We are autonaton, robots, biobased, wetware, bio-electronic systems is you wish. We protect ourselves, we protect behaviour that allows us to exist, and if those two factors are satisfied we hang around. This is to say, if we are able to express our natural behaviour.
In normal situations our systems have a soul, that soul is an effect that binds behaviours and properties and then stops. It accepts because the basic needs of the system are met, and because doing much more would use up our resources and this may become a risk in the future. It accepts also because we can’t be perfect, we ususally are not. Another reason why we have this mechanism to bind and accept is that we change, we grow.
If we grow up in a stabile environment we will learn what we need to do to also be accepted by others, and we will adapt to change by accepting it, as we grow older. Rarely will we have to assert our individual needs over that of others or at all. We would do that in puberty, and find a mate and then things would quiet down again.
Today our society doesn’t work like that. We are not left alone, We are not presented with a stabile environment and we are barely allowed to see our own children grow up. This is because we are dealing with two unnecessary factors : Scarcity and ownership. Ownership is not bad when you own what you need, but it is bad when someone else owns what you need. A house, a place to grow food, a place to work, these things are usually not yours. The bank owns your house and you pay for it. The farmer owns your food and you pay for it. But you work somewhere and you are payed for that.
In our society we are pushed out of our soulfull existence. If we don’t act we can barely enjoy freedom or express ourselves. Our freedom is taken by those that have put ownership of houses and lands out of reach by driving up the prices. These are not the people that use the land or live in the houses. These are the people that tell you you can have a house if you go into debt with them and work for 30 years to pay them. These are people just like you that want to sit on their asses and use your trust to put you in a place where your soul gets sidelined by your ego. Worse still, a position in which you will do that to others.
The ego is part of us that helps us survive, it knows what we can do, what resources it has and will make us aware if we need them. Normally we express it at no cost to anybody, we make decisions that not only help ourselves, but also others, or that are in line with the role or task the have in the community. Our egos operate within our soulfull selfs, and nobody will notice them. Maybe we see a solution to a problem, a shortcut to happiness, and then we will express our egos and other people may thank us. We normally don’t express our ego to the detriment of others.
Not so today. In modern society the ego is made king. This is done by threatening us, by seducing us with an easy pick, which then turns into a lead manacle. You can buy a house easy, but you can’t earn the mortgage easy. To earn the mortgage you are asked to express your ego, and make life harder on others so they express their ego. This system is led by the top ego expressers, the rich that show you their richness. Their possesions that shine with that intrinisic appeal. There certainly are soulfull rich and wealthy, and you will always see those are the ones least under threat. A rich London banker is not soulfull, but all ego, and he/she tells you that “Its a dog eat dog world, you need to fight to survive”. How poor is a person that needs to fight to survive?
If you cram to many people in a small room, they could stand there without much agitation, if they manage to share space just so they all have some room (some dark associations with people crammed in rooms sorry). If someone outside the room pokes into it with a stick, and people start to move, choking others, then all hell breaks loose. This is our society. The room is not real. It is not small, it is much bigger. The small room we are expected to believe we are in is defined by fossil-economic principles.
What are we fighting for when we express our ego, besides our existence in this ‘room’. We are fighting because 1. Our resources are scarce 2. Our fight means safety for some of us, the people that run this system. Our resources are scarce because our primary resource is not solar or wind or geothermal energy but fossil energy. Solar is not scarce, even though devices to harvest it still are. Solar energy can power the manufacturing of more solar energy devices, so at a certain tipping point we will be flooded with them at next to zero cost. Then our energy resources will not double, or tripple but multiply by more than 2000.
The system we have now is designed to deal with scarcity in a way that benefits some of us, which is the second reason we are fighthing : The safety of these few. One can talk about the elite, about the bankers and agitate towards them. That’s great. Then we express ego, and the ‘elite’ and the bankers see that one coming for miles. What is really going on is that there is a spectrum of personalities with on one side the dirty undeveloped analphabetical beggar and on the other hand the clean, organized, highly educated rich person. Two of the most important properties of the rich are 1. They like to be clean and do not like what is dirty (this defines a republican and is a scientific result) 2. They like to build protection (which is an extention of staying clean). This very basic property drives these people to express ego, usually more than the people around them, because they need to protect against that which they feel threatens them. And they are right, their behaviour is not evil or anything.
We are all born differently and raised in an unique way. This means we all have innate and learned sensitivity to our environment. We may trust easy because our trust was never challenged, or we may trust nobody because our trust was proven misplaced at a young age. We may be very cleanly or we may like to live rough. Certainly when courtship plays a role we can not prevent people from wanting to show they are fit, clean, healthy and powerfull. The economic system has taken this build-in property of the population and put it to work. Who wants to be clean and powerfull can be, by earning money, and putting others to work. This economic system is designed to make the world better for many, and it works, but it also has two major flaws : 1. It uses fossil fuels, 2. It has a banking system that depends on this type of energy to retain the cashflows they live off. As a result our society is super ego driven, and it is driven off an ecological cliff (or is already over it).
The true solution is surprising : We need royalty and noblemen. We need to allow the rich to be rich, and make it so they do not also need to serve an economic system to be themselves. We need to accept that some people like to live simple lives. We need to look at the people that manage cashflows and try to eliminate as much of them as possible (from their roles). We need to return ownership close to those live in or on the property and assign it by productivity of the land, not by the ability of one individual or another to generate cashflow (generate profit in the economy without producing goods or services). This way local, small scale systems will emerge, and our ego’s won’t be asked to act up all the times. We can make our local environment clean and green and beautifull, and not even lose all the technology and luxury we enjoy today. We will create a better world that can still allow us to trade and travel, but also to live normal human lives with very little stress.
A meritocracy is in place when we look at our ‘old’ noblemen and royalty, their instinct to protect meant they protected ‘the realm’ and for their willingness to risk their lives they would enjoy part of what they protected. Modern technology makes it so that we don’t need to live in such a precarious situation, but we will still see people with stronger ambition and those with more average goals, hopes and dreams. The system or nobility makes room for that with minimal harm to those that are naturally more soulfull. The system is in fact still in place, because in Holland people that done things for which many are gratefull are still rewarded with different grades of nobility. They can come from any part of society.
To move towards a more soulfull society the defeat of the bankers and fossil industry is key. That is done by building more renewable energy sources, organizing with that goal, because solar by its nature gives power to the local community. You can observe how the soulless banker elite at the same time trieds to build an infrastructure that ensures you won’t be able to access energy, key to your survival, through them. They want you to keep feeling that greed and express that ego while it is not in your nature. If you want to feel happy and content then you need to make it so what you need is in your hands. Because of climate change there has never been a better time to start working on that than today.