I find it amazing how many people misquote and misunderstand Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), especially on his disdain for segregation we are now heavily embroiled in.
Let me remind you; we are all part of one race, the human race consisting globally of 45% yellow, 20% white, 20% brown, and 15% black-skinned people.
MLK was ahead of his time. Perhaps more than even he was aware of, like all people who envision a greater world than exists today. I fancy myself that proclamation and combat the fallacies we inculcate in the manmade systems of policy, capital, and innovation so destructive to the renewal of human excellence.
So, on MLK’s birthday, let me reiterate some of his powerful quotes and how they remain relevant to our future:
“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
In a true meritocracy, where you come from is irrelevant. None of us are free unless all of us are free.
We simply cannot build a renewable society when we artificially preordain who has merit and who has not. Our next Einstein, responsible for the discovery of a new normalization of nature’s truth allowing us to better adapt to nature’s entropy, can come from anywhere.
“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
With the disproportionate exposure of people on social media never taught how to think; this quote is especially pertinent today.
In fact, in The United States, we are heavily embroiled in an inverse meritocracy, where the sheer amount of barking dogs, unwilling or incapable of thinking, drowns out those who spent inordinate amounts of time to discover a higher normalization of truth that can change our world for the better.
We must deploy a meritocracy based on evolutionary first-principles to save us from ourselves.
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
Hear, hear! The charlatans of thought, calling themselves thought-leaders, cunningly resell the old as new to the many greater-fools in society, unable to think for themselves.
Aided by nature’s relativity that there are no absolute truths, those charlatans rely on a new downstream suboptimization of an existing truth to promote a shiny new remedy sinking us further into the morass of human incompatibility with nature.
“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”
Spot on. Not sustainability but the quality of renewal fine-tuned to human adaptability to nature’s entropy dictates the excellence of the human species or any species for that matter.
Nature evolves differently than our current manmade systems suggest. We must change the operating-systems to comport with nature’s first principles to adhere to a game nature, not humanity, dictates.
“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”
Very true. The power to forgive comes from the realization not all people, by their unique proximal development, can rise to a higher normalization of truth that would eradicate conflict of interest in the first place. Once you comprehend their normalization of truth, it is easy to understand their actions, save for the approval.
To love is to understand and appreciate someone else’s proximal development.
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
True, but with a caveat. None of us are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free (Goethe), so the direction of the compass to move toward must be established first before you endlessly dredge yourself through a morass filled with crocodiles shooting for another horizon of unfreedom.
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”
Precisely why I challenge the foregone conclusions deployed by systems of policy, capital, and innovation, not only holding the expanding fractal of human ingenuity hostage but also causing an anthropogenic cascade due to our growing incompatibility with nature’s principles.
My work is not popular, but it is highly respected by an increasing number of people in power. My work is undeniable, for nature’s truth is undeniable. I can only tell you how nature works and how to transfer its principles to benefit the operating-systems of humanity.
Nature does not have the patience, and I am not responsible for other people’s proximal development to ignite their conscience at their leisure.
“A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”
This strikes me as a complementary derivative of Horace Mann’s original quote; “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” My passion to improve humanity comes from years of discovery to realize I can. With a new normalization of nature’s truth benefitting all of humanity, regardless of where they live.
I balk at and disgrace the fortresses of untruth, holding humanity hostage. The most intelligent species on our planet must, can, and deserves better. I am carrying the weight of nature’s truth up to the mountain top. Whether I will get there with you, is not up to me.
“We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”
I come from the land of dikes, The Netherlands, where they know a few things about resistance. Not just the kind of resistance the Dutch demonstrated against the Nazis, while most other European countries had already capitulated.
The multilevel dikes along the rivers bleeding, containing, and using the overflow on the low-lands is the tactic I use to help policy-makers, financiers, and entrepreneurs develop renewable strategies to fundamentally and systemically improve their performance.
The fear of change must be displaced by realizing that any stasis amidst the decline of available energy on our planet, referred to as entropy by Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, is a losing strategy. Courage is not an option but the only viable survival strategy for humanity.
“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”
I have been called Grumpy Gus on occasion, understandably by people who never realized how enslaved they are by manmade dogmas.
Only a cynical realist can detect the defects crucial to forming the impetus of fundamental change. So, rather than becoming bitter, the ability to see the fallacies of our manmade systems emboldens me to figure out why, who created them, and how to change them.
I am a proximal realist, for, despite the overwhelming mess we create for ourselves, I went on a journey to figure out how to build a better world for us all, with a better normalization of truth upstream. My remedy the cause for optimism.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Somewhat. Not all of us can see or carry the torch of fundamental change.
The only thing that matters today and tomorrow is human adaptability to nature’s entropy. Not all of us need to realize or care about how only this focal point truly improves the excellence and longevity of the human species.
Surely, not everyone needs to or should speak up. Some silence is golden.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Right on. There is no better way to discover a person’s true compass than to throw a few problems at them. Whether they detect, analyze, prioritize, take cover, or tackle the problem is the first indicator of their measure.
The controversy induced by a problem can lead to the discovery of foregone conclusions many people have hitched their formidable wagons on. Livelihoods are often attached to the relics of our past. Fifty-year careers have been wasted on the wrong manmade religions.
I cannot tell you how many people appear afraid of me, not because I am an evil man, but because I squash make-believe of any kind, and by using nature’s rulebook, prove 240-year old dogmas easily wrong.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
The sincere ignorance of humanity is to assume the world revolves around us. Ignoring comfortably that a planet 4.8 billion years old with another 3.5 billion years ahead, circling one of 100 billion stars in one of 400 billion galaxies, with humanity in some form of intellectual capacity no older than a measly 250,000 years, does not wait for us to mother it.
The truth is, humanity needs to do better, as our planet will make our existence completely undetectable in one thousand years after we have gone extinct. The coronavirus has given us a preview of planet earth’s amazing recovery skills in only nine months.
The conscientious stupidity is that in a universe revolving around relativity, as Einstein has proven, all manmade systems of policy, capital, and innovation have stubbornly remained oligarchic systems of attempted totalitarian monisms of absolutism, incompatible with the assets to which they are applied.
“When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative. ”
Indeed. I am right in my assessment of the truth because the truth I convey is a better proxy of nature’s truth, not mine.
Hence, I do not mince words when I see manmade constructs erected that deploy a plethora of ingenious and cunning schemes of modern-day slavery to 7 billion people in this world, suffocating our ability to reinvent ourselves.
“The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.”
Change is hard for some, as it requires the constant reappraisal of merit, integrity, and fortitude. Again, real human livelihoods are attached to the stronghold of oligarchic constructs resistant to change.
But the nature of entropy dictates we must change to adapt to the reduction of available energy on our planet. We can easily induce change by leading the way and modifying the incentives towards change everyone can follow.
We must do more with less. Become more efficient rather than more complacent. Stronger, rather than weaker. Natural selection takes care of unchange.
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Totally. The makeup and evolution of any species, including the human species, is dependent on the value of our differences, not on the value of our commonalities. We should be more interested in people who are not the same than people who are. Segregation of any kind, therefore, is an evolutionary fallacy. E Pluribus Unum.
Humanity would not have evolved if the composition of our DNA were the same. The tiny portion of our DNA sampled differently from anyone else’s is what allows it to adapt to nature’s entropy.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
We have no ability to revise history, not by deed or by memory. To nature, the color of one’s skin appears as relevant as the color of one’s eyes. So, why should we apply a different judgment?
I really care less about the color of your skin (albeit I have a personal preference for black women). Again, globally, 45% yellow, 20% white, 20% brown, are 15% black-skinned people. Their character’s contents, designed to pair their individual interests with our collective interests as a species amidst an environment we depend on for resources, determines evolutionary merit.
The people unable to accept that premise will weed themselves out over time. Yet, as Oprah Winfrey astutely phrased, not in her lifetime.
So, stop paying attention to the people who cannot change; you are barking up the wrong tree. Focus on being the change you want to see. Prove those silly predispositions wrong with an attitude aligned with nature’s evolutionary principles.
In summary
I could have gone on for hours to explain how great Martin Luther King’s mind truly was. In favor of unification rather than segregation, he understood humanity will always be subjugated to nature’s infinite elasticity of truth.
Not all of MLK’s quotes I fully agree with. Understandably because we know quite a bit more about nature’s first-principles than he was privy to. Of course, his demeanor and actions were more impactful than a mere collection of quotes.
We must stand on the shoulders of his intelligence and courage, by quoting and understanding him correctly, to chart a path for humanity much brighter and lighter than our unchangeable past.
