This is a story about what happens when people become part of an equation and hidden assumptions are forgotten or abandoned. Assumptions, I mean, about why productivity matters, why waste is bad, and what we are doing when we work and strive for something.
Work doesn't mean anything if it doesn't relate somehow to human welfare. Otherwise it doesn't matter. It fact it's obscene if all the intelligence and effort and expenditure of resources fail to result in more happiness for more people. That's where we are, though.
We're blowing resources and working our asses off and making rich people richer and nothing else, all to comply with a sick psychology and we're all implicated. All of us, that is, living in the USA. We need help but of course we think we're better than everyone else.
That's how it works. Crazy people don't think they're crazy, they think they're right. Normal people don't worry about being right, they want to be happy. Instead of humanizing economics and politics and all the sciences and education we quantify and objectify people.
We make them into things. I propose that we consider the life of a person, for a month, in reasonably pleasant and satisfying circumstances. It has value and not only for that person. And yet this "month-man" becomes mathematized so that it has no weight. No value.
There is human suffering underlying all the statistics and lots of confusion. People are frightened and don't understand what has happened. What's happened is that they have been systematically thwarted and disenfranchised, not by conspiracy but by common interest.
The common interest and application of people who care only about themselves, clearly. I think it will all end in more suffering, the kind of suffering we have brought to other people with our greed, our compulsions, our demand for oil, our demand for drugs and for more stuff.
It has to stop.
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