We have energy problems. We have air, land and water pollution problems. We have health problems. We have social problems. We have a lot of problems.
99 problems but a profit ain't one.
As I have said many times over the years, the quest for profit at any costs is the thing that drives us to have so many of the problems we face, whether it be war or pollution, obesity or depression. Everything is affected because it is all part of the supply and demand chain, and we are conditioned in ways that keep us consuming to enrich the suppliers, even though what we consume is what is causing the majority of the problems we face. Simply put, if we demanded different, things would change, but the incentive isn't there. If the incentive was aligned to health outcomes in order to make profit, then things would change, because suppliers would then be driven to condition us to consume what makes us healthy, rather than what makes us sick. That includes what destroys our environment, which is obviously a key influence on our health.
But I was wondering, as I often have, what if the world was a bit different. For instance, what if instead of all the mental and material resources that go into making machines of war, the same effort was put into designing machines that cleaned the environment.
For random examples, what if every new large building had a filtration system that sucked in air and filtered it of the unwanted particles, and pumped out filtered air. The filtered solids could be dried, bricked and then contained or used in some way. Or what if large desalinators were invented that could provide filtered water to create wetlands or hydroponic greenhouses in the deserts starting from the coast. And what if these were powered by clean energy resources, or nuclear fission, or something that hasn't been invented yet?
My point is, that instead of building what we are currently building that we know harms the environment and humanity, but we feel we need to build it for our defence, but the only reason we have to defend is because of the terrible economic system we are supporting, we built differently? Yeah, I know that it will never likely happen, because humans are ridiculous creatures, but essentially the only thing stopping us having a high quality of life, with high levels of health and wellbeing across the entire earth, is our own ridiculous nature.
That is pretty sad isn't it?
What if instead of making wealth from war and harmful activities, we could only make profit from generating health. How many current companies on earth would actually be profitable? Now, some of these companies are not necessarily unhealthy by design, but they promote or support unhealthy usage. Like Facebook, TikTok, X and all the rest. The algorithms and amplification mechanisms they use incentivise poor behaviours, bad habits, mental illness and a host of other related problems that are all part of a knock-on effect in the chain of all the other issues we face in the world, like pollution and social disorder and loneliness and poverty.
It isn't just the rich and powerful, they are just part of the machine.
The machine parts of governments and corporations, combined with the machine parts of social structure and order we have created, are structured in a way that promotes negative outcomes at the micro and macro level of society. Individuals weaken, communities weaken, and everything just falls apart at the hands of the profit-incentivised people in control. But those people are symptoms of the broken system, not the causes. Once they have more power, they can influence the machine to do more harm, but that is the design of the machine.
It will never get a continually improving outcome.
There is room for so much innovation in all fields of study to improve our human outcomes, but the problem is that this kind of innovation is fringe and relatively unsupported, even though it should be the *most supported majority of all innovation. Instead of finding ways to support our behaviours to become healthier individuals as a whole, there are tens of thousands of behavioural economists working out how a platform or game can squeeze a little more of our attention from us. Instead of using the energy to clean the water and air, we use it to generate AI girlfriends to ease our loneliness.
The thing that people need to remember is that it doesn't cost more to be healthy, nor does it cost more to be green. Because an economy doesn't actually worry about the cost of anything, it adjusts accordingly. The "cost more" comes from the current economic situation, where the status quo is not only cheaper due to having more time in the market, but it is also cheaper to do things that have negative impacts on the environment and humanity. But "cheaper" doesn't mean that there isn't profit in it, because the consumer is paying to both pollute, and clean up the pollution, get fat and for weight loss medication and a personal trainer, to start a war and to end it.
The economy wouldn't change much if all the business activities pivoted to health-focused innovation and supply, but our outcomes as a species would shift radically. Everyone would have a better life, except people who believe that other people shouldn't have a better life. And those kinds of people, well - do you want them to be the ones who make all the profits? Because they are the ones making it now. They might not be doing it directly or even consciously, but they are profiting from the machine that is designed to cause suffering.
The ultimate weapon.
A killing machine powered by all of us.
Taraz
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