As I was watching some of the World Economic Forum (WEF) talks, the song Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan from 1974 came to mind.
Inculcated Failure
In the United States, you can get a pretzel at any conceivable size, indicative of the magnitude of the devastating societal impact of the confounding of consequence and cause inferred by its shape. There is no top or bottom to a pretzel. Its cyclical structure makes us all feel good, symbolically binding us together in a perpetual cycle of grave depravity of reason by which we pretend to care for each other, and no one does.
That’s my summary of the talks I witnessed. Grave depravity of reason, first described by Friedrich Nietzsche, from confounding of consequence and cause, is on majestic display at WEF.
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.
Christopher Hitchens
We have learned so little from the geniuses that came before us. We put people on stage who have made a lot of money from human solipsism in staunch denial of nature’s first-principles, foolishly expecting them to cannibalize themselves to improve humanity’s future.
The change we can depend on, in the words of Albert Einstein, will not be coming from people with the same level of thinking that brought them there.
Grandiose Ignorance
We do not define the excellence of the human species. It is determined by nature.
Thankfully we, the general we, have discovered some of nature’s first-principles by which we can fundamentally improve the outlook for humanity. I do not take credit for all of those discoveries. I do take credit for unearthing many discoveries we have buried for too long.
Let me give you a few examples.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) discovered the universe; thus, everything on Earth revolves around relativity. One hundred years later, today, none of the systems purportedly designed to improve human efficacy are systems of relativity. What could possibly go wrong? Everything.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) gave us something to think about when he explained how the confounding of consequence and cause leads to grave depravity of reason. Almost two-hundred years later, today, we confound currencies with economies, money with merit, markets with marketplaces, etc. The list of our confounding is long.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) explained how the available energy is always in decline due to a natural phenomenon called entropy. That observation completely invalidates the false promises of sustainability humanity embraces today. Sustainability drives a vector of expansion, akin to the ideology of a cancer cell, that has significantly damaged the value and standard deviation of human merit needed to strengthen human renewal.
Giving Back
The WEF, run by German professor Klaus Schwab, heavily promotes public-private partnerships to promote the value of all stakeholders supposedly. That sounds dandy if you can get over the vague definition of stakeholders. He should get to the point and say humanity. Well-off companies and individuals giving back to a society kept on the wrong evolutionary track will not improve humankind. It perpetuates our misgivings.
It gives me the creeps when I hear about The Giving Pledge Warren Buffett started years ago. Here is a man who destroys the health of civilization by being a significant investor in Coca-Cola, the producer of sugar water, as Steve Jobs called it. Coca-Cola is now focused on “poisoning” innocent people in the rainforests of Brazil, bound to cause massive obesity epidemics not unlike the one that currently kills 40,000 people in the U.S. every month(!). Are we then supposed to cheer on the giving back as an act of moral justice? What a way to whitewash the destruction of humanity for the sake of money.
Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, gives me similar yet less overt Pavlovian creeps. You do not solve poverty in the world by giving back. You solve it by establishing a theory of humanity that fundamentally realigns the merit of humankind to the first-principles of nature. Nature’s first-principles evaluate human value fundamentally differently than the rat race for money. Then, and only then, the broad scope of human merit will be aligned with the wide range of human needs to minimize poverty.
Nature, not mankind, determines the longevity of the human species on Earth. The future of humanity should not be subject to the whims of giving corporations that have taken too much and eroded the renewable strengthening of humankind.
Learn To Think
The human species is lucky to have the unique capacity to think and preempt the humanitarian danger coming. We can and must fundamentally and systemically improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy. We cannot continue to allow laissez-faire freedom to feast on and shorten the runway of the future of humanity. Paradoxical rules must guide freedom, the ones nature dictates.
Simply put, if a company does not improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy, directly or indirectly, it should not be allowed to exist.
Nature is authoritarian. Yet, nature is fair and patient, much more so than humans. We can predict the future, for human foresight comes from discovering nature’s hindsight.
Think Natural
For two hundred and thirty-five years, we have run amok with Constitutional rights sans obligations that made us the most powerful country in the world. That sounds good until nature puts the smack down on us, and we discover that our adaptability to curveballs from nature’s entropy thrown our way, like Coronavirus, destroys our house of cards, the systems that are not, in no time.
Planet Earth, already in existence for 4.5 billion years, will survive the human species. The human species, with a pitiful 5,000-year somewhat-cognitive lifespan, will not survive the evolution of Earth. So, to enhance human longevity and excellence, we must get our cues from nature and stop being so full of ourselves to think we can Mother Nature.
We must learn to think and act –naturally.
