Achieving A More Perfect Society—Part 2

Achieving A More Perfect Society—Part 2

Parenting will always be one of the most challenging and risky adventures in life. There is no ‘best way’ to be ‘the best parent’ simply because a given parent and given child have their own peculiar genetics.  A method of parenting that works with one child may not work with another. Success is never guaranteed. While the goal is for all family members to be close and supportive till death do they part, this too is not guaranteed. What has changed in this proposed system is that financial support by parents stops after the formative years. Any assistance with medical or financial problems in the adult years comes from the collective support of all citizens via the Golden Rule. Mates will continue to support each other by any legal means possible till death or divorce ends the relationship. This is the way nature works and is part of the way to make an entire society more successful. 

I suppose if everyone is required to work based on their skill level, some will refuse for varied reasons (“I don’t want to drive a bus, I want to be a professional baseball player”). These dissidents will be required to work in special communities full time, at work commensurate with their skills, until they get a professional base ball contract or whatever their demanded job. What they will lose is their freedom. Of course everyone is entitled to pursue any career they wish, but need do so while working some job to support themselves as adults. It is important to society as a whole that every adult capable of supporting themselves does just that. In areas where financial assistance is needed that assistance is available to all adults. For example, if one needs financial aid to pursue a college degree then that aid is available to anyone who can qualify to be admitted to college. Well, it might be noted, then what about parents who can afford to send an offspring to college? No, the financial strings have been cut. The parents wealth will come back into their society upon their death. In the mean time, all young adults are expected to earn their own financial wealth. The goal is to put all young adults on a level playing field to the extent possible. Just like a parent can root for a child from the grandstands in a sport contest, but they cannot play the game for their offspring.  All citizens will be issued citizen identification cards, renewable every X number of years. Existing as an illegal immigrant would be far more difficult. 

Trade schools or education through college will be free although the nature of college will likely be drastically different.  Again, computers will supply most of the informational input. Many courses will be on line, not associated with a particular college but a particular Professor. There is something to be said for young college age students existing together on a campus, pursuing career education in a group environment with the associated activities such as sports, and other organized activities like band, debating, semesters abroad, etc. With most courses online the need for $50,000 plus tuitions will vanish.  Most instructors will be busy with research except those with exceptional ability to lecture, and these will compete for students on line nationwide. Students on a campus will still be able to work with Professors on research projects. So who pays for the research work and salaries of the research Professors?  The government.

With all adults and teenagers gainfully employed at livable wages (the teenagers part time), our ghettoes can begin to be dismantled or renovated. This too provides more employment opportunities. The  urban, rural, and suburban ghettoes have to go. They are the source of chronic high levels of stress hormones amongst the children trapped there. If we can conquer space, invade countries routinely, maintain military bases all over the world, and so on—then we can reduce expenditures in these areas and demolish our ghettoes. It is a matter of priorities. With few exceptions, nations, like parents, lead best by example of how they live their lives or run their own nations. It really is hard to force other nations to adopt a certain form of government or culture through military means. Even more important to understand is that if our nation can use force to make another country adopt a political system or religious system—than any group, wishing to make others be like them, has the same right to use force. It does little good to call our fighters ‘freedom fighters’ and opposition fighters ‘terrorists’. Oddly enough we always kill far more enemies than they do us, but it has been many decades since we have ever achieved any objectives via military invasions.

It seems obligatory to pause here and point out that no plan for a more perfect society can work if it doesn’t start with responsible reproduction and full employment for all adult citizens and teenagers. Nor will their ever be any fairness if the playing field for young adults is not independent of parental financing. The needs of society as a whole trumps individual genetic ties. Religious beliefs and parental bias to their own offspring is not bad, but natural. But this natural tendency is overridden by the evolutionary process and the welfare of society as a whole. The evolutionary process can survive most anything and has, but societies which do not generate level playing fields for all its citizens, implode in a relatively short period of time. When a couple reproduces they are not cloning themselves by a long shot.  This notion that reproducing produces little clones of ourselves is way overblown. It is one of the biggest illusionary mental concepts of our lives. We start with only half the genes of an offspring coming from our own genes, then add environment, chance, and how much help our offspring receive from others throughout their lives and well, we will most likely rarely even recognize our clone. Our parental skills and these other factors may well make our parenting an outstanding success but not much of a success in cloning ourselves. Parenting can be one of the most meaningful experiences of our lives, but not because we have cloned ourselves. We have not even come close unless one is talking about racial features like skin color or inherited religious beliefs, or cultural stuff. 

We attain, if lucky, a lot of pride and affection for our own offspring based on our efforts and the time consuming tasks of parenting, but we need simultaneously, via the Golden Rule, attain meaningful appreciation and intrigue for human diversity. To root for, and help, those different from ourselves is rewarding and necessary for us to maximize our level of contentment.  Put it this way: we develop really strong attachment to pets, not because they are remotely any clone of us, but because both pet and owner develop strong emotional ties despite little similarity in our genetics. Good teachers develop the ability to relate well to all sorts of students who have little in common genetically with the teacher’s own genetics. The strongest emotional attachment may well come from a spouse whose genetics are clearly outside our own genetic tree. Of course it is fine to say ‘my child’ or ‘my pet’ and declare it a most meaningful relationship, at least when it is. It is an entirely different matter when one supports policies which favor your children getting a better education than those living in less affluent neighborhoods. The needs of society as a whole trumps you own small family world. When the Golden Rule reigns it is just as important for other children to have good schools as it is for your own children to have good schools.

Many of the changes proposed in this musing will be dismissed as naive, changes which will never be able to happen, changes people of today will never accept.  This is the same reasoning that existed for many changes that eventually took place. How many people would have predicted the legalization of gay marriage ten years ago? When we talk about changing things we really need to put things in historical perspective. The Earth has been in existence about 4.6 billion years. Life has existed on earth for about 3.8 billion years.  Multicellular life has existed on earth for about 2.1 billion years. Our species has existed about .2 million years. This means  humans have been around a mere .004% of the Earth’s history. The history of the Earth has been divided into 19 time periods, all of which were created by climate changes produced for various reasons.  Some scientists now claim a new evolutionary time period is underway, one in which future climate change is being dictated by the activities of one species—our species. We are already in the midst of a 6th great species extinction period. It is not just climate change which is being affected by human activity.

When we talk about a system which will improve human societies it has nothing to do with what any electorate might vote for today. Majority votes or majority rule does not determine the best society. The laws which govern the evolutionary process determine what is ‘best fitted’ for the evolutionary time in question, and this time is not the minuscule time associated with human life spans. Many things which are best are considered not best at the time someone first advocates it. Slavery didn’t end, women didn’t get the vote, children didn’t get rights, etc the first time someone rationally proposed this would be the correct change needed. 

The major issues of the day involve responsible reproduction, livable minimum wages, full employment with job security, good health care for all, good schools for all, and limits as to how much of any nation’s wealth can be sequestered by a few. Democracy itself has become burdened with very complicated issues, not so much in theory, but in actual practice. The average voter would be hard put to come up with even a 5 or 15 minute intelligible discourse on economic issues, environmental issues, health care costs, full employment, and so on. Thus, by default, elections become professionally designed ploys to manipulate emotional issues like race, gay marriage, making the country ‘white again’, abortion, whether a person has an electable face to be President, the ever effective Hitler-istic “make our country great again”, pitting varied groups against each other to determine whose political base will pay off state or national debts, which groups are responsible for our problems, and the newest wrinkle—just vote for anyone who will blow up government and start over again with no clue as to what the ‘over again’ even means. 

In the end only the “Golden Rule” can bring fairness, justice, social harmony, economic prosperity for all, more level playing fields, protection and opportunity for all children and adults, and enable peace and contentment to maximally be achieved amongst all citizens. On top of all this, via various media gadgets, no nation anymore can be an island unto themselves. Everything discussed in the above musing has to be global. The idea of individual nations competing for dominance, or power, or wealth, is rapidly becoming obsolete. And of course the notion that genetic family cabals, have the right to sequester most of the wealth in their hands for generations, is also self destructive to any kind of society. Of course individuals can become wealthy via their own ethical, legal, and talented means, but when they die that wealth goes back into the society from which it was derived. 

When people talk about how important their children and grandchildren are to them, most of the time it is egregiously disingenuous.  The future generations are not best served by invading other countries on borrowed money, paying pensions on borrowed money, financing all sorts of major projects on borrowed money, permitting 43% of our



 citizens to make so little money that they don’t even qualify to pay federal income taxes, allowing 2-5% of citizens to own 90% of a nations wealth,  allow ever growing ghettoes to exist with ever-increasing unsafe environments, poor schools, poor teachers, 60-70% unemployment for young people, a continued Police and political War on Drugs centered in these communities, jailing so many young people that we now have 25% of global prisoners in our own jails, and so the list goes on. We, collectively, cannot permit any of the above and yet with stupid sincerity, claim we genuinely are determined to make sure our own kids and grandchildren will have a good life. The kind of politics which prevails today guarantees they will have no such thing.

This musing topic will end here because it is senseless to worry about any more particulars since little of the above is even beginning to be effectuated. Across the globe, with few exceptions, the main emotional feeling is to throw the current leaders out, well, just because enough is enough, and yet have no clear alternative changes of any substance. Bernie Sanders came the closest but he is a relic, much like myself.   

In the context of this toxic election year, where does this kind of musing fit in?  It is perhaps comforting to understand that this particular election does not determine, in any way, the course of the evolutionary process. Advancement, whether it be physical changes, or changes in behavior, or ethics in the case of humans, will proceed eventually in certain directions. The trouble is we view changes in human time, not evolutionary time. For example, slavery is a human unethical practice via the Golden Rule. For hundreds of years it was considered via culture and varied religious scripts to be an ethical practice. It was ended because it was not the best fit for any successful human culture. Lincoln may have engineered the end of slavery in the United States, but if he had failed, someone else would have ended it. It was a time dependent process not a particular person dependent process. Women getting the right to vote was the same sort of thing, opposed by the same cultural and religious scripts. Gay rights the same way. Children’s rights the same way. And on it goes. 

This presidential election will effect the timing of progress, not whether evolutionary progress will occur. In the long run (evolutionary time), all will end up in a progressive way with the best fit for life on earth, or at least somewhere. Neither political party is addressing responsible global reproduction, or global livable minimum wages, or everyone sacrificing anything to pay off huge national and local debts, or to monitor stress levels of children as the means to enabling the maximum number of people to develop into the best possible citizens. One party will speed up domestic implosion at home, the other party simply delay it a few more years or decades. One party at least attempts to maximize tolerance to diversity, the other party is led by this principle: whenever two people or two groups interact in a common endeavor, one side will get the short end of the stick. This mentality certainly worked for Trump. The objective is to make sure the other person or group always gets the short end of the stick, and the necessary laws are in place to ensure the favored group or groups, get(s) a rigged path to success. This is unethical and will not prevail in the long run. This is a nation of true diversity, measured by any category, and if diversity cannot be embraced and supported by our citizens then we will now become Baghdad West or Afghanistan West or Egypt West, etc. 

For us as individuals, the long run is is dependent on our age and whether this long run is decades, hundreds of thousands of years, or millions of years away. It seems clear enough at this point that societal implosion will occur at any soon moment, and after that any time span for recovery is beyond human predictability. 

For those who have already lived a peaceful and prosperous life, there can be no logical gripe. For the younger people, this is a very dangerous time. No smart gadget, or app, or Facebook, and so on is going to effectuate needed changes for the environment in which they live. Most people today live such that their society is basically their daily contacts via gadgets. There is far less pressure to tolerate diversity, because their own world on their gadgets is not diverse. Before all the electronic gadgets their world was full of diversity. Is this bad or good?  Not relevant at all since evolution simply proceeds depending on the best fit for the environment at hand. 

Thus this musing ends with no firm grasp at all on the immediate future. Which is ok, it is never smart to worry about that which one cannot control. What kind of future will exist? Even The  Shadow doesn’t know, and given the way evolution works, maybe even the Creator doesn’t know. The only certainty, after billions of years, is that the evolutionary process continues, with many ups and downs, toward a more complex and better universe. This process has hardly taken note of me personally at all, and that, for sure, without a doubt, will be an irritant to me till death. Ok, not really since I can’t think of any good reason why the process should. 

If I had a picture of me chasing wind mills I would end with that picture.