Summer is just around the corner and for me that means travel and workshops. This summer I'm really excited to teach Quantum Wizardry. It's basically how I do all the magical things, and now you can too.
As I observe society, (okay if I'm being honest as I mercilessly judge it) I've noticed a pattern. The story of progress has always seem to come about by people in power using coercion of varying levels to make everyone else do the work to make things happen. Yes accomplishing something of value often requires sacrifice. Every piece of food on your plate had to pass through many hands to reach you. It takes the collective effort of thousands to feed us at each and every meal. It's downright impressive. The thing is we throw out close to 40% of our food in my country. Why is there so much waste? Well we like the story of hard work, and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. If you don't measure up to the societal standard of productivity, we'd rather throw food in the trash to rot, rather than let you have it.
The sad thing is that as technology and economic systems change, more and more people can't quite make ends meet. The tragedy of it all is that this is by design. This is an outgrowth of thousands of years of history where rulers focused on strategies of coercion. Often times there were whips and chains involved, and not in that fun sexy way either. Once absolute monarchies faded from prominence, economic means were brought to bear to force the population to do the bidding of the people with the most resources: build this thing or starve, break your body in a factory or starve, work 2 jobs to barely afford to not starve....
I would like to point out that not every society went down this route. However due to colonialism most of those societies were either exterminated or folded into the current power structure. Work became a divine mandate. What really sucks is that the work tends to be the hardest and most unpleasant also happens to be the least economically rewarding. During the pandemic a lot of these minimum wage workers were renamed 'essential workers' of course we didn't vote to improve their wages. We just gave lip service to their sacrifice.
Why am I bringing this up? Well I see our civilization at a crossroads. We could continue down the path of coercion by psychopaths to determine the future, or we could try something different. Some of you may think that society would collapse without people being forced through the miserable gears of late stage capitalism. I mean what's left once we eliminate systems of coercion? The answer I think is learning to build systems of consensus. See the problem isn't productivity. The problem is productivity that doesn't serve people. Right now productivity only serves the profit of wealthy shareholders. Any positive benefits that come out of that are basically side effects, and as the economic game gets more refined those, side effects are being phased out.
There are hard jobs that need to be done, like harvesting crops, plumbing, construction, shipping, caregiving, and sanitation to name just a few. Our civilization depends on these and many others, but there are a lot of projects that really don't support human life and aspiration. Those things that take up a lot of resources but only serve the ego and pocketbook of very few individuals, but what about the visionaries you say? How can they change the world if they can't force the population to build their new future? I don't know maybe they should try inspiring people instead.
So what about you? Are you tired of systems that don't serve humanity or the planet? Do you despair in the mindless drudgery you go through just to keep from starving? What if something else was possible? What if all the needs of people could be met? What if it still required sacrifice, but nobody was left behind? Would it be worth it? I think so, how about you?
Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle
