We have created a fantasy world running out of inspirational characters. We must breathe new life into the brave world we envision. So, the world we want to escape to is the world we live in.
We share an authentic desire for entertainment, imagination, and discovery, and we take our children to Disney World to experience them. We visit theme parks and zoos to learn about nature we depend on for survival and are afforded the luxury of admiring, in close-up, flora and fauna housed there. We build some fantastic fantasy worlds that take us on a journey away from the day-to-day world in which we live.
Then, we come back home.
And return to our jobs in a world order we have created for ourselves and ordains our behavior as human beings. Despite such order allowing the destruction of the things we all care so much about in our brief moments of escapism—a rule we promote as religion and seldom dare challenge.
We have created a fantasy world of make-believe, running out of Mickey Mouse characters to believe in. Walt Disney knew better.
Why?
This stark contradiction is supposed to rattle your brain. Not just for the fun of banging it but to tear down the conventions of our past we submit to and frankly make no sense.
The “why” question is the most critical weapon in any entrepreneurial thinker’s arsenal to stir the pot of mediocrity. A weapon helps win the war against stagnation and decline if applied correctly. And a rhetorical question begging for a new normalization of the future.
So, why do we build a world that destroys many things we love, connect with, and depend on for survival? The answer is straightforward: we allow it.
We allow it because we assume our freedom is absolute. We believe we can do whatever we want and forget about and kick the can of long-term consequences further down the road. Pretending we can comfortably ignore the paradoxical nature of freedom. The definite rules of nature curtail the freedom we pay insufficient attention to.
We bite nature’s hand that feeds us. With arrogance, we can somehow and someday control and overpower it. It is a deadly mistake, considering nature is considerably older (by 4.6 billion years), wiser than we are, and destined to outlive us.
We allow
To optimize the human race’s quality and longevity, we must change our insensitive exploitation attitude to a deep understanding of nature. As our knowledge of nature improves, so do our chances of survival.
Our ignorance of nature’s paradoxical ruling of freedom starts early. It is exemplified by how many children today are allowed to rule the parental household joined after birth. Described politely as “lively” in some circles, many of these wild animals have been given the freedom to do whatever they want, eat whatever they feel like, pop medicine at the onset of fever, and boss their parents around with remarkable audacity, foul language to boot.
The modernity of such upbringing in unbridled freedom, most likely the antithesis of their parents’ own, ignores nature’s less forgiving rules. And school teachers, as the last and sometimes only straw to set unruly children straight, with the best intentions, try to compensate for before nature applies its inevitable sickle.
Our ignorance of nature forgets how the scrubbing of veins caused by the foods children want to eat rather than should causes devastating illnesses to surface later in life. Ignorance ignores that a fever is a natural response by the human body to rid itself of unwanted bacteria. The dependence on self-medication causes inherent weakness, and applied over many generations, causes attrition to our species’ health. Ignorance also forgets that success in life is mainly based on a capacity for empathy rather than obnoxious defiance of a socially unacceptable stance.
So, while unbridled freedom applied to children sounds good, the ignorance of freedom’s paradox builds significant resistance to nature’s ruling. An opposition that gives these budding humans a considerable disadvantage later in life.
Pay attention, and you will notice how less “advanced” cultures generally raise their children with more respect for nature. Their quality of life depends more directly on their compliance with nature—an observation giving the adjective “advanced” a whole new meaning.
In the words of famous Mexican dog trainer Cesar Milan, “The dog’s behavior is the responsibility of its owner,” and so is the behavior of a child the responsibility of its parents. Freedom is imperative, yet it only builds lasting universal value once its paradox is achieved, not when the pursuit of ignorant and selfish short-term freedom prevails.
Fantasyland
Raising our children influences the systems they build to better their future. We are accountable for the evolution of our future and our past systems’ compliance. Few of us dare to question the past and willfully submit to the other guiding principles as a “fait accompli.”
We shall not automatically submit to the rulings of our past. Generations before us may have devised wrong normalizations, are un-calibrated to our deepening discovery of the rule of nature, or have lost their redeeming value in the evolution of time.
Across a broad spectrum, here are some examples of the foundational constructs we unjustifiably allow to flourish:
Economics:
Classical economics, from which many better-named versions are derived, is improperly measuring our collective human household’s performance. Merely because the formulas that describe our performance in monetary terms are as irrelevant as the score in sports is a reliable indication of the game’s quality. We can also prove its pivotal theorem of supply and demand is in blatant violation of principles that promote free-market mechanisms. Thus, classical economics’ dependence is the improper proxy to model or project the natural world’s performance.
Sustainability:
Sustainability is a misnomer of immense popularity and broad adoption. For nature predicates, nothing but itself is sustainable, and certain evolutions are, at best, renewable. No resource will exist forever and, therefore, must be displaced by others. Death is natural, should not be avoided, and is a necessary evolution revolution—quite the opposite of sustainability’s suggested longevity.
Financial systems:
The U.S. financial system is a hydrocephalus eleven times the production size and a blatant violation of fundamental principles perpetuating free-market mechanisms. As a result, “investors” get away with cunning greater-fool economics, in which each investor amplifies the investment of their predecessors until the last in a chain of believers (destined to be the public as the most clueless investor) is confronted with valuations, not living up to intrinsic values.
Asset management:
Financial asset management, the construct by which much of the public’s monetary reserves are re-invested, deploys a musical chair game of pancake economics. A rotating investment scheme reshuffles sizable financial assets based on the avoidance of risk rather than a deliberate deployment of risk that yields socioeconomic value the public cares about. Impactful investment decisions with an astonishing lack of imagination arise from this dance, and we better hold our breath when the music stops.
Wealth creation:
Creating more millionaires may make for a better-looking graveyard. Still, when those riches are derived from greater-fool economics, it will yield an unmerited redistribution of wealth away from those who can and will create socioeconomic value to propel evolution. A structure that misappropriates its value has eroded the trust in money. Hence, wealth in and of itself is a highly inaccurate economic prognosticator.
Healthcare:
The care for our health starts with a healthy lifestyle fueled by regular exercise and healthy foods. The ballooning cost of health care can never be curtailed by our multi-generational ignorance, which subsequently requires doctors’ chronic intervention to correct. As my doctor friends freely admit: “A strong argument can be made; our work is regressive to the evolution of mankind.” Our evolution is to become renewable with the most potent gene pool possible, and I am sorry to break it to you: not for each of us to live as long as possible.
Technology innovation:
The internet is a fantastic distribution mechanism for the world’s knowledge. We have since deployed wildly popular applications on top, perpetuating economic fallacies with dire long-term consequences. To name a few: Facebook now hosts the largest population (over 1.5 billion users) of oligarchical controlled socialism. Apple iTunes has gotten away with the most blatant economic violations: price-fixing that commoditized the value of creative arts (I predicted this model would not last). Twitter promotes a barking dog syndrome in which no outliers are destined to reinvent the future and find a voice, but the me-too rationale prevails. We cannot and shall not entrust the world’s development to the economic ignorance of greedy investors and seedy entrepreneurs.
Stop the madness
Our society’s effectiveness and the human race’s longevity are determined by how well we adhere to the undeniable rule of nature. A world dictated by economics, the rules of our collective household, the exploration of our unique capacities, and our equilibrium with nature.
To see natural economic recovery, we must reevaluate the world we created for ourselves, not with new and endless sub-optimizations of a broken past but with a renewed application of economics that, like our evolution, instills and reinvigorates human behavior in compliance with the rule of nature.
New character
Walt Disney realized early that a fantasy world with one character could not survive. Not Mickey Mouse World or Donald Duck World. A reason why he called his world Disney World.
A family of curious outliers shapes the overall character of Disney World, a life-size mouse (Mickey) with large stomped feet, a duck (Donald) with a squeaky voice wearing a funny hat, a sloppy dog (Pluto) of an unknown breed with a long thin tail, a flying baby elephant (Dumbo), among many others.
With the humanization of animals as a certain respect for nature, Walt impressed upon us a serious message: a vibrant world consists of appreciating meaningful differences.
The economic fallacies in the world we created yield quite the opposite. We have created a fantasy world of growing mediocrity fueled by our stifling commonalities’ increasing compliance.
To reverse our declining fate, we must breathe new life into the character of the world we envision, using modern economics to free the merit of our differences. Ideally, the world we want to escape is where we live.
