I was watching a lecture by professor Jonathan Haidt from NYU discussing the rise of populism. In it, Jonathan summarizes how despite his criticism of populism and coddling, America is still doing well and better than ever. The broad historical trends are good, he says. A decline in crime, less poverty, and more wealth should make us all feel good about ourselves.
Solipsism Reigns
He is wrong. Success is a matter of purview.
You see, it is easy to give yourself a great report card. The three indicators mentioned are related to how humans evaluate the excellence of self. Crime is a function of the acceptance of others. Poverty is the downside for those who do not fit in. And wealth is the assignment of upside to those deemed to have merit—all measures of self.
Nature, not humanity, defines the measure of our excellence. Our excellence is measured by the strength of our renewal, not by how much money we take to our graves. Nature does not give a damn about any of our indicators of success. Nature dictates the rules of excellence and survival on our planet, and I am sorry to have to remind you, it completely ignores what we want.
Rise Above
So, if you elevate your purview and look at it from the perspective of nature, humanity is doing quite poorly.
We, homo sapiens, are the youngest major species on the planet, having slowly emerged from a barbaric animalistic state into a progressively cognitive, intellectual, and collaborative state only for the last 10,000 years. Embryonic is human development compared to other species having lived for much longer on the 4.5 billion-year-old blue dot we call home.
Prove It
We, humans, have a lot to prove. We have yet to prove that our intelligence serves the adaptability to nature’s entropy better than the less cognitive capabilities of other animals. We have yet to prove we can outlive a common fly.
So far, the prognosis is not good. The late Steven Hawking estimated humanity to live for another 1,000 years. I will not engage in predicting the longevity of humanity given that one nuclear bomb could wipe us all out tomorrow. There is always a possibility we come to our senses.
Assuming the nuclear wipeout does not happen, it is worthwhile looking at the human excellence in a country the world looks up to—the United States of America.
American Excellence
Today, the U.S. is the second most obese country in the world. Seventy percent of Americans are chronically dependent on prescription drugs, most antidepressants, threatening the quality of human renewal. I hate to say it, but those people are evolutionary walking-dead. Suicide rates are at a 30-year high.
Our health is buckling under the pressure of a multigenerational lack of personal responsibility to our own health. We are not producing the strength of renewal evolution requires from us.
But the state of our health is merely one discovery derived from the causal flawed manmade theories we, humans, deploy to manage ourselves. As I explained in a dedicated article previously, the manmade practices derived from the belief in the U.S. Constitution, freedom, democracy, economics, sustainability, systems, markets, capitalism, socialism, healthcare, cryptocurrencies, asset management, and venture capital are flawed ab initio. If you haven’t tapped out yet, proceed to more humanitarian idiocracy I describe on the boulevard of broken ideologies.
Excellence this is not. Worse, it develops a fractal of human expansion in a different direction than what nature requires from us. Guess who will lose that battle?
Systemically Fixable
And in the words of Albert Einstein, when the causal theory of humanity determines what can be discovered is broken, its consequential discoveries will be broken.
To date, not a single country in the world has developed a viable game plan for humanity correlated to the principles of nature. That is akin to the stupidity of running a business without a business plan.
Humanity is not doing well by nature’s definition –the only definition that matters. So, let’s fix it.
