Universal Basic Income

So I found this clip about work and the merit of it in contemporary society.

It seems to be the point of this idea to create awareness of the complication introduced into production and consumption, when we politically moralise the debate about who deserves what and when based upon individual contribution to the whole. Rather than rearranging society in accordance with current technical capability to ensure the highest possible rate of production, we would rather limit the possibilities to ensure that anyone who can, and even some who cannot, experience the feeling that they therefore should contribute in order to receive.

If you are as regular a reader on this blog as my posting habits would allow then you should be aware of the fact that I am a firm believe in basic human rights including a roof along with sufficient nutrition for every single human being on this planet. It should never ever be considered a luxury to be able to sustain life along with mental and physical health no matter the contribution to society.

As a transitional tool away from monetary exchange and economic pressure all together into a true economy with equilibrium and steady state systemic structure as the goal, I do think this universal income idea has some merit. A bridge obviously has to exist from our current ecocidal and asocial ostracising patterns into a much more humane paradigm, where human beings are recognised as such rather than the label “consumer”.

A day in the life

Trapped. Queued. Shopping... Looking at a plastic basket full of imported groceries, I find myself contemplating how fast I could escape this situation should I want to. I wonder if the sun is shining outside, and in about five minutes time, when I have paid for my temporary solutions, I will find out if it does.

But then I sat up. I was in bed. Nightmares always make me rather groggy when I wake up, so it takes a short while before I distinguish this moment from the last in the string of conscious experiences. The sun was indeed shining outside, and I feel it now warming my hair ever so gently as I bend down again resting on the elbows. I know what comes next, but the delicate grace of the consuming familiarity has to be overpowered, before I can get up and do what must be done.

Going to the bathroom for a quick leak, and I will have my breakfast afterwards. Some progressively charming people would refer to it as “a cheap golden spa with the doctor”. Reviewing the numbers popping up on the mirror as I wash my hands, I find that my recent diet has been a bit too sugar-heavy, so instead of just leaving, I tab the recommended meal touch pad.

Jumping into a pair of nano-fabric shorts and a t-shirt I feel the short chill, before I venture into the garden outside. The sun shine really is lovely today. Like a never ending and never beginning kiss on the cheek from the love of your life. But after dwelling on such a rather poetic notion for a short while, my stomach lets out a brief growl shoving me back on track. So I sign in with a finger print on the pad next to the hydroponics, and upon recognising that I asked for a recommended meal, lights beneath the artificial soil quickly appear, highlighting the necessary fruits and vegetables for my breakfast. I sheathe my hands into the gardening gloves on the desk and take to gather the components.

I must say I do not care much for the compliments I get from my kitchen, just because I went with the suggested meal to balance my vitamin intake, but I guess some concessions have to be made, if it helps other people be motivated towards a better a diet. I could just tell my kitchen to stop giving me those messages, but I like to be reminded of my own attitude. And of course there is the added bonus that fewer and fewer people have to see doctors now. I reckon medicine will easily transition into a focus on preventative treatment and health maintenance in my life time given where we are now.

Leaving the house I greet the neighbour coming home. She has apparently already been out and about on one of the new city roamers. These vehicles never seize to amaze me. Plated with a photovoltaic shell, just like almost every road is now, they run entirely on sun light, but the interesting part is that this has completely vamped society, and I think this is why people get up so early in the morning now, even though there is no labour left to do. These bikes never stay stationary for longer periods of time, and yet they have a fascinating break down rate of close to zero.

So when she gets out, I jump in and articulate my destination to the receiver. When I get to the university, I quickly traverse the stairs in anticipation of the study group I have been preparing for all week. “Applied Teraforming” has become my new hobby, and I hope to one day become sufficiently knowledgeable on the subject to teach it myself. Although most classes are now taught by the students themselves on a rotation basis, it is suggested that one takes a number of classes on a specific subject, prior to leaving the student roster and entering the the student-teacher roster.

Regarding “Applied Teraforming” I tend to day dream about a production team of developers and programmers working with me to realise my dream of a computer game, that tasks players with cultivating the best possible environment on a given planet, drawing raw data and calculating impacts made by player decisions from the global database. In turn this could become applied teraforming, if the record setting players' designs would be submitted back into the database for engineers and ecologists to review as possible schemes for real space exploration. But that is just my personal goal, and if it is to be, then I am sure I will eventually find the people I need for such a team to start working.

Later this week I did sign up for another study group called “Beyond exchange”, but I am actually considering not going. The people are very nice, but I do sometimes feel that I spent a bit too much time on that subject before Liberation, so I am not sure I would learn much from a thorough analysis into the socialisation process concerned with human interaction and that stuff. It just always seemed like a given to me that it would obviously work out in the end, even if we did not have anything left to threaten each other with.

However, I do see the merit in the course, because we certainly did not evolve past the exchange based culture as soon as we technically could have. And if I do go, it will be to explore how the transition seems to be going based on recent findings. Most of the previous advocates of exchange came around after strife and famine were ended, but some still cling to the idea that humans are categorically egoistical, and the only reason we are currently functional in a cooperative society is because it benefits ourselves the most. I guess they could be right. But then again, the results speak for themselves. All the psychiatrists either chose another education or shipped off to the Americas to work with transitional conflicts over there, simply because the need here fell like never before a few years after Liberation.

What amuses me greatly is when I get back home and do my exercises before dinner. I was always one of those lazy kids who were never properly motivated by the physical socio-dynamics, but now that I can track my progress on a bar that slowly builds towards the next level, I find myself working out almost every day. It is purely recreational though, but I do not see why that would be a bad thing. The results are that my ulcerative colitis is kept in check, and my body has never been healthier. To think I was pretty much addicted to junk food and computer games before Liberation. Now I feel in shape, and not because I have to impress anyone but myself.

So for dinner tonight I believe I will treat myself to a soy burger with a quinoa bun and a relish of kale and pees. Afterwards I try to stay motivated towards a short session of meditation. After training for a while I can tell it helps me stay curious and open minded, but when there is no bar tracking how well I do it just gets a bit too intangible sometimes.

So have a nice evening friends. I will see you in class for “Steady-state patterning”.

Consumed

Burying itself alive and wasting away its youth
Life becomes a timer, the host awaits the ring
Deceptively consuming to shroud a reality
A reality unwanted keeps the dreamer asleep
Endless entertainment of oceanic proportions
Wishing for the horn of Jotunheim to fill
Keyboards now absolving the blade, the rope
The tale of Odysseus inspiring scars
And yet it finds itself no mourning
In being drawn towards Next

Service

Depending on what culture you are from you may have experienced what I am about to describe. In my country it is very much the case in the service sector of the market that younger and younger people are employed as front line personel. In short, people of the new school.

Aside from the obvious financial benefit this has brought to the employers, since younger, inexperienced people are cheaper, it may be worth pointing out another very important point about this situation.

In the past when the service sector was a relatively fresh industry, following the downsizing of the work force in aggriculture caused by the technology available around the start of the 20^th century, there was a period where it had include a certain flexibility to market itself. The kind of flexibility you would probably only experience presently if you get in contact with someone with a higher grade of responsibility than the service level. The shop keeper or to a lesser extent the manager. Most managers would not apply though. They are put in place to uphold the rules put down by their own employer and their job is based mostly on making sure the staff beneath them bends no rules and applies no flexibility.

Not because the industry tries to work against flexibility, but because the total stream lining of the service sector has allowed for a much more rigid rule set. If you do not like the rules in place at a restaurant or a store, you are pretty much out of luck. Because you can be certain that a quite similar set of rules are in place in whatever other place you may visit.

This may or may not bother you. If it does not I would venture the guess that it is because you have not thought it through. Surely you would rise to some level of discontent if you realised that you had been manipulated into the acceptance of this.

The most modern and ”hip” places introduced this concept into our culture and since then we have come to accept it on a daily basis. We are now at the point where we consider good service the abnormal and remember it for days when some employee somewhere gave us a personal experience. But why is this? Should it not be preferable for society to accept only bad service as the abnormal?

The reason for this rigid business model that we are all supporting with our purchases out of the lack of proper alternatives, is of course that it works. It works to cut back on the extent of service, because the extent of service mostly implies the extent of lowering expected pay for whatever service was given. Deductions and good will are concepts swept under the carpet and the consumer remains ever oblivious.

And this is just the beginning. Now that the industry has us accepting a very poor standard of service, they can easily make the transfer to automated kiosks everywhere. In the grocery store, in the café, in the restaurants and in the malls. For what is more rigid than a machine? And companies know this. They exploit it. They are very much interested in automating the process of purchasing everywhere.

Ownership

What is ownership? In its most basic term it seems to imply the occupation of something by someone. This someone has since the original term was used been expanded to also include organisations and institutions such as corporations and even countries or groups of countries.

What it legally means, however, is simply that this something you have legally bought or acquired is now reserved for you by the enforcing institutions of your community. Is this just a silly overanalytic way to say that the something is yours?

No.

There is a vast difference between the idea of ownership and the actual phenomenon of ownership. You see in the idea of ownership it is possible to say that something is yours. But in the actual world nothing is really yours. It can all be taken away, if not by other people then by external elements operating outside the rule of ownership, such as your dog deciding to eat it or a tsunami washing it all away.

So what you are left with is simply this illusion backed up by real world enforcement that in the event that your something is taken away from you and still desirable for you, then you may call upon these enforcers to bring it back to you or at the very least punish the ones that took it and in some cases recieve a monetary settlement in exchange for your something. It is an illusion that only works because we are all hooked into the same feed of rules, norms and acceptable behaviour.

Just like money it only works as long as everyone operates under the same principles. As soon as someone breaks the norm and becomes a thief, then you need to bend the guiding principles of reality to incorporate enforcing parties, such as the police, to shield you from this asocial behaviour.

And just like money it is only required for society to work properly as long as everyone operates under the same principles. As soon as someone breaks the norm and becomes able to grow their own food and gather their own water from natural sources, they start breaking the need to compromise themselves as individuals to function in this game of monetary exchange.

This clash of topics will most likely raise the issue of what happens to ownership when nothing is bought or sold anymore. When money is no more.

It obviously ceases to exist as the illusion it has survived as for so long. Surely it is a requirement for society to function though?

When you think about it, it should be a perfectly viable model for adults to share rather than own. After all we are not the primates we evolved from, nor are we the child we grew up from. If you connect the reality of sharing rather than owning with the reality that our current means of production could produce an abundance of high quality items for everyone, so long as there is no need for a profit to be generated anywhere, then you will see that this idea of ownership really only serves the salesman. The buyer is left with purchasing illusions.

So this is where the closing question arises. How much do we believe in the modern social sciences proving to us that we are extremely adaptive to the rules of whatever context we apply ourselves to?

Integrity

About a month ago I came up with the idea that I wanted to show my girlfriend a clip from a movie that I would like to discuss with her. In spirit of Black March I completely forgot about it until last night, where I dug up the clip on YouTube. The clip is from the majorly provocative feature called Brüno.

Even if you have watched the movie, you may not remember it as I did. I actually saw the movie in the cinema with my brothers and my cousin. It was quite a movie that we were in no way prepared for, but I suppose that was the idea. What stuck with me, aside from one other very disturbing display of the male body, was this clip of how extremely devoid of integrity the people interviewed seem to be.

I cannot guarantee that they are not actors and this is not a setup, but what I can guarantee is that it would then be very inspired by actual events taking place on an every day basis in the entertainment industry. If you have seen The Greatest Movie Ever Sold you would most likely agree.

But without further ado I bring to you the modern parents with stars in their eyes.

I hope I did not cause any heart problems when the answer ”yes” was given to the question ”can your child handle lit phosphorous?”.

Advertising Revisited

This will most likely not be the last time I visit the topic of advertising. I just thought this picture went so well with our previous discussion on public space used for advertisements.

 

1st of March

Yesterday was the 1^st of March. This kicks off the event Black March set in motion by big players and discussed earlier in these posts Black March and MoreBlack March. And I must admit that I did not think of it. I was reminded by a friend that this is the time to make a stand against mainstream media.

Rather than describing how I think this action relates to active protest against Hollywood, I will take quite a different route with this post. I am going to post a short review of the latest product from Hollywood I was unfortunate enough to support with a fraction of my purchasing power.

The movie Safe House, starring such renowned actors as Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington, was a dissappointment to me in several ways. To retain some sort of self-respect I will hide behind the excuse that recently I frequent the movies with my younger brother more than I do so with any one else. This limits the amount of inspiried independantly produced movies I get to see on the big screen. But back to the movie Safe House.

The main critique I have of this piece of so-called entertainment is that while this movie fits in the genre of action, the action scenes portrayed were so poorly realized that I drew several loud sighs and probably even rolled my eyes a few times. The camera was shaking for every action scene with no exception. In addition to this the plot was weak and unexplored. The characters also felt too weakly developed to engage the audience properly.

These and many other reasons should solidify how easy it will be to go through with Black March and refuse to support these underachieving industries claiming to profess themselves at understanding and providing entertainment.

News

Here Jason Read, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy, comments on the conservative notion of face value in society.

Dr. Read seems to think that the book is not to be judged by its cover. That the classes of society are not only what the media portray them as. Please remember that the media, from where you might have had your view on this matter skewed, are institutions that obviously do not act against the interest of their owners or share holders. And it should be obvious to most people that such owners or share holders portray not in the slightest the lower classes of society.

You see the news is not just the news. It is not everything that you need to know about a given situation that is relatively new. It is a perspective. Brought forth by the interest to sell it to you. You have to inspect news and information as you would a car being sold to you. Make sure that the model is not suitable for you because of how the salesman pitches it, but because it is what you need it for. A car is a vehicle for transportation. The news is your way of relating to contemporary society. That makes it vastly more important to inspect thoroughly when it is being sold to you.

For a broader perspective on matters somewhat related to my points, you can take a look at Dr. Read's lecture "The Social Individual" here:

Television

Just a minor post today with a picture I saw recently. I think it illustrates quite nicely the points brought up in this presentation on conformity, that an audience to any expression of opinions will end up adopting them if they are repeated thoroughly enough.

I will revisit the topic of television and media again soon.

More Black March

Yesterday I wrote a post on the Black March. Today I wish to add to that post a few ideas and benefits I see besides the main points raised on the offical site.

First and foremost there is the spiritual liberation to gain from joining in this very accessible type of activism. You do not need to leave the comforts of your home, in fact you can pretty much do just fine with supporting this movement from your couch. If you become restless easily, then all you need is a trip to your local library to arm yourself with a good book or several. If you have a family, you could introduce a game night once, twice or more times a week where you borrow a game from friends or family members (most people know a collector of such things) and just play a fun board or card game with the people you love but spend too little time talking to, because of the attention seeking television.

Secondly there is the liberation of value orientation to be won. What I mean by this is that entering into this challenge, if you are the type to consider it as such to live without this influx of ordinary entertainment, may just give you more control over what type of stimuli you depend on to remain entertained and relaxed in your spare time. It could free up some space in your imagination for thinking of new things and new activities for you to enjoy, rather than the same old same old.

Finally your electric bill will be substantially lower!

So do your imagination a favor and consider this break from the repititous realm of normality. Like a muscle it needs practise and I can promise you it gets none of that from your regular entertainment feed.

Black March

Coming up is the event called Black March. With support from major players in the open source community like Mozilla, Black March will constitute a strike against the mainstream media in the US. The foundation for this action is to temporarily boy cut the big guns in the entertainment industry, so they will notice a month-long loss in revenue and reconsider how easily swayed their subjects are to their rule. SOPA, PIPA and to a larger extent ACTA have all proven that these players need to be kept in check or they will do away with liberties we have become accustomed to.

Instead of side tracking into another debate on piracy (read this post instead) I will go on with this Black March concept.

To join the Black March you simply need to stay away from the cinema and away from mainstream media channels on your television. Depending on the support for this idea, the goal is to create a black hole in their quarterly margins where they get lower support, lower earnings and a lower amount of costumer data to work with. All of this sounds great to me, and it should sound great to you too if you are concerned with your freedom of expression and opposed to be viewed solely as a consumer.

Check out the official site for Black March here for more information and a direct plan.

Now. I brought this up not only to try and get my readers interested in also supporting this activism, but also to highlight a very important side-effect such activism would have.

Consider how much mainstream media you consume in a month. Most of us visit the cinema regularly, some purchase movies instead of renting them and the vast majority spend most of their evenings in front of a television being spoon-fed what the media produces. Disney, Fox and ABC are right there in your home with you every day, and they are dying to tell you what's new. What's hot, what's not, what should you wear, how should you talk, how should you think and what should you laugh at. It is all orchestrated quite perfectly and my proof of this is how absolutely docile normal people are when it comes to taking actual action and a stand against what is clearly wrong.

Piracy

The hot topic of january certainly has been piracy. No less than three bills, SOPA PIPA and ACTA, have been discussed in order to further combat piracy. You may recall the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and 2010. The case was appealed twice and in 2012 the supreme court in Sweden will provide a response.

The point brought forth by the defense lawyer is applicable as a general idea of why file sharing should be completely legal. It is no different than producing cars that can drive faster than the speed limit, he says. I would then start comparing that to owning a gun and other non-sense like that, but I am sure you got the point.

What is relevant to this blog is to discuss is how piracy can been understood. Obviously it can be stealing. But it has other facets to it as well. Socially it is an expression that consumers want easier access. Whether this means cheaper, completely for free, without the hassle of getting physical copies or whatever else we certainly do not know at this point. It is, however, obvious that these could be issues that made piracy so prevalent in the first place.

Regarding whether pirates are thieves you have to step outside the traditional mindset for a second to fully grasp the situation. This author agrees that stealing something physically is quite different from copying something digitally accessible. Certainly something can be said for the fact that the copy right owner may have been deprived of some income had his legal property not been copied. He may have. He probably has to some extent. But is the extent as vast as the expanded exposure his work recieved? And is that not a relevant question?

You have to remember that the entertainment industry (which holds the majority of complaints towards piracy) is more interested in keeping their produce solely for paying costumers, than they are in promoting their subjects, the artists that actually create the expressions the industry is profiting from. This means that if the industry gets to earn x amount of dollars on a product with a 0% piracy rate, that is more interesting for them than to earn x amount of dollars on the same product with a 50% piracy rate. In essense they want to fence down their work, because they see the pirates also as potential costumers, so what they want is for pirates to stop pirating and start spending money instead.
Again it is of no interest to achieve the possibly massive exposure that free file sharing can offer for the work of the artists. What is interesting is to earn as much money as possible.

I doubt they expect piracy rates to completely convert into paying costumers, but even if one pirate is turned (or discouraged through increasingly tougher regulations) then it is a win for the share holders expecting bigger turn outs.

Not only is this greed socially offensive on multiple levels it is also directly harmful. Just like the Pirate Bay regular people are being made an example of by the twisting of the legal system which is extremely toxic. It may function as an immediate detergent, but just as when you bring the millitary into another country to fight a war, you may win it in a couple of weeks, but you will have your work cut out for you with the uprisings your transgrassion will spark.

A final point that I will make is that you should consider that piracy rates far exceed what is possibly consumable, both economically but also in simple human life. The sea of content available is simply too vast. And quite a lot of that content is of medium and lower quality. Probably the majority of the content. Artists are not all Van Goghs, and a lot of them would be stretching it calling themselves artists in the first place. So in this world of currency drains I can certainly see the logic in the consumer crowd moving away from traditional patterns of purchase towards more egoistic ones. It makes perfect sense that as soon as technology arose to offer deliverance from wrongful purchases, in this time when wrongful purchases could be among the most prevalent, people starting utilising this tool to avoid disappointment.
A lot more could be said on this part of the discussion, but I will leave it here and we can discuss the issue of boredom and entertainment another time.

Also, this post will most likely be used to vault off into another post outlining an alternative system based on access rather than ownership, but since that will take some effort to piece together it might not be the subsequent one.

Economisation

According to the free dictionary the word economisation means: To practice economy, as by avoiding waste or reducing expenditures. Now I bet you would be scoffing at that if you know how anti-economic we are being in contemporary society.

Most of what is debated in constructive parts of society is economy. People spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years of their lives to try and grasp the concept of maximising output at minimal expenditure. But with all these collectively abundant thought processes going on, it is still a broadly held view that the first part of the idea is the most important one. To maximise output. The second part; to do so at minimal expenditure, must take a back seat if there is a conflict.
So the point of this short post was really just to point out an ironic but common misconception.

You may have heard of The Story of Stuff Project. It is indeed a nicely simplified introduction as to how anti-economic this global economy really is. If you have not yet seen any of their work, you should check out this brief walk-through of consumption.

Economic Hitmen

Today I wish to familiarise my readers with the person John Perkins. Mr. Perkins has wide experience with the private sector in the states associated with facilitating international industrial expansion. What does this mean you ask? Well I will so gentle as to let a short animation tell the story for you.



For a full personal account on Mr. Perkins' personal experiences and knowlegde from the inside of this business check this interview.

So what have we here then? The initial response you are suppose to extract from this is obviously that this is how guerilla fighters and “terrorists” are made. That is the main point. And it makes reasonable sense. I do not know your personal standpoint on whether terrorism goes before empire expansion or whether you think it is the other way around, but those two elements certainly seem linked together.

What else can we extract? We can look at how a country is flooded with debt and cheap industrial pollution to make it another production chamber to keep our ever growing consumption rates rising. Turn that around again and you will note that most of the things on your desk you are sitting at right now were probably produced in some poor country that was exploited in this fashion. The IMF and the World Bank accepts this as collateral damage, and this should solidify the argument that they most certainly are western banks for the west – not the world.

This growth economy has to stop before the last tree is cut down and the last lake is polluted with oil waste.

3D printing

Today I saw something remarkable. You probably already know about 3D printing and the prospects of such an addition to society in terms of production. But with this following example you should be able to take it a step further and visualise just how absolutely gigantic a step this could be socially. To enable costumisation on a completely new level along with reducing imports and exports.

Consider the opportunities.

Experiments

Today I learned of an experimental dietary treatment for a chronic disease I happen to suffer from, and among other things it made me consider just why exactly there are so few dietary treatments going on. Obviously everything is experimental at first. One can have a scientifically backed expectation towards the outcome, and in medical science one probably should, but it will be experimental none the less. So the wording is not my issue. What I take an issue with is that treatment such as this is natural. Now I for one am not the one to label tradition as something positive in and of itself, however, I do entertain the following philosophy.

The body appears to be a bio-mechanical machine hard wired to sort out internal problems. This is scientifically proven, so there is not a lot of philosophy contained in this. But then the general belief goes on to denote that the mind is what we have for external problem solving. What I would propose, however, is that the mind is very much involved in both. How we think and feel will change patterns in how our body works. You can tell by the countless studies in psychology that proves rises and drops in various types of body-functions based on the mood swings of the test subjects. Stress is the big subject now, and it is very related to our physical well-being. For instance placebo pills in some cases work to rid the patient of self-inflicted symptoms. The mind is a powerful tool.

So returning to the subject of diet again, I would venture the guess that the fuel for the body should be very much a factor in how well the inner machinery works to keep itself healthy. Most people already know this, so instead I will try to be a little more abstract.

As a society we hold a common responsibility to work to further the understanding of everyone of what their diet should and should not contain. It is quite possible to poison the body into a state of weakness exposing it to a wide variety of diseases, both the ones commonly known to be related to unhealthy life-styles like diabetes and the more complicated diseases. Now I am not attempting to preach that a healthy diet can keep you disease-free. But I could certainly preach that it would help. I will refrain from that at this point though.

About the responsibility, one could hope that society would realise it as a duty to keep its inhabitants as healthy as possible. This is why the free market model is counter-productive when it comes to collective health. In the book The Spirit Level the first basic graph introduced is one that shows how the GDP of nations only work proportionally with standards of living below a certain threshold. It bends off at a point where people start being able to take care of themselves, and this means that some of the poorest countries out of the richest ones (western ones, generally) are very equal to the much richer ones.. The point to make here is that the idea of rapid expansion and consumption only gets us to a certain point. This cannot be stressed enough, because it is the principle argument that the neo-capitalistic machinery we have installed to run our world for us, serves us no longer and today it is in fact an inhibitor to our true potential.

Do some research on your own. Next time you go grocery shopping check out how expensive it would be for you to buy only organic food highly based on fibres and less based on meats and dairy. You will note that it gets a lot cheaper for you if you buy unhealthy, non-organic products because this is what industry can produce cheaply. It is a lot cheaper to produce long-lasting (genetically modified, filled with additives) food products than it is to produce short-lasting (natural) food products that would benefit the consumer much more.
Considering the value of money today, you could say we are actually making it a rewarding game to try and spot the better deals and shake up a good price. The exact opposite of what people should be doing. And then we ask ourselves why sickness, depression and cancer rates all are off the chart now.

A doctor I spoke with today concerning this experimental diet actually told me that he had patients who had gone to Thailand on vacation, and while there they experienced almost complete remission in their symptoms. His thoughts on the matter were that the patients had been staying outside of general tourist areas and therefore been eating locally produced, natural meals loaded with vegetables and without a lot of meat. It should come as no surprise that this is much better for the body, but what should come as a surprise is that these conditions are regarded as unsuccessful in normal terms, because that rural area was probably highly impoverished and this is the reason for their inability to import fizzy drinks and mass-produced meat.

This is especially relevant to consider during this period of global economic unrest, because now is when we simply should not and cannot accept, for the sake of the future heirs to this planet, a continual lowering of quality in our food. It is unacceptable, and just like it was an economic bubble that burst, so too will the health bubble burst when we not only have the demographic issue of too few working people versus too many retired people against us, but also the issue of too many sick people versus too few healthy people.

As a future project I would like to blog for a week about a healthy, easy diet. Be sure to check back as February will most likely feature such adventures.

São Paolo

Yesterday I revisited the documentary by Morgan Spurlock called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Having already seen the movie, I had spoken to my girlfriend a couple of times about it, and she suggested we would see it together.

The movie itself is by no means a masterpiece. It deals with its message in a similar way as his previous movie Supersize Me, in that it slightly mocks the viewer with his obvious points all along. And even though I label myself an experienced observer especially when it comes to the central issue of the movie, product placement, I did notice a few extra items on my journey through his tale.

One particular issue did stick with me though. About half way through the movie Morgan introduces us to the legal ban in São Paolo on all outdoor advertisements. The returning reader will note that I have mentioned this before.

According to this article São Paolo is the 4th largest metropolis in the world and since 2007 when Mayor Kassab outlawed "visual pollution" the city has been free of billboards, posters and cab-commercials. This is very interesting to me, because it employs a fresh perspective on what pollution should cover as a term. Apparently pollution is not only toxic biproducts of other products. Pollution can then be understood in a broader sense as anything that is physically or mentally harmful towards any recipient. So if advertisement in São Paolo could be derived as harmful towards the recipients, take a look at this image of Times Square and tell me what your immediate impression is.

It might just be about time we ask ourselves just where we stand in the debate on heredity and environment. Do we believe the notion that we are from birth determined to make self-sufficient decisions or do we believe that the environment greatly influences our lives? While I am sure most readers already have a stand point in that debate, primatologist Robert Sopalski has some interesting insights on what comprises a human being.

What the movie, the city and the research seems to show is that human beings are very susceptible to marketing ploys. Indeed it is the only explanation why such an industry exists. The counter-argument always seems to be something about free will and anti-determinism, which makes perfect sense from a controversial stand point. But it should be quite obvious that Times Square would look a lot different if everyone were capable of making independant decisions in particular when it comes to patterns in consumption. It could be viewed as the greatest social experiement ever made ©.

And in its own way São Paolo is contributing to this debate by taking the stand point that a city with less visual clutter is a city with less clutter. Furthermore it is mentioned in an interview with a store clerk in the movie that they have noticed a rise in product quality in the stores, simply because referrals are now the primal force of marketing.
If that is not a hard hitting argument for less advertising I do not know what could be.

Groceries

With New Year's Eve drawing close everyone is starting to reflect on what changes they desire to see in 2012. It probably comes as no surprise that I would like to see quite a few. But I will not be listing all of these today. Instead I will share a few thoughts on how I personally intend to greet this new and blank page in the book of me.

Today I went for some grochery shopping, and I did this with the intention to try and see whether it was possible on my budget to purchase only organic. To my amazement I actually ended up with a shopping bag that costed me about one and a half as much as I normally spend on food for a couple of days, and this was even with a few extra items I would not normally need.

Now the prices where I live are normally a lot higher for organic products, but given that I have a physical condition that requires me to be more healthy in my diet, I did pick up an interest to learn about cooking and food in general. This was a while back, and it probably started before I was diagnosed, but it is quite evident now that I have changed my view on eating.

On my normal budget I never knew I could afford to buy organic and healthy food in the maner I exhibited today. I am not a vegan or vegetarian, but I do not eat a lot of meat and I should stay away from milk in any shape or form, and the meat certainly is the expensive part of any diet in the area where I live.

So this was more or less just a cheerful post about how I tried something different to see if I could make 2012 a year with an improving diet for myself, and the first step proved to be succesful. And now I will be off to the kitchen to make myself a wholesome meal.

I hope you have equally important prospects for this new year. The revolution in you is the most important one.

Motivation

So today I thought I would take some time to write a piece on motivation. A subject I have had to deal with in many various facets of my life. Because what is motivation? Motivation is the drive that makes you productive. It generates the energy and the want to do a certain thing. It is the fuel for your machinery and it is evidently needed throughout the globe to make this and all other races viable for survival. We quite simply rely on constant motivation in some form to keep us going.

Evolutionarily males are hard-wired to try and be accomplished so they would attract the better females and secure healthier offspring. Now I do not know what presumptions you enter into this debate with, but if it comes as a surprise for you that this has residual presence in the society of today, then I am afraid you may be in for more surprises as you progress through this post.

Since man has lived in scarcity for most of our time as a species, it is quite understandable that our brains have evolved into working in a way where we associate resource acquisition with success and thriving. It might be far fetched to say that most of us today look for economic success in a partner, and I assume it would seem derogatory to say that women especially would do this. So what am I saying?
I could be saying that women biologically were driven to look for these things in a partner, but underline the point that no one has to be a slave to any biological drive. We can starve ourselves to death if we put our minds to it, so certainly we are capable of not adhering to all tenants of our human drives.
So perhaps our biology is a bit too conservative and maybe even outdated? It would certainly seem this way, as people are trying to break out of these bonds and claim freedom from any societal influence on their preferences. People do not like being told what they look for, they want to establish that for themselves. At least in our culture.

What we are interested in is to maintain our own motivation. Especially in the consumer culture where we are constantly under attacks from fizzy drinks, junk food, noisy entertainment and informational overload. Our physical blood sugar and our attention levels are jumping up and down all day, and this tires out the brain and body and causes us to lose motivation towards generic drives. It makes people lazy and perhaps it explains why online dating is such a growing phenomenon today. Even the most basic need for physical interaction with the opposite sex has to be sated from the calm and comfortable position of your own chair.

But this is just a symptom. The real enemy is the lack of motivation. The massive increases in anxiety and depression in most if not all of the western countries over the past 50 years, could be explained by the fact that we are the first few generations that have no goals. There is nothing to fight for. Only to shop for. And only having things to shop for leaves the human body and mind in an unhealthy state where we begin to perform a sort of social apoptosis. Depression takes hold of a person when he or she feels useless and unmotivated. A psychiatrist would probably disagree with this and explain it chemically, but there is no denying that the younger generations today are the less motivated generations and they are also the more anxious ones. The correlation could be unrelated, but I doubt it. Multitasking at the level we ask people to do it today quite simply should not lead to anything good. We have not been underachieving as a species so far, so why do we need to go so much faster now? Have you ever tried hyper-motivating an animal? They go crazy and start running around in circles not knowing what to chase, do or act upon. This is more or less the constant state for a normal western person today. Everywhere marketers are trying to get to you, and your solace is broken by the fact that you own a television that will allow the continuing of the mind-invasion you offer to your insurgents. All in the name of getting the carousel to run a little bit faster to allow for a little more growth.

It would seem then that this culture did wish for a greater knowledge of and capacity for empathy this year. We require the managing institutions of this world, the media and the law makers, to start paying attention to the fact that we have to slow down or we drown in our gluttonous intake of rapid social expansion. You will note that it also becomes increasingly difficult to scout a system or construct, social or otherwise, for errors if you constantly add more and more parts and modules. So we never know if sub prime and interest free loans undermine our economical strengths, or if artificial sweeteners act as carcinogenics, or if it destroys a generation to have Kanye West as a role model, before it is too late and the damage has been done by this free flow of seemingly innovative additions to our partly determined, partly ever-adaptive life styles. And the industries do this with a double standard, defending to the best of their lawyers' capability their corporate rights to avoid telling the consumers which products are genetically modified and which are not. Because they do not want to scare the consumers from buying their products, before it is 100% scientific that consumers, formerly known as people, dig their own graves with them. And if you ask me you can disregard the last part of the prior sentence actually.

The intrinsic motivation for all of us beyond water, food and a roof, is that we want to be socially relevant, as we have discussed prior. When it comes to what we get the most out of it is certainly a widening of what is socially capable. If you look at this study showing which nation is the happiest in the world, you will notice that resource acquisition is far from relevant to such happiness.

Luckily we have pills for postponing the solution of this social decline a generation or two.