Is Piling Hate on Trump Really the Solution?

Ever since the people of this country slowly realized that Donald Trump was actually going to be our president, there has been a massive outpouring of hateful rhetoric aimed at the man. In actuality, most of us have never met the person and our reactions to his presence are based upon media representations that usually align with some form of bias or another, for better or worse.

I think the real issue with the way we talk about Trump has less to do with who he actually is as a person and more with our country's injudicious tradition of placing outsize expectations on a single man within a single organization to solve whatever gigantically complicated problem our fickle minds conjure and that we have no intention to solve ourselves.

It is a tradition based upon our identity as self-reliant go-getters: we expect the most powerful one among us to single-handedly solve whatever problem presents itself to our country of 330 million people. Meanwhile, the country itself has become increasingly complicated and beset by ever-larger problems, with the population of the U.S. having increased by nearly 50% (or over 100 million people) over the last 40 years.

How soon we forget that Barack Obama, and George Bush before him, were held to the same unrealistic standards and subject to the same sort of vitriol.

Problem

While we've been spewing hatred towards whichever president we didn't vote for over the past 20, 40, or more years, how many among us have actually instituted real changes that are best for the entire country?

While we've been repeating talking points broadcast by news corporations, how may of us have been building more resilient food systems, investing ourselves in enterprises that support the long-term health of the people of our country, or building political networks that will facilitate these sorts of changes?

Many of us have done nothing more than mentally masturbate with the temporary good feelings that come from verbally putting down men we will never meet and the pressing issues of our country have remained unsolved.

Our education and upbringing have done us no favors. We've not been trained to be effective individuals, rather ones that are easily influenced, manipulated, and molded by "authoritative" figures who themselves have been misguided. Rather than being able to make an actual difference, most of us have been destined to propagate the sins of our fathers, doing nothing about the problems of our society until we are compelled to impotently whimper acrimonious insults towards those we unfairly have charged with doing something for real.

Solution

Desteni is a group of people who have researched and exposed the actual state of the human being through asking why and how we have become powerless hate-spewers as opposed to responsible human beings.

Destonians have discovered that there are two main roots to the evil of our society: our minds and money.

Unfortunately, our participation within our minds supports the money system and the money system supports us to remain in our minds in powerlessness.

By learning the nature of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and how we allow ourselves to be possessed by them within competition, jealousy, anger, and self-serving yet fleeting experiences of joy, happiness, and gratification, we can forgive ourselves for them, stop participating in them, and commit ourselves to change our participation in this world.

Similarly, by exposing the corruption and abuse within the money system, we can forgive ourselves for participating within these abusive systems, stop participating in them, and commit ourselves to build new systems such as a Living Income Guaranteed.

Reward

By stopping participating in abusive thoughts, feelings, and emotions, we can for the first time stop abusing ourselves. This, in turn, will allow us to take a moment to step back and stop participating in the abusive Money system which externalizes that self-abuse onto others.

What this will bring us is as yet still unknown: we've never reached a point where we stop reproducing the conditions of abuse which have characterized human society since the beginning of recorded history.

But, rather than inadequately yelling at our televisions while nothing changes and everything gets worse, it's not difficult to imagine the type of world we can build when we are purified of corrupt thoughts and external structures designed to suppress and deny us our full potential.

For more info on Self Forgiveness and Self Honesty, check out DIP Lite

Check out Desteni.org

Check out EQAFE- Every questioned answered for everyone 

#CancelCulture: Problem, Solution, Reward

With the rise of social media, we've seen a new phenomenon in what people are calling cancel culture.

If you're not familiar: someone finds something someone else did that was politically incorrect (said something insensitive, didn't hire enough minorities for their project, etc.), and posts about it online. A large group of people are then mobilized to post online about the insensitive thing someone did, and continue to do so until that person is met with real life consequences (their business gets boycotted, they get fired, or their show/movie gets cancelled (thus the term cancel culture)).

Problem

The problem with #CancelCulture is that it allows people to think and believe they are doing something to make the world a better place, when in fact they are not doing much at all to change the situation. It's very easy to sit there behind your computer, read a news article about something someone did, and post about it online with a catchy #hashtag. Reading about the offending person facing consequences is temporarily satisfying for the computer activists, but has anything really changed?

Do the people involved in getting the thing or person "cancelled" really understand what caused them to act in the first place? Do they understand that, most times, the profit motive causes people to act, and say and do things that are later deemed controversial, and that just because one thing or person gets cancelled, the fact that that profit motive remains as the major driving force of our society means there are dozens of iterations of the same thing waiting to replace it?

I'm not saying that it's not good to extricate negative things from our society. However, when #CancelCulture picks and eradicates a target, there is very little understanding of the underlying issues that created the cancelled thing in the first place. Do any of these people posting online understand why was this person racist? Why did this person say something sexist? Why did they fail to hire enough minorities? By blindly attacking a single person or project, the precursors to why such a disgusting thing got created in the first place are almost wholly ignored.

Rarely do these online activists offer a solution, stopping short in self-satisfaction when the offending element is eliminated. What's created when something is so blindly cancelled is a vacuum, and that vacuum tends to get filled with something equally offensive.

The major problem here is that the profit motive continues to be the primary driving factor in society and all other considerations fall by the wayside when people move to create something.

Solution

As a society, almost anything is applauded if it makes the person money, and as such all sorts of controversial and offensive endeavors are undertaken to produce said money. While cancel culture often focuses on politically incorrect statements, we see this behavior extended to a more horrifying form when major corporations poison workers or our waterways to turn a profit.

While the profit motive is apparently the driving force in our world, I'd actually argue that it is the fear of the lack of money that truly motivates us.

Solution: A guaranteed living income.

If and when every person on the planet is guaranteed enough money to meet their basic needs, no loner will we be driven to act in harmful and abusive ways to make money.

Reward

When an economic system is in place that supports each one to access their basic human rights of food, water, shelter, an education, and healthcare, there will be much fewer enterprises engaging in uncouth practices. The end result will be there will be much less things to "cancel" and much more to celebrate.

Living Income Guaranteed - The Proposal

Basic Income and Universal Healthcare: A Perfect Pair

One of the largest obstacles to the transition to single-payer, universal healthcare in the United States is the huge portion of the economy- and the labor market (read: jobs)- dependent upon the existing health insurance industry. It’s one thing to say you want single-payer healthcare but it’s another to find solutions for the million who's lives would be affected with the effective dissolution of the health insurance industry. Sure, costs may go down when the government is paying, but part of those costs support paychecks for insurance industry workers. As legislators in California work on a bill for single-payer healthcare in the state the real question is what is going to happen to the employees of the huge health insurance companies that would be all but cut out of the picture should single-payer become the law of the land? One such company is the largest private employer in the state- what’s going to happen to the 160,000 workers it employs?

Problem

Healthcare in America may be a giant, convoluted mess but millions of Americans depend upon it for their employment and thus survival. Streamlining the process by implementing single-payer healthcare would lower costs for consumers but, in cutting out insurance companies, would jeopardize the futures of the hundreds of thousands of Americans employed in the health insurance industry. So far, proposals for single-payer have failed to present adequate solutions for those workers.


Solution

As the US continues to look to make the transition to a single-payer system, lawmakers should consider co-implementation with a basic income guarantee. Such a large transition in the economy will be majorly disruptive and everyone should be offered a guaranteed income until they find an alternative occupation. The Living Income Guaranteed scheme presented by the Equal Life Foundation is a good framework for making something this massive work.



Reward

Despite employing hundreds of thousands of people, the health insurance industry is, as most other advanced countries have shown, largely redundant, making health care unnecessarily expensive. Transitioning to single-payer is a solution but it needs to be coupled with a basic income guarantee that supports those workers as the economy recovers from such a large change. Under such a program, everyone would be guaranteed an income sufficient to cover their basic needs as they search for alternative ways to earn a living.