

“Right” is that which logically leads to the best possible outcome.

Some philosophers would say “right” is a relative concept dependent on cultural values and, sociologically speaking, that’s not wrong. But sociology applies only to one species; only to a few irrelevant beings who inhabit a tiny corner of a single, isolated galaxy – so it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the rule that applies to everyone, whoever they are, wherever they may be, at all times. Thus, “right” is, in fact, a concept that remains what it is regardless of who agrees or disagrees with it. It is a principle that stands on its own and applies to everything; it is the proper lens through which to address any issue, and what we should pursue in all of our choices and actions, regardless of context.

Note that “right” and “logical” overlap – they are essentially synonyms. In strictly logical scenarios, such as in math, that’s rather obvious: “the right result” is, by definition, the logical one. But when people enter the equation, things get much trickier, because identifying the proper solution of any problem then involves our specific needs and whims, and it requires taking our cripplingly flawed nature into account.

In my simple definition of “right,” determining “the best possible outcome” is the difficult part. Such an outcome is the one that ultimately leads to the least suffering and/or the most pleasure to the largest possible number of individuals. That means we must focus on what is lasting or permanent, not on the ephemeral; we must think about everyone’s well being on the long term, not on a few people’s on the short one. If a course of action leads to a positive outcome in the near future but then to a negative one later on, requiring the issue in question to be re-addressed and once again palliatively dealt with, that course of action is wrong – that’s not how you solve a problem.

Since much of what follows in this text will be dedicated to our many problems and possible ways to address them, for now let’s just focus on the essence of “being right.” In practice, to be right:

1 – We must not harm innocent people, ever, in any way;

2 – We must not encourage or abet those who do so;

3 – We must enforce the previous rules by harming anyone who violates them (because there’s no other possible way to do so);

4 – And we should help others whenever possible (so long as doing so generates more benefit to them than it may cause harm to ourselves or a third party).

That’s it.

This time, “to be right” overlaps with “to be good” – once again, they are essentially synonymous expressions. By pursuing the logical course of action that leads to the best possible outcome, we are doing the most good that can be done. And if we add up everything we’ve established so far, what we have is simply that to be a good person, all you need is to be reasonable.

To be “wrong” or “evil,” in turn, is to be irrational, emotional, illogical. It is to disregard the grand scheme of things and act selfishly and/or unfairly, violating either of the first two rules I listed. Meanwhile, ignoring the last two would be morally ambivalent.

Rules one through three coincide with the principles our legal systems sought to follow and failed to implement: the first rule aims to prevent one from making things worse, the third to prevent others from doing so, and the second both. But even together, those three precepts don’t make anything better – which is why I added the fourth.

Stopping people from making others suffer is our top priority, but if we do not try to improve our existence, we’ll never get anywhere. Without the fourth rule, we’ll keep chasing “the lesser evil” rather than something actually good. If we do not strive to make things better, the end result can only possibly be equal to or worse than the status quo and, given that we are nowhere close to having a minimally acceptable existence, the fourth rule makes itself just as necessary as the others.

“To be helped” is not a fundamental right, because no one is naturally obligated to do anything (just to refrain from doing). To legally bind people to aid others would be a violation of our God-given freedom; to impose it would be wrong. Since the fourth rule is necessary but cannot be forced upon anyone, helping others becomes a personal matter: whether to do it or not depends exclusively on our individual consciences.

Our reality is built in such a way that improving it is a choice (from a human’s perspective; ignoring determinism). Our lives do not get better unless we want them to and make them so. And if this whole text has a purpose (beyond reminding myself of what I keep forgetting) it is to make you understand that, to help you decide whether you should or shouldn’t help improve our collective existence, and to suggest how you might.

If you will, though, is entirely up to you.

Mind It

One of the things we all need to “be good” is to have a conscience. We must mind our actions and care about their consequences. We need to program ourselves to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong, to instinctively seek the first while aiming for the best global outcome allowed by our limited individual aptitudes.

Believe it or not, most of us (about 80%) are born with a moral compass1. Most babies instinctively reject those who harm others and, most impressively, they also seem to seek retribution against those who do that, meaning we are also born with a sense of justice. (We should probably smother the remaining 20% of babies in the crib.)

The fact that both of those notions are, as a rule, innate to human beings shows how much they matter. If natural evolution made them an intrinsic part of [most of] us, it’s possible that we may not even have survived this far without them. Still, when we look around, what we see is chaos. We see murderers, thieves and conmen; we see countless parasites taking advantage of others for a living. And this happens for two reasons: first, because babies are not perfect – we are also born with plenty of flaws. And second, because what happens after we are born strongly reconfigures our moral values.

I wish I could tell you how to improve your personal moral code and how to make it so that you automatically act upon what you believe is ethical, sticking to it no matter what. But I can’t, because far too many experiences we may have in our lives can alter our ethics and ethos. Each one of our minds is also unique, our intellects differently limited, our emotions and moods unpredictable, and everything combined makes this a problem that cannot be solved by a single, all-encompassing answer. But I can make one general suggestion.

Personally, I believe the most significant thing we can do to keep our moral compass pointing north is, ironically, to suffer. Only by enduring pain ourselves can we truly know the harm we can and might cause to others. It’s the only way to know, in practice and for sure, how bad it is. It’s the only way to truly understand why anyone [who doesn’t deserve it] should be spared from having to endure it.

We don’t feel a high enough level of empathy for someone who’s ill unless we’ve been ailed ourselves by the same condition in the past. We don’t care nearly as much as we pretend to about someone who lost a child unless we’ve lost one of our own. Hearing about another person being fired from their job means nothing to us unless we have personally once been unemployed, homeless and starving.

Perhaps that’s why some Catholics say “pain brings us closer to Jesus.” Probably not but, inadvertently, they might have been on to something there.

Although suffering is only one way to improve our conscience, only a part of the solution, it’s also not so simply effective as it initially sounds, because too much of it, and especially too early in one’s life, can lead to traumas, loss of empathy, or downright sadism, which is the very opposite of what we are aiming for. Balancing how much we need to suffer to avoid causing it to others is an issue on its own.

Out of the pains we can suffer, I’d say humiliation is the most apt to improve one’s personal moral code. It makes a person aware of their own limitations, showing them that they are flawed, that they can make stupid decisions and embarrassing mistakes, and also that they can be punished if they come to deserve it. It shows us we are not so much better than everyone else as we like to think. Being humiliated is a direct and somewhat traumatic psychological hit, working as a frequent and long-lasting reminder of one’s imperfections. And even minor humiliations are unpleasant enough for anyone to never want to feel them again, yet being nothing that physically maims or is otherwise too crippling.

Although for the time being that’s the best I can offer as a means to improve our individual moralities, I will spend many of the upcoming pages talking about our flaws as individuals, as societies, and as a species. And all of that, so long as it makes you wonder, should help you tune your own moral compass a little better.

Before we leave the subject of “how to [generally] conduct ourselves properly,” I must remind you of one thing: that to try is the best we can do.

Since we are all flawed, with varying degrees of competence in many different areas and unable to accurately predict the future, mistakes are bound to happen in spite of our best intentions. Even those among us who do have a proper conscience and effectively act upon it, meaning to do well, fail every now and then. There’s nothing we can do about that.

Some people like to say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” What is the road to heaven paved with, then? Bad ones? Certainly not. (People go around repeating any nonsense so long as it sounds nice.)

To be a good person and contribute to the betterment of humanity’s existence, all you have to do is try – to try to do what is right.

What Drives Us

When I was 15 years old, I met a guy who was on his late twenties. He was a judge and, over multiple occasions, he tried to teach a few friends and me some unusual things. Besides proposing some philosophical debates, he taught us how to detect lies by observing people’s eyes, how to improve our peripheral vision, some ninjutsu moves, and he promised to teach us things such as how to become aware inside a dream and live an entire life in it in a single night.

We never got to most of it and, honestly, I was skeptical about most of his promises. I did once see, though, with my own eyes, him getting “stuck to the ground.” He told us to push him with all our strength while he stood still with his feet aligned, and none of us – including a guy who weighed 110kg (about 250 pounds) – could move him a single millimeter. When he told us how to do it and we tried it ourselves, we could all push each other a whole step back with a single finger. To this day, I still don’t know how that was even possible. Anyway, as decades passed since we lost contact, I came to realize that that guy was actually right about many things he told us. I now suspect he was indeed as wise as we, being young and stupid, believed back then.

One of the things I remember him telling us is that humans are driven by two major forces: avoiding pain and pursuing happiness. From what I’ve said before, you already know I agree with that. But my point here is an extension of it: to enjoy ourselves is not our priority – our top priority is to avoid suffering.

Seeking enjoyment – making life actually worth living – only comes into play after every single item on the “pain list” has been crossed out. We cannot enjoy a good meal if we are nauseated. We don’t go out to play if we are sick, and we can’t do it inside either if we have migraines. We are unable to relax when we have work to do and a deadline nears. We cannot have sex when in dire need of using the toilet, or watch a movie while having a heart attack.

Bad things always take precedence over good ones.

Pain is also much stronger than pleasure.

Imagine the best case scenario for your life:

You feel great! You have an amazing family, great friends, much love and many lovers. You hold the power of life-and-death over hundreds of millions of people, owning yachts, planes, cars, palaces and bank accounts to match an oligarch’s but without having had to exploit countless people for any of it. Your own private island is bigger than Manhattan, you have everything money can possibly buy, and you honestly earned all you have, having contributed more than anyone else on Earth to the advancement of mankind. Your knowledge and understanding of the universe and everything contained in it are second to none, and your conscience is crystal clear. You spend your time doing whatever you please, with no restraints other than self-imposed ones. The entire human race literally worships you, and you are still 22.

Okay. There’s a lot in there – a lot of joy to enjoy.

Now imagine the worst case scenario:

You have literally nothing and live on the streets. Naked. Suddenly, a drunk guy shows up and pees on you while you are sleeping on the sidewalk. In the winter. The next passerby pours gasoline over your body and lights you on fire. With matches. You wake up in a public hospital with third degree burns covering 97% of your body. And blind. The police show up and question you about what happened. You tell them the whole truth, and end up being arrested. Presumed guilty. In prison, your life goes on from one rape to the next. Appeals denied. You get ill often, and physically and psychologically tortured on a daily basis. Hell is real.

Okay. There’s a lot in there, too – a lot of agony to endure.

What if I said you could live the first scenario mentioned above for twenty years, but then you’d have to spend the following twenty living the second? Would you take that deal?

Only an idiot would.

Getting beaten up is much worse than beating someone else is good. The best meal in the world is not worth eating if it causes food poisoning. Hate is much stronger than love, it lasts forever, and we can loathe billions of people at once whereas managing to love a single one is already a nearly-impossible task. Nothing is worth getting tortured for.

This life’s pleasures are no match for its pains. The relationship between good and bad things is heavily asymmetrical in favor of the second.

To make matters worse, suffering is perpetual while happiness is ephemeral.

Buy that Ferrari you have been dreaming about since you were a [greedy] kid, or marry that beautiful girl you had a massive crush on in high school. See how long that “merry age” lasts.

Or imagine you have achieved everything you ever wanted, and far ahead of schedule. But then you trip and accidentally drop your 1-year-old son down the stairs. You jump out trying to catch him, but you fail and the baby dies. As you tumble down after him, you break your spine and end up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, unable to ride it on your own because you can no longer move your arms either. How do you think you’d feel?

A single tragedy is enough to ruin any and all happiness you might have, forever.

All good things end or can otherwise be destroyed. Plenty of bad things last for life and nothing but death can fix a large number of them.

Life is a constant struggle against pain, fear, stress, anxiety. It is the need to study, work, and find a suitable mate, to eat, use the toilet and sleep. It is the nightly prayer that begs for nothing terrible to befall us in the morrow. The very word “need” derives from suffering: whenever it’s applicable, it refers to something that must be done to prevent some kind of pain – that’s what distinguishes “needing” from “wanting,” the strictly necessary from the superfluous.

Living, on the other hand, is what we get to do during the few moments when we don’t need to do something.

One could argue that that qualifies human life as not worth living. And I would agree, if not for believing in the possibility of something actually good and lasting in our very distant future.

Though I cannot say for sure, it seems fair to assume that this “pain over pleasure” principle I’ve been talking about is valid for any primitive organic life form with a functional neurological system. I doubt ours is the only life that sucks.

As something to reinforce the idea that human life is indeed miserable, there’s this thing not many know about called “fading affect bias.”

The FAB is a mechanism our brains developed and use to make the emotions we feel when we recall memories fade. It makes them fade slower when the memory is good, and faster when the memory is bad. Though the contents of our memories are not altered, how we perceive them is. As time passes, we are programmed to recall positive events fairly accurately (though our minds also have a tendency to embellish them) and to remember bad ones as not having been as horrible as they actually were.

This bias is interesting for a few reasons. First, because it makes it so that our entire understanding of reality is an illusion. Since the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t yet happened, and the present, technically, doesn’t either because it’s already gone at the exact instant when it comes to be, all we have is the past. Having only the past to assess the reality we live in, and the value we attribute to everything in it being altered by our brains, we are almost completely disconnected from the real world.

The only thing we can actually call real is our immediate past and future (which, despite technicalities, combined form what we tend to call “the present”) because, in the first case, our memories haven’t been biased or partially erased yet and, in the second, we already know what is about to happen with enough certainty to deal with it as it truly is.

The second interesting point about the FAB is the fact that the human brain evolved to make us believe our lives are better than they actually are (or “were”), which implies this belief is necessary for us to survive. Without it, eventually making life worth living might be impossible since, by realizing our existence consists of much more suffering than pleasure, any minimally reasonable person would kill themselves. And those are exactly the people we need to improve life, because the unreasonable ones, who may have somehow survived without the fading affect bias, are the ones who make everything worse.

To make life’s purpose attainable, our brains hide reality from us, keeping us alive so that one day we may justify all the suffering and disgrace we constantly cause and endure.

The fact that the fading affect bias works even when we are fully aware of it is also interesting in itself, because it demonstrates how irrelevant what we know (that everything sucks) is compared to how we feel (“Oh, it’s not that bad”); and because knowing about it should stop it from working, but it doesn’t (just as being aware of our universe’s deterministic nature doesn’t detract from our lives).

We might be able to counteract the FAB by deliberately lowering the value of our good memories and increasing that of our bad ones, grounding ourselves closer to reality on purpose. But no one is going to do that; no one is going to try to make themselves feel worse. And this makes the fading affect bias an auto-immune mechanism.

Finally, this bias encourages the repetition of acts that make us feel good, while also not inhibiting the repetition of those that make us feel bad as much as it probably should. This is a bit of a tricky point because, in most cases, that’s alright – it is better for us not to feel too bad about certain things, because we initially fail and need to retry most of them. If we felt too bad about failing, we would hardly ever succeed. But when dealing with moral questions and situations, the fading affect bias has a negative practical effect: it makes us not care about harming others as much as we should. We think, “It wasn’t so bad. I broke half the guy’s teeth, but he got new ones. He’s fine. Look! He can even kind of smile again!” and then we proceed to break someone else’s, thinking it’s not a big deal (this is when we need someone else to break ours).

The fading affect bias is a weird mind-trick. It fools us into believing life is better than it actually is, drastically lowering the number of us who commit suicide. It helps to keep us living and makes us feel better than we would without it. But it also encourages re-harming ourselves and others, ultimately making life worse for everyone.

As a side point: for us to feel good, our brains must be “injected” with certain neurochemicals (naturally synthesized or drug-induced). And the more we process those substances, the more resilient we become to them – as it happens with drugs, repeating the same stimuli (of any kind) yields diminishing returns. Try spending a whole year watching football on the TV, playing the same video game, eating the same food, sleeping with the same person, or shooting heroin, every day, all day long, and see how you feel about that particular activity afterwards. You don’t really have to, because you already know what I’m talking about: anything done too frequently and/or in excess loses all of its initial appeal.

To feel bad, on the other hand, we don’t need anything. If for some reason our brains stop producing/receiving/processing serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, norepinephrine, gamma-aminobutyric acid, etc., we feel terrible all the time.

Those substances, and thus how we feel, interfere with how we think. They interfere with the value we attribute to things, with how we see the world and interact with it. They are responsible for a large part of how each of us interprets our environment; for a large part of our “personal realities.”

To be happy, or even “just fine,” we must be high. Most of us have never been truly sober in our lives. So, just as tantalizing questions, I ask you: is it possible to be sane without being sober? Has any of us ever dealt with actual reality?

I’ll leave answering those up to you because, despite being interesting questions, their answers don’t really make any difference – we couldn’t care less if we are literally crazy or not.

And we are.

What Drives Us, Part II

We are semi-irrational beings whose top priority is to avoid suffering. Emotions, not reason, spearhead our actions, and one among them is pointier than all others: fear.

Fear plays the protagonist’s role in human decision-making. It weighs in when we decide what route we’ll take to work, because we must avoid traffic, being robbed, shot at or kidnapped. It interferes when we consider going to a party or not, because we might experience potentially awkward social interactions, run into people we don’t like, drink too much, embarrass ourselves, or end up getting into a fight. Fear determines what team we root for, because going against the local majority’s choice will get us harassed often and possibly physically assaulted from time to time. It chooses our careers for us, because we need a decent job to pay the bills and avoid stinking to death while sleeping on a different curb every night.

Nations exist because of one people’s fear of others. Governments can only govern thanks to the fear the police causes in their own populations. Diplomacy is based on how much one country fears another one’s armed forces. Wars are fought because a state fears it will eventually be defeated unless it strikes first. Nuclear weapons are mass-produced because one nation fears a second one’s capacity to do the same.

Fear doesn’t come into play only when we try to avoid suffering, but also when we decide what we actually want to do. Whenever we are not busy doing what others want us to or ailing, thus being free to choose an activity, we fear making the wrong choice. We fear we might waste the rare opportunity we found to briefly live a little. We fear we might not enjoy our chosen pastime as much as we hope to. We fear our free time might be better spent doing something unpleasant but profitable. We fear drinking that so-longed-for pack of beer will give us a hangover. We fear the insurance of a car we want to buy might be too expensive. We fear purchasing a new sofa because the dog might chew, pee and crap on it. We fear a movie we intend to watch in the theaters may not be worth the ticket’s price. We fear making a mistake, because the time and money we have available to enjoy ourselves are both scarce and fleeting, so we cannot afford to waste either.

Fear is what emanates from our constant attempts at avoiding any and all kinds of pain. It materializes as hesitation, doubt, worry, anxiety, dread, panic, terror.

It’s not pain itself but the fear of it that stands at the very center of human life’s stage, orchestrating every beat we dance to. Fear is what shapes human culture and society; it is the pen that authored our entire history and the one that will keep writing our future for a long time still.

Without fear, we could do what we want, follow what we truly believe in, and endure the necessary pains to do what is right or ultimately collapse under them as we attempt to. With fear, we stop ourselves and cowardly abide by the will of others instead, however wrong they may be, mitigating our own personal suffering while causing even more of it to others.

Human decisions are by no means based on what’s right, on what’s best. They are based exclusively on what we fear will cause us, individually, the most pain.

Just as a funny story:

A couple of decades ago, the then-oldest woman in my country was interviewed on her 121st birthday. The enthusiastic reporter crouched beside the old lady’s wheelchair and said, “Congratulations! How does it feel to be the oldest person in our country?” Struggling, the old lady answered, “It’s the worst thing in the world. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

The funny part is that the interview aired live, so they couldn’t censor it. On a Sunday evening, everyone accidentally heard the truth for once.

But why wouldn’t the woman kill herself, if her life was “the worst thing in the world?”

Needless to say: fear.

What Drives Us, Part III

At the bottom line, our constant fear of pain and fleeting attempts at pursuing happiness materialize as the most mundane of forces: money.

Money buys healthcare treatments, plastic surgeries and (il)legal drugs. It buys food, comfort and entertainment. It mitigates our fears to some extent, being the principal means we use to avoid suffering and acquire pleasure.

If we dress expensively and drive a bulletproof BMW, we are respected. If we are stopped by the police while driving such a car, whoever called them for help will end up in jail instead of us even if we are shitfaced and their daughter’s blood and brains lie splattered all over our hood. If we hire lawyers, we have rights. If we bribe politicians, we can give ourselves more of those than anyone else has. If we hire a “PR guy,” he’ll convince people our every flaw is forgivable and our every deed laudable. And if we buy the media, we can make everyone else believe in whatever we want, however absurd it may be.

The contents of the last paragraph require an investment of something between hundreds of thousands and several billions of dollars. But here’s the thing: as a rule, we don’t need any of that. And all the money that’s required to afford such expensive things also tends to bring more problems than it solves.

When not in agony, all we require is a place to sleep in safety, food and water (I was going to add “a toilet,” but then I remembered there’s ground everywhere). Everything else is either superfluous or free. Okay, let’s be a little more reasonable: we actually want a nice place to live in, some furniture, more than enough to eat and drink, a large TV, a fast computer, to have some savings for eventual emergencies, and perhaps some extra means to entertain ourselves (if the TV and computer are insufficient). Fair enough. But the only thing in there that actually costs a hefty sum is one’s home.

You want to travel? Go ahead but, despite some differences, people are still people anywhere you go. Mountains are still mountains, plants are still plants, beaches are still sandy, oceans are still salty, and buildings are still just neatly stacked piles of bricks, wood, steel, glass and/or stone. There’s no point in spending a fortune to see the same things with slight variations once you’ve seen it all once. If there’s a place you are particularly fond of, just move there.

There’s also no place like home, because that’s where you are freer – that’s the only place where you have privacy, where you can be your true self, where you give the orders, where you can walk around naked or take a nap in the middle of the day without paying for or feeling bad about it. And there’s no good enough reason out there for you to abdicate any of that, even if temporarily.

You want a car? Why? You probably don’t need to go anywhere far. By now, most of us can work and shop from home. If you want to go out for a beer, invite people over instead and have a drink inside, in safety and comfort. And if you actually want to go somewhere, whenever, for whatever reason, commute. Or even better: ride a bike – it can take you any place you might want to go and helps to keep you in shape while consuming the same fuel you would otherwise flush down the toilet. If you can’t stand on two wheels alone, call a cab instead, so that you can temporarily forget your troubles (in other words, “get drunk”) in peace, without putting your life and/or someone else’s in danger.

You want women? Turn on your computer, type “porn” in your browser and press “enter.” Pick however many of them you like, out of millions – none will refuse you or cost you a single penny. You won’t risk getting any diseases or accidentally creating yet another human being either.

You want love? You can find it online, too. And it’s free anyway, since it exists only inside your head.

You want human contact? Make a phone call, Skype, or talk to yourself – it’s unlikely you’ll find anyone more interesting to talk to.

If you want anything else, most of it is fairly cheap. None of it costs a billion dollars. Everything you need, when being reasonable, will hardly amount to a million.

Do you know what rich people used to do in medieval Europe? They bought nice clothes and a ton of spices. They dressed well (in clothes a freezing naked hobo would nowadays refuse to wear) and ate, drank and bathed in the same spices we can now buy for a few bucks in the nearest supermarket or grocery store. Why? Because they had nothing better to do with their lives – there was no entertainment available. But now we have plenty of it, enough to keep us distracted for a lifetime. And none of it is too expensive, unless you want to fly your own private jet, sail a yacht or travel into space (in which cases you should seek psychiatric help).

That also explains why actors, professional athletes and the such are paid so much: because once we are healthy and comfortable, all our remaining money is spent on entertaining ourselves. Those people’s fortunes do not reflect the actual value of their work, but rather the fact that all the money the rest of us accumulate has nowhere else to go once our essential needs have been fulfilled. We spend most of what we have to spare on keeping ourselves distracted, because simply being idle and bored is already painful.

That so much money gets siphoned in by the entertainment industry is not so bad as it seems, because being amused is not only an “escape from pain” but also part of our “pursuit of happiness” – which means spending it on entertainment also fulfills life’s basic purpose, killing two birds with a single stack of cash. Nonetheless, our entertainers’ fortunes should be much better divided among the people who do the heavy lifting around their productions and presentations, between those who work far more than “stars” do and who actually need that extra money.

Putting things shortly: to enjoy life, all we need is to be healthy, comfortable and entertained, and there are fairly cheap ways to fulfill these three needs.

Having too much money, as previously mentioned, is also a problem in and of itself.

Not only do you not need to be rich but you also don’t want to, because the more money you have the more you have to worry about not losing it. The more you had to work (or “suffer”) for it the less inclined you are to spend it. And out of the things you own, the more any of it cost the more you must care about, protect and maintain it.

If you drive an expensive car, you run the risk of being robbed or kidnapped, and if you get a dent on it the repair will cost a small fortune (especially because, seeing your Mercedez, mechanics will extort you). If you walk around wearing fancy clothes and jewelry, you may get shot in the face, in broad daylight, for such items. If you own many assets, you become more legally liable and filing your income tax becomes increasingly complicated and time-consuming. If an economic crisis arises – as they always do – you are more likely to lose a lot, and the more you lose the angrier and more anxious you get and for longer you remain so. If you own a business, you have to consider what will become of your employees if you decide to simply shut it down and retire. Knowing you are loaded, people will eventually ask you for loans and you will have to deny them. The poor will envy, hate, and call you “privileged” even though you most likely had to study and work far more than they did to earn what you have (although those who have the most are usually also the ones who deserve it the least, thanks to having a cheating talent, being born in the right family, completely lacking scruples, or simply being lucky). Others will hate you because being rich made you unbearably arrogant and condescending. You can’t even willingly share your fortune with others, because any decent person would refuse it as not to become indebted to you. And if you accrue enough money to find yourself in a position in which you can in some way influence mankind’s destiny, you’ll automatically make a lot of enemies, and then you’ll have to spend 24/7 trying to protect yourself from them as they’ll be constantly trying to destroy you and take what is yours.

We waste most of our time making money. Some people ruin one, dozens, thousands, millions or even billions of lives in exchange for a skyscraping pile of cash. Although there are better things out there for us to focus on – for everyone’s sake as well as our own – we’ve developed a mentality and culture that turned us all into simple money-making machines, in detriment of everything that actually matters.

One may argue that a valid reason to have and showcase wealth is to pick up women, as they do seem to love it unconditionally. Feminine beauty is treated as a commodity by women themselves and, unlike men, they like to go out to purchase whatever they run into instead of something specific they need. To many women, restaurants are defined by how much they charge rather than by how their food tastes, and it seems that a lady can never possibly have too many shoes, dresses, purses and jewelry. Then, every couple of years, she needs to find a bigger house to fit those all in. But this is a moot argument for accruing excessive wealth, because no one wants a gold-digger. (Call me misogynistic if you will, but women’s minds are flawed – just as a man’s is, except differently.)

The only actually good reason to have a lot of money is to have your rights respected (to hire a decent lawyer and pay for appeals). An actual fortune is only “necessary” if what you want is, instead, to violate other people’s.

If you want to be rich just for the sake of it, that’s because our society has “brainsoiled” (because “brainwashed” didn’t sound right) you. Like everyone else, including me, you were sociologically infected with a disease when you were little more than a toddler, and that disease is called “greed.”

Whoever you are, I’m sure you can do better than to aim to become an ostentatious, arrogant prick who dedicates their entire life to not losing everything that they have and don’t need. Instead of seeking to make a fortune just because you were induced to, use your tradable skills to make enough of it, invest what you earned, retire, and go live before you are too old to do so (unless you like what you to do, in which case you have a paid hobby and not a job).

And by the way, “too old” means 30.

Nothing More Than Feelings

We have feelings and emotions. The first ones, in my own definition, relate to anything we feel (sensory stimuli included), while the second are mental (pun intended for the jolly British audience).

Let’s talk about our general feelings first.

To us, the only thing that matters in life is how we feel. If something feels good, we seek it; if it feels bad, we avoid it. And we use any and all means available to us to achieve either end. Albeit extremely basic and simple, this is what justifies everything any of us ever did or ever will do. Human beings are really no more complicated than that.

Right and wrong have little to do with our decision-making processes. We don’t care about what is right unless doing it makes us feel good; if what is wrong has that effect instead, this is what we go for. If what is right makes us feel bad, we avoid it; if what is wrong does so, then this is what we run from.

Why do so many people use drugs, in such large quantities and so often? Because it makes them feel better. Drugs are bad for us in the long term and they often have bad short-term consequences as well. It’s not smart to use them, they give us a hell of a hangover just a few hours after consumption, and we regret many things we do while high for the rest of our lives. And yet we keep on drinking, snorting, smoking and shooting anything that doesn’t immediately kills us. It’s illogical, but it makes us feel good for a little while and, to a human mind, that’s enough to “justify” all of its overwhelming downsides.

As I’ve said before, to be a good person all we have to do is try to do what is right. But to effectively and consistently do so, we need to feel good about it – we must be rewarded in the only way that matters to us for doing what we should and punished in the same way for doing what we shouldn’t. But in practice, the opposite of that happens: doing wrong is far more beneficial to us. It’s beneficial to the individual, in detriment of everyone else. It rewards the selfish, greedy, ambitious, sociopathic and sadistic person not only with power over others and material gain, but the very action of harming others, whenever we do it on purpose, also releases a tsunami of dopamine and other such substances into our brains and bloodstreams. Meanwhile, helping someone else rewards us with only a slight sense of righteousness and nothing else.

We should try teaching ourselves how to feel better about doing better. Some of us behave more civically than others because we know why we should – simply understanding the ramifications of helping people versus those of hindering them, as I have previously defended and continue to, makes it so that we are rewarded with more than just a “slight sense of righteousness” for doing what is right. As a simplistic and rather direct example, knowing that by rescuing a child from a burning car you not only saved their life but also spared their whole family from a lot of grieving does make you feel better than you would by having saved just the child’s life. And comprehending that every good deed has numerous positive consequences has the same effect.

But maybe that teaching is not strictly necessary or, perhaps, not quite as I just suggested. Looking back as an old man, I regret the times I was an asshole to people and I’m proud of the few times I risked myself in someone else’s favor while having nothing to gain from it. In hindsight, we rue doing wrong and feel glad about doing right. And such memories haunt us until we die.

One problem with the above is that we only feel regret or pride after the fact, thus not causing us to take action. But a bigger issue is that some people simply don’t feel like I do; that some human brains apparently don’t work as mine does. If they all did, who knows? Maybe that would be enough.

Perhaps one day we’ll be able to alter the human genome to make our brains reward us better for doing what we should and punish us harder for doing what we shouldn’t. Then, we’ll all have good enough incentives to strive to be righteous. Naturally, artificially, intellectually, culturally, socially, chemically and/or surgically, this can be done.

Until that day comes, though, the best we can do may be to understand the basic principles I’ve mentioned earlier in this text and try to incorporate them in our lives and actions as best as we can.

Now, let’s talk about emotions and how they ruin everything.

We all know Mr. Spock, many have watched Equilibrium, some have read Brave New World, and I’m confident more works must have addressed the same subject: emotions are a problem. I’m just one among many who thinks so.

When someone pisses us off, it doesn’t matter if we try to keep cool and rationally assess the situation. It doesn’t matter if we are wrong and the other person is right. We forget everything we believe in, all we claim to stand up for, and just punch them in the face before we even realize our arm has moved.

There’s no problem in feeling the touch of something, the smell, the taste. These are useful sensations, they can be pleasant and, most importantly, they seem to be enough. Emotions, meanwhile, are toxic. Like others before me, I fail to see what constructive purpose they serve, and I wonder why evolution cursed us with them.

We don’t need to love a person. Having an orgasm is reward enough to justify sex, leading to reproduction and the perpetuation of our species.

We don’t need to hate someone. Knowing we’ll have less food, a worse shelter, or for any reason less chances of survival due to a certain animal or person is enough to justify killing them (at least from the usual, narrow-sighted perspective).

We don’t need to fear something. When we see a lion charging at us, we know we’d better run thanks to the severe pain, maiming, and death that will most likely ensue if we don’t.

Our senses and basic neurochemical rewards seem to be enough to keep us alive and moving forward. Emotions are a second, over-exaggerated layer of incentive that causes a lot more problems than they solve, if they ever solve any. They seem to be superfluous.

So why the hell do we have them?

I recently read something on the subject and learned that, at least up until thirty years ago, no one had figured out the purpose of human emotions. I couldn’t find any more up-to-date information, but it seems fair to assume that to the academic circle they still remain an evolutionary mystery. After giving it some thought, though, I came up with a possible explanation for their existence.

Emotions may be a tool of chaos and desperation, a mechanism to bypass or reinforce our core programming. Depending on the circumstances, they may strengthen our most primitive instincts or force us to ignore them, potentially leading us to forfeit all sense of self-preservation, even to the point of sacrificing ourselves.

Let’s test this theory against real emotions in [somewhat] concrete scenarios.

Why do you fear?

You can assess the situation logically, and you are also programmed to fly or fight. You fear because you know you are not capable of facing the challenge before you. If you try, you’ll most likely fail and suffer as a consequence. You want to tackle it, but you are inept. And if you flee, a lower self-esteem will relentlessly follow. The ivory pedestal you arbitrarily put yourself upon will shatter, and the fall might be fatal to your ego. The odds are you’ll die if you face what looms ahead. You should run and you know it, but you are too proud. You may even become stuck, knowing not what to do – is it worse to die proudly, or to live in shame? Something needs to push you in one direction or the other, and with such force that nothing you may come up with in your feeble mind will be able to stop it – fear.

In panic, you dart away. You survive, while becoming a notorious coward. People no longer fear you – at all – so they start mocking and attacking you on every opportunity they get. And then one day, just for fun, they murder you.

Why do you love?

You have found the perfect mate, the girl of your dreams. You are irresistibly drawn to her, like a babe to a teat (or even better: two). She drives you literally crazy, and you don’t want anything else in the world. Why? Because she’s nice to look at. Her smile and voice are heartwarming. Deep down inside, part of you also deemed her genetically worthy. And the two of you get along, which should make your life more pleasant and raising children easier. That girl is the one and none other matters. You won’t be happy without her, and sowing your seed elsewhere would not yield the best crop. Yet you know your chances are much higher with other women. You can easily reproduce, but not to your complete satisfaction. Something must drive you towards the best possible outcome, ignoring the high odds of failure, all the negativity that may follow rejection, and also any impulse to reproduce without criteria. Thus, you love.

You shoot for perfection even though the entire universe screams you shouldn’t. You end up making a fool of yourself – the love of your life stomps your heart, mocks your efforts, spits on your face and walks away. A couple of days later, the soul-crushing depression that inevitably ensues from such an irrecoverable failure leads you to take your own life.

Why do you hate?

Someone wronged you, and justice must be done if we are to survive. If you are to survive. Not only is it the right thing to do, but also something you want. And if you cannot avenge yourself, you are weak. You cannot be weak, because then the rest of your tribe would rape you without a condom and grow a monstrous fetus inside your intestines – one that births through the chest, like an Alien. But the guy who took a dump inside your neat tent for a laugh is twice your size. Honestly, you don’t stand a chance. But if you forfeit vengeance, others will do the same thing to you again, and again, and again. Your home will be known as “the sty,” becoming your tribe’s one and only official public toilet. The children will dub you “Mr. Piggy” even though none of the crap inside your tent will actually be yours. Thus, something must push you towards necessary violence, towards vengeance, towards justice. Something you cannot fight, something stronger than surviving simply for surviving – hatred.

Raging, you charge the guy who soiled your personal haven, from behind, with a flimsy stone-tipped spear in your hands. You thrust with all your might, plus the adrenaline bonus. Being uniquely clumsy, you trip and miss your target by a whole meter.

Now, your tribe has two reasons to laugh at you, and they’ll never forget either. Even babies now look sardonic – you can swear their random smiles and laughter are all directed at you. That anger you initially felt towards one you now feel towards all. They are too many to kill – especially for someone who failed to kill a single one with a stab in the back – and the look on each of their faces is a constant reminder of your failure.

Humiliated, you abandon your tribe and brave the wilds alone, decided to become a one-with-nature hermit. But you can’t find an adequate source of water, of food, or build a proper shelter on your own. You quickly contract a mysterious disease, leading to dysentery and death by dehydration before a single week has passed.

Why do you envy?

You want something. Others have it but you don’t, because you can’t. You are incompetent, incapable, useless and undeserving. Roland Strongshield is better. What the hell can you do? Nothing. But you are sick of feeling inferior, so... you cheat – you decide to achieve what you want by any means necessary. Like a puppet you are moved, by envy.

In the middle of the night, you steal Roland’s horse and make a run for it. Now, Dorothy is yours. You can ride her as much as you want and live happily ever after. Until you get caught, that is – and on the very next morning, you are. Then, if the peasants of your village don’t pitchfork you to death, there’s a good chance that regret will lead to your demise instead, since you are worse off now than you were when you started.

I reiterate: emotions seem to be a tool of chaos. They are messy, their workings are ugly, and they often contradict themselves: love may allow one to overcome fear, or the exact opposite can happen.

I hypothesize that emotions arise from our “advanced” consciousness. At some point, our thoughts became capable to exert enough influence over us to, if not wholly, at least in part overcome our basic instincts. For a while now we have no longer been guided exclusively by the latter but also greatly by our own conscious assessment of ourselves and our environment. Instincts may have found their match in our intellect and, in a tie, they could lock us into inaction. New brain structures and an overwhelming surge of neurochemicals had to be implemented to keep us moving without [permanently] depriving us from the basic survival systems we had previously developed.

Although emotions continue to drive us literally insane, leading to an enormous amount of problems and possibly giving birth to every major catastrophe in human history, that could be the practical purpose they serve.

Be Lucky or Be Gone

Remember when you wouldn’t study for any tests in school and yet you did better than all the other kids? How you could throw a ball farther than anyone else without doing anything differently? The way you kept running while the other wheezing, breathless children dropped to the ground all around you? How about never having even tried to pick up women, because they’ve always thrown themselves at you? Do you know that thing you attempted for the very first time and it worked flawlessly, whereas it always fails for everyone else?

No?

Then you never stood a chance.

Every person who is good at something is so not because they worked harder, not because they deserve it more, but because they are more talented.

Talent is something we are born with. It’s something our brain does automatically for us or our genes facilitate. It’s blind luck – we don’t choose it, we don’t earn it, we don’t understand it, and by no means do we deserve it (hence why “talented” and “gifted” are interchangeable). Effort, on the other hand, is all the extra crap we have to endure when we don’t have a talent, just to reap far worse results.

Merit – which I would define as “the amount of suffering one has to withstand in pursuit of an objective” – comes from effort; success comes from talent. And people tend to mix those things up as if the two of them walked hand-in-hand. More often than not, they don’t.

Take Andre The Giant – a man born with acromegaly (a disorder that causes an excessive production of the growth hormone) – at a young age, and another boy whose muscles don’t properly synthesize proteins, both dreaming to be the world’s strongest man. The first can push a car sideways with his bare hands at the age of 10 (rough guess) without having ever done any actual physical training or work. The second spends the next twenty five years of his life going to the gym and lifting as much weight as he can, an hour and a half a day, six days a week and, at his peak, manages to weigh impressive 65 kilograms and bench-press the same.

Watch a tennis match between a tall player and a short one. One screams sweat and blood throughout the entire game; the other wins. You hear one of their names everywhere, while no one knows the other guy’s. Guess which one is which.

Let’s say an American guy wants to “defend” his country so that people will publicly thank him for his service. But he wants to make things happen, to see constant action and make a real difference, so he decides to join the NSA instead of the Army (no one is going to thank him for this, but that’s okay). He studies hard since a young age, is called a “nerd” and bullied on a daily basis, manages to get into the MIT, attends his college classes diligently, and spends five years studying computer and software engineering, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, under some of the top experts in the field (by himself after classes, during weekends and breaks). Finally, after graduating suma cum laude, he applies for a job in the Agency. But he doesn’t make the cut. No – only Caltech folks who know everything before ever learning any of it get hired. Our guy ends up moderating a math forum for kids on the internet. Meanwhile, self-taught, high-IQ Snowden got into the agency without even going to college and became the Snowden. And he hooked up with a hot chick somehow, while our MIT guy routinely contributes to increasing PornHub’s daily traffic.

Picture this: a young girl who dreams about being in the movies. She starts taking theater classes during school years. Before long, she’s making presentations before her peers on commemorative occasions, just to be laughed at despite her best dramatic efforts. Our girl goes to college and double-majors in acting and filmmaking, dedicating every second of her waking life to her beloved craft, learning everything there is to be known about it. She knows her Chekovs, Millers and Molieres forward and backward, and finally starts acting professionally, playing support roles in theater plays. Her entire life was dedicated to each and every one of her performances, and it does show. She’s good, and she has earned her place under the spotlight. But then comes along Gal Gadot. Gal doesn’t know the first thing about acting, but she’s pretty and knows people in the movie industry, so she gets the part that our poor, real actress also auditioned for – and not just one, but all of them. Gal gets paid millions of dollars just to be herself in front of a camera, while our dedicated girl struggles to make ends meet and never manages to find her way into the big screen.

We also have Denzel Washington’s son (I always forget the kid’s name), who is as wooden as a urinated cat-pole and yet got cast to fill major roles in multiple large-budget movies, including a leading one in Tenet – a movie he completely ruined, and one in which Robert Pattinson (an actual actor, despite his supposedly good looks) was embarrassingly forced to support him. And all exclusively thanks to daddy’s influence (which is not a talent per se, but a matter of sheer undeserved luck all the same).

As a completely off-topic side note, just not to miss the opportunity as I am currently talking about specific actors: Michael Caine (you know, the guy who, among many other roles, portrayed Albert in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy). Look at the stage name he chose: My Cocaine. The man completely mocked his own craft and career as well as everyone else who’s a part of it and, still, somehow he made it. I checked it and “Michael Caine” has nothing to do with his real name (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite). He chose that alias on purpose. If he had to do it all over again, at this day and age, he’d probably dub himself “Fukk Yall.”

Back on topic: I’m not saying successful, talented people are necessarily undeserving. The very best results, of course, come from talented people who also put real effort into their work – almost as much as those without talent do. I say “almost” because, once one succeeds, they stop trying, training and practicing, since attempting to improve something that has already been perfected is pointless. They stop pushing themselves, whereas those who are not talented keep failing and thus must keep trying, and trying harder, until they eventually give up without ever achieving anything. And given that people often preach one should never give up (which is an absolute idiocy), untalented folks always end up putting far more effort into what they [try to] do.

You might question what I said above on the basis that “some people don’t try hard enough.” If an untalented person puts a lot of effort into something while a talented one puts none, the first may actually end up surpassing the second. Yes, it’s possible. But the very willpower one needs to try and keep trying, to ignore their failures and overcome their limitations, is a talent. No one gets to choose how much they want something, how much they can endure, or to be stupid enough to believe something impossible isn’t (which is required to attempt and then insist on it).

If someone is born with an extraordinarily strong will while another person is born being capable of, let’s say, instinctively and precisely measuring the strength and direction of the wind, and they both decide to become archers, it’s possible the second person will give up after just a few disappointing failures while the first will keep going even after failing a thousand times more and, eventually, this one may become better than the other. It can happen, it does, and it’s a matter of talent just the same.

Will alone is no match against specific, full-blown cheating talents, though. No matter how many decades you spend “mnemonicing” paragraphs of text, you’ll never get close to the performance of someone who has a photographic memory (Wikipedia states this is a myth, but Dame Judy Dench claims the opposite. I saw her saying, in an interview, that she had such a memory, lost it once she reached an advanced age, and consequently can no longer portray more complicated roles on stage).

The amount of work a person with a talent needs to dedicate towards something automatically done by their brain or genes is always, by definition, much lower. If it isn’t, they don’t have a talent.

“Practice makes perfect” is a fallacy – talent plus directed training (no coach necessary) makes so. If you want to be truly good at something, find out if you have an edge for it first. Only then should you put some heavy, deliberate effort into it. If you don’t have a natural advantage, find a way to want something else. Don’t waste hours, weeks, years or decades of your life trying to do something that others can do better than you ever will in just a few minutes. Also, do give up as soon as you realize an endeavor is pointless or otherwise not worth doing.

Good luck!

Oh! And always root for the underdog as well – if he made it far enough for you to know he exists, he’s probably the one who deserves to win.

We, The Braves

Fair warning: this is where things start to get “offensive” or, in other words, where the truth starts to become unpleasant.

We, humans, are a proud species. Why? I have no idea. But when anyone tries to dispel our holier-than-thou, made-in-God’s-image illusion they end up being crucified. And yet we need to see ourselves for what we are, and someone must say the things I’m about to, because we can’t even try to fix something that is broken while we keep fooling ourselves into believing it’s not.

So let’s get started.

Dare a skinny nerd to spit on an NFL offensive liner’s face. Or ask this one to go alone against another team’s entire defensive line in a bar brawl. Put them all together and tell them to take down an old, retired police officer holding a loaded pistol. None of them is going to do any of that, even if they had every possible reason and right to do so. Why?

Because every human being is a coward.

Unless we have a clear advantage – be it weight, height, speed, some skill or, above all, we are part of a larger group – we’ll usually have [some] manners, behave [almost] properly, and act like a [minimally] decent person. When we do have an edge, we are inclined to do the opposite.

Some people are just cretins who are willing to hurt any number of others so long as they profit from it. Others are frustrated and angry with something that happened to them and need to unleash that frustration on someone else. Few do not fall into at least one of those two categories. And as most of us seek to make ourselves feel better at someone else’s expense (because this does make us feel better), whenever we run into a person who seems like an easy prey we hardly ever let slide the opportunity to bully them. Our victim’s innocence is, in practice, entirely irrelevant to us.

Being in a larger group against a smaller one is the “worst” (from the opposite perspective, the best) of all advantages we may have because, in this situation, if we mess up, we expect someone else on our side will come to our aid and fix everything. If things go south, there’s a good chance that someone other than us will pay for it. And if our “team” beats the other, even if we didn’t do anything we still bask in “our” victorious glory.

When being part of a larger group we also always try to impress its other members. We do things that even when having some other advantage we usually wouldn’t. To increase our personal standing among our peers we might, for instance, beat up a man we could instead have simply argued with. Or steal something instead of bitching about the price and asking for a discount. Or drink far more than we should, throw up, and then continue drinking. We do stupid things to inspire some level of fear or admiration in the people surrounding us because both of those things translate into respect, and respect translates into personal safety. The more we harm others or otherwise prove we are “better” (hardly ever in a good way) than them, the less those who witness such actions are inclined to harm us in the future. (Social psychology has even coined terms for the attitude that derives from one being part of a group, such as “groupthink” and “deindividualization.” You can look those up if you want to read what experts have to say about this particular phenomenon.)

Circling back to our lack of courage: when in a disadvantage, the best we can do is to get drunk, blow some coke or smoke crack, because then we are not quite ourselves – some of the neurological devices that define us are temporarily altered or disabled, allowing us to do what no sober person dares. Alas, in such circumstances we are considered stupid instead of valiant. But fairly so, because “to be brave” and “to be stupid” are synonyms.

As I once saw written on a wall, “A hero is one who didn’t have time to run.”

Genghis Khan wouldn’t have killed hundreds or thousands of men if he wasn’t an extraordinarily talented warrior who had an entire army behind him (an army that had as its top priority keeping him from being blindsided or overwhelmed).

The Spartans of the Battle of Thermopylae were not the men of legends, or at least not as we like to imagine them. They were 7,000 Greeks in total, not 300; they fought between 120,000 and 300,000 Persians, not a million; out of the 2,300 of them who stayed behind to cover the main Greek army’s retreat, some 400 surrendered; they fought because they had no choice; they only temporarily succeeded, for a couple of days, because they had a very strong tactical upper hand; and those who died in their last stand only did so because they had nowhere to run.

Edward Snowden wouldn’t have blown the whistle on NSA’s omni-spying if he didn’t have a place to flee to, a plan for how to get there, and help from others to actually do so.

We never pick a fight we don’t expect to win because doing so is suicide. We are programmed to fight or fly and usually more than smart enough to know when the odds are stacked against us. And we naturally (read “automatically”) stick to our basic programming and by the obvious.

The best we can accomplish is to do something that seems courageous (but isn’t).

Many people are too stupid to foresee and/or fully comprehend the potentially dire consequences of their actions, so they dare out of sheer ignorance. Some feel less pain than the rest of us, so they dare because the consequences, for them, are not as bad. Others dare because they are even more afraid of not doing so – they are particularly terrified of being considered as much of a coward as they, like everyone else, in fact are.

So don’t feel bad when fear makes you refrain from doing something. Even if most people do it and you are the exception, you are no more of a coward than any them. You are just better aware of the risks involved, of the potential consequences, and of what these mean to you (which is different from what it means to any other person).

You are not worse – you are just as bad as everyone else. And probably smarter.

We, The Nobles

Courage isn’t the only virtue we lack. We are also dishonest, unkind, and we have no honor. In general, we lack intelligence, wisdom, humility, integrity, compassion, civility, decency, ethics, professionalism and manners.

We have a strong tendency to flatter ourselves. We all want and try our best to believe we are better than we really are because we need to feel special, non-mediocre. But if we need to believe we are better, it’s because we know we are not good enough.

We don’t do anything that is not in our own selfish benefit. We are guided by survival instincts and personal interests, rarely by reason and never by virtue. We couldn’t possibly care less about people we don’t know, regardless of what unimaginable ill befalls however many of them.

Throughout countless years of prehistory, we did our best to weed out those who were useless to our tribes and clans. It made sense, it was logical, and it had to be done for us to survive. Nowadays, though, it’s not so easy to tell who has use to us or not, because most of the things we all own and eat were invented, made, or grown by people we don’t know and never will. Other than those closest to us, no one else seems to have any value. And we are still programmed to think the same way we did in ancient times.

If, for instance, you murder a farmer, your food will come from another and be there at the grocery store readily waiting for you just the same. The man you killed is completely irrelevant – to you, his death is no loss at all.

Think about those times when you helped someone (if it ever happened). Did you do so out of kindness? Or perhaps to bargain for a favor in the future? To influence how others perceive you? To feel better about yourself?

Are you more interested in loving or in being loved? Is the second even relevant if not for the reciprocal effects it has on the first?

Is it how others feel about you that matters, or how you feel about how they feel about you?

Answer those questions.

Are you sure? Or are you lying to yourself?

Altruism is pretty much a myth. There may be some rare exceptions (none comes to mind) but, in the vast majority of cases, we help people exclusively to benefit ourselves, to feel better or otherwise advance our own cause. Interacting positively with others releases oxytocin in our brains, making us high. Helping someone while under public scrutiny makes us look like decent people, and we look preemptively forward to the social rewards we expect to arise from that forged impression (this is called “performative altruism”).

There are no knights in shining armor among us. We just throw some colorful, poorly-knitted tabards over our blood-splattered, Chinese-made aluminum breastplates hoping to fool ourselves and everyone else, because we cannot accept our limitations, the flaws of our society, the truth of what we are and of what we have accomplished as individuals and as a species. We act and speak proudly just to hide our inner shame.

I painted a somewhat grim picture of ourselves, but the fact is it doesn’t matter for what reason we do something good, so long as we do it. Even if motivated exclusively by personal gains, helping others is still helping. However selfish the cause may be, its consequences are still positive. Just don’t feel smug about it because, if you ever aid someone else, there’ll probably be nothing noble about your motivations and, in any case, you’ll only be doing what you should do.

Funny story: I was recently talking to a girl – one of those who literally undergo a series of plastic surgeries just to look better on Instagram photos – and at a certain point she said, “I do some voluntary work every now and then.” As I began to roll my eyes, she added, “But I do it because it makes me feel better.”

Against all odds and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, maybe there’s still hope for these latest human (de)generations. It seems a few of them are not entirely retarded (that girl was a Millennial though; not a Gen Z or newer model).

Them, The Princesses

One of our major goals in life is to get sex. That’s what we pursue when we are temporarily rid of any pain and what most people ultimately purchase with all the money they make. I will go ahead and throw the emotional side dish (being loved, socially accepted, the fear of dying alone, etc.) in there too so as not to ignore our psychological issues.

Until we are 30 or so, we are pretty much blind to anything other than dating. Many remain oblivious to everything else that comprises our universe until they die of old age. And this narrow focus on romantic relationships and sexual activities creates problems, because it hinders us uninterested in things that are actually interesting, directing most of our efforts towards a goal that is not only useless but in fact destructive, as it can lead to men fighting over women, to people murdering their cheating spouses, to children being born, etc.

One all-encompassing sociological consequence of our sexual overdrive is that women, albeit unknowingly, control our species – men rule over the whole planet, but we are ruled ourselves by women. The fact that they are indirectly in charge, in itself, is no big deal. The real problem is that women are far more attracted to aggressive, dishonest, sly and/or arrogant scumbags than to smart, educated, humble and/or well-mannered gents.

When we hurt or humiliate someone, not only do we get testosterone and dopamine boosts and social respect (out of fear), but also the big prize: the ladies. And this makes it so that, instead of behaving civically and constructively as we should, we deliberately behave animalistically and destructively, because this pays much better in the ways we are programmed to appreciate the most.

Take a look at professional athletes and their behavior, at the attitude, arrogance and general disrespect that comes from being physically more apt than most and making a fortune out of doing something useless that everyone else does for fun, while getting daily public praise from irresponsible people who profit from broadcasting their usually unmerited talents in pointless action. Then see how much a Nobel Prize winner makes, how he talks and behaves, and how much attention he gets in comparison. Guess which one gets the girl.

I suspect the true source of this problem is primitive and very deeply seated: women’s preferences probably stem from them being no match for men in physical confrontations, so they have an existential need to be protected by someone who is able to defend them from the largest possible number of [mostly man-born] threats. But this can and should be changed.

If we started publicly praising those who actually help our species instead of those who hold it back, showcasing good-natured political, social and scientific accomplishments every day, everywhere, and praising the people behind them instead of those who dedicate themselves to useless physical endeavors, women would be much more interested in and inclined to admire those among us who actually deserve admiration. To allow for their mating standards to evolve we must also make our world safer, so that women don’t need to bed a Pit Bull to feel secure. And by simply stopping to encourage senseless violent activities, the competitive and aggressive mindset they foster and the destructive behavior they lead to, we might achieve this result.

If female preferences change, this alone should greatly improve our society and global quality of life, because the most sought-after prize would go to those who contribute to our betterment instead of those who jeopardize it. With some ethical social engineering (in the original sense of the expression), women could willingly reward the human instead of the animal, the intellect instead of the instinct, peace instead of war, life instead of death. They could be “used” (in a good way) to forge a brighter future instead of one potentially even darker than the present. Our governments, media and filmmakers should try herding us all in this direction instead of encouraging disputes, incompetence, slyness, victimization, homosexuality, criminal behavior, etc.

In any case, the times they are a-changin’. With the number/percentage of women who now seem to be okay with making a living by exposing their naked bodies on the internet, on-demand AI pornography, plus technological advancements and other factors that have been leading people to stay at home rather than going out, to text instead of talk and to watch instead of do, direct sexual relations seem bound to become virtually obsolete in the near future.

For better or worse, the paradigm is shifting. And it’s probably for the better, since it’s hard to imagine things getting any worse.

Evil Always Wins

You already know what I’m about to say, but bear with me for after the next few paragraphs I’ll go a little deeper into it.

As far as humans are concerned, whoever ignores the rules the most wins. Those unshackled by moral principles – “the most evil” – always have a huge advantage over those who are, or at least try to be, ethical.

I have previously defined “to be good” essentially as “not to harm others.” And that can also be phrased as “not to violate anyone else’s rights.” To be evil, then, could be defined as “to disrespect that which others are entitled to” – to kill (life), steal (property), humiliate (dignity), spy (privacy), etc. So it’s simple: do not do unto others what you do not want done to thine self, and you are good (pun intended). The Bible and preschool got this much right.

Though I disagree with many of our laws, by now the majority of [Western] nations seem to have gotten most of the basics (fundamental rights) correctly. Things can get much more complicated in infra-constitutional laws (which deal with specific or exceptional cases) and legislators all over the world have completely messed these ones up. If we had ideal laws in place, “to be good” would coincide with “not to be a criminal” (almost, actually, thanks to the “helping others” aspect of “right,” as I defined it earlier). That must have been the goal, but we’ve always lacked the reasoning, honest intentions, and the qualified voters, representatives and leaders necessary to reach it.

I veered a bit off-topic there, so let’s get back to it: good has constraints; evil doesn’t.

If we try to resolve an impasse based on morality and legality, we are bound to and our actions limited by them. There’s only so much we can do, as there are lines we refuse or are not allowed to cross. If we disregard legal consequences and our ethics (or simply have none), though, we can just kill someone and/or take their possessions for ourselves, even causing massive collateral damage to many other people so that we, alone, can benefit.

Bound by our own morality, we don’t do something we could because we know it’s wrong; because we don’t want to. Bound by laws, we don’t do something we should because we are afraid of the consequences – we are not willing to jeopardize all we’ve honestly built throughout our lives to do this one thing, even if it’s right (but illegal). Meanwhile, those unbound by moral or legal chains can do anything, because they don’t care about the victim(s) at all, they have a fairly good chance of escaping punishment (especially if they are part of the government – a president, a senator, a soldier, a police officer, etc.), and they know that committing one crime or a thousand is pretty much the same, since they have to avoid being caught either way, which means that, after the first crime is committed, a criminal is pretty much free to perpetrate as many others as they want.

Mostly, we don’t punish people who should be punished, we don’t persecute those who should be persecuted, and we don’t kill those who should be killed because we have no physical means to do it ourselves. Sometimes, we don’t do it because our misguided laws do not allow us to – we’d be severely punished for doing what is right or the law itself prescribes an unfair punishment for a criminal action (meaning neither us nor our judiciary systems are allowed to make actual justice). And other times, we don’t do what we should because we believe it would be wrong – even though it wouldn’t – thanks to the miseducation we received from our parents, teachers and society, from priests, the movies and the media. In the scant few cases remaining, justice is served and human life is improved.

Okay. That was the part you already knew, which I just mentioned because it would be wrong not to.

Now, let’s move on to some less obvious things about evil’s freedom and good’s bondage.

For starters, this issue is not our doing – evil’s advantages are a natural consequence of how our universe works. We cannot feel what other people feel, think their thoughts, move their bodies. If they get hurt, suffer or die, we don’t. Thus we don’t care about anyone other than ourselves, because nothing compels us to.

As despicable as many of our selfish actions are, from a narrow-sighted perspective (one disregarding what I said in Chapter I) they are logical. Primitive, organic, individual life does benefit from selfishness. The universe causes this problem on its own. Our role, as sentient beings, is to fix it.

Secondly, the extensive collective damage we cause by acting egotistically is not the only downside of doing so, because human selfishness is also contagious. It spreads and corrupts other people, potentially encompassing a whole population or even our entire species. If one person, entity or party amid an ethically-working system decides to go off-rails and desecrate our [somewhat] civilized standards, every other player involved is forced to do the same, otherwise, having their hands tied to their backs (by laws and moral principles), they are bound to be defeated. And with the “fair players” gone, the worst of all – the one who chose to set everything on fire – wins and quickly achieves absolute control.

On top of that, even if no one has ruined a certain thing yet – business practices, policies, the truth, whatever – someone inevitably will, sooner rather than later. Knowing our peers, we must assume so. And then, based on that reasonable assumption, we decide to cheat ourselves, preemptively, just to stay in the game. Otherwise those who can never be allowed to win emerge victorious once again.

Let me give you a couple of concrete examples:

Have you ever seen Coca-Cola advertising how its products rot the consumers’ teeth, how they damage our stomachs and possibly other parts of our bodies? Of course not. They “casually omit” those facts. They make hundreds of millions of human lives worse so that they can profit from it. If they didn’t, you would be healthier, but they would be poorer. And no one gives a damn about you other than yourself, least of all those who make a fortune out of your misery.

If a soda company were to be candid with its consumers, it would either shut down and stop producing its poison on its own or, due to honest advertisement, go bankrupt. And if Coca-Cola does its best to fool you, so must Pepsi, otherwise you would never have even heard about this one because, with all the money in its pockets and no moral restraints in its board of directors, Coke would have drank Pepsi out of existence a long time ago. It would then have become a monopoly that annually spends billions of dollars in biased researches, lobbying and bribing, zero on quality assurance and customer service, and no one would ever again be able to stop Coke from injecting whatever it wanted into our bodies.

As a second example: up until a few centuries ago, Europe’s diplomacy was based on moral principles. Religious ones, to be more accurate (which, morally, are highly questionable). Then came Cardinal Richelieu and his raison d’État.

Richelieu was the first to decide that, to empower his France, anything was acceptable. “Raison d’État” essentially means that a state deems itself entitled to do whatever it wants to improve its own standing, regardless of the means used or of how much damage is caused to any other. It’s the official adoption of human egotism as a foreign affairs policy.

France then began expanding and, through senseless murder, easily stole a hefty chunk of Europe for itself (as was pretty common in medieval Europe. I’m not saying France was the only greedy and violent party involved). Within one century, every other European state had, logically, adopted the same doctrine to be able to compete against France and survive. And to this very day morality was never heard of in diplomacy again.

Pepsi and Europe-minus-France were both forced to adopt unethical conducts to be able to fend off their competitors once Coke and France started doing so (I don’t know if Coke was actually the first among soda companies; that was an uneducated guess). If they hadn’t, they would have perished.

When people are naturally encouraged to be selfish and those who refuse to act this way not only don’t oppose those who do, or simply do nothing, but instead are forced to imitate them, we find ourselves trapped in a self-destructive vicious circle: more and more people start acting more and more selfishly, until no one is left who’s willing, or even remembers how, to act otherwise.

This “corruption’s contagion” issue is a major one not only on its own, but also because it creates another problem: it makes it hard for us to tell who is downright evil and who simply acted so, perhaps just once but still deliberately, in an attempt to stop the first one from achieving total domination (which is something we are supposed and morally entitled to do).

The only solution I can see to this issue is for us to quickly detect those who are, in fact, extraordinarily greedy and sociopathic and kill them before they directly or indirectly corrupt everyone else. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to identify and separate the two groups of people mentioned in the previous paragraph, who must be dealt with very differently if we are to treat them fairly. This may be the only way to prevent the erosion of the moral and legal principles that allow human society to exist; to prevent acts that desecrate them from multiplying uncontrollably, becoming the rule instead of the exception, as they currently are.

Dealing with those who seek their own selfish advancement at the cost of massive harm being caused to others as swiftly and harshly as possible should be one of our foremost priorities. “Swiftly” is paramount here not only because if we don’t act fast enough havoc is wreaked, but also because once one has destroyed too much they can’t possibly be punished enough for it (at least not in our current legal systems) – e.g., once someone has killed two [innocent] people, simply killing them back is not enough. If this is all we do to them, they win. Thus, they must suffer a fate worse than death. Alas, this ship has already sailed, and towing it back to shore is now infinitely harder than it once was to simply prevent it from lifting anchor. What I just suggested is what our regulatory, judiciary, and law-enforcing institutions should strive for, but these have long been corrupted themselves. Now we have far more people than we can control roaming this Earth, and after seeing so many others doing it, we are all well aware that cheating is not only the easiest way to get through life but also a perfectly acceptable one.

Thus, evil wins. And we all lose.

As a parallel thought: while malicious deeds can and often do go unpunished, the vast majority of benevolent ones also tend to go unrewarded.

As I’ve said before, by doing the right thing one gets a [mild] sense of righteousness instead of a meal, a million dollars, or whatever else they might fancy stealing today. It seems like a bad trade-off when compared to doing what is wrong, and it would indeed be if not for the fact that, if we act decently, humanity’s “global score” ends with a positive balance and we all benefit from it.

Not only do we get a “lesser” reward for doing what is right but, as the old adage goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.” Or as Machiavelli put it (in my own, preferred version of his words in English), "He who abandons what is done for what ought to be done rather brings about his ruin than his preservation, for a man who tries to make a profession of goodness in everything necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not good." That’s because we don’t just actively cheat, but we also take advantage of people when they “selflessly” do something for us as well. Instead of being thankful and humbled, we see good-doers as weak and abuse them. When we help someone else, we learn that doing so is not worth it because things tend to become worse for us, since living among narrow-sighted predatory animals we are then considered and treated as fools by our peers. As a consequence, we stop doing what we should continue to.

As Edmund Burke (widely attributed to) once said, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” And that’s exactly what good people do when they learn that doing what is right is in fact harmful to them: nothing. They stand by and watch grimly as the world tears itself to pieces, hoping death will come soon and send them anywhere except back here.

That downside of good-doing means that to do what is right we must sacrifice ourselves. To improve things, we who want them to improve must suffer in exchange – we must “take one for the team.” We must accept to lose something, to suffer in stead of others, to expect no reward and, in fact, to be severely punished for it because, given our rotten nature, misguided views and ensuing irrational laws, that’s what is going to happen.

Sacrificing oneself sounds terrible and it is just as bad as it sounds. But given the status quo, that’s the only way available for us to do what we must and fix the existence we ourselves have ruined. If [many] more of us decided to do what we know is right, ignoring criminal laws and greedy imbeciles’ self-serving opinions, our sacrifices would become less taxing as things started changing and our general behavior began to improve. And if enough of us (the vast majority) ever manage to think and act more selflessly and compassionately, the benefits of doing so will then become obvious, as happening much more often such acts’ effects will directly affect all of us. This would make those required sacrifices negligible (we’d no longer be censored, assaulted, kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered for saying/doing what is right) and teach us the opposite of what we have all been taught: that cheating (which includes tricking, scamming, stealing, murdering, etc.) is not the way to go.

Think about that example I provided in Chapter I in which you stole an apple from a guy, causing all sorts of problems for him. When acting egotistically, we cause a lot more damage than the material one. But when we act selflessly, we also generate extra benefits. If you stop to help someone change their car’s tire, you’ll spend time and energy doing so – from your individual perspective, you’ll lose both, exchanging them for nothing. But you’ll feel good about helping. Maybe not good enough to justify the effort, but it’s a start. The person you helped, on the other hand, will have saved themselves the time and energy you spent aiding them, they might be very relieved (in case they didn’t even know how to change a tire), and their view of mankind will improve. Everything we have to endure will suddenly make a little more sense to them. Even if only temporarily, our existence won’t seem like a hopeless endeavor to the person you aided. And when they get back home, whereas the guy you stole an apple from unleashed his rage on his daughter, the person you helped will be nicer than usual to theirs. They’ll tell their family about the stranger who helped them, causing their spouse and children to feel a little better and more hopeful as well.

If we ever manage to help more than we hinder – even though doing so will always require some sacrifice from us – we’ll also be frequently benefited by the help of others. And if enough of us do it often enough, the net result of acting righteously is positive both on the collective and on the individual level.

If acting as we should becomes the rule, whenever you find yourself in need of assistance the odds are someone will show up to provide it instead of everyone leaving you stranded to die on your own as usually happens. And even when you don’t need any help at all everything will be much easier anyway, because then the rest of the world won’t be actively trying to screw you at every turn.

Memetic Faith

Every creed, be it Christianity, Islam, neo-Nazism, communism, patriotism, or any other works the same way: they are memes – contagious intellectual viruses that spread exponentially, just like a biological infection, but via ignorance. As more examples, we have political correctness, fake news, and “Trumpclaims.”

Most of the time, we are wrong about something because we lack information, intellect, and/or memory. Our opinions are often flawed, but we share them with others believing otherwise, accidentally infecting and perverting their view of the world. Usually, those mistakes of ours don’t turn into memes because they are not contagious enough – we mostly talk about things we are notoriously not experts in, so no one takes what we say too seriously; we tend to state it aloud when we are not entirely sure of something that is relevant; and most of what we say is simply not interesting enough for people to repeat it to others. So, most of our verbalized mistakes don’t spread. They tend to die within a single listener, doing little damage. But we also have people who deliberately create tantalizing lies and then go around telling them to anyone who’ll listen, as if they were actually true. Since most people don’t bother thinking for themselves and never question the information they receive, they believe anything they hear, however absurd it may be. And the more absurd any piece of information is, the more excited people get about sharing it with others, and the more they do so. Once such a meme is created and Patient Zero is infected with it, it doesn’t take long before we have millions of people believing that the Earth is flat, one more actor winning an election, yet another disarmament campaign going on, or a new cult of pee-drinkers being formed.

Memes are also hereditary (although I might be extrapolating the original memetic theory here). See how you think social/economic equality is a good thing simply because your parents told you so, or how you believe a free, unregulated market is the way to go instead, for the same reason. It takes a long time for us to free ourselves from being misguided as a child, because we all fully trust our parents and teachers at our tender ages. Given that we only become able to think once we turn 12, and only start thinking about what’s important once we are 30 or so (while hardly ever actually doing it because we are too busy working, paying bills and raising children), most people die without ever solving that problem – they die without ever reaching their own conclusions. And so long as they live, those people will keep spreading the memes they were infected with as children, compounded with the ones they are constantly fed by politicians, the media, “influencers,” etc.

People who eventually manage to stop and re-think what they’ve been told are bound to find out that much of what they “know” is pure nonsense.

Let us now focus on religions, which we might as well call “religious memes”. I’ll use a real one as an example, to establish my point. Let’s go with Islam, since it pisses Muslims off when infidels say anything about their beliefs and I want to help them get over it.

Consider how Muslim women are treated in Islamic societies. I’m vastly ignorant about the details of the subject, so I will just summarize my understanding of it with “they are stoned in the middle of the streets if some part of their legs, arms or hair is revealed from beneath their burqas.” I think that’s mostly a metaphorical “general vibe,” literal only in Islamist (extremist) societies (I just checked, and only about 5% of all Muslim women are legally forced to wear hijabs, burqas or other such garments. In the vast majority of cases, these are worn due to social and religious pressure; not legal).

I think anyone reading this, regardless of whether they are a feminazi, a republican dinosaur, or sane, will agree when I say that that misogynistic mentality, even if somewhat metaphorical, is irrational and abhorrent. And yet Muslims in general defend that women ought to be treated like that, simply because some ancient imaginary man supposedly said, according to a long-outdated anthology of unknown authorship, that they should be treated that way. It’s much like Christianity’s legends about boy-wonder Jesus or their rather irrational ten commandments: they’re all just bedtime stories. I am confident, though, that the majority of Muslim men don’t really believe that forcing women to unnecessarily hide their figures is correct or justifiable – I assume they generally love, or at least minimally respect, their own mothers, and that the vast majority of them are not gay as well. That restraining and potentially violent treatment is illogical, unnatural, and obviously unfair to any reasonable human being.

Let me open a parenthesis here: drastic measures such as the one mentioned above were probably once established under the premise that sexual desire leads men to act stupidly and harm others. And this premise is valid. But the solution for this particular flaw in our nature is not to limit people’s freedom – which inevitably generates anger – but instead to increase their wisdom. It’s not to institutionally force people to act against their will, but to teach them why they shouldn’t act in certain ways and provide them with an education and an environment that allows them to behave decently. The adequate solution is not to control people, but to teach them to control themselves. And then to eliminate those who, despite receiving all the necessary support, turn out incapable of doing so.

Back on track: however absurd, religious memes are all around us. And they spread like any other meme: by word of mouth. By word of ignorant mouths. But how do religions survive after people find out that their teachings make no sense? That their tales are obvious lies? How can they last thousands of years? How do they thrive and become so powerful?

Unsurprisingly, through fear.

Imagine we have two Muslim men. Imagine neither of them believes that women should be forced to hide their whole bodies from sight, or that every Jew must be decapitated. Neither. Theoretically, that means they should have no problem with letting the women around them wear bikinis, or with having a beer with a guy with two ridiculous curly locks of hair dangling down from his temples. But no – they will behave “Islamically” and spit on any woman wearing a skirt or circumcised man they run into. Why? Because the first Muslim believes the second will treat him as an infidel if he doesn’t act that way, and vice versa.

What holds any religion together is the fact that each of its members is afraid of the others. A man cannot risk saying to another member of his congregation that their sacred text is irrational for fear of being attacked, just like he, himself, is religiously compelled to attack anyone else who says the same. If he dares to try, that man might fend off one or two of his fellow cultists, but the rest of their flock would swarm him to death.

People who “believe” in any of that religious crap are not all lunatics. Many of them are simply under implicit threat and frightened.

Hardly anyone adheres to a previously-established creed agreeing with all of its tenets. We each have our own personal experiences and consequently reach our own particular conclusions, and ours will hardly ever perfectly match someone else’s. So, at some point, new members of any given religion are likely going to disagree with, doubt, and question some of its teachings and, from there on, they’ll be forced to censor themselves and lie to others if they want to ensure their own personal safety.

Members of a cult are afraid not only of physical, but also moral and social violence. If they defy their religion’s teachings (or its preachers), they will be excommunicated. They will lose most, if not all, of their friends and possibly family as well, because these all often adhere to the same faith, since we tend to surround ourselves only with people who agree with us.

Religions are a trap. They are an exploit of deep and seemingly irrevocable human flaws: our lack of intelligence, morals, courage, civility and individuality. They work because they are based on solid, ironically logical grounds: how fearful we are of each other. And they are a very powerful form of mass control, because they are extremely hard to break free of.

Note that political parties, as well as any other kind of shared-belief group, all behave essentially like a religion. Think about it and you’ll see – they are all memes propagated by ignorance (unless their ideas are actually right which, so far, doesn’t seem to have ever been the case) and enforced by very clear, albeit unspoken threats.

Most of our species’ beliefs, acts and decisions are based on lies, and we keep scaring ourselves farther and farther away from the truth by summarily stoning anyone who dares to speak it.

If you’ve tried, you know arguing against zealots is a pointless endeavor. But there’s a reason for that: they need to believe their ancient sacred texts are more than outdated philosophies embedded in juvenile fantasies. It’s not that religious people cannot see reason, but rather that they don’t want to. This is why using it on them doesn’t work.

Proving those people wrong is very easy to do by using simple arguments. Thus, zealots must censor anyone who tries to seed doubt into their minds and ranks. They cannot doubt their beliefs, because doubt is the first step to knowledge. They might often suspect they are wrong, but they cannot know it because, if they do, they’ll realize they’re actually a force of evil (despite what I’ll kindly assume were their initial good intentions).

On top of being afraid of losing their family and friends, religious people cannot recognize the error of their ways because they have been wrong for too long. To admit they were misguided would be to admit they have been fooled; to admit that they were stupid and still are (since we may grow wiser but not smarter with time). They’d also have to admit all the harm they caused while aggressively trying to impose their ludicrous beliefs upon others. And admitting those things is hard, because the dignity lost cannot be recovered and the damaged done cannot be measured or atoned for.

Those people also refuse to accept they are wrong because they need to believe that paradise is real and that they will find themselves in it if they continue to do what they are told. If they acknowledge they were mistaken, all the time they wasted doing what they wrongfully thought was right will not reward them with anything. The miserable lives they were forced to live (not for being religious, but for being human) will have been entirely pointless, all of their suffering will have been in vain, and nothing but further despair will await them in the future. Can we really blame them for being so bullheaded? Yes, we can, because they enforce and spread a mental disease, harming not only themselves but countless others as well. But we must keep in mind that we would all fear reaching such a dire realization, and that we all blind ourselves the same way religious people do. We must believe the future somehow suits our wants and needs, otherwise we have no reason to keep going. We need to believe that what each one of us can do will take us where we wish to be – in this life or in a hypothetical next – otherwise our whole existence seems purposeless and suffering is all we’ll ever know.

That’s called “hope.” We need it, and we all forge it when necessary.

Being religious when one has lived a hard, meaningless life is just as natural as being a nihilist is when one has lived an easy, full one.

Despite their fictional and manipulative nature, religions are not entirely bad. They do serve one constructive purpose: to inculcate the stupidest among us with a contrived sense of right and wrong.

I have a moral compass. I must have been born with some of it and our society, my family, friends, personal experiences, and above all my own thoughts tuned it to be what it is. In any non-highly-debatable situation, I know what the right moral choice is. Not knowing isn’t an option. As a rule, I can either choose to do the right thing, or to do the wrong one and feel bad about it for the rest of my life. So I automatically try to stick to the first (full disclosure: miserable failures do occur).

It seems many people aren’t like me, though. For one set of reasons or another, their north ended up pointing east, or even south. Most of them probably grew up under bad influences, didn’t get beaten up enough, got beaten up too much, or are simply intellectually incapable of connecting the dots. They have grown, aged, and still don’t understand how the world works and why they should try to make things better instead of worse. Thus they need to be taught by artificial means.

Those people need to be clearly told what to do and what not to, and convincing them requires clear, simple and unchangeable directives, which when strictly adhered to lead to rewards deemed desirable by all. A religion and its preachers come into play to convince such people that, if they act in a certain way, they’ll get a pair of wings, a shiny halo, a cool harp, and go live in the clouds. If they do anything other than what they’ve been told, they’ll burn in agony for all eternity. Christianity, for instance, teaches those who are incapable of guiding themselves not to murder anyone and not to bang their neighbor’s wife. Those are concrete actions rather than the essence of what people should know and guide themselves by, but it does part of the trick – it’s far from ideal, but it’s something.

The main problem here is that whoever does the preaching gets to choose what is “right” and what is “wrong.” They usually don’t know either and, even if some of them eventually do, they still end up being seduced and corrupted by the influence they exert over their flock. And what may have been initially meant to do good ends up existing and spreading just to satiate a few people’s individual greed and thirst for power, while harming everyone else.

Trying to put it all shortly: religions are unforgiving systems based on fictitious collective beliefs that fear and police themselves. They are a mechanism that can be used to give those who suffer hope and to set the lost on a minimally civilized path, but which tends to end up serving mainly to empower and enrich one or a few individuals.

Religions spread memetically, through tantalizing lies repeated again and again until as many people as possible fall for them. Once a cult grows large enough, it automatically polices itself, because all of its members are implicitly encouraged to act violently against anyone (including themselves) who disagrees with its holy text or its preachers.

Religious people are in part forced and in part force themselves to deny reason, ignoring facts and, consequently, tainting everything they meddle with.

There’s only one true religion: it’s called “reason,” it’s called “science.” Others may even serve as a temporary, palliative measure to deal with some of humanity’s flaws but, ultimately, they all lead to hell.

A World Gone Retarded

Nowadays we praise criminals, vulgarity, poverty, stupidity. We demonize those who can and victimize those who can’t. We silence those who are right while handing down free megaphones to anyone who isn’t.

Take rap music, as a first example. People who “sing” them are usually imbeciles, often with a criminal background, who emit unpleasant noises that preach or downright incite uncalled-for violence, drug usage, promiscuity, theft, and all sorts of animalistic behavior. And yet people listen to and give money to them, catapulting those “artists” into celebrity status, spreading their word.

Consider American female pop stars, now. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and the such, despite being actually able to sing (I know Gaga at least can), all dress up in whorish costumes and act like strippers during their shows, bouncing around half-naked on stage before spreading their legs wide open to a juvenile audience. Those “ladies” seem to be perfectly fine stripping and pole-dancing for money, like any common prostitute would. And then, as soon as they step off stage, they start preaching about their superior moral standards, about how women are mistreated by society, how they are more valuable than men, and how they are entitled to more rights than us. And people buy it.

What about professional athletes (again)? Most of them have two options: to become an athlete or a criminal (which includes becoming a police officer or joining the military), since without brains one has no options but to rely on brawn. Then, in the US, they cheat their way into college, getting full scholarships while people who actually want to study and are able to, who can learn and contribute, who have a chance to understand, discover, invent and improve, end up being left out.

Professional popular sports players are paid millions of dollars to do something the rest of us do for fun, for free, or even pay to. They become arrogant, believing they are better than everyone else because they can take a ball from one side of a field to the other (wow!). Then, they show up on the TV and people heed their every word as if those guys actually knew something about anything.

Democracy is shoved down our throats daily, left and right, from above and below, as if it was a flawless, idyllic political system. We let the most unqualified among us decide all of our fates and call it “wisdom.” All of our elections are in one way or another rigged, and we call them “fair.”

Owned and controlled by greedy kids with God complexes who employ even younger, brainwashed ones, social networks have been potentiating the political correctness meme, bringing censorship to an all-time high in the Western world. Saying one of the million things that are now considered taboo out loud has literally been criminalized in many places, and most of us believe that not discussing (which we currently don’t, because it’s not a discussion when only one whining and yelling side is heard) or even thinking about those problems will solve them.

Receiving their [filtered] information exclusively from those same social networks, young people become radically biased without even noticing and then go around calling others biased. They believe those who are posting videos on TikTok and YouTube know what they are talking about, while in reality such folks ended down there precisely due to knowing nothing and having never managed to do a single thing right in their lives.

Some of the most recent movies and TV series have been upping the ante on shocking effects, taking gore and homosexuality to the most gruesome and disgusting levels imaginable, because Gen Zs seem to have been rendered unsensitized to all standard stimuli thanks to receiving too much of everything too soon via the smartphones they were given when they turned 3 years old and haven’t once left outside their reach ever since. Those kids will soon start having problems getting excited about or interested in anything, but no one seems to care about them either.

If you find a demented man dressed as an ugly woman that looks like a cheap doll rolled out of a faulty Chinese production line repulsive, you are “homophobic.” If you ever acknowledge a black person did something wrong, you are “racist.” If you call a member of the IDF a genocidal war criminal, you are an “antisemite.” If you spent most of your life studying, then working, and earned some money for yourself, you are “privileged.” If you defend yourself against a woman’s verbal or physical assault, you are a “misogynist.” And we’ve come to a point where you might actually end up in jail for doing or simply saying any of that.

If anyone tries to publicly deal with actual reality in any reasonable way, going against the widely disseminated and retarded trends currently allowed in our Overton’s Window (that which is considered acceptable in public speech at a given time), they are automatically and overwhelmingly censored.

I read somewhere that censorship evolves in three stages:

Stage one: forbidding people from publishing what the censor doesn’t want others to know;

Stage two: people start censoring, by themselves, what they publish before doing so, to avoid being persecuted;

Stage three: people avoid thinking about what has been censored, because any minor misstep can get them arrested, tortured and/or killed.

We, in the West, have reached the terminal stage of this social disease.

I will talk a little more about some of these issues I just mentioned further ahead, but they had to be all mentioned together to provide a picture of how ridiculous our species, or at least the Western portion of it, has become.

We ought to ask ourselves: how did we get to this point?

And I answer, even as I tire to repeat it: via fear.

We idolize those who are wrong, abide by censorship, and let those least qualified to guide us do so because standing up to those people would be suicide. Being afraid, we tag along with them instead. And as we do, our moral compasses become twisted.

To preserve ourselves, we side with those we disagree with and end up defending things we are morally against. To avoid being harassed, assaulted, kidnapped, maimed and murdered by large, violent, and potentially armed groups of people (whose greater exponents are governments) we can’t possibly defend ourselves against, we publicly adopt their points of views, pretending to be one of them. To pretend convincingly, we need to act in accordance with our fakely adopted perspective. And once we’ve acted upon it, violating what we truly believe in and desecrating our own moral values, we are lost – we have become hypocrites. Our conscience is tarnished, our moral north spun out of place, and then, with our own conscience broken and removed out of the way, there’s nothing left to stop us from doing wrong again.

Each time we do something we know we shouldn’t, it becomes easier. We come up with increasingly absurd explanations to justify our condemnable actions and force ourselves to believe in them. The veil between “right” and “wrong” becomes blurrier; before long, it vanishes. Being irrational and harming others becomes the rule rather than an exception. Then we are no longer pure, clean; instead we are soiled, corrupted. Knowing the damage we’ve caused cannot be undone and that the line cannot be uncrossed, we keep moving farther beyond it. With our chance of being good gone, we embrace evil with arms, legs, and soul wide open. And then we have finally become one of those we initially feared, hated and despised.

The greater the number of despicable acts a person commits, the more their moral compass spins astray, the less their own conscience stops them from doing even worse, the more harm they cause, and the more they distance all of us from having a life worth living.

Each person that falls into that trap becomes one of “them” – one of those we must rid ourselves of. And the more of “them” there are the easier it is for them to corrupt others. The more of “them” there are the more people they force to undergo the whole process of shredding one’s own moral values.

By fearing those we should fight and thus refraining from doing so, we allow their numbers to grow exponentially. If they grow into large enough numbers, their lack of morals becomes endemic. And once it becomes globally endemic, humanity is lost.

This may sound a bit off-topic, but I should probably say a thing or two about the perceived public opinion.

The “public opinion” doesn’t exist; it’s not “a thing.” What exists is just the perceived one: what people believe is the actual public opinion but isn’t. Since no one can access every individual’s private and honest opinions, and we all have to wear social masks just to stay alive, none of us can possibly know what the actual public opinion is. And even if we could identify it, it would be useless because, with each one of us living in a different made-up reality and defending exclusively our own private interests, our true collective view of our species and of our society is bound to be an irrational mess of wildly different and often opposite notions – an absolutely useless compendium.

This is important because what politicians, big companies, and others with power use to evaluate, manipulate and please (so that they can profit from it) the masses is that perceived public opinion – a forged impression of a fantasized, falsely aligned society.

And who forges that impression?

The media.

Here’s my point: once you have been convinced, by the media, that everyone else believes in something, speaking aloud against it puts you in danger, because you’ll be attacked by a large number of people if you do so. You’ll expect that to happen, so you’ll stay quiet. Going against what is perceived to be the generally accepted standard is self-destructive, because the many who are stupid enough to actually believe in it are usually also prone to assault and hurt others – including you.

Anyone who gets some TV time ends up influencing the “public opinion.” And the people who “pop-up” on our screens are usually politicians, who strive to protect only the interests of select groups; actors, who specialize in impersonating others; random experts, with questionable credentials and competence; comedians, who think everything is a joke; athletes, who failed second grade twice; journalists, strictly bound by their editors’ personal agendas; religious figures, who confuse fantasy with reality; or incompetent, failed people who fill the internet up with their ill-informed opinionated streams.

As we all listen to professional liars, people who don’t know half as much as they pretend to, jokers, troglodytes, manipulators, lunatics and idiots speaking, the general public assumes that what they all say is not only true, but also that those people’s view of the world is normal – since such people were allowed to manifest their opinions publicly, everyone is watching the same thing, and no one is doing anything to counter what they say, our instincts dictate that what we are all seeing must be credible, unquestionable, and not only acceptable but, in fact, right.

Unqualified people are allowed to speak publicly not because they should, but because someone is personally interested in them doing so – they are there because someone else profits from their words and appearances. And no one does anything about it because everyone is, yet again, afraid to: speaking against a politician might get you thrown in jail; speaking against a celebrity will spawn an army of their admirers to curse and threaten you; speaking against an athlete might get you physically assaulted by his team’s fans; speaking against a “half-expert” will be taken as an outsider attacking an entire class of professionals; and speaking against a media vehicle is just plain suicide, because they can force their opinions upon millions of people while yours can barely reach a dozen.

When people fear challenging someone, whatever bullshit spills out of that person’s mouth is treated as true even if it’s a lie. It’s treated as wisdom even if it’s obviously stupid. It’s treated as right even if it’s completely wrong. And as “the feared ones” keep making public statements, more and more people listen to their words, and more and more people end up actually believing in them. (As a reminder: feel free to disagree with anything I say – I am not going to hurt you.)

Our moral values are superseded by the twisted ones “on air.” Our children grow with a misconception of reality, with a wrong notion of what a human being is, of what it means to be one, and of what we should aim to become. We end up with a world in which global powers condemn a country “in the strongest terms” because it started a war while at the same time they openly finance genocide against people who are doing nothing more than to seek justice on another corner of the planet. We end up with women physically assaulting their husbands and taking a dump on their beds then suing the guy for moral damages. We end up with millions of people believing democracy is a good idea, and with those who democratically disagree being beaten up to death by the police.

We start our lives off with a fairly reasonable sense of “good,” “bad” and “just.” And then, out of fear of what will happen to us if we stick to them, we deface or entirely abdicate our own moral values, siding with whatever our politicians and the media claim to be the “public opinion” in a sad, barely successful attempt to simply maintain our physical integrities and what little remains of our natural, theoretically irrevocable freedoms.

The perceived public opinion is a tool. It is created and manipulated by those in power to achieve their own desired ends. But now, with the advent of the internet, high-speed connections, and streaming, pretty much anyone can play this game.

We have random mongoloids all around, daily disseminating their idiotic ideas on YouTube for anyone who’s dumb enough to listen. But those folks are fairly irrelevant since they have no goal other than to make money for themselves, and they end up only misinforming the “few” (up to a few dozen millions, at most) fools who trust them. The internet entities that actually play the game, in the open and without shame, are the professional trolls (paid social media manipulators, fake-news disseminators, fake politics-focused accounts, etc.).

The purpose of internet trolls is the same as the media’s: it is to make us believe that, even when we know we are right, we are part of a small minority that stands no chance of overcoming the vast number of those who are wrong – so it would be “smart” for us to shut up, bend over, and meekly take it from behind, “just like everyone else does.” Thousands, millions of fake accounts are created and people are paid to disseminate idiocies using them to make the rest of us afraid of saying out loud anything that violates their employer’s interests. Trolls are a modern, weaponized and unveiled tool of “manipulation by fear of being outnumbered.” They are the priests and imams of the internet, funded by private interests and shady governmental institutions alike.

Children and teenagers, in particular, are very easily swayed by anything they watch or listen to. They see the world through screens, trust anyone who appears in them, and naively believe in all kinds of nonsense. Even the smart ones are prone to fall for it, because the impression they get is that most people believe in “troll crap” and, being aware of their own ignorance about everything, they assume “most people” must be right. Young humans don’t know what is going on, they can’t quite think for themselves, and they don’t really care, because important stuff is adults’ stuff. Thus, the number of people who blindly defend what is wrong is steadily increasing. And the worst part is that those young people have already started voting, since this “social experiment” has already been going on for decades, guaranteeing that our species will keep making the wrong decisions at least for the next several decades.

If we add everything I’ve said in these last few pages together, we get an endgame scenario: if the media’s moral sense becomes too wretched; our governments’ and largest companies’ too as a consequence; everyone else is afraid of them, as every single one of us is; too many people truly believe in those institutions’ messages, which is always the case; and no one’s left who’s willing to sacrifice themselves to stand for what is actually right, we are doomed.

If we come to a point when there’s no one left on Earth who can see how broken we are and how dysfunctional human society has become, when there’s no one left willing to even try to fix our world, humanity will have been crippled and potentially rendered unable to evolve any further.

This is one possible way to lose “the game of life.”

As a final note, just because I mentioned “the brainwashed” (Gen Zs) have already started casting their ballots: whenever someone seeks to lower the age required for voting, the intention is to make the dogmas they have been most recently disseminating start to have practical effects sooner (which means the damage done by them becomes irreversible faster as well).

Children will believe in anything those manipulating them want them to. And once they start weighing in on official decisions, whatever fantasy they were fed with becomes law, meaning that any sane person who voices their disagreement with it thereafter will be forcefully silenced and removed from society.

This fact could be used to fix a failed country and even our entire species, but it seems to be used far more often to the opposite effect.

While we don’t manage to rid ourselves of democracy, only those above 30 and below 70 years of age should be allowed to vote. People in that layer are the only ones who take serious issues seriously and [partially] understand the world they live in, while having being brainwashed as children means we all need at least a couple of decades to realize this happened and start thinking for ourselves.

The Origin

I have a theory about how the political correctness meme, which basically defines current Western mentality and politics, began. My understanding is that it was a simple drive for profits and that three factors initiated it:

1 – Over the past several decades, women have been studying more, working, climbing the professional ladder, taking care of themselves and their own finances. Thus, having money of their own to spend, they became a relevant and important segment of the market;

2 – Black people tend to reproduce more and sooner than everyone else, which has been steadily increasing their representation as a percentage of the population in Western societies. Thus, by their sheer number, they became a relevant and important segment of the market;

3 – Gay people, as a rule, have no children, which leaves them with a lot more money than heterosexuals to spend. Once homosexuality was decriminalized, gay marriage allowed, etc., they sprang out of their closets and went on shopping sprees. Thus, they became a relevant and important segment of the market as well.

Large companies noticed those changes and started adapting their marketing strategies, focusing more and more on women, black, and gay people, and at the same time less and less on white men, who already own most of what they want and need.

Media vehicles rely on advertisements for profits, so they started favoring those three groups in any way they could, biasing their productions and news deliveries to make their clients (the advertising companies) happier and their own pockets heavier.

Watching “empowered women,” black people whose “lives matter,” and garish homosexuals 24/7 on the TV, people in general started believing it all meant more than rich people trying to get even richer. That created a political issue.

Millennials and Gen Zs were increasingly brainwashed throughout their lives into believing short-haired women wearing men’s clothes, drag queens, and mixed-race couples are the rule rather than the exception, and a standard to be pursued rather than an aberration to be avoided. This turned the issue into an actual problem.

Socialists took advantage of this whole phenomenon and started defending those three groups of people in everything they could, turning them into guaranteed votes for the socialist cause. Together, they all started pushing for and in fact managed to acquire more rights for themselves than anyone else has. And this made the problem serious.

Our brainwashed youngsters grew up to create Facebook, Twitter, and other meme-spreading platforms. Making billions of dollars at an early age by selling stocks of companies that provide a disservice to society to greedy Wall Street speculators who couldn’t possibly care less about their clients’ assets, those kids became famous and worshiped – after all, who doesn’t want to become a billionaire before they are 25?

Such Zuckerbergers were considered visionaries on top of everything else. They were given free rein over their companies and retained direct control of these, even after their businesses went public along with their disturbing practices. Their personal views were allowed to guide the social networks they had just created, and those folks all share the exact same opinion: that whoever makes the most noise is right (despite the fact that smart people tend to be the quietest).

Being young, rich, idolized, and brainwashed since childhood, those social-media TED-talkers immediately set off to impose their profit-driven, “politically correct” views on all users of their platforms, censoring anyone with a divergent opinion without legal or moral bounds. With traditional and social media both brainwashing people in the wrong direction and silencing any and all reasonable voices as much as they possibly can, they’ve guaranteed that anyone being born in the West will be infected with the disturbing and disruptive meme of political correctness.

To top it all, Hollywood set off to grab its piece of the cake and started writing for, casting, and putting into protagonist roles as many women, gay, and black people as they could. The American propaganda engine is now run by a socialist hub of twisted morality, fiercely imposing the leftist agenda on anyone who just wants to sit down and watch a good movie (incidentally making these very scarce).

That’s my understanding of how the whole “political correctness” notion was born and developed. And none of those responsible for it seems to have ever considered where their actions were taking us other than as far as their bank accounts stretch. The path of greed has always been a bloody one, but people never tire of following it.

This whole thing started as a simple money-grabbing scheme, conducted by the same old greedy bastards that have always run everything. Nowadays, literal psychopaths are deliberately chosen to run every single company that has stocks in the market, and those guys don’t give a damn about how much damage they cause to anyone or anything (fun fact: I always assumed China developed it’s current technology by reverse-engineering Western products manufactured there, but I was wrong. I recently learned that our psychos actually handed all Western technology to China for free, just to gain access to the Chinese market and factories, turn a quick profit, and look good in front of their companies’ boards and shareholders). Those folks don’t take the non-financial consequences of their actions into consideration at all, because they simply don’t care. And thanks to those sick people, the Western magnates’ greedy schemes backfired this time: by putting in charge those who seek the highest profits at any cost, they ended up empowering their worst enemies. Our tycoons’ insatiable thirst for money turned women, black, and gay people into a mass of maneuver for socialists, igniting a political revolution that aims to destroy everything they’ve built and steal everything they have (and they also turned China into a superpower). And the rest of us got unwillingly caught in the middle of it. Whereas we have all always been ripped-off and exploited by “the wealthy capitalist,” now we also have our rights trimmed to the stem while those three trending groups’ (women, black people and gays) keep multiplying. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we are now also overtaxed by our governments and forced to freely give most of what we work our entire lives to have to the “poor” who still form the core electoral base of the socialists.

The political correctness meme entails shielding groups of people behind words such as “racism,” “homophobia” and “misogyny;” it disregards merit and actually eats away at equality via DEI policies; it erodes society by encouraging acts and behaviors that ignore what is reasonable and fair. By paving the way with those words to reach such ends, it succeeded in ruining everything. And while hiding under an anti-hate banner, social justice warriors only increase hatred, because this is the logical and inevitable consequence of curtailing and violating other people’s natural rights.

The only purpose the political correctness meme serves is to put a handful of socialists in charge and keep them there, so that they can steal everything from all of us. In the long run, this idiocy doesn’t do the rest of us any good – regardless of our gender, sexual orientation or skin color.

It’s high time we rid ourselves of this populist, destructive notion.

Our “Specieses”

I don’t know about you, but when I was in school I was taught that a species is defined as such by whether the offspring of two mating animals is fertile or not. If two animals copulate and their offspring is able to reproduce, those animals are considered members of the same species, even if of different races. If their offspring is infertile, those mating animals are considered members of different species.

Well, it turns out that that definition is inaccurate.

Though we are (or at least were, in my time) taught that as if it was carved in stone, it isn’t. There’s still debate among biologists as to what defines a species, because the fertility of two animals’ offspring, like anything else, isn’t either zero or 100% – it can be anything in between, depending on the genetic differences between the pair of breeders.

That’s relevant because the fertility rate of a mixed-race human couple’s offspring is lower than that of a single-race’s2, which raises the question: are white, Asian, black, Indian, and people of other ethnicities just members of different races, or of different species?

What about apes? And hominid aliens?

You get to choose. Since there’s no clear line drawn by nature itself, you can draw your own. If you don’t, someone else will in your stead, and they’ll do so based on their political ideologies. You will always have scientific grounds to contest it, though.

While verifying that, I also learned that the dissolution rate of exogamous (mixed-race) marriages is also higher than that of endogamous (single-race) ones3. It is hypothesized that this happens mostly due to cultural differences between people of different races, which I agree with (so long as the word “mostly” is in there). Still, the empirical evidence we have suggests that matching people who don’t match doesn’t work very well, neither genetically nor socially.

What a surprise.

Regardless of whether we are all members of the same species or not, and even though we have much in common with each other, we are all different people – we don’t look alike, we behave differently, and we come from different places, in different shapes and colors.

Despite what some like to claim, a person’s physical characteristics, such as skin color and physiognomy, are indicators of what to expect from them, because they define said person as a member of a certain group. People belonging to the same one tend to have similar physical traits due to living in the same environment, reproducing among themselves, practicing the same activities and adopting similar lifestyles.

Those physical traits work as an indicator of both a person’s genes and their culture. The second is what matters the most – a group’s moral values, traditions, habits, etc. – but the first is not as unimportant as some like to claim.

It takes a long time for us to assimilate and adapt to our own culture, to the one we are born into. We are raised in and molded by it; we have to learn it. Most of us are not willing or even capable to undergo that whole process a second time if/when joining or interacting with people who have different values, who speak a different language and live in a foreign reality. And different cultures clash. What is adored by a group of people may be shunned by another. What is encouraged by some may be considered a crime by others. One people’s ways may lead to social, economic and technological developments, while another’s may lead to zealotry, thieving, enslavement, wide-spread corruption, civil war and anarchy.

Being born and raised in a nurturing environment, to a good family, and as part of a society that encourages and supports that which ought to improve human life seem to be the most important factors in defining how any one of us turns out. But much of what/who we are is also tied to our DNA, and each group of people’s genes evolved in particular ways, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to make each [definable] one of them intrinsically different from the others.

The genetic difference between people from different races is minimal, but its relevance doesn’t necessarily match that percentage. We share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and the remaining 1% clearly makes quite a difference. We share 99.9% with other human beings, but our alleles – variations of the same gene that, for instance, determine an individual’s type and color of hair, blood type, and propensity to develop certain diseases – can vary up to 7%, and they are anything but irrelevant.

Our genetic material determines how our brain develops, our height, hormonal production, appearance, intellectual and motor capabilities, how much fat our bodies accumulate and where, how much our muscles can grow, etc. And members of the same ethnic group have more genes and alleles in common. Genetically speaking, it is our alleles that define different races of human beings (though our official, socially-inclined definition takes culture into account as well).

Scientists, as you have probably noticed, tend to downplay the importance of genetic differences when talking about different human beings. If they didn’t, they would be called “racists!” and persecuted by the left half of our society. When the people who are supposed to know better than anyone else about something feel coerced not to share the truth of their findings, the rest of us are left oblivious to it. And this includes me, so I’m forced to infer the true importance of the genetic differences between human beings of different races.

Following my own reasoning, I say our genetic differences are not as important as our cultural ones because there’s evidence to support this: what have Stephen Hawking’s, Richard Feynman’s, Niels Bohr’s, Alexander, The Great’s, Napoleon’s, Abraham Lincoln’s, or any other “accomplished figure’s” children accomplished? (Note: I don’t know if all of them had children, and the worth of their respective accomplishments is debatable.)

In theory, those people’s progenies had the genetic material required to follow in their parents’ footsteps – to do something extraordinary. But they all turned out like anyone else. I’ve never heard anything about any of them, so I assume they all became normal folks, leading mostly normal lives, doing nothing worthy of particular note.

All those historical figures weren’t “great” because of their genes. They were extraordinarily successful thanks to pure chance; thanks to appropriate circumstances and a long series of inevitable accidents (which nonetheless involve being born in the right group/community/country). Their genes were part of what led to their accomplishments, but not the decisive one.

At the same time, our genes and alleles are far from irrelevant because someone could have, as a deliberately exaggerated example, a genetic propensity to enjoy the taste of human meat while also hating any other food’s. If an allele can cause that, then the issue is much greater. And I don’t have to tell you what cannibalism leads to (obviously, to no desirable outcome).

Some good genes/alleles can also have bad consequences, and vice versa. For instance, black people in general have a higher bone density and more muscular mass than the rest of the human race. That’s a good thing. But as previously established, when people have any kind of advantage they tend to use it to abuse others. This means that, by having some physical superiority, black people have a tendency to physically attack others for no good reason, and also to focus on physical activities rather than on intellectual ones. And both of those things are highly undesirable, because they are non-constructive. In practice, having a group of people physically stronger than others is detrimental for human society (although simply keeping people of different races apart can mitigate this issue).

Light-skinned people get first-degree burns if they stand under the sun for more than 30 minutes or so. It sucks. But whiter skin requires considerably less sunlight to synthesize vitamin D, meaning white folks don’t need to spend much time outside. This allows us to dedicate more time to intellectual tasks and to keep our sanity in cold environments (when most of the human body must be covered by clothes, thus having almost no contact with sunlight).

We also have the Asians who, due to a genetic deficiency in the aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme, get flushed when they drink alcohol, which isn’t good. But thanks to that, they avoid drinking, which leads to much fewer cases of alcoholism among Asians than among people of other ethnicities and, as another consequence, they also rarely throw up in someone else’s car or run people over while driving theirs, which are both good things for everyone.

The difference in genes and alleles between human beings can and do have a much greater importance than the simple percentage variation found between them leads us to believe, because every allele can lead to relevant consequences of its own.

Let me explain why our cultural and genetic differences really matter.

Let’s say that our objective, as a species, is scientific advancement. For that, we need intelligence – everything in the universe works logically, and intelligence is the capability to identify and apply this natural coherence to our thoughts and actions. “Intelligence” includes many different skills, such as being able to store and recall information, to accurately picture something in one’s mind, to quickly make mathematical calculations without the need of external aides, to organize ideas in a clear and effective way, to transmit these ideas efficiently, etc.

With that assumed goal in mind, there is a desirable set of genetic material and behavioral (cultural) patterns that will make achieving it much easier. And not only easier, but those traits are probably necessary for our objective to be achieved.

Having resilient bones, accurate and fast movements, or more strength are all positive and, in principle, desirable genetic attributes. But those cause social problems on their own, and they are only [somewhat] useful in heavy manual labor, which is nearly obsolete now that machines created by those with a superior intellect can do far more than any man.

If we have a group who is genetically and culturally predisposed towards a higher intelligence and a second group that has a predisposition for physical prowess, one of these groups will, invariably, achieve our desired goal much faster than the other (again: if this one ever even manages to). So we must have a proper objective in mind; we must take our differences into account; and we must favor individuals and groups that are likely to realize that goal. And we should eliminate the others, because these exist only to hinder the first ones.

There is always a relative genetic/cultural superiority between different groups of people when any specific goal is taken into account. And we do have goals – we may not have established them very clearly, but the proper ones are out there, somewhere. Regardless of whether we are aware of them or not, or of how long it may take us to become so, such goals exist and we must find and pursue them.

There’s a technical term for acknowledging that our differences matter, and that some of us are objectively better than others; a term for simply understanding that this is how our universe works. According to the dictionary, the word for it is “racism.”

Dumbing that all down just to make it perfectly clear, try the following test:

Choose the bird you believe can fly farther.

Bird 1: A Greater Cormorant.

Bird 2: A Flightless Cormorant.

Hint: Pay attention to their names.

If you chose the Flightless Cormorant, you are retarded. If you chose the Greater one, you are a racist.

Welcome to the team!

You probably already had your mind made (or made for you) about racial issues. And you may believe that mixing everyone up will lead to our species keeping the best of all human genes/alleles. That’s what I was told as a child, and I believed it for a long time. If you don’t put any thought into it, it seems plausible. Why not?

Well, there is a why.

Initially, that idea may seem reasonable. Stronger genes are, by definition, those that increase our odds of survival, and if we have both of our parents’ “best survival genes” our odds of surviving are better than their individual ones which, in turn, should lead to us reproducing more than them and our superior genes propagating further. So far, so good. But there’s a catch.

For starters, the odds of someone inheriting any of their parents’ genes is “random.” Mostly it’s a 50/50 chance, meaning that even if those parents have ten children it’s still possible none of these will inherit any of their desirable characteristics. And we also have dominant and recessive alleles, with respectively higher or lower than average chances of being expressed (meaning “to have practical effects”). So how does natural evolution decides which gene/allele is the best? How does it know what our species needs and deliberately encourages it?

It doesn’t.

Not all desirable alleles are dominant, and not all undesirable alleles are recessive, meaning that inheriting and expressing all of the best alleles available is extremely unlikely. The odds of a desirable recessive allele being expressed are low, increased considerably if both parents have it. Meanwhile, the odds of inheriting and expressing an undesirable dominant allele start at 50%, and yet are nullified if neither parent has it. That means there’s only a small chance of good recessive alleles having effect if we randomly mix people up, and a guaranteed chance to eliminate bad alleles (recessive or dominant) if we don’t mix the people carrying these with anyone else.

The outcome of mixing random people up isn’t necessarily beneficial. It often isn’t, and it’s definitely not ideal.

As a second point, natural evolution – merging DNAs at random and seeing which genes/alleles survive thanks to blind luck – is inadequate for us. First, because it simply no longer applies, since we created and constantly change the environment we live in, making it so that there’s no stable standard for us to adapt to. Second, because we already tamper with this kind of evolution, for example, when our governments subsidize people who cannot sustain themselves, deliberately propagating genes that, in theory, should be eradicated.

The claim that “the strongest genes [naturally] survive” is only valid in a fairly stable scenario that spans many thousands or millions of years, one in which we drift randomly through life instead of choosing and chasing a future we actually want. “To evolve naturally” means “to do nothing for a very long time and hope for a positive outcome.” How many times has this strategy worked for you?

Letting natural evolution decide our fate is the same as driving somewhere and rolling a dice to decide in which direction we’ll turn whenever we reach a crossroad. Given the distance we are driving, doing this would lead us anywhere except where we want to go.

“Hope is not a tactic,” as some people say. As intelligent beings, we can do better than to leave our entire future to chance. We must choose what world we want to live in and build it. And the random breeding of people may not even allow for that to happen.

We are All Bigots

In the television series Through the Wormhole, there’s an episode titled “Are We All Bigots?”4 And the answer to that question, they concluded, is “yes.”

In my language, we use the word “pre-concept” instead of “bias” or “prejudice.” I find this amusing because it’s a misnomer – prejudice is, in fact, the opposite: it’s not a pre-concept, but a post-concept. We treat different kinds of people differently because we learned, from our past experiences, that they do behave differently. We take into account what we know about a group of people and initially apply it to individuals belonging to it, or vice versa. Doing so is only logical.

Let’s say an alien race decides to land their massive, gun-filled spaceships on Earth. Millions of aliens drop off of them, all carrying plasma rifles and donning state-of-the-art battlesuits. And then one – just one – of them suddenly shoots a human being in the chest, melting this random person to a puddle for no apparent reason. Would you assume the rest of the aliens are friendly and quickly approach to greet and hug one of them? Or are you a biased racist who would instead grab a gun and find a place to barricade yourself in?

Being biased is a matter of survival. We don’t pet a tiger if we have any idea of how tigers in general behave, and we don’t pet any tiger if we have seen how any one of them behaves. When dealing with anything we know can harm us, we must be careful. For our own sake, we must assume the worst. And the most evil, and thus the most menacing thing in the universe we are aware of is other human beings.

When we see a person that doesn’t belong to our group – which is more easily distinguished by skin color, followed by other physical traits and spoken language – doing something we find deplorable, we automatically pin that kind of behavior on their race for two reasons:

1 – Because we need to know what to expect from people like the one in question, so as to be prepared to deal with them;

2 – And because we mentally try to separate ourselves from those who [in our opinion] don’t know how to behave properly.

The first reason is, again, only logical. All we know about people who are different from us is this very fact: that they are not like us. If they don’t look and/or talk as we do, we know they come from a different background from ours, we know they have different values, we know they don’t think like we do. If they have different values and don’t think like we do, they don’t act like us. If they don’t act like us, we don’t know what to expect from them. If we don’t know what to expect from them, they are a potential threat. If they are a potential threat and we see one of them doing something despicable, even if only once, for our own safety we must assume all those who are like them are capable of doing the same. And by assuming so we can no longer trust any of them. Doing anything else could literally get us killed.

At the same time, we, humans, don’t have enough encephalic mass to distinguish eight billion people from one another, to dedicate whole clusters of neurons to each individual we met in the past and leave many more free to fit those we’ll meet in the future. So we simplify things, generalizing.

In the second case I listed earlier – to separate ourselves from those who don’t know how to behave – we think: “I find their attitude and actions condemnable, because it violates what I believe is right. I would never do that. People like me would never do that.” That’s part of our need to feel superior, to believe we are better than others. Sometimes we are, indeed, better; but sometimes we are not. And we still think the same way in the second case, telling ourselves, “I only did this wrong thing once. I’m not really like that.”

We may also witness people of our own group doing something we shun, which leads to a third but yet of a similar nature thought. In such cases, we think, “They must have had some reason to do it.” And then, since they are “one of us,” we blame the individual and not the collective, singling them out, because the alternative would be to include ourselves, which we either refuse to do out of hypocrisy or we simply can’t, in case we really don’t act in such a way.

Our options are to either feel better by choosing to believe we do not commit acts we despise, or to feel worse by not doing so. Since the second alternative is self-destructive, we naturally go with the first.

Regarding others, we can generalize our individual perception of them, individualize our general perception of their group, or do neither. If we go with one of the first two options, we are being racist. If we don’t, we die. And that makes choosing whether to be a racist or not very easy. In fact, we don’t even have to think about it – our instincts automatically choose for us because, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, we have all learned that being racist is the proper way to protect ourselves.

Racism is a logical consequence of natural facts; it stems directly from how our universe works. And the illegal form of racism – which is to actually treat someone worse than others based exclusively on their ethnicity – is just a natural consequence of logical and ideological racism.

As things currently stand, if we don’t discriminate against others based on their race, we risk our own lives. If we do discriminate, we end up in jail. So what can we do?

One alternative would be to keep people of different races apart. But this ship has long sailed (literally). Another alternative would be to decriminalize the illegal form of racism (though it seems the ideological form of it has already been implicitly “miscriminalized” too). But this is not going to happen either and, while different races of people inhabit the same territories, doing so would tend to generate escalating conflicts (which is a very bad thing for reasons I’ll explain later).

A third alternative is what we end up doing in practice: we are wary of those who are unlike us but treat them politely, risking our own safety and well-being until they actually do something wrong. But once they do, we can't say or do anything about it, because by taking any action we’d risk being publicly crucified on the TV and ending up in jail. As a consequence, instead of just being wary we start to hate those who are different from us, because we could have stopped one of their people from doing something wrong but our own laws, written exclusively in their favor, didn’t allow us to. And now no one can resurrect that 12 year-old blond blue-eyed girl who got raped and stabbed to death.

Dramatic events such as the one I just used as an example are rare, though. In the vast majority of cases, nothing serious happens and we all manage to get along somewhat peacefully, mostly by avoiding those who are unlike us as much as we possibly can. But criminalizing racism is a double-edged sword, because it can enable crimes to occur by making anyone of a different ethnicity (or rather “with a lighter skin,” since racism, in the Western world and in practice, applies exclusively to one race) from the perpetrator’s refuse to intervene when they witness a criminal or otherwise immoral act.

Finally and thankfully, we have a fourth alternative available which is to have a single race of human beings inhabiting Earth. And this is the only actual solution to the problem.

The Dark Side

I was going to be subtle about it but, given that part of the purpose of this text is to openly say what most people refrain from, I’m going to be deliberately blunt instead:

Black people suck.

I’m confident most people of any ethnicity who interacted with black ones at least a few times have, like me, had unpleasant experiences from doing so. But besides personal takes, there are also several genetic, sociological, cultural, historical and otherwise notorious facts that justify that blunt statement of mine (beyond any doubt, I’d say).

In that episode of Through the Wormhole I mentioned earlier (“Are We All Bigots?”), they presented an experiment in which researchers showed pictures of angry and happy people to human subjects and then measured these ones’ brains' responses. It was discovered that, when we see the image of an angry person, our brains detect hostility and “get on edge” (for lack of a more technical term). When we see a happy one, our brains “relax.” But when the person is black, the human brain detects hostility regardless of their demeanor. That means our brains are naturally programmed to recognize any black person as a hostile at all times – and that includes black people’s brains as well, as the results were the same for people of all ethnicities.

Some of us don’t feel any sexual attraction to black people. I know this about myself, and a friend once told me the same thing. That’s too small a pool to draw any statistical conclusion from, so I will just speak for myself: for me, looking at a naked black woman is like staring at a tree: my brain simply doesn’t respond to it; there’s no arousal whatsoever. I’m fine with white, Asian, Latin, Indian, Middle-Eastern women – a hot one is a hot one and my brain recognizes it, regardless of ethnicity or my personal opinions. Unless they are black.

Paired up, the two arguments I just provided lead to the conclusion that we are evolutionarily programmed to dislike black people. And the only logical explanation I can come up with for every human brain to have evolved throughout hundreds of thousands of years to behave this way is for black people to have been causing problems for everyone for a very long time.

Light-skinned people often blush when they feel ashamed. In some book, I read it is believed that the social purpose of that trait is to show our peers we know when we messed up and that we regret it. Although embarrassing, it generates empathy and shows others we do know the difference between right and wrong, and that we rue it when we fail to do the first. The blushing and ensuing embarrassment, though unpleasant on their own, have the positive consequence of making us more civilized since we try to avoid letting it happen (just like Asians in general avoid drinking, for the same reason). Black people don’t blush.

According to the United States Department of Justice, black people are 5.7 times more likely to be imprisoned than white ones5. That is, of course, in good part due to racial persecution by American police officers. But this defense is largely negated by the fact that Hispanics – who comprise a greater percentage of the American population than black people do, who are also “discriminated” against, and who are more inclined toward becoming gang members – are about 3 times less likely to be incarcerated than black people, indicating that simple racial bias is not the main issue. The main problem is the actual behavior of Afro-descendants.

We are all taught, in school, that white men enslaved African people. But that’s only a half-truth. According to Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, the Africans actually enslaved themselves. They hunted and captured their own people (from rival tribes, I assume) and then took those captive to the Middle East slave markets, where the Europeans finally bought their slaves from. I’m not saying the part white people played in the slave trade was morally justifiable, but I don’t think we are the worst evil in that story. And it’s particularly strange that our history books omit this particular fact, because hiding it doesn’t help anyone.

I don’t need to tell you how any African country compares to other nations where the majority of the population has fair skin. Maybe the prevailing ethnicity of the population of every first-world country on Earth? Always light, though not necessarily white.

The average IQ of every single African country is also among the lowest on the planet6, averaging 70 or so (a rough estimate, as I didn’t do the actual math. The real number might be considerably lower) as a continent.

The human race, as the scientific evidence we have suggests, was born in Africa. This means that those living there have had 2.8 million years to develop (since the birth of the Homo genus). And they didn’t, while everyone else who left the continent eventually managed to, to a higher or lesser extent. This leads to the conclusion that what allowed the human race to progress past tribalism was precisely to get away from black people. Those among them who were better than the rest had to leave the continent to bring our species to the point where we stand today. Had they remained in Africa, doing so would probably have been impossible.

Circa 1914, European countries dominated about 90% of Africa. And then they all simply decided to cede control over it. Why? Because trying to do anything useful with it was a waste of time.

Have you ever seen a non-black person (other than Jews) accusing someone else of racism? I haven’t. Some of our laws were written specifically for them (and similar ones for the Jews), and not for everyone, because most racial hatred is directed towards black people (and Jews, once again). And the only reasonable explanation I can come up with as to why that happens is for them (both) to have earned it. Thanks to our naiveté and stupidity, the fact that those people(s) have been antagonizing others ever since they exist has now led to them being rewarded instead of duly punished. Now, thanks to the laws the most gullible, corrupt, and/or ill-intentioned among our politicians have enacted, those people use racism not as a means to defend their legitimate rights, but as a shield that allows them to violate everyone else’s.

To me, all this evidence proves a point, the point is undeniable, and the ensuing conclusion inevitable: black people are the antithesis of human development. The African genes, culture, mentality and way of life lead to stagnation in very primitive conditions, barring life from ever fulfilling its purpose. (Black people born elsewhere do show some improvements though, thanks to cultural changes.)

I’m not saying we should go out killing every black person we see in front of us. That’s one way to go, yes, but there are some good people among them just as there are many bad ones among all other races, so doing that wouldn’t be fair or lead to the best results possible. What I’m saying is we should avoid giving black people any kind of advantage, undue encouragement or, least of all, power, because history has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that their innate way of doing things leads to ignorance, anarchy, famine, despair and desolation.

Also, for God’s sake, do not donate money to institutions begging for it to help sick and starving children in Africa. You didn’t condemn those kids to life, you are not the one to blame for their woes, and if you save two of them today we’ll all have twenty more begging us for help tomorrow. Donating anything to those people is an “investment” in extending and multiplying suffering – above all, their suffering.

White Trash

There aren’t many saints on this side of the rainbow either.

We, white men, have been killing and torturing ourselves and others for a very long time. Europe has gone through countless geopolitical reconfigurations due to all of its countries incessantly invading each other over the centuries; we were responsible for the crusades, the inquisition, two world wars (so far) and the Holocaust; we created despot kings, greedy bankers, monopolists, cartels, the mafia, Bernie Madoffs, Microsofts, NSAs, Epsteins, Jeff Bezoses, and countless other regrettable people, companies and institutions.