CORRUPT Vision

Assume for a minute that the rules for life in outer space do not differ from those on earth. On multiple planets, spread so far across the universe as to be isolated, species make their way from a primitive origin to a state of self-consciousness. Composed of individuals, they organize themselves into civilizations and adopt technology. One in a thousand survives this challenge.

On planet earth, humanity is at the largest crossroads it has ever faced. Our size and technology has given us the power to separate our inner worlds of thought and emotion from the outward worlds of consequence in reality. This creates an illusion of power because we see no feedback from our world regarding our behavior. By inertia, we assume there are no rules.

Yet paradoxically this freedom has not given us more meaningful lives. We pursue pleasures, and then become bored, but knowing nothing else repeat the same patterns. We work to afford these pleasures, and while concrete reasons are elusive, we do not like our jobs. We have become disconnected from our world and have lapsed into an inner world with no objective. This lack of direction precludes accomplishment. The same problems persist and the same "solutions" fail.

Our survival balances on the hinge of two dysfunctions: Our behaviors do not reflect what is necessary for our future survival and success as cultures. And there is no reward or meaning that can be derived from this directionless behavior. This is natural hurdle for a growing species to face, but if we do not overcome it, we will not survive the evolutionary challenge of our growth.

To the individual, it seems difficult to care. The world does what it wants, after all, and we are just along for the ride. But when a tunnel appears in which the possibilities narrow at the same time the closed and dead negatives increase, that outlook needs reconsideration. In life, we do what is not convenient because we have some reason to believe in it making our lives better. You like life? Yes, it is good to be alive. Then you want to work for life to be better so you can enjoy it more.

Outside of your body and mind, the world may seem like a hell of unending traffic, petty concerns and ongoing disasters for which there is no solution. As we all find from experience it is not impossible to extricate ourselves from bad situations by reversing that which got us there. The outside may be a disaster, but if inside of us there exists a constructive force, we work from that thought toward its realization outside of us. We find certainty in liking to be alive, and to enhance that avoiding the destructive and building up the constructive.

In this outlook we have become meditative: instead of reacting to the world around us, and/or taking its hell inward, we have created in ourselves a resolution to make beauty inside of ourselves and in the world surrounding. We have connected the inside world to the outside, and found reason again to take the reins of life from its own decay. We feel better doing this, as we are no longer inert and sad but powerful in the clarity of our choice. We are not helpless, and we are not nobodies standing idly by. We are the force of renewal, springtime and sunlight pushing apart the clenched maw of winter.

There is no "objective" or "scientific" reason to make our world go from more like hell to more like heaven. We do it because we prefer it. We need no proof, no figures and no holy word to tell us this is right. We know it in whatever part of our personalities and minds are our "souls," and we do it because it completes our inner and outer worlds on a path toward something better, something that enhances the joy we feel in life (and if we did not feel this joy, we would already be dead).

When analyzing this situation we first become aware of the failure of linear thinking. We have been conditioned to expect "a study" done by a scientist somewhere which delivers a clear yes-or-no answer, as in "Asparagus causes homosexuality" or "Masturbation causes cancer." But no such study can exist for a complex relationship between human behaviors with millions of factors.

Instead of attempting to find tangible "proof" of the kind that we use for broken technology or making money, we must find a way to understand systems of thought, a master science of all sciences. Throughout history, this has been the realm of philosophy, but recently our philosophers have backed away from bigger issues and focused on the academic. So we must return to a philosophical tradition that shined most brightly with the ancient Greeks.

This constitutes our only weapon: the ability to think critically and compare our intended reality (inner world) with its actual consequences in the physical space we share (outer worlds). Where science is limited to a specific discipline and observable, linear results, philosophy is not. Where data is prone to error and falsification, the power of philosophy is logical argument and the ability to see how complex scenarios can be true or not. This is why in healthy societies it stands above all other forms of thought.

As we apply philosophical thinking, or critical thinking as it sometimes called, to the question of our future, it becomes apparent that we are no longer analyzing function but values. Values are the preferences that people believe they have for one type of action or outcome over another. When our diagnosis arrives, it will not involve the re-arrangement of physical things as much as a re-construction of thoughts leading to values changes.

The first question that greets our newly philosophical minds is this: as a society, are we on the right direction? Some positive signs exist: wealth and technology/medicine. There are obvious signs not: loss of culture, environmental damage, mechanistic cities, depersonalizing jobs and relationships, dysfunctional leaders and many with wholly empty lives. Even more disturbing is that these strains of disaster have been increasing over time, which suggests they will not magically abate but are closing in for the kill.

Nothing can be more affirming of who we are and what makes us like ourselves than that we do what is right in a situation even if it is inconvenient. To lie still and let death take us is convenient, because we have these nifty distractions like games, intoxicants, sexual pleasure and buying things. We can even lie still by trying to escape it and live the dream of a normal life in some gated community, but the waves of collapse come ever closer and so soon we make ourselves prisoners.

Modern society, like all periods in history, begins with assumptions and makes these incarnate through the actions of people. We are told something is reality, and we act on it with that assumption, and make it so with our expectations. The guiding principle of modern society is that a definitive answer can be established, like the blueprint for a machine, and it can be applied everywhere by people doing roughly the same thing. This idea -- that a source outside of life itself contains truth that applies to all of us -- is our first area of question.

From this, we inspect other ideas of the modern paradigm. What defines modern society is its reliance upon this singular truth external to the world. This idea is expressed through a philosophy of the singular scientific truth, or a perceived public perception which averages diverse ideas into a singular generic truth. If most people think they like something, goes the logic, it must be best for all of us. Philosophers call this idea "consequentialism."

Consequentialism: An action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable...
In fact, the most attractive feature of consequentialism is that it appeals to publicly observable consequences of actions...
Utilitarianism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone...

Bentham also proposed that we tally the pleasure and pain which results from our actions. For Bentham, pleasure and pain are the only consequences that matter in determining whether our conduct is moral. This aspect of Bentham's theory is known as hedonistic utilitarianism. - The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Act consequentialism is the claim that an act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes the good, that is, if and only if the total amount of good for all minus the total amount of bad for all is greater than this net amount for any incompatible act available to the agent on that occasion. (Cf. Moore 1912, chs. 1-2.) Hedonism then claims that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and that pain is the only intrinsic bad. Together these claims imply that an act is morally right if and only if that act causes "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," as the common slogan says. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In later stages of civilization, by the nature of the deference to the opinion of others common to social relationships, consequentialism becomes "interpreted consequentalism." This philosophy hinges upon the idea of "favorable" interpreted as "favorable according to the people involved." For this reason, consequentialism rapidly becomes utilitarian according to the means by which most people can measure self-interest, namely hedonistic or materialist concerns. Under such systems, if a group of people receive $500 so that toxic waste may be dumped in their water supply, and they do not object, it is considered that a moral good has been done.

The future of modern society: impoverished, oppressed morons picking through trash and ruled by crafty but soulless barons

Interestingly this concept does not address whether their lives or more rewarding or significant, but solely their material well-being. All of our technology and economic efforts are directed toward the end of making most people "feel" they are materially better off. It focuses entirely on what the individual thinks of its individual status, but not on the impact on society as a whole. Consequentialist thinking does not take into account "socialized" costs of individual material well-being, such as rotting inner cities or global political instability, and it does not address the aspects of life that make it rewarding or bring beauty to the individual or whole. It's all about you, kid, or at least the stuff you can buy.

The modern philosophy breaks down into a number of isms which we hear bandied about in positive terms. From consequentialism comes individualism, which is different from individuality (being a human distinct from others) in that it concerns itself with material reward of the individual above all else. From this come our philosophies of humanism, or the idea that preservation of individual lives is more important than sacrifice toward a goal, and materialism, which states that happiness and value are derived from physical well-being, usually expressed through economics, medicine, technology and comfort.

From those philosophies, finer divisions are achieved. Egalitarianism is the idea that we altruistically raise everyone to the same level, or lower others to a uniform level, to eliminate economic disparity and strife. Capitalism (Social Darwinism) is the idea that competition for material wealth causes the best ideas to come to the surface. Democracy is the concept that what most people think they want is best for all. Our social structures reflect a mix of individualism and humanism that can best be described as "popularity," or the thought that the person who ingratiates himself or herself to the most people is the most important in a group.

These philosophies, together, form the foundation of modern society, and our acting upon them constructs the world we know. Much like we are split between our inner worlds, in which we assess meaning and joy in life, and our outer worlds, in which we measure how well we are materially rewarded, modern society splits between a public concept which sounds good and an outer reality which is often depressing.

In this schizoid assessment, where our desires and thoughts are separated from their impact on our physical world, we see the root of the modern problem: we are disconnected from a unity of thought and action. Democracy produces masses who are easily led to vote for one manipulator or another by their television screens while profit-hungry oligarchs donate the money candidates need, and receive the only real attention in the election. Humanism causes us to avoid conflict that would eliminate real problems, and so problems lurk until they explode into full-blown disaster. Capitalism "creates" wealth that is then distributed to the greediest, but also creates "socialized" consequences in the form of pollution, rotting cities, unstable societies and class war throughout the world.

There is no question of adapting to modern society, because it is easy. Find a job, a credit card, and rent or buy housing, and life becomes easy. Yet you will wait in traffic. You will drive past cities of lighted signs that advertise empty futures. You will constantly seek housing away from the rotting ghetto, and jobs away from the small-minded who do not appreciate intelligence as much as certifications, degrees, allegiance and inoffensiveness in not promoting better ideas over "the way we do it around here." Your life becomes a struggle to escape socialized damage and find some kind of retreat, a home-as-castle, and even then you will be beholden to the errors of society in its wars, depressions, pollution (cancers) and sadness.

Your leaders will apply the carrot and stick philosophy. They will tell you of grand-sounding things like "freedom" and "prosperity" while warning that if you accept any dogma, from an unending series of Others compared to Stalin and Hitler, you will lead your nation into decay. They will bring out symbolic issues like flag-burning, abortion, gay marriage, drug use and lack of religion, but they will not address the creeping decay that has been advancing with increased strength for decades. Are these leaders?

There is more to say, and an endless list of problems and "proof" we can offer as to why society is failing, but this document is not meant to further the depression into which modern people sink. Instead, it offers a truth that applies to any troubled age: we can make this situation better, it will not be difficult, and we can do it without greatly disrupting the lives of normal people.

One reason the modern social system seems unshakable is that it fragments its dissidents into opposing political camps. They adhere to one ideology or another without realizing that these ideologies are themselves fragments of the modern philosophy. For this reason, political critique in this time resembles one of the tracked rides at Disneyland, such as "It's a Small World," in which we ride the train past different scenes where characters act out drama and then reach the same point where we departed. Our goal is not to take sides in the small drama, but to question the course of the ride itself and the assumptions on which the train track is laid.

Modern art reflects our inner trashiness

Plato hints at the small drama with his metaphor of a cave. In it he describes people in a cave seeing the shadows cast by objects carried before a fire and concluding those shadows are the objects themselves. His metaphor applies to many interpretations, but its most germaine is that we the people react to the shadows of a situation cast by our collective agreement or the appearance thereof, and rarely experience the direct reality. Much as Nietzsche outlined in "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense," it is these externalized, socially-determined "truths" that define a modern time. Like any growing pain, the schizoid division between the small drama and the esoteric reality is a product of our size. Our response to this size has been to opt for interpreted consequentialism of the masses and then mass control through other means, but this has only further separated the small drama from the actual task, as most people lack the ability to comprehend the bigger view.

What is troubling about the small drama is that it is fought over methods, while the goals of all parties seem similar. People want more stability in society, less internal friction, less pollution and ugliness of commercially-designed cities, and fair treatment for all -- whatever their political creed. While they have this goal in the back of their minds, they accept the struggle over method and allow it to confuse them, so that they become derailed into a conflict over ways to achieve this goal and lose sight of this goal.

In our schizoid society, this form of confusion is endemic. Methods belong to the outer world; ideals belong to the inner. We confuse the means of dividing resources (money, wealth) with that division of resources, and so our tool becomes our master. We confuse methods with goal, and so serve the method while the goal becomes mostly forgotten. We want to treat people fairly, but end up focusing on people as material beings instead of thinking autonomous animals with souls.

The end result of materialism/humanism in society is this fragmentation, and it can be seen most destructively in the competent. Observing the mess around them, they tend to become classist, and esteem those who earn a good living above others as "safer" or "saner." This is elitism disguised by a worship of money, however, and not only cuts out some quality people but allows those devious or sociopathic enough to disguise their outward aggression to gain admittance to an inner circle and breed within it. Is it not surprising that wealth does not endure for more than three generations?

Those who do not have great wealth, but enough, lapse into a comfortable middle class oblivion where they act decisively for themselves alone and then apply the band-aid of pity so they feel altruistic. This competitive altruism leads these people to enact illogical egalitarian legislation and create a massive government bureaucracy dedicated to solving insoluble problems through pity-based emotional logic. This furthers the antagonism between classes, genders and ethnicities.

The fragmentation furthers as each person attempts to find their "own" interpretation of these divisions of method, and soon we are a crowd of conflicting voices shouting at each other, and no one is heard.

We are domesticated by the machine, which we serve much as we now serve money, both originally devices meant to liberate us

The result of this process is a form of domestication, much as occurs with the animals and plants we use to produce food, except we have done it to ourselves. We rely on "the system" (or "society") to look out for us, and limit our thinking to changing options within it as if it were a software configuration or machine control panel. When we see problems, we attempt to fix them within the methods of our society or write it off as an unchanging and unchangeable mess to which we adapt. As neither works, our cycle of helplessness and alienation deepens.

In turn this lulls us into docility. Those who resist face long lives of living in the margins, and those who are not bothered by dysfunction succeed easily. Are there any tasks in society which test us particularly? Not really. We go through the education, get the certification, make the contacts and then have our jobs waiting for us. Within the remaining narrow space of time any actions we choose are seen as "hobbies" and inconsequential. Nothing will change, get in line and wait, our friends counsel.

Of course we do read the newspapers, a form of entertainment which profit by presenting us with the most vivid information possible. So we see the procession of murders, disasters, horrors and comedic corruption and start to view it as background noise because it is always there. We descend into nullity thinking that it has always been this way and never will change, and we turn inward. Soon we think about nothing other than ourselves because the rest is a constant scream of depletion.

Yet we worry when our noble leaders fail to notice the bigger problems, and these problems increase like a cancer or a slow leak, soon inundating us in a negative and parasitic environment. Isolated in ourselves, we try to explain them away or ignore them, or fall back on some pathetic statement that we are waiting for our species to wake up and figure it out. And our doubt grows, because we know that each daily activity we undertake is contributing to this mess. Each disposable product, more landfill. Each purchase, more staying power to the disaster. Each interaction, another lost chance to vote no faith in this mess.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant invented a theory called "radical evil." In it, he described a situation where to do what is normal becomes a way of tacitly endorsing a great evil by participation. In such a case, the individual is faced with a difficult choice between life as others do it and turning away from a "radical" or all-pervasive evil. Kant used this in contrast to the image of evil popular at the time, which held that normal life was good and only a few deviated. He was the first to describe a systemic, or civilization-wide, environment in which destructive actions (evil) were the norm and the burden fell on the individual to resist it.

In the present era, we face a choice between participating in a society that clearly is heading toward a bad end, and choosing a difficult and solitary path away from its insanity. Even more, since most of our philosophies of life are defined within this evil system, we have few choices that we can take "off the shelf" and pursue. One can be an anarchist, Communist, Nazi, extreme Christian or even jihadist, but these paths lead back to the same situation we have now. To resist our society, we can no longer complain about its methods, but must attack its underlying values.

Modern morality: pity the lesser as a means of revenge on the higher

This process is made further difficult by its means of pacifying us. A materialist system thinks solely in terms of wealth and comfort, and assumes its dissidents act only from a lack of these two things. Had Hitler been given a Mercedes at age 16, we reason, he would not have done what he did; the current crop of Muslim guerrillas (and what is a terrorist but a guerrilla acting within civilization) would cease their evil ways if they had the right amount of money, drugs, sex and television. The problem is that this assumption is partially true: most people can be bought. The "partial" truth does not contain however an assessment of their long term happiness through finding meaning in life or sanity in society. Of course it does not; that would debase it.

Our society has a curious relationship between inner and outer worlds. We are told that it supports individualism, or placing the individual concerns before all other demands. We are represented in politics, given an ability to compete in economics and finding mates, and can construe ourselves however we like in a social world. We are our presentation. And in this the inner world is justified by the external world, so while it is tempting to call us egomaniacs, it is more accurate to say that we possess an "external ego," or a self-image, and that our inner world is mostly disconnected from it.

There as in many places we see the split between individualism and individuality. Individualism is the material reward and representation of the individual, or the outer world public face of our inner world. Individuality is our inner worlds: what motivates us, for what we are willing to sacrifice, and what we value beyond the convenience of material living. Individuality is what makes us not only human but discernible, and the only possible reason we could see ourselves as necessarily distinct from others.

In the realm of individualism, we can boast of our proficiency in writing TPS reports or our comfortable lifestyle away from the madness of social decay, but the world of individuality is what makes our friends like us even when we're broke, makes people fall in love with us and makes our families respect us. Our civilization recognizes individualism but not individuality. Even our qualities like intelligence, health and appearance, in addition to our character and values, are replaced by external assessments like popularity, wealth and geniality. These are easily forged.

One fundamental question that is essential to any discourse on modern society is the question of how we arrived at this state. Assuming that one recognizes the problems of modern society are structural, and will lead to doom, the inevitable thought appears: First, why did it happen? Second, why do we continue to tolerate it?

The first question is surprisingly easily answered. There is nothing wrong with us; we have made a wrong decision and it has compounded itself. Much as in life good people have to make screwups in order to find the right path, so humanity must do the same. We are not wrong; our decision turns out to be wrong, and now all that is left is to fix it.

The modern social order is based on putting people who cannot control themselves in charge of their lives so others can profit

A technical diagnosis of our error would be as follows: humanity started in the habits of animals, drifting among forests and survival on foraged food (nuts, fruits, grains) as well as occasional predation. For these early humans life was easy, since in moderate climates three hours of foraging and spearing animals produced all they needed. However, they lacked the basis of a civilization which would permit them to develop and pass on learning.

A new type of civilization arose based on the impetus of those who wanted such abstract and intangible powers as learning, language, art, culture and philosophy. They sought dominion over nature through inventions such as fire and tools, but something else impelled them to further heights. They moved toward the north to avoid the larger populations who found life easy in the jungles and later temperate forests. These original seed societies existed on every continent, although whether it was the same group or not is a matter lost to history. They forged themselves anew not only against the rigors of their environment, but fighting an inner depression at living in bleak surroundings.

These initial civilizations were based on the work of a few with the foresight to establish lasting agrarian societies. Although all humans sought dominion over the environment, these did so for a goal other than immediate material comfort. They wanted something to fill their souls, and were a searching romantic people who found transcendent value in ideas. These idealist-realists developed as a result a transcendent philosophy in which suffering and death were accepted as a given, and seen as secondary to what might be achieved.

Their eyes were always on a distant goal, a possibility and not an actuality, and they traded their lives for it because they saw the wisdom of this future state. They sacrificed easy comforts as could be found in warmer climates as well as easier lives for a sense of creation. They were fulfilled by this creation as they saw in it a rising above, or transcendence of, the everyday struggle for mediocre existence. They thought on a grand scale and worked toward it, as nothing else would fill such stalwart and expansive souls as a vision of an intensely powerful future. This enabled them to survive vast hardship and to divide up labor, or "specialize," without constant infighting over petty material gains when larger gains for all -- holistic gains -- lay easily ahead.

Over time, they mastered not only the basic technologies of survival but became a population that although hardened by its climate lacked the meanness of spirit and negativity of those who fight over the smaller, tangible things. They were guided by a realistic idealism that rewarded striving for intangibles, such as learning and rational state of mind, a positive outlook that did not shirk from mortality and suffering. As a population, they developed culture far beyond what any other group achieved.

They prospered against all odds. Through time, their population surged, and their castoffs roamed the world, leaving genetic and cultural traces. Soon the tribes of the southern areas were able to benefit from much of the learning of the northerners. Here humanity reached its second branching point, as both seed civilizations and southern societies prospered and expanded: it became unified by water travel and language, and had to find a way to rule itself. This was a break from the earlier small civilizations, where each person directly knew the local leader(s) and followed their wisdom because it was daily proven right.

In this challenge is the origin of all modern human problems. A small group knew how to lead, and the rest knew the benefit, but over time it became clear that the larger group would assimilate the smaller. As those who did not make the pilgrimage north, the larger group were accustomed to laboring for their immediate material gratification, were unfamiliar with transcendent philosophy, and were less likely to accept death and suffering than to create "alternatives" in fanciful worlds where these downsides of life did not exist. Their philosophy was inherently materialist-humanist, and as a study of the tangible, was incompatible with the vision of the seed societies.

What afflicts humanity is the ongoing development of this growing pain. Among us there are a few with the vision to act on an idea for other than immediate material benefit. The rest do not possess this capacity for leadership. While there is nothing wrong with them, and nothing wrong with this, a society who places people who cannot lead in leadership positions is doomed to gradual but inevitable failure. And in this the source of our problem is simple: humanity has never overcome specialization, or the process by which some will be better at some things and some will be materially better off than others. This hangup is the exact opposite of transcendental theory, in which one accepts inequality and suffering as means to the end of life itself, and then is able to not only "forgive" life for inequity but celebrate it. This inability to overcome our different-ness, and the consequent impulse to go into denial and "morally" demand equality, is a growing pain we will either overcome or which will destroy us.

We have a dubious view of evolution which comes down to a simplistic, symbolic interpretation. We think of it as two competing groups, and one wins, so that must be the best choice as if ordained by God. In nature, evolution occurs not in a single instance but in many over time, and is less a victory in battle than a gradual predominance of better adaptations over less optimal adaptations. When humanity began making fire, however, it assumed the course of its own evolution, and in our time of civilization, natural selection is determined by ideas. It is by this mechanism that we can both make error and reverse it.

To summarize the human error and our response, our success caught us by surprise. The task of early civilization was to find a way to survive at all. After that, it became a question of surviving well. Finally, as we looked around and saw how we had grown and also how much we had lost, we abandoned the drive to surviving well and began focusing on method. We gave up our inner worlds in the name of pragmatism, and fought directly against our environment and each other for what was viewed as the best of all systems. Only a few hundred years later, we see what we left behind is needed, and how our own system has stumbled forward in this effect before cause style, creating an entrenched and functional but destructive regime.

So here we are, looking at the future. Do we choose the declining path of increasing misery, or pick something better even though it entails (gasp) risk and effort? Our choice will determine not only our material future, but how we think about ourselves. A society rising above its petty conflicts and reaching toward a higher goal is not only a more fun place to live, but makes us feel better about ourselves. We're not the useless lumps of flesh waiting for the end -- we're the people who got ourselves motivated and made something better. Say it twenty times.

Our CORRUPT psychology lab defined a clear division between two philosophies we can take. One is of the present time, and the other is of the possible future we can grasp with relatively little effort. They are:

Intraversion - This term implies not only going within ourselves, commonly called "introversion," but the thought of going "between" which reveals our divided self between inner world and outer world. This philosophy is motivated by individual fear of insufficiency, and as a lowest common denominator, can unite us into crowds who act destructively indirectly and without overt aggression -- what psychologists call "passive aggression." Our species is a divided self marked by a suppressed inner world and an overgrown representation of ourselves in the outer world, like an avatar in a strange game made of popularity points, profits and the manipulation of ideas (control). Intraversion takes us into the worst of life, which is a fear of death and unpopularity that paralyzes us from taking action. In this state we become absurdly passive, unwilling to criticize or act against things that are wrong but benefit others, and at the same time disproportionately aggressive in the areas society designates for competition. With our excessive reliance on our external self, we become underconfident, as we never come to know our inner world and find ourselves not at home in our own minds. Even worse, we know we are self-serving and come to loathe ourselves for being so shortsighted.

Ascendancy - In contrast to inward-going philosophies, ascendancy starts from the inner world and believes in the clarification and growth of ourselves as only we know us. An ascendant person thinks, molds themselves into an ideal of their own creation, and derives their self-confidence from that accomplishment and a knowledge of themselves. They have individuality, not individualism, and are less concerned with public perception than actual reality. They know it is easy to convince others that one is competent (pass tests), honest (don't get caught), well-meaning (flatter) and intelligent (memorize facts). They know it is impossible to fool oneself. The goal of an ascendant person is to know himself or herself fully, to discipline that self to the highest standards possible, including ethical and physical and mental, and then to apply the beauty found within to the world without. Where an intraverted person questions whether he or she dares presume to change the world, and talks in terms of rights and obligations, an ascendant person thinks in terms of making things better much as evolution made us better: create ideas, test them, and pick the best and repeat the process on that basis. Ascendant people are confident and moral and lack sneering contempt for anything but bad logic.

One goes from intraverted to extraverted by a process of deconstruction of assumptions, and then rebuilding of a worldview based on tested logic. Much like Zen masters, post-intraverts possess a type of "nihilism" in which they reject all belief, all faith, all social values. The difference between a post-intravert and an ascendant person, like the gap between Zen initiate and Zen master, is that the ascendant person has reconstructed knowledge and values. In this they walk a fine line between realism, or study of physical reality and its likely function, and idealism, or a belief that thoughts define the progress of an individual. Through study and self-discipline, they are able to see the parallels between the function of our minds and the way reality operates.

Modern culture is based on who is clueless enough to pay more for an inferior product

Consider a mind: it is composed of a brain composed of many different neurons which offer impulses to a central chain of command which filters out the erratic and correlates impulses. When enough impulses are roughly in harmony, a decision is made. At no point is there a conscious decision, because this presupposes that the mind is able to define the decision before making it. Instead, there is a process of informed democracy by which the impulses of the mind are filtered to clarity and then the idea that predominates is picked.

This is not to say that the mind cannot be disciplined, only that this is the form our consciousness takes, and we recognize this through sayings such as "it burst into my mind" and "the realization loomed" and "the idea formed." Our brains are not a God-principle but are like a patch of forest in which many small animals working independently create trends that ensure the forest as a whole stays healthy. We see a single consciousness because of our thoughts we know only the conclusions, not the mechanism.

With this function, it is natural that our greatest challenge is determining "reality," since we know it only through our thoughts of it. As the brain-in-a-vat metaphor suggests, we have no way of knowing that we are not remote brains connected to electronic nerves that simulate the touch, taste, smell and sight of the world around us. It is for this reason that our philosophies tend toward either "materialism," or the belief that nothing but tangible matter exists or is important, and "idealism," or the belief that the world operates as thoughts and our thoughts determine our ultimate reward in it.

It is natural that, much as our thoughts cycle between options for anything in life, our thoughts vary between these interpretations of our world. We are forever attempting to make our inner world of thoughts and feelings correlate to our outer world, or finding another explanation for these thoughts and feelings that is more important than the outer world. Between the two extremes of materialism and idealism there are two stopping points: nihilism and transcendentalism.

Nihilism, in its purest definition, is a belief in nothing at all. When we unpack that concept philosophically however, the word that stands out over time is "belief" and not "nothing." Nihilism can be either a lack of belief, or a firm belief in "nothingness." Since believing in something that is not extant makes little sense, we narrow in on the first definition: a lack of belief, or an alternate process of finding a path in life than belief. Of all philosophical ideas, nihilism is the grand leveller that reduces all unnecessary thoughts, dispenses all illusions, and returns us to only what we can demonstrably find to be true -- a cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction.

On the reconstructive side, nihilism quickly becomes realism, or a belief in the supremacy of a single shared physical space of interaction that is "objective" although we can never experience its objectivity. Nihilism is like rock bottom at the end of a ten-day drunk when one sees, through exhaustion and the wreckage of a life totalled in pursuit of distraction, the bare minimum of what is important to carry on. When our beliefs become pompous and symbolic and detached from reality, nihilism is a winter that whips through our souls and removes the irrelevant.

Nihilism is an antidote to the false realities we might create in horror at death and suffering. If there is death, we can create fantasy worlds in which death never exists, and if there is suffering, we can attempt to address it materially by giving to those who suffer. Both responses are an impulse to deny that death and suffering are as necessary to life as empty spaces are for motion. This fantasy world response, which we call "symbolism" because it erects a symbolic anti-negativity to counter negativity, is the part of our cycle of beliefs that leads us furthest from reality, causing a disconnect between our inner world representation of reality and reality itself, and triggers in us a primal nihilism as we attempt to re-introduce reality.

On the other end of the cycle, prior to symbolism, is transcendentalism, which leads us from pure realism into idealism because it suggests realism as the base of its idea. Transcendentalism does not attempt to create a competing illusion to drown out death and suffering, but accepts them as part of the mechanism of life itself, and therefore more than "good" or "bad" it sees destruction and creation as harmonious counterparts in the creation of "meta-good," or reality itself. As such, it is a philosophy that offers no tangible answers for what terrifies us most, but gives us instead a reason to live for the results of the mechanism of life, reducing death and suffering to colors on a painter's canvas.

Transcendentalism eventually becomes made tangible, or simplified, into symbolism, engendering yet again the passage through nihilism. On that journey we lose all false associations between our inner world, in which we expect certain responses from our physical world, and our outer world, in which the only true arbiter of reality exists. As the external world is a whole that is interconnected and consistent, and our internal world is a smaller "mirror" or "map" duplicating its function as best we can see, this means that we gain a clearer view of reality. On the other side of nihilism is realism.

Realism is by its nature materialist, at first, in that it assesses the physical world and studies it to predict its response. Even simple knowledge such as of the nature of gravity or the rising of the sun is part of building a realistic knowledge. As learning increases, realism branches to include individual psychology and the workings of human minds when connected in a group. It begins to encompass the knowledge of prediction, in which uncountable factors are tracked with the knowledge that their partial collaboration will result in the ultimate outcome. At this point, the realist seeks to understand the principles that govern external reality, and finds that, like thoughts themselves, these principles are logical and consistent. When the realist is comfortable enough with reality to begin understanding its abstract component, a new stage called idealism dawns.

Idealism in the vernacular means an outlook seeking the moral best in life, but in philosophy it means someone who recognizes that either reality is composed of thoughts, or that its mechanics are like thoughts. Much as the brain works by a principle of creating multiple impulses, and then through natural selection and predominance selecting the right (hopefully) one or a hybrid of ones, reality is guided by metaphysical principles. These principles explain in abstract terms how our world operates. This general operation fits the form we call "natural selection," or a creation of many impulses so that the best can be picked.

From this idealism, we gain a dimension that cannot be found in realism: a sense of design, or appreciation for the abstract structures of nature/physics and their adaptation to certain functions. Whether the smooth walls of a water-sculpted cave, or the repeated mathematical structure of a fern, or the intricate rhythms of the valves of the heart, we see how ideation is represented in reality -- and how the laws that govern our physical reality have analogues in the laws that govern our mind (this makes sense, when one considers that thinking is itself a physical process).

This is the path that nihilism begets, and it is why Zen masters (ardent nihilists) are prone to illustrate their philosophy with a slap: wake up and pay attention to reality. Your ideation is not threatened by but rather strengthened by the inevitability of physical reality. When one has undergone this journey, the separation between our inner world and the outer world is terminated. It is clear that our physical state determines most of our mental state, and that like computers, we each have different processing abilities. Zen is the state of living both in the mind and reality, but being aware of both.

To get the most out of preparing for and reaching toward ascendancy, discipline is required. In addition, as in all things, we are limited by our abilities. Many will get no farther than a state of basic realism, and indeed most of the population will stop here in an enlightened materialist state, but as each rises to a place in wisdom a balance which determines the role that individual should play will be found. Those who can go farthest are a rare sort, possessed not only of high intelligence but the capacity for thought of an architectonic nature, or that which requires no linear path and can compare multiple factors and by the difference between them produce an approximation of structure.

Probably obsolete technology, or maybe just a bad design, but no one can tell -- signs of a failing species

Intelligence alone does not determine this state, as they must also have an impulse toward leadership thinking: conceptualization beyond the individual and a desire to do what is best for the intersection of all individuals and their world. This character, a personality trait encompassing both ethics and goal-oriented action, is produced in limited quantities by nature. The rest of us rise as far as our inclinations and abilities allow us, with most stopping at an educated materialism, a smaller group ascending to conscious idealism, and a few nearing the full capacity of this philosophy. For those who wish to attain the greatest height, a flexible but aggressive state of mental clarity is required.

This state of mind is not only personal, but reflects how the individual approaches society. An ascendant person needs no morality to tell them not to kill, but acts by the principle of understanding the order of the universe, and enhancing it wherever they go. The parts and processes of life that pass their hands will be enhanced, made more efficient and less destructive, and they will move on in confidence that what they did was right, even if some were killed. Not all desires lead to greater efficiency and less destructiveness, and not all people are reasonable; an ascendant person recognizes not only the justice of some conflict, but the necessity of conflict, and is untroubled by the thought of dying in service to enhancing life.

Intraverted society, on the other hand, applies a morality of humanism and materialism which states that the best possible good is what people think they want, and that when no lives are lost, the action is morally supreme. It struggles over its confrontations with conflict, and has a sick tendency to refuse to engage conflict until it is a disaster, and then to wrap its martial ventures in good intentions and benevolent-sounding aims like democracy, peace and prosperity. As a consequence, when intraverted society makes war it is from a passive position in which it construes itself as the victim after provoking its enemy with non-aggressive but nonetheless destructive actions, and its wars end in failures because it cannot morally stomach conquest.

Moral societies by their schizoid nature are afraid to connect inner knowledge of what would enhance life with external action. Internally, these societies are divided by a knowledge of what is right blocked by a fear of what others think, or what is popular. Their logic is universally individualistic and argues that individual desires and survival come before other concerns, so destructive actions are allowed as long as they do not violate the basic taboos of violence and denial of "rights" to others. Consequently, such societies are filled with parasitic people who understand how to appear passive but act aggressively and selfishly, knowing that the rest of the society will not limit them because it is afraid to deny their individual desires as expressed in economic competition and social status.

Ascendant people recognize this state as being one motivated by basic fear of death. If violence is outlawed, the thinking goes, death will not be brought onto any of us and we can live as we see fit by allowing others to do the same. Moral societies use grand-sounding terms like tolerance, freedom, justice and peace to describe their leadership void in which all behavior except that which appears violent is tolerated. Yet the violence of parasitism cracks them because it causes massive socialized costs as the society rots under the weight of parasitic behaviors, which extract profit at a cost passed on to all others. Many of these costs are not financial, but existential. Driving down a city street clustered with ugly signs, breathing the exhaust of a thousand cars, while endless commercial messages rain down from multiple media and a few wealthy rule over a cultureless mass of stupid people... this is the end-state of a moral society, and one we have now attained.

While moral society is defined by its fear of death, ascendant people are in part defined by the simple idea of context. They believe that if one acts from a love of the order of the universe, and of the organic whole that is life on earth, nothing can be wrong, even if their own deaths or those of others occur. They are concerned with creating better life and making sense where otherwise disorder reigned, and they leave reduced socialized costs by making things better that do not personally benefit them. In our literature and philosophy, we refer to this outlook as "heroic" because it is willing to sacrifice convenience and even life itself to make civilization and nature work better together.

Although for now most of its direct impacts are escapable, moral society -- modern society -- continues its path toward self-destruction. Look not at any given point, but at a curve of multiple points, and it becomes clear that its path has not changed: a steady degradation of ascendant values and a further enmeshment in the material and unrewarding. Corresponding to this is a series of external failings which we are told to view as unconnected to the denial of our inner worlds of thought and creativity.

In many ways, we have reached a time that approximates the warnings issued in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." He described a society where people were mechanically classed for intelligence and produced without identity, where pleasure was the only goal and seemed to satisfy most who yet lived with doubt, and where a lack of purpose but the material made people trivial, thoughtless, dysfunctional and lost. All of this is partially true, although not as centralized as Huxley envisioned it. Those who bow easily and get ahead in the system, no matter how trivial or destructive it is, are rewarded, and yet we all live for our own pleasures and little else, and signs show most are unsatisfied. Suicide rates have consistently risen alongside cancer rates and inversely to intelligence since the industrial revolution. Do we need "proof"? Look around, but do so while thinking critically: what function do these elements of society serve, and what do they make better? Are they intelligent designs or not? If not, what is the impact not only on our time and wealth but our outlook and feelings of confidence in our world?

The modern society, derived from the collision of moral society and technology, is both declining and likely to be destructive in its passing. We can see in this the classic symptoms of intraversion and its consequences. Individuals are less confident, and less likely to undertake acts outside of themselves, and while they have pleasures to pursue, lack feelings of intangible reward. Consequently, the family breaks down, as the rising divorce rate illustrates. With this, the individual is completely alienated from society and has to "settle for" small rewards of an unthreatening material nature. This underconfident, destablished, quasi-functional individual is the basic unit of modern societies.

The great problem with such people is that by being alienated from any hope for themselves, they feel threatened by any solutions which offer hope at all. For the hopeless to see hope is for them to feel they somehow missed a chance or were inferior to the task. Their inner world has been entirely delegated to an external world of social approval and the popularity of their function, and for that reason, they feel an inner void. They have no intangible ways to value themselves and so are chronically underconfident. This creates a "crowd," or group of people unified by a lowest common denominator of morality which opposes any person or idea that might reveal its shared bankruptcy.

Normal people, of normal ability, deprived of satisfaction in their inner worlds and forced to compete in an externalized group of selves, will undertake a defensive mental state in which they are both nearly sociopathic in their personal material ambition and resentful of any who appear to have risen out of the group of selves. The subculture they have created within society is joined by giving up what makes one an individual in exchange for an approval of their external selves, but this makes them an enemy of anyone who retains that inner self. As this decision is an embittered one, even if they do not recognize it, their bitterness takes the form of a revenge-orientation which opposes that which dares transcend the crowd.

Materialist/humanist societies all follow this path, although it may take decades or centuries to fully manifest itself, and consequently undergo a "norming" process by which excellence is downgraded and mediocrity celebrated. Mediocrity challenges no one, but excellence requires rising above the crowd. At first the heroes are celebrated, but then, as in celebrity culture in modern society, they are required to become more accessible and are dissected for their flaws. This brings them down to the level of others, and makes them part of the crowd, even if "fortunate" enough to rise above by accident. The crowd eschews symphonies and great novels, but is fond of quirky and unusual variations on known themes, as these are within crowd morality.

Modern society waxes hypocritical, and then punishes dissidents because of its own underconfidence in the sanity of its path.

This is the physical manifestation of intraversion. Having denied the possibilities of intangible experience and achievement, we turn to the material, and through that we reach the humanist stage where we praise the form (human individual) and not its abilities or inclinations (heroism, love). In a society devoted to material want there is no place for non-material reward or achievement, which is fine by the alienated crowd because such intangibles cannot be used to construct external selves as necessary for the intraverted crowd persona. Misery loves company, and will enforce it on others if they lack it.

In this process we can see a corruption of any sanity in life. We have become prisoners of our flesh, slaves to its want and to taking care of it materially through the politics of the crowd, and in doing so have eliminated the possibility of the one indefinable joy in life which is the accomplishment of intangibles. Our system takes into account sex and the physical contract of marriage, but has no way to justify love. It values popularity and earning potential but has no place for truthful behavior in all its forms, whether art or heroic action, because these do not translate into material reward.

Attempts to oppose this have failed because all of these also have been materialist. The leftist impulse has been to re-distribute wealth, but this gesture is incapable of finding a higher value than that wealth. The conservative approach has been to attempt "Social Darwinism" which rewards those who are most morally correct and possess heightened business acumen, but because this morality and wealth potential are represented through external behaviors, has no room for the growth of souls or character. We are living in an illusion that denies both inner world (personality, soul) and outer (natural, physical) worlds, thus we are intraverted: between our bodies and our personalities we are trapped in a false social representation of self that leaves us alienated to a greater degree.

Our civilization has outgrown meaning in favor of symbols of meaning, much as we pursue money not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, since we no longer trust each other to have inner selves that direct us toward behavior that enhances life. We have picked a more comfortable world in the tangible, but have in trade given up the one thing that can make us feel our lives are a worthwhile trade for the inevitability of death: meaning in self-refinement and non-material accomplishment. When we plot this curve, we see a greater intraversion coupled with greater distrust and isolation, and at its end point is a dissolution of all impulse to civilization whatsoever.

One of the most destructive aspects of modern society is its adoption of all activism under its wings. It endorses political activity but demands that it norm itself to the public format favored by all other forms of political activity. Much like it turns all art not explicitly for profit into a "hobby," it turns political activism into self-representation. It is assumed that all political groups act in self-interest with an eye toward future material reward. For this reason, it is not surprising that no movements to increase existential joy have ever made it to the polls.

Modern aesthetics reflect convenience of thinking, not excellence, and we become correspondingly dispirited

For example, if one wishes to end plastic packaging that stuffs landfills and slowly degrades into a toxic mess, what can be done? Only buy non-plastic packaged goods, and start a movement to campaign against plastic packaging and encourage others to do the same. Yet at most a few percent of the population follows this idea because it is inconvenient and not materially rewarding, so soon there are new more expensive products without plastic, and everyone else buys stuff in plastic. The travesty is that if plastic packaging were simply replaced, products would not be more expensive and no waste of that type would be generated.

This is tolerated because of the inverse psychology of self-negation. When there are no real sacrifices to make, people use sacrifice to accessorize. They pay more for the "safe" goods, and secretly congratulate themselves for having the financial ability to do so. They feel better about themselves because others are so ignorant and cannot choose and afford such packaged goods. This is similar to pity, in the thrall of which people will act to help those lower than themselves for that rewarding feeling of being powerful enough to help others. The pitier needs the pitied more than vice versa.

At this stage, most of our "activism" ultimately becomes the same sort of moral pretense that allows the crowd to detest any who dare rise above the morass. Our activism changes little because it is not designed for effect, but to make us feel better about being unique and different in what we choose. In the intraverted society, where the inner self is denied, our actions reward the external self under the guise of helping society as a whole.

It is this same moral pretense that causes democratic nations to wage "well-intentioned" wars to spread democracy. Everyone else is ignorant and needs our help and we feel that warm glow of pride when we bomb their cities, destroy their cultures and invade them with our product-oriented lifestyle. We're helping them, we reason, and if it also eliminates a potential enemy, it must be a bonus. We feign surprise when they resist us, having looked carefully at the neurotic and unstable life we represent, and then as if wounded use their rejection to justify even more violence.

The cycle does not end until the system ends. Like the ride in Disneyland mentioned earlier, the figurines acting out drama on the stage are only symbols. Our activism is picking one of those symbols to support with the same impotent cheering that accompanies public sports events, and has as little consequence. The only real activism is finding a way to get off the ride and pick a better path, because at the end of the singing and fighting animatronic displays there is only a return to the same dreary continuity of underlying failure.

Like many things, the question before us appears paradoxical at first. How can an external world be designed so it rewards the inner self? And even more, how can we act in a way that many would prefer us not to, but that would benefit them more greatly, even in ways they cannot see and which will not manifest themselves for some time?

As thinking beings, we face a life where we are physical bodies which must be cared for and minds which must be fed. This constitutes our first challenge, which is how to understand our inner worlds and outer world as continuities of the same "space" in which we can act, a thing that we call life. In this state of mind, we see both inner and outer worlds as a conduit to the experience of life, in which some things reward us enough that we find death less bothersome. Death and aging constitute the limits to our experience.

When we think about "getting over" our physicality, we have two paths: denial/illusion or making physicality a means to an end, that end being fulfilment of our inner world, which requires the inner world in itself be a means to that end. To get over physicality, we must accept that it operates consistently and when we learn the rules of its operation, based in a "metaphysic" or "mathematic" of logic, we can then use it as a means to an end. Denial/illusion is possible through our wealth and technology, but at some point, the conflict between illusory visions and the tendencies of reality leaves us the loser.

In every religion and philosophy there are many interpretations. Some are more accurate than others. In the most accurate interpretations of every religion and philosophy, it has been revealed that whatever divine or metaphysical forces operate in the world do not intervene on the level of our consciousness; they are slow, like the change in seasons, and consistent. Gods do not appear at our summoning, but in response to our actions, we can read the will of the gods or metaphysical forces. At some point in our thinking, all language including religion and philosophy is a metaphor for these forces.

From that realization it is easy to see that whether we are atheist or Jewish or Hindu or Shinto, we are the commanders of our own life because the gods/metaphysical principle has gifted us with the ability to do as we see fit. Much as we have many thought-impulses, and select some for thoughts, and some thoughts as realistic or reflecting the will of these gods/metaphysical principles, we as humans have many actions and a few as realistic are selected by nature. If we anticipate which of those actions will be most successful according to an accurate inner-world image of the outer world, we as a group become more successful. This is the science of leadership.

No matter what gods or metaphysical principles to which we subscribe, it is clear that we are in the driver's seat. We determine our own fate. Both collectively and individually, the actions we choose that are adapted to our outer world (realistic) bring us degrees of success, and those that are poorly adapted (denial/illusion) bring us degrees of failure. If we love life, we tend toward more realistic responses because we wish to enhance life. However, this brings us a final conflict.

Sometimes it is necessary to, in the course of loving life and wanting to do the best, do things that appear unloving. For one who loves peace, it is hard task to make war even in self-defense, but without that war-impulse, the peace-lover is overrun by enemies and cannot enjoy peace (or life, if those enemies are hard). Between wanting war and wanting peace is a realistic response to life, in which conflict is necessary much as it occurs in our thoughts and allows us to select the best response and deny the rest. Conflict is a natural mechanism of testing the adaptiveness of certain ideas or biological designs.

It is possible to have love in one's heart while doing unloving things. Too much life chokes a pond, and too much human life chokes humanity. Because nature is universally just, it gives every thought-impulse or biological design a chance, but then applies realism like a net to remove that which is illogically adapted. Since we as humans are tool-users, and can make our own environment within an environment, we now must apply the same realism to avoid denial/illusion which leads to intraversion, and instead pursue an enlightened realism which leads to ascendancy.

Through this process we overcome the paradox of our inner worlds divided from outside reality, and can create for ourselves a more functional human reality. Presently, out of fear of unloving action, we have chosen a false love that results in us being overgrown with illusion, and from this we have buried ourselves in false concepts and taboos that prevent us from doing what is necessary.

Modern society is a future of rotting buildings, wasted freeways, and stupid people.

When an ascendant design does not intervene, human society like all things bumbles along a path to decay. It is a form of default in life that all things must fail, unless they overcome paradox and find a higher goal that the persistence of what they are. We can view our future in two divisions: what will happen on the present course, and a series of other possible futures if we choose to avoid that default of decay.

Should we not alter course, we will experience the present reality with a gradual tightening of factors. As we pick people for breeding by their monetary impulse, society will separate into those who are super-rich and those who are super-poor, with the former becoming increasing vicious and the latter increasingly numb, stupid and servile. The servile will continue to demand representation, and will be fooled every time by their masters, guaranteeing no end to society's problems.

It is easy to fool most people. Our words and symbols mislead us, because we can label any illusion as "good" and most people if told enough times that it is "good" will come to demand it. The super-rich will manipulate as oligarchs, meaning they will appear in no elections and never make a public statement, but will use their money to influence government and society so that their means of achieving wealth are unobstructed, no matter how destructive they are. (This is why in democratic societies the most pressing problems are never directly addressed).

F.W. Nietzsche, in his "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense," pointed out this disparity between "public image of good" and "realistic image of good" and ushered in a time of post-modern thinking when people attempted to grapple with the idea that symbols do not inherently accurately represent reality. His critique of public morality as derived from Christianity, crowd thinking and technology was that it creates a schizoid reality where we the citizens live between public illusion and inner truth, but never achieve either. Already we have seen this pattern developing over centuries but it becomes increasingly powerful.

Our fall comes through our unwillingness to leave our illusion behind because we see it as a useful way of manipulating each other. We fear that without morality, and a public illusion to support it, we will descend into a primitive state of warfare and violence and death. This thinking reflects a fear of the appearance of unloving methods but does not achieve a loving outlook toward life. It is in short fear of possibility that occludes any hope of having a plan or deliberate behavior on our part.

Since we cannot abandon our illusion, it continues to manipulate, and the travesty goes on. Oligarchs behind the scenes manipulate politics so their destructive industries can achieve profit. Pollution destroys small parts of our environment and causes an effect similar to removing parts from a complex machine, which is a gradually increasing tendency toward failure. The inner cities get more violent and hopeless, and the normal working person must give up more money to avoid destructive cities and purchase better quality services than the norm, which is declining in quality. There is no way out but change.

If we are brave enough to choose a different path, we should pick carefully the most realistic path we desire.

The most fundamental concern for most of us is the economy, because in supporting our physical bodies we need food and supplies, and in any civilization bigger than a familial tribe this is accomplished through an exchange of value-tokens, or money. A sensible society would continue to use money, and to encourage competitive business, but would discard the speculative investment strategies of our current time. Allowing interest-bearing investments to be traded separates the actual value of things from their perceived value, and "creates" false wealth that is extracted from the worker.

We must remember that economy is one way of motivating our people. Other motivations also can hold together a society. We must provide for our people, and give the best of them some way to display higher competence, but this does not mean that our primary values-system must be based in this materialism. Money like all things must be a means to an end, and that end is an ascendant society, as it gives us the opportunity to see our inner and outer worlds as means to the end of significance, or meaning to our lives. Significance cannot be achieved through material alone. It requires that we have space to create and challenges that face us outside of the material, and that we are motivated to overcome these and thus feel something few modern people experience: a sense of achievement rooted entirely in our inner worlds.

Modern architecture reflects convenience of function and little else

For this reason, most intelligent thinkers believe that we need a higher value which can be found in culture. Authority and government cannot substitute for this, nor can religion alone, nor can economics. Every civilization needs a unifying principle in the form of a values system. Fortunately, these occur organically in each population that has, isolated from others, developed itself to civilization level. In such societies, ability to act according to culturally-derived values determines the evolutionary success of individuals, so values are "bred into" the population.

Such a system is far superior to any form of law enforcement, because for a society to enforce laws on an unwilling population, it needs an uncorruptible police force that matches its population in rough size. Such absolute power is easily abused and rapidly leads to decline. For this reason, enforcement of social norms is a failing strategy, but having social values "bred into" the population means that most people act according to those values without having to be threatened or bribed.

The most successful instance of any government is one that carefully divides itself into nearly autonomous local communities. The larger a society gets, the less likely it is to successfully rule itself because of the anonymity of its people. Anonymous people must be assessed without context, as their background and contributions are not known. In a local community, each individual is known to someone known to everyone else, and therefore, if (for example) a transgression occurs, it can be counterbalanced by a knowledge of the positive that the individual has done, which encourages forgiveness. This eliminates the heavy-handedness of most large anonymous legal systems.

For these reasons, the first cornerstone of our counterplan is this: renew, renovate, rebuild and re-assess culture. Our goal is a strong culture for every local community, and to unite those local communities on the most general of ideas so they can collaborate toward larger goals.

Although local culture will determine many values, what unites those into a civilization is a belief in shared values of an abstract nature. As shown above, when these values are ascendant, a society thrives, but when it becomes introverted, it follows the inevitable path into decline and insignificance.

The first steps toward achieving ascendant values are twofold: radical truth and compassion. Radical truth means that we place truth before any concern about who might be offended, and work toward establishing a clear view into of many competing perspectives like products on a shelf. Compassion means that we do this without hatred or a desire of revenge toward others, but that we act honorably for all, and work without ourselves to understand their perspective on life and to accomodate it where rational.

With these as our guide, we can inspect every aspect of our current society and reject its failures while keeping its successes, and design replacements for those parts that do not function realistically.

1. Holism: any action or idea is considered in the context of the whole, not in a limited context such as "all individuals" or "the economy." The whole is human civilization, nature, and that intangible zone of emotions and ideas that we will call "the wilderness," or a space where achievement and betterment of self provide meaning.

2. Idealism: we recognize that ideas work by natural selection, and that our physical world functions by the same principle. For this reason we consider all things and then winnow down to the most realistic solution.

3. Transcendentalism: regardless of religious belief, we are unified in the idea that one reality exists and it is our physical reality, but that spiritually enhanced states of mind can be achieved in which we live in a mental "heaven" that balances realism and a fulfilment of our inner worlds. Transcendentalism includes reverence, as defined by Paul Woodruff in his book by the same name, for the mechanism of nature and its brilliance. We no longer complain about death and suffering, but see them as methods to an end, whether natural or our own more reverent design.

4. Naturalism: our nature world provides for us not only unparalleled beauty, but a model of how to adapt to the physics and metaphysics of our universe. It shall be our guide and our enjoyment. Our goal includes preservation of nature (conservationism) but we go further and esteem an enjoyment and understanding of nature as the principal root of all future values.

5. Successionism: critique without a counterplan is next to useless. Instead of a society of critics, we aim for a society of critical thinkers. Successionism is the process by which a critical thinker studies the process at hand and designs an enhancement or superior replacement. No whining. In the Successionist view, neither religion nor science are demonized, but are viewed as languages through which the eternal truths of ascendancy can be spoken. If they are off-track, it is from lack of these values, and they can be updated and become useful again.

The gateway to this mode of thinking is the ascendant state of mind in which inner worlds and outer world are seen as a continuous, logical whole. Ascendant thinkers recognize that the same logical forces that crafted nature have shaped the human mind, and that the human mind represents a good start but like our personalities can be continually improved with discipline and realistic logic. We aim for a state of balanced realism and idealism that some call "Zen," and others call "positive nihilism," in which our guide is reality and we correlate our thoughts toward that state.

We have one warning toward future philosophers: never trust any passive philosophy. When people start speaking as if something holds them back, and they are oppressed by some facet of reality, they are already thinking passively, and the result will be an impulse toward revenge coupled with a denial of reality. We can, and we will, make things better. At any state in history past or future there will be this ability. With truth as our guide, we can enhance our reality without a desire for retribution, without hatred, and without illusion.

When we speak of constructing a civilization, we are referring to any human society with a division of labor that reaps corresponding value from efficiencies of scale. Each person assembling their own home is slower and less reliable than having experts who can do many in a sequence of steps. This enables us to increase our expertise, share knowledge, and have some people detached from raw production to do mental labor. Our assumption is that a civilization is necessary because we desire the fruits of division of labor: intellect, the arts, and future technologies.

For us to have a working civilization, we must carefully apply our values. A study of history reveals three types of civilization ranked according to their specification of methods and goals toward an end:

1. There is a single right method of achieving a single goal.
2. There are infinite right methods of achieving any one of an infinite range of goals.
3. There are infinite right methods of achieving a single goal.

Ultra-totalitarian regimes like Soviet Russia were of the first type, while modern liberal democracies are of the second. Our desired society is the third. We do not give up on the idea of having a goal, but we are not calcified, reactive, knee-jerk and conservative regarding methodology. As long as our values are good, any method of achieving them is also good, insofar as it does not create ancillary or socialized damage.

With culture as the anchor of our goal-set, we can transition from a society led around by the nose by finance, politics and social popularity to one in which leadership, or doing what is right no matter how unpopular, is the goal. This type of society can have a free market without being overwhelmed by it, much as it can have oven mitts without them being required attire at social events. Culture does not replace methods, or means to ends, such as law, economics, popularity and religion. Instead, it becomes the founding value to which they adapt, and they are given free reign insofar as they fit within cultural guidelines.

In this sense, we would create the first "post-monetarist" society in a modern time by rejecting wealth distribution as the underlying issue to all politics. In our view, cultural fulfilment (and through it, a "wilderness" creation so individual fulfilment can occur) is the most fundamental issue. Unlike Communist and Capitalist societies, post-monetarist societies do not attempt to solve human problems through marginally different means of wealth distribution. We know that where there are healthy values, people are treated well, and money/wealth can revert to being a secondary issue.

Trash generation appears to be the function of modern society, since it produces no culture worth noting

Through that sentiment we approach a new theory of power: that power is what motivates people toward their best interests as expressed in the health of society at large. This type of power is tautological, in that the citizens cannot agree on its importance until they see its effects, which often happens years or centuries after the decisions in question are made. For this reason, such a society requires leaders of genius intelligence and uncommon dedication. Much as we cannot regulate citizens without the ability or inclination to do what is right, we cannot so pervasively regulate our leaders as to outsmart their own inclinations.

A civilization is defined by the basic motivation it gives to all citizens, as seen in the tripartite division above. Civilizations based on individual preference and wealth alone become selfish, where civilizations founded in the idea of a single public right become slavish. In the middle is our civilization which is motivated by both a collective value (culture) and enhancement of the individual, both materially and within their inner worlds, where only the individual can create meaning by setting goals for him or herself.

Where most civilizations fail is poor leadership, whether by selecting a bad leader or by picking a system of politics in which leadership is not rewarded. The utilitarian nature of democracy, in which what most people think they want is considered good, assumes they are each as wise as a good leader and that they will have the time and resources to see beyond the immediate. As most people lack the inclination and devotion to such study, they inevitably pick short-term benefits with long-term negative socialized consequences.

The future civilization will recognize that a leader exists to do what is right and this is often unpopular but avoids greater problems. This means that at any given moment, most of the population may disagree with its leader, but that over time, they will come to agree with most of what this leader does. No leader is perfect, so we aim to satisfy the most important structural needs and to provide for individuals to have a reasonable place to live. Perfection does not and cannot exist, but if in chasing details we lose sight of overall direction, we fail, where if we get the basics right and screw up the details it is at most an inconvenience.

This leads us to a question of what political power actually is. We can measure it in money, or allegiant subjects, or popularity, but in its oldest and most realistic definition it is the capacity of leadership to build a nation toward a more functional state. Per our habit of using lists of three, here is another list, measuring power and its motivations.

1. Those who lead to achieve an unrelated object, such as profit.
2. Those who lead from a desire for power.
3. Those who lead in order to achieve a goal through leadership.

Consequentialist societies, which determine best courses of action by what most people find is positive, are by their nature of the first two types. When public image of satisfaction is more important than a better course of leadership, leaders will naturally be dishonest as they are incapacitated from enacting positive change that is not popular. Consequently, they manipulate through symbols and the smart ones shy away from any controversial decisions. Since controversy follows those decisions which need the most clarity in leadership, this produces a headless and directionless society parasitizing itself.

Avoiding this structure requires that people do not expect to revoke leaders based on an unpopular decision, but that leaders are picked for their ability to do what is right. This requires leaders of high intelligence and moral character, and a nation with values capable of producing and promoting such people. Within this leadership structure, there are two important modes in which people move: vertically, they must be in a hierarchy of aptitude for different tasks; horizontally, within each task those who are competent must be rewarded.

Where most societies try to make their leaders represent their people, such a society recognizes instead a covenant of leadership. Since abilities are unequal, leadership is seen not as a linear superiority to others, but a specialized ability like any skill or craft. As it is a relatively rare skill, those who have it inherently recognize that stewardship of others is their future, and as such feel as much an obligation to those led as the led feel toward leaders. This covenant between people has each do what he or she does best for the benefit of others.

Each of us is both a unique individual and a set of characteristics that determine what tasks we do optimally, which we do acceptably, and which tasks are beyond us. As people tend to come in different degrees of intelligence and character and health, we group them by specialization. Those who can do any untrained task toward which they are pointed are workers; those who can handle a generalized specialization in craft or the military are artisans; and those who perform exceptional mental or leadership labor are commanders.

More kwalitee kultcher from modern society

This division by actual skill replaces the "class" distinctions we have artificially drawn among us through which those with the greatest inclination toward making money have become upper, those with moderate incomes middle, and everyone else lower class. Class relies on Social Darwinism, and Social Darwinism requires the notion that that who excel at our illusory tasks of making money and pleasing others must be our best. Our system, like that of the Hindus or ancient Europe, is a "caste" system, or hereditary position according to specialized ability.

Few doubt that the largest part of our traits and abilities is inherited. History shows us that people gain ability over many generations of reaching upward. A caste system gives us tasks appropriate to our skill level, and frees us from unnecessary competition which forces our jobs to take on a predominant role in our lives. In a caste system, we see work for what it is: a means to supporting civilization. It is not an identity, nor does it create an intraverted self-image to supplant our inner fears. Caste is us giving back, and without it being so overwhelmingly definitive of our individuality, it can take an appropriate place and the extraneous parasitism, theft and useless jobs can be converted into something positive.

The advantage of caste is that it gives a guaranteed good living to all, save those who are hopelessly incompetent. Each individual is born into a series of positions they can take, and if they do well, they move forward in a horizontal hierarchy. After a few generations of this, they move up a notch in the vertical hierarchy. This enables all to be rewarded for what they do well both financially and in position, but slows the transition so that radical incompetence is reduced. It also enables those who are born to a position but do poorly to move down in the hierarchy so they are taken from areas where they can do harm and given the ability to reconstruct themselves.

Within this social order, each citizen is an equal in the political sense but given a task at which they can excel. Jobs no longer dictate earning and wealth no longer dictates importance in the social order, ending the struggle of individuals and groups to dominate an economic ladder which seems to reward those least concerned with social welfare of the whole.

In this newfound world where economy takes a back seat to culture and common sense, yet is still vital, we are able to reward people for competence with more than income. For example, motherhood and parenting would be acknowledged, finally, as jobs more difficult than anything done in an office and correspondingly praised. Those who sustain the community through non-materially-rewarding professions such as education, study and social work would be given an appropriate prominence. The endless jockeying for power would be subsumed by a goal of appropriate behavior instead.

As part of a desire to place culture first, nation-states would be redivided into nations, or organic populations defined by commonality in language, culture and heritage. These cultures still exist despite a century of onslaught by mass media and corporate interests, but can be enhanced and reconstructed slowly over time by putting more emphasis on culture.

This is your future, and you still don't realize modern society is going to exterminate you.?

Each culture, whether Jewish or Swedish or Basque or Tamil, would be granted its own historical grounds to rule as it sees fit. That rule would not be subject to oversight by any other groups, or even critique. Each group would be allowed to exist in isolation for the purposes of keeping its people together on the notion of culture and heritage and language as an organic bond that compells individuals toward the same goals and values.

It is impossible, as noted, to avoid conflict, nor is it necessarily desirable. The world order proposed here would not eliminate conflict, much as the current one has not, but it would end conflict for abstract principles and bring the field of politics to a level of realism previously not experienced within memory. This would however end ethnic conflict and class conflict, and by removing the question of moral authority of world government, would end the years of superpowers attempting to herd the rest of us into their economic systems.

The nation-state, or government by political boundaries unified by belief in an abstraction like democracy or capitalism, is collapsing under the burden of the inspecific politics of the average to which it subjects its citizens. Nation-states create uniformity and political unity but cannot achieve a consensus of values, and collapse into different partisan political and economic interest groups. They lack a common value between people. Much as two beliefs cannot occupy the same place without dissolution through compromise or constant conflict, any single population needs a value system that fits or it disintegrates.

Nation-states form ideal marketplaces but create long-term socialized costs and social divisions that destroy them. The cosmopolitan state comprised of people from every background and belief system can only exist for a few generations, and then interbreeding converts its population into people of no heritage or culture. These are ideal consumers in that lacking any values system, their inner worlds are suppressed and unguided, and they purchase products from caprice and enter the insatiable cycle of buying physical goods to fufil non-physical needs. They leave behind ruined, wasteful states.

As our modern experiment unfolds, and we see that conflict is increasing, it becomes clear that nationalism will rise in Europe and the United States. For this reason, our goal is to integrate with nationalist philosophy and develop it to a point of wisdom and compassion. We stand against all ethnic discrimination, violence, hatred, and sneering contempt of one group for another; our view is that modern society is a poor design, and that the people caught within it are good people in a bad situation, and this breeds the negative results we see.

The first step in forming an alternative to modern society is to restore leadership by values and not utilitarian principles (popularity, profit, democracy). We can use utilitarian methods toward this goal, but the highest goal must remain culture, and for culture to exist, it must be isolated in its parallel versions. This form of "blood and soil" government connects people to each other, to tradition and to the land they occupy.

Much debate concerns the environment in the modern time, but very little is done because real solutions require we give up fond notions of our own importance and the validity of letting each person do whatever they see desirable. Since the fufilment of their desires have not brought happiness but misery, we have to realize how that it is pretense not reality that dictates this.

Humanity: if we're 'responsible,' let's hope something less 'responsible' evolves to replace us

We might argue over global warming, but on a more realistic scale, the whole of human interaction with nature must be studied. In the last sixty years, we have tripled the world's population and moved from a low-tech metal/wood manufacturing to a plastics and electronics based industry with the resulting byproducts. Most of our population growth has been in impoverished third-world countries with a lower average intelligence than the developed countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The result is a two-part worry: first, that right now we are consuming too much land and producing too many byproducts to avoid altering our natural environment in a deleterious way; second, that the rest of the world wants our lifestyle and will blame us for withholding it from them, even if giving it to them would result in planetary death.

Humanity's growth and industrial results in more concrete on the planet, more fences, more pollutants, and more resources depleted, in turn damaging the billion parts of the natural ecosystem, which is composed of interdependent systems in the form of plant and animal species interacting with natural forces and raw materials. This natural ecosystem recycles energy and is responsible for our atmosphere and sources of food.

We have minimal or no ability to reconstruct this natural environment if it is interrupted greatly or destroyed. Although we can cut back on resource use in industrialized countries, unless we go back to living in mud huts, our impact will remain high. However, the industrialized nations are few and those nations which could not industrialize represent most of our population. Each person on this planet requires more resources, so that even if we all live in mud huts, at some point there will be too many of us to not destroy the environment.

Our solution is simple: support no place that cannot support itself, and we must begin questioning whether our resources are best spent on the people among our own nations who are of a parasitic or otherwise dysfunctional nature. Fewer humans means a healthier environment. If we do not change our population patterns, we will surely overburden and destroy our environment. The choice is ours, and even making no choice is a choice: for destruction.

Our concerns for any future society involve the most pragmatic issue: how we would survive in it, and what it would give us that makes it more successful than our current model, as well as what it would take away. Consider a day in the life of our potential society.

Dave Schafer wakes up early, around seven, to get a jump on the day. He's 24 and lives alone in one of the apartments downtown near the river, which was upgraded from a drainage ditch (after the society-wide Change) to a treelined path that divides the city proper. The first thing we would notice about the situation is that it is quiet and mostly left to natural light. Dave's apartment is good-sized, with high ceilings, and was built after the Change using economies of scale to make better versions of our low-cost living spaces. For Dave, there is no point having a house, yet. He's young and wants to see the world and enjoy it.

He showers in much the same way we do, except that the grey water he produces is recycled and distributed to nearby forest and farmland with the knowledge that it will then re-enter the reservoir system eventually through the mechanisms of nature. His breakfast might be different: not a single plastic package is visible in the refrigerator. He takes out bacon wrapped in wax paper, farm-fresh eggs, mushrooms and spinach. Again using the power of economies of scale, a public food trust pays farmers better than the pre-Change rate and distributes it to any number of medium-sized grocery stores. Dave's breakfast cost him less than our would, and no products remain that cannot be composted.

The clothing he pulls on is less formal than what we wear to work, in most cases. Society opted for an atmosphere of reduced moral pretense in all areas. Much as the farms consolidate their product but not their autonomy, in the case of clothing many small manufacturers sell their wares through a single distribution channel that accepts anything but the incompetent or destructive. For this reason, Dave actually had more clothing options than we do, but like most, he chooses an inconspicuous but comfortable series of garments. He boards an electric trolley for the five-mile ride into downtown; with the money saved from administering to cars, government was able to build a transportation network where every major stop is a new police sub-station.

On the roads around him are some trucks for small businesses, but mostly it is other electric trolleys and the small air-conditioned golf carts that many use to get around their local neighborhoods. In the city, Dave doesn't need one; public transportation runs twenty-four hours a day and is free. To ride it, one must be clean and respectful. As each major stop runs literally through a police sub-station, he feels there is little risk to his person.

Dave works in the former Enron Building, now rented to many tenants. Some changes occurred in law to make this easier. First, much of civil law was thrown out, since society recognized that financial costs to society at large were doubly incurred through destructive incidents and then equally destructive lawsuits. Insurance is far less prevalent as a result, and rents are lower. When someone does something grossly negligent, it is either the fault of local government for being inspecific, or the person has committed a criminal offense and goes to Florida to work off the damages incurred.

On the seventh floor, Dave steps out of the elevator past an inspector. Much as builders are now expected to master not just carpentry but plumbing and electricity, there are no longer multiple types of inspector; an inspector must be a master builder and knowledgeable architect, not just a bureaucratic functionary. Society reasons that while sending out experts is more expensive, it wastes less time than forcing normal people to confront one-note bureaucrats, and encourages a smoother-running society. There are no spreadsheets that suggest it is cheaper. That question is secondary.

Before the Change, more people would have worked in this office, but society recognized that the more divided a task becomes and the more super-specialized the worker becomes, the more bored and easily replaceable they are. The new concept of employees is to let them rise as far as they can. As part of this, while Dave started out as a technical support contact for people using the company's product, he was able to learn to write computer code and from that to rise up to quality control associate. Dave earns more money, but not radically more. Most people have what they need already and their jobs do not define them. One gets ahead for the extra cash and for the sake of having constant growth in the workplace. Bigger tasks means more responsibility and more recognition for competence and that undefinable aspect that makes some people likable as leaders.

For the average employee, it will be a few steps up the ladder and then much slower motion, but since the income and consequent value of their jobs are less prominent, this gives them a daytime occupation and a chance to define their lives after work through the real tasks of being a human being: contributing to the community, bettering oneself in abilities and inclinations, spending time with family and friends. Education is cheap and available after work for those who want a career change. Those who are unspecialized labor, which includes anyone who lacks the inclination to learn a trade, work at a minimum rate that affords them an apartment like Dave's and a retirement plan plus enough for necessities and a few perks. The tradeoff is that they can move flexibly between jobs and spend less time at them.

Dave's trade has changed from administrative support to quality control associate in the two years since college. We can see part of the reason why: today is a Thursday and moving slowly, so when necessary tasks are complete, the team agrees it's time to disband for the day -- at noon. Without the moral pretense of a job determining the worth of a person, they look at the task first and when there is nothing pressing, find better uses for their time. In this city correlated to a natural light cycle, Dave is usually out of the office by three in the afternoon. Greater focus on work itself made for greater efficiency and less willingness to labor for observable form, resulting in fewer hours. Sometimes, there's a lot to do, and during those few weeks a year Dave might labor sixteen hours a day. But this is a rarity correlated to actual work, and not a phantom of administrative incompetence. Social values don't reward working extra to salvage what incompetence ruined, because that only creates more space for incompetence.

The focus of his work is getting the job done and he knows that the quality of output, not its profitability, determines how others will see him. This is a socially-accepted value and one that has brought good results in any number of things. Dave's computer uses less energy and fails less frequently than any pre-Change machines. His apartment complex is regularly maintained by a woman who takes pride in being a guy who can fix anything. Even the small grocery stores are clean and well cared-for. Individual farmers grow food, sell it to a centralized distribution service which operates on a zero-profit basis, and get the food into grocery stores. At each level, the individual is rewarded for competence but not at the expense of the whole. Every job is essential in the post-Change society.

After work, Dave rides the trolley home. Normally at this point he would phone some friends and they'd head to one of the coffee pubs in the outer city ring, maybe catch a live band or movie, but today Dave has another quest: He wants to find a house for himself and his girlfriend, Merilee. On his current income he can afford a house over the next twenty years, but thanks to the post-Change government abolishing unearned interest, that's all it will take and there will be some leeway if there's a lower yield one year to the next. Incomes are lower after the Change, but vacation time is more abundant, often up to three months a year, workdays are shorter, and goods are easier to afford.

Dave finds a home about the appropriate size for a starter family. While the only determiner of success in the workplace is ability, most men choose careers that give them more time with their families and most women choose motherhood. The reason is simple: after the Change, society values the natural more than the symbols of social obligation and success, and so is less inclined to see jobs as more important than the simple experience of an honest life in which the individual reaches for greater heights. Pleasure is no longer relaxation, in this society, but accomplishment. Most find that as their 20s end, there's little left that fascinates them for its own sake, and they discover pleasures of the mind and family. This is alright with Dave - he can still have his friends and have a good time, but he knows that only a lasting foundation of joy is going to carry him through the rest of his life. Another difference in post-Change society is that it no longer hides aging and death behind euphemism. Dave knows he's finite and while he doesn't think of it every day, he recognizes the necessity of planning for it by ensuring his life is meaningful enough to balance out that great yawning void.

He calls the listed number and talks to the owner of the house. One advantage of the Change was that unnecessary roles, like real estate agent and recruiter, were done away with. People are expected to take on more now and be able to work in more than one area, and in uncertain situations. It keeps life refreshing and challenging. To find a job, one looks in the database and calls companies. To find a house, one looks in the database and calls owners. The miles of red tape that used to create innumerable lawsuits and forced employers to hide behind a screening process are now gone. Interestingly, so is most paranoia.

After the Change, it was decided that repeat criminals could no longer live within the general population, and they were deported to Florida from which they cannot legally leave. Small issues like drug use, drunk driving, and petty theft no longer become problematic in the legal system. Outside the city center to the South is a "tippelzone," or tolerance-area, where just about any behavior can go on but there's no legal protection. One goes there for quality drugs, prostitution, a place for a good fistfight, ultimate fighting championships, and rowdy behavior. With the legalization of such things however, Dave has found that most people find them less important. Sure, he can smoke a joint on the weekend if he wants to, but the challenge in it is gone, replaced by bigger challenges elsewhere. Drunk drivers are stopped, their golfcarts towed, and they are sent home with a fine roughly double that of the cab fare. If they do it too many times, their golf carts are taken away, and they're wholly dependent on public transport, which makes being drunk a lot easier.

Serious crimes on the other hand are less tolerated. Where pre-Change society made pedophilia illegal and was overrun with pedophiles, post-Change society has simply made it not tolerated as a behavior. There is no legal obligation to rent or hire anyone imposed on any other person, and no reasons need be given, so pedophiles find themselves out of work. Most end up in Florida. Violent crimes outside the tippelzone are pursued diligently and their perpetrators sent to Florida. There is no death penalty. There is only the option to not be tolerated in society. The same behavior, interestingly, is reserved for those who steal from society on a larger level. Welfare cheats, white collar criminals, grafters, frauds, spammers and other parasites all go to Florida, where they live by the law of criminals since society is not concerned with regulating them. Those caught leaving Florida are considered open targets for all officers in the region and are shot without warning.

One of Dave's friends has a burning ambition to be a doctor. He is now in his first year of medical school, having taken one year off to work. His father was a plumber, but his grandfather was a doctor, and so he is facing the rigors of this task to see if he is ready. The process is harder for him than if one or both parents had been doctors, but he is thankful, because this same rigor dropped another guy who wasn't ready from the program. This is done without sneering contempt through the simple reminder that no profession is dishonorable but that not all are apt for all positions. Dave is more confident in his medical care as a result, and he doesn't feel bad for the guy who got left out. He won't be earning much less than a doctor, and if he finds something at which he is as good, he'll earn the same.

A difficult profession in the land however is as mental laborer, the category for intellectuals and leaders. Where in pre-Change society an intellectual was someone who had completed the requisite degrees and taught at a college, in this society intellectuals were put to the test: make reality better in the real world, without support from academia to coddle you in a bubble world of unreality. The results were staggering. Fewer than half of those in academia kept their positions, but students agreed the quality of teaching had more than doubled. No ideas were taboo and no trends dictated that taboo. "Intellectual" now means more than "useless theorizer"; it has its original meaning of thought leader.

Dave knows he's not really ready for that in his life and so he is comfortable at a middle level. This new society is designed for people in the middle, it seems. It rewards excellence, and knows some will fail, but mainly exists to make sure those in the middle have comfortable lives and are encouraged on to bigger and better things. There is job security, but no welfare, and there is wealth, but no super-rich. In moments of contemplation Dave thinks society after the Change is more mature, because instead of rushing around at extremes it has focused on those who do the bulk of the work that keeps society running.

Dave is also enamored of how things are done in this society. Very little is done by law or bureaus. He knows that, pre-Change, people were instructed by government in what to do and then periodically elected different governments who also told them what to do. The idea was that one law could be made for all people, and that way lives could be saved and made from confused into right through bureaucracy. Dave wonders how they got anything done. He also remembers that at the time of Change surveyers found that 98.6% of the elected officials had taken monies from special interest groups, which was a form of legal bribery. Dave shakes his head.

This principle of leadership is the opposite to control, people said at the time of Change, and is decentralized because our values are centralized. Dave does not think this society is centralized. He knows that for each district of the city, there is a leader who coordinates all government in that sector. There is one place to go for all licensing, inspection, violations, courts, etc. and one person responsible. These leaders report back to policy leaders on the regional level, and those report to an overall leader in Boston who is responsible for only the biggest concerns: defense, disease, cosmic and weather disasters. Each local leader administers taxes and sends on an appropriate amount to the regional leader, who forwards some of this to the central government. But on the whole, government is quite small, and the reason, Dave thinks, is that it is not the primary means of change.

For example, Dave doesn't own a television. There is no law against television. He can acquire one easily. However, in this society, sitting on one's ass and watching TV is seen as a distant second to getting something interesting done. Why watch TV when you can be learning, have a hobby, or spending time with family and friends? To many in this society, sitting watching television is what people who have had brain damage do. Correspondingly, the mass media is less profitable and less outlandish in its opinions. Still, who wants TV? Dave thinks. You don't get that time back, and nothing happens during it. Government doesn't tell him this. He learned it from the people he respected, his father and his older sister and his neighbor Jim.

His father said these values were roughly inherent to his culture. He explained how through history, people who look like Dave, Europeans, had evolved a set of remarkably similar laws based in several principles. One was that the individual could be fulfilled only through a task that made sense to both nature and the ascendant aspects of other people. Another was that nature was a form of reasoning higher than humankind. Yet another was a belief in making everything better by understanding nature and adapting its order. America is 60% European, Dave's dad told him. There are African communities in California and a mixed-ethnic area in the former Las Vegas.

Dave thinks this is basically true. Although most do not, Dave does like to smoke some marijuana periodically, but it generally occurs in concurrence with something else he's doing, namely hanging with his friends and girlfriend. Since the economy does not force him into such rigid competition he must move, Dave lives in the same part of the city where he grew up, and has many of the friends he has since childhood, plus some new ones, since some people opt to move. He met his girlfriend through a woman he knew since third grade. Their values similar, they formed a solid friendship, and then a romance, and one of these days Dave is going to place the question of marriage and family on the table, although he thinks he knows how she'll answer.

Interestingly, he knew that in pre-Change society America had been critiqued by Europeans for its Puritan nature. After the Change, it was explained that nudity and sex taboos are unimportant, but that nature rewards those who are most chaste and therefore place the most importance on choice of mate. The Europeans, it was felt, had gone too far to the opposite extreme and made sex a bodily function, thus their long-term bonds had declined. The Americans had gone too far and demonized sex so it was useful as an aspect to advertising. In the new regime, it is recognized that those who fornicate and mate most selectively go the farthest. No government intervention is needed; people like Dave who have a clue about their future heed this call.

He knows that not everyone will do the same, much like some will still spend every free moment of their time watching TV. And he knows that some people will behave like idiots. Nothing is perfect, and nothing ever will be. But a lot of the problems of society have gone away, and Dave has gained a more important ability than any right: he is not forced to associate with idiots or pay for their mistakes. He doesn't have to hire them or rent to them. In this sense, he knows that life might get harder for the idiots, but he is happy that in their place, smarter people will live. It's a gentle process with no shots fired but the same comforting rhythms of natural laxatives.

Dave is not prone to illusion and so knows that history will always be fickle. At any moment, humanity could be wiped off this rock by a new disease or cosmic event like a comet strike. But, he thinks, humanity is on a better path now. The long years of fighting over wealth are over, as are the long years of trying to survive equality of wealth. Instead, life has become a means to an end, and that end is the experience of life. This has made people happier in invisible ways, Dave thought, but he senses that since the Change, life has been a lot more logical. And he likes it this way.

While we know what we desire, most people in our current time do not, so they will benefit from a contrarian scenario: how things will develop as they are now.

Dave Shaver gets up at nine and hoses himself off in the shower, then heads down to his car. Apparently, he parked too close to the fire hydrant, and there is a ticket waiting for him on the dashboard. He ignores it, since it's only a problem if he gets pulled over, and gets into his car with a sense of anger. He knows that the ticket-giver has a quota to fill in order to get promoted, and so profits from dinging Dave with a fine made heavier by the costs of enforcing it. Dave senses this process is parasitic, but cannot articulate why, and so like the rest of his society tolerates it despite finding inner voids of resentment engendered by it.

People have pointless, aimless, contextless lives of buying things and abusing them

He kicked out the last girl the previous night because he got bored, and wanted to play video games. Even someone like Dave, whose wealthier father married the pretty stripper without much intelligence and thus produced a functionally smart but not contemplative kid, can realize these people live for junk. They buy junk. Or they try to go high-class and dress up their loneliness in surrogate joys, like drugs or sex for the cheap or charities and "political causes" for the classier. The girl wasn't bad, thinks Dave, but he's glad it was a hookup. Anything else would be too much of her chatter. He took few risks. He doesn't look forward to getting older, however. The city is littered with women in their late 30s and early 40s who have had too many husbands, too many hookups, too many bad experiences and come onboard any relationship like a baggage cart full of fears and doubts. Dave knows he can go to Las Vegas for his sexual needs, and anything else... well, who would want to have kids in this place? Yuk.

At work Dave wanders aimlessly for the first couple of hours. If anyone stops him, he's doing research for the new platform they're going to put out, and wants everyone's opinion. You can never go wrong with that, because when everyone is represented, they're less likely to turn on you as if you were out to eliminate their own position. And that's what a job is, staking territory. Dave's got himself installed as a webmaster, a popular position for his generation, and he knows that unless he radically screws up he'll keep going in this job or one a couple above it. He estimates he does about three hours of anything that can really be called "work" each day, and the rest is talking with coworkers, playing video games, taking personal calls and spacing out. As long as the bossman doesn't find out, he's in the clear. Dave is bored at his job but he doesn't see an option that doesn't require more work, and he's exhausted.

The exhaustion comes from deep within. He's tired of following a political cause to see it end in scandal or a revelation of how it, like everything else, was poorly designed and/or corrupt in motivation. He's exhausted with the endless girls and their chatter that devolves into a need for someone warm to hold them in the small hours of the night. He's bored with meeting new people, seeing the new clothing styles and hearing patter of a new outlook on life, only to see they boil down to the same old human wants and needs. Dave is, if he had the ability to see it, sick of humanity. But he's got a webmaster job, and enough cash for a fly car and some quality duds, so he's going to live it up while he can. He looks out the window at the crawling dots below and thinks how most of them are dumb office workers who will never get above ten bucks an hour, or are manual laborers who live ten to a room, or are useless homeless bums who drift around soiled and contribute nothing. Whatever. He likes the cheap goods at Wal-Mart and the way government is tangled up in social welfare and foreign wars and never does much to touch his drug supply, his drunk driving, or his own social future. Screw the rest of 'em.

After work, he goes by the grocery store. There's always three options: OK, better, and what he'd buy if he had the money, but it went to video games and car repairs. So he gets the generic brand of eggs which are tasteless because they are raised in factory-farms where hormone-induced egg laying puts out more per day than another method, he buys the cheap meat that tastes more like "pink" than flesh, and a few TV dinners that cost six times the sale value of their ingredients but are convenient. The grocery store is depressing when he sees all the human wrecks -- impoverished ghetto-dwellers, aimless elderly anxious for anyone to talk to, clueless suburban people with the hipness factor of a white sock -- wandering around, so Dave bolts for home. On the way he stops at his drug dealer and pays sixty times the production cost of a plant he likes to smoke.

One thing that bothers Dave, thinking back over the day, is how after childhood people change. Something goes wrong inside. Maybe they're tired of fighting for themselves against others who want to take what they have, or maybe they're just bitter because the work is stupid and other people reveal their dumbness and can't be criticized too roundly for it. He feels safe in the crowd, but he also tires of it, since bonding together with others means tolerating the stupidity. He shrugs it off. The best revenge is good living. Life has always been the haves versus the have-nots, and

Corrupt

CORRUPT VISION

v1.4