Competition

This statement is increasingly indicative of my overall life's philosophy.  And it's one big reason why I don't feel like I belong in most settings.


Our entire civilization is predicated on the notion that if there are winners, there must be losers. This is so axiomatic that it goes unquestioned and usually unnoticed. It's just the way it is.  The winners bask in glory; the losers pick themselves out of the dust and try harder next time. At least in theory. In reality, the losers often simply give up, especially if the losing is constant.

To our credit, we've begun to notice this. We've tried to do something about it, by making everyone winners: the gold medal for showing up. We've stopped keeping score (officially) in kids' games. Some schools have even stopped giving out marks. Which is ridiculous. The world outside your precious snowflake's bubble is harsh and unforgiving, and it's full of competition. Sooner or later, no matter how much you try to shelter him, your child will burst forth in that world, full of self-confidence with an ego polished to a glossy sheen...and fall flat on his face and shatter.

Human beings have an amazing ability to respond to problems in precisely the wrong way. Either we double down on the behaviour which caused the problem (the monkey trap) or we  misdiagnose the problem entirely. In this case, we've taken the latter approach with the biggest problem our world faces, and we've done it with everything.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM OUR WORLD FACES

is competition. Or rather, the worldview that encourages competition. For everything. For money. For resources. For some notion of supremacy.

For love..

Money Makes The World Go Round. Lip service is paid to the ideas that "the best things are free" and that "money does not buy happiness", but at heart, most people don't believe this. If they did, the world would be a different place.

A study has shown that at $75,000 a year, people are about as happy as they're ever going to get. (It's worth noting that there were two separate happiness scales used in this study: "day to day contentment" (which is self-referential), and "life assessment", which gauges your life in relation to the lives of your friends and neighbours. We just can't avoid competition, it seems, as poorly as it serves us. What matter that someone is richer than you? There will always be someone richer than you, not to mention many, many people a very great deal poorer.

That day-to-day contentment is my definition of happiness. And in terms of day-to-day contentment,  $75,000 is the optimal number. Income beyond that is superfluous, and a great deal of income beyond that is often destructive. (The lives of the .001% are empty and lonely in most cases, as hard as that may be for the rest of us to believe.)

I'm not going to suggest that everybody on earth should be $75,000 a year and no more. I am going to suggest that nobody should make less.

This is preposterous, isn't it? It's like I'm some sort of communist utopian pinko radical...I mean, the only way to bring about this vision is to take money from people who have earned it (like hedge fund managers and CEOs of failing corporations) and just outright give it to lazy good-for-nothing...

...human beings.

What price a human life? I think seventy five grand is chump change, really, no matter what life we're talking about. Take care of the basics, which seventy five grand does, and people are free to pursue their dreams without having to devote their every waking moment to the exigencies of day to day existence. Imagine what people would be able to accomplish if they could devote themselves to accomplishing things beyond keeping a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs.  Think of the world we could create.

And it's not as if you couldn't earn more if you wanted to. God knows there's enough of it. The banks print trillions out of thin air, after all.

There are a few billion people on this planet for whom seventy five grand is riches beyond dreams or avarice. Strangely (to our Western sensibilities), many of these people would consider themselves happy...on both scales. But let's set the threshold at $75K anyways. Again, it's not like that much money doesn't exist.

I know, this is anathema to everything our society holds as accepted wisdom. People have to deserve money. They have to earn it. If you just give people money, they'll spend it on trivial stuff, right?

Probably wrong, in many if not most cases. But even if not...so what? It's not your money. You've got your own money. Why do you care what other people spend their money on?

Now you're going to tell me that the prices of everything will just shoot through the roof. Well, yeah. It's patently obvious that you can't just snap your fingers and poof! all seven billion people earn $75K a year. For one thing, there aren't enough goods and services for the legions of formerly destitute people to consume and use...not at any price. Something like this would have to be phased in very gradually. And so it is phasing itself in even as we speak. Just not in the way you might think.


This globalized made-in-China-costs-less-than-made-down-the-road craziness is an anomaly in human history, made possible by burning up a few million years of stored sunlight at an absolutely ferocious rate.  I firmly believe that we are seeing the last cheap oil we'll ever see right now: within two or three years, if not sooner, I predict we'll be back to where the price was before the plunge...and in ten to fifteen years, oil will likely be scaling new heights in price.  The reasons for my prediction are beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that it takes more and more energy to extract oil. In 1850, the equivalent of one barrel of oil's worth of energy inputted yielded you somewhere between 80 and 150 barrels of oil. Latest figures are between thirty and forty barrels returned and they are declining every year. Long before the energy return/energy invested ratio reaches one to one, oil will cease to be economical, which means it will cease to be a meaningful presence in our world. I'll be safely dead by that time and so will you, dear reader...but your grandkids might not be and their grandkids almost certainly won't be.

This sounds like a depressing sidetrack. It's neither. I believe that a huge simplification of...well, everything...is just starting to get underway. It's going to be chaotic at times. More than chaotic, really: people very much like to preserve the status quo, especially when they're the ones whose quos involve a high status. Unfortunately (for them), they're not going to have a choice. Natural laws are a bitch.

What I'm saying is that as time goes on, we're all going to be earning less and less in real dollars. That seventy five grand is going to be utterly meaningless, eventually...and people will be a lot happier for it. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get through the coming storms with a new vision of how the world ought to be. I'd like to think the words "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" will actually get to meaning something.

There is enough, you know. There's enough money to hand out $75K to everyone on earth--and enough real wealth to actually back that up. There's enough food. Nobody should be going hungry on this planet. There is enough water.

There is definitely enough love. If you take the competition out of it, there's more than enough love.