Our World’s Miseries and How to End Them
There is only one way out.
Trump’s illegal-immigration raids have led to street battles, and we will see what today’s protests precipitate, although the organizer is advocating peaceful protest. The city that I live in, Redmond, Washington, is bracing for today’s protests. In the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, our community saw robberies, murders, and looting. My town even had a curfew, while battles against the police were waged in nearby Seattle, and that protestor enclave turned into a shooting gallery once the police left. My nephew asked me to take him to that protestor enclave, just to see it, and his father told him that touring areas in social unrest was not a good idea.
My studies have shown me that animals and humans rarely leave their home societies unless they have to. They almost always leave their homes for survival and misery reasons. The stampede of the world’s poor to history’s richest and most powerful nation is very understandable, especially with the USA’s porous borders of recent years. I have watched crime skyrocket in my community in the past decade. My home was burglarized. somebody was murdered a stone’s throw from my home, drive-by shootings are becoming commonplace, there are now armed guards at some nearby stores, and it is one of the world’s most affluent communities. These crimes are all committed by the underclass. I don’t have to worry about my neighbors. All of the crime is imported. What is called “crime tourism” (1) from South America is rampant.
My work often documents this world’s woes, both past and present. I recently awoke to an article by one of my favorite investigative journalists, on how an LA Times journalist smears the vaccine-injured. I got a bellyful of the LA Times’s lies back in the 1980s (1, 2), before I ever heard of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman. Ed’s Propaganda Model only helped explain what I had already experienced. Of course, the media has smeared Ed and Noam ever since, and even before, when it could not censor them.
While the mainstream, right, and left are using the street clashes for their political agendas, a sitting U.S. Senator was arrested for asking questions at a Homeland Security press conference about the raids. Was it worse than what Biden’s State Department did to Sam Husseini? Sam got a concussion from his rough treatment.
Those goonish behaviors obviously pale to insignificance beside Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, which the USA has supported the whole time, with billions in aid and weapons to Israel while it has happened. Israel now trades missiles with Iran, which could lead to World War III. The risk is not negligible. Just yesterday, Newsweek published an article on which states in the USA would best survive a nuclear war. The carnage in Ukraine and elsewhere is often instigated and supported by the USA. Trump cheered Israel’s recent bombings of Iran. It is shameful, as an American, to be aware of these events. Neither political party can hold their heads very high. Sam just published an article on Israel’s nuclear saber-rattling, and he asks if it is more about coercing the USA.
How about ending all of this, now? I know how to do it. It may be the only way to do it.
One thing that my studies made clear to me was that Hobbes was right, that human lives were nasty, brutal, and short until very recently in the human journey. Hunter-gatherer lives were terrible, with the threat of a violent death ever-present, and half of all children died, in a trend that stretched from gorillas to industrialization. Hunter-gatherer parents killed perhaps half of those dead children, as they could not afford to feed them.
Agrarian peoples fared little better, unless they were elites or professionals, although nobody from the middle classes of industrial societies would have wanted to trade places with them. Life in what I call the Fourth Epoch was immensely better than everything that preceded it. For all of the horrors of early industrialization, between 1730 and 1830, child mortality (before age five) in London dropped from 75% to 32%. Industrialization did that. Brutality, misery, and short lives largely ended with the modernization of industrial societies.
The arrival of what I call the Fifth Epoch would end human misery for all time. I recently wrote on what the transition to a world of abundance can look like. I seek people who can learn to sing the song of abundance, and I know who I am looking for. There is nothing really stopping us but us. How about it?