There Are Many Reasons To Stick With The Status Quo But We Shouldn't

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there are many reasons to stick with the status quo, to not rock the boat, to keep your head down and do what you're told to do, what you are trained to do. Also, obviously, it feels good to fit into a community, even if that community doesn't include a lot of "real" friends.

You have responsibilities and to fulfill them, you need money.

Or maybe you don't have money, you can't make much money but you need to grow food and gather water, or you and your family will die.

Perhaps the War Lord or Strong Man in your region demands something of you, and you don't have the power to refuse. Maybe you are an office clerk, an entertainer, a sports star, a model, a rock star, a professional, an investment banker, a laborer with specialized skills and you are making enough money to have everything you need and more.

I could think of many more examples, but at the crux of it is that everything boils down to money and power relationships. You weren't born with GenX values burned into your soul any more than I was born with Baby Boomer values. You randomly pop into the world because your mother and father did some things and you made it past childhood and into adulthood, and now you have a good chance at having a long life. Things are pretty good if you were born into the right circumstances. If not, you have to deal with carrying water, always being at the edge of starvation, being brutally exploited for your labor, paying down your debt, still in fear of War Lords and tough guys who have no compunction about killing people: that's just the luck of the draw.

If you're lucky, you're a healthy, well-balanced person with some excellent friends living a beautiful life. You have all the comforts and conveniences our current world has to offer. You are well entertained, well loved, you have some interesting hobbies and some plans for the future. You are a fortunate person.

Let me say this if you are a fortunate person, you have more in common with an unfortunate person than you think. That's because everything in the Universe and on this planet is interconnected. Without getting into the weeds of causality, systems theory, chaos theory, thermal dynamics, quantum physics and complexity theory; without getting into nature and nurture, psychology, the interwoven big and small things that determine our behavior, epigenetics, concepts of free will, law, sociology and all the rest of it, the fact remains that you could not exist without everything else in existence.

The Tiger needs the forest and the river and the forest and the river need the Tiger.

Understanding this is understanding that the trees are not the most essential part of the forest. Why did I just mention trees and forests? Because it's a good illustration of why we need each other and why many ideologies and world views are so pathological.

Allow me to quote the first two paragraphs of "How a Forest Ecosystem is Defined" by Steve Nix at ThoughtCo.

Forest ecosystems are defined by a "salient" or common set of characteristics that make the forest ecology of a particular area unique. These very complex sets of forest conditions are studied by forest ecologists who try to isolate and classify the common structural patterns that continually reoccur in a particular forest's environment.

The perfect forest ecosystem is where simpler biotic communities live in the same approximate space with increasingly more complex biotic communities to each communities benefit. In other words, it is where many individual biotic communities symbiotically live in "harmony" with other biotic communities in perpetuity for the benefit of all neighboring forest organisms.

If you don't understand homeostasis and the dynamic interplay between the systems in your body and the systems in your environment that keep you healthy and satisfied allowing you to contribute to a socioeconomic system that is highly destructive, you are on the bandwagon heading for a violent dead end.

I know, look around, if you are in a rich country and have an excellent job; if you are a successful entrepreneur or business person who can afford to consume a lot of stuff at a high level, you're probably thinking that things are great the way things are. Sure, you have your complaints, but you're going to go to the game or the concert this weekend, and you're hardly concerned about parsing poverty statistics or keeping track of which animal went extinct last month or which ecosystem around the world is under threat. Climate change is slow moving, right? We don't have to think about it until January, first 2100 and, by then, a bunch of genius entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and technologists will have found a commercial solution that is affordable and have fixed everything. By then, we will be extracting the things we need to keep the economy growing from asteroids. Well, we want to hope for the best.

It's good to be optimistic, mainly because many of the fantastic things we currently dream of doing are possible if not probable, but do you know why I'm not that enamored by our current socioeconomic structure? It's because the incentives are all wrong, our understanding of causality is all wrong. We can't see the forest for the trees.

Because we don't pay attention to some fundamental domains of thought like structuralism (there are many kinds of structuralism) and systems theory, we can't comprehend the delicate balance required for a healthy, sustainable society.

Honestly, here I have to say, ignore these ideas at your peril. It's time people everywhere got on a new bandwagon that's going somewhere truly beautiful. It's time we understood what it truly means to be an evolved human on Earth in 2019.

Don't worry, you can still go to the game and the concert. I'm only suggesting that you spend a little time looking into concepts that may seem unfamiliar to you now but that I'm sure you'll understand in no time at all.

Let's learn about a "Natural-Law Resource-Based Economy." Since TZM began in 2008, scholars, scientists, and professionals from all over have been publishing work that, without intending to, supports the framework of ideas inherent in The Zeitgeist Movement's train of thought.

In later posts and videos, I will focus on some of these people, their work, and the public debate that surrounds them. Lest you think I'm spouting the party line and can't think for myself, actually, over the past 35 years, I've known lots of people who've had similar trains of thought, including me, it just happens that this particular organization is unusually acute in its vision. More on that later.

Please take this journey with me, and let me know what you know about developing a sustainable and healthy global culture. We are very much open to new ideas. Do you have solutions to water shortages, or how to maintain biodiversity; do you have answers to inequality, corruption, debt peonage, global trade, energy development, and the like? Please let us know who you are and what you're working on. If there is someone you think we should know about, please tell us. We don't want to give ourselves headaches criticizing the way things are, we want to experience the positive stress of the challenge of making things better for ourselves and future generations. We may yet, crash and burn, but the efforts we make to come together and solve problems will allow us to live a much happier, healthier, and loving life.