Gil Can Run!A blog on Running and all the crap that runs through my head while doing it

Dec 20th When I lost my mind the truth set me free

Here we are on the cusp of the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere). Got my mile in today. Two more work days and then I travel back to the United States for a couple weeks with my family. Spend the holidays and then back to work, a new schedule, new challenges as well as some of the old.
Life is a series of challenges, and we absolutely go out of our way to make them more difficult than they should ever be. The more I realize about all of it the less sense it makes to me. The more it pains me to see what is happening in the world and the more I wonder if I should be so concerned with the long-term health and viability of humanity on the whole.
I love my friends and family, and I certainly don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Beyond that, I look at how we treat each other, how we treat the animals, how we look at the planet as something to be conquered and owned, and we never seem to learn enough to realize that way is a dead-end. The problem of course isn’t that we just will destroy ourselves, it’s how many other species end up being destroyed due to our ignorance, negligence, or even our designs and greed. So I honestly question the continued existence of humanity as a good thing.
We, of course, are capable of great things. We’ve shown how truly amazing humanity can be, in very small ways. In total, we seem to keep destroying more and more as we move forward.
I like to be hopefully and think of the current political climate as the last tantrum of the societal babies we have in this world, but it’s not true. The fact is these people are created every generation and become strong as their numbers grow into old age. Fear of the unknown, feelings of loss of a past that never was, greed for more time, for more value, a worry that in the end the things they worked and lived for, that which they truly believed in was ultimately meaningless. That their descendants will be those deemed to not have value, as they have not valued others. All these factors come together to create the great lie of conservatism.
But let’s talk about that idea of value. Even though I listed it last, I believe it to be the biggest threat. Capitalism is our problem. First, I need to evaluate what capitalism is. A system of distributing resources based on the perceived value of people, places, and things, brought about by the faith in the desirability of those things by those deemed worthy or acceptable to assign value. Those people, we generally call financiers and brokers, then turn and convince others of the value they believe in and dole out resources based on this faith-based system. Even when the system was based on “metals” it was still a belief that a metal was valuable because of its beauty, scarcity, or some other reason deemed suitable. No matter what the article of faith is, the whole system is based on faith, faith that things are not equal.
“This metal is worth more because it is shiner, that makes it better, and therefore more valuable. This rock is harder to find than this one and so I am willing to pay more for it. This factory makes more money than that one, so I will give them money to make more money.” Yes, that last one is exactly the thought process behind the modern market. In that, we find our most profitable “companies” generally exploit the labor force to its fullest. Our electronics companies use metals mined from the sweat of slave laborers, people often denied basic human rights and treated as disposable tools to get a job done and line the mine-owners’ pockets with more profit. Textiles have always been made and cut and sewn by child-laborers and exploited women as long as we’ve had a textile industry. Factories simply move across the globe from colony to colony, from developing country to developing country as people begin to shut down the monstrous practices of this industry. Even our modern food supply exploits, not only our labor resources, but also our evolutionary family. First for the labor aspect. No politician or businessman in the US who says so is interested in ending migrant worker exploitation, in the form of deportation. That is the biggest lie ever sold to fools by charlatans. The unpresident-select makes money off of exploiting workers, at his businesses, in the plants that make the clothing line he sells. He needs people coming over the border with no rights and no legal standing, he depends on them for higher profits, to make his business look more profitable. So do most of them, but a majority of those people are working out fields, in California and Texas, the Midwest, for what? They do jobs, back-breaking, low-profit-margin jobs the “farmers” (read farm-owners), need to make look more profitable so their company stock will rise. The modern farm is not “American Gothic”, it’s not “Ma” and “Pa” and the children working the fields and bringing the prize pig to market. It hasn’t been that idealized schlock for many, many, many generations. Farming in the US, from Slavery, to Sharecropping, to the Dust Bowl, to Undocumented Workers, has been a steady progression of exploitation and abuse.
Now let’s look at the abuse of the animals. We create these Frankenstein’s Monsters, these behemoth creatures, they maximize meat yields, while making a normal life for these creatures impossible. To the point the industry can even claim their farming habits as being a kindness, to make life bearable for poultry that cannot naturally sexually reproduce anymore, calves crammed into crates where they can barely move, livestock packed to the rafters to the point where they shit and piss on each other regularly. Pumped full of drugs; antibiotics, steroids. Packed into trucks and sent out to slaughter, sometimes killed in truly horrific ways to appease some people’s religious ideology. The cruelty of humanity is exemplified best in the treatment of anything we deem other than human.
What is amazing in all this, is how we deem each other as something other than human. The heartlessness we use to make our system of value stay together. Afterall, if you view others as equal, how can you determine who “deserves” more, and who “deserves” less? Because the system requires a generally finite amount of “value” someone must always have less for someone else to have more. As time moves on, in order to have more and more for yourself, more than one individual must have less and less. How can you say someone deserves to starve, a child deserves to go hungry, if you view those people as equal? How can you condemn a person to suffer if you see yourself in them? If you see your god in them? How can you demand their obedience to suffering and your dominance if you are not their “better”? You can’t, and so we tell ourselves lies, we make up whole theories, and have even tried to have science prove superiority in order to justify our system and the suffering it causes. This is the great unseen truth of Capitalism. A system which requires scarcity, lacking, less in order for something to be more, will necessarily create other systems in which those with less will be determined to be lacking in some way, and systems of thought, whole philosophies, will be designed in order to justify why that class is left behind and not worthy. Whether it be other humans, animals, or even the Earth itself.
Someone asked me how we can destroy this system, when those in control of the weapons also benefit from the system. The answer is non-compliance. But it’s obviously not as simple as just saying no. One must first change the conditioning they have been subject to, their ancestors have been subject to. Not just the surfactant things that some believe. But even things that we believe about where wealth comes from. Why wealth is distributed in the manner it is, and that somehow people’s only motivation to work is somehow the acquisition of material goods. We must accept that as beings with a mind capable of discovering the very nature of the Universe itself, that we are all capable, and responsible to overcome the mere desire for survival, and that we are clearly meant to, and have evolved to do more. We must learn to actually have faith in ourselves, and each other. We have been taught that we are not good, we are not just, we are not decent. We are taught we are selfish, we are lazy, we are base. This is fundamentally untrue. We are then taught that some are worse than we are! This is grossly untrue.
So we must break our prejudices, and our conditioning. We must then stop participating in the system which creates the inequality. Grow food with your neighbors, share it. If your tomato crop is yielding more than the person next door, it’s not up to you to judge why. It’s up to you to tell them what you did, when they ask, so they can have a bountiful harvest next year. It does not serve anyone if you attempt to keep your way secret and capitalize on that success. The virtuous will teach what they can, for the benefit of all. This is where the argument needs to be made that a sustainable world with enough for all is possible.
The first part of this hinges on one of the most important parts. We currently produce enough food to properly feed every man, woman, and child on this planet, no question about it. The only reason food is scarce is due to market manipulation. We make a choice to create hungry people, we play with the prices of products for profit, and we cause suffering in its wake. A truffle is worth lots of money, they are hard to find and coveted for the flavor they impart on things. But if everyone had truffles all over, or if nobody liked how they tasted, they would be worth nothing. But they are still an organism growing, they’re not there for our benefit, they don’t grow to create value for those skilled in finding them. They don’t grow so chefs have something to put into food. They grow because they exist, that is their value. Nothing more, nothing less. Their value is not determined by the outside observer, it is determined by the fact they exist in the first place. Food, no matter what it is, is needed for every living creature. Whether it converts the Sun’s energy into fuel for its system, or it uses chemicals to digest other things for the same ends. Everything needs some sort of fuel. What is the value of it? How much is a calorie worth? We are all entitled to live, because we are here. There should be no profit in what which we simple need to maintain life. Food, air, water, no creature can get by without these things in some combination.
The next is that we require shelter. Humans specifically, require shelter. We developed big brains, the ability to make and use tools, and to walk bipedally in order to use tools while moving. We did not develop thick coats of fur and blubber for insulation against the cold. We did not develop complex systems of water storage and cooling to survive the heat of a desert. We need to shelter ourselves from extreme elements, we need to shelter ourselves from other creatures who wish to predate on us. Shelter, clothing, these things are required for anyone to live. What is the virtue in profit from these things?
There is no virtue in telling others they can’t live. They don’t deserve it. Based on whose objective standard do the poor not have a right to food, shelter, clothing, clean water? The very basics of life? Why is creating this a virtuous choice? It is not. So that leaves us a question as to where to go and how to get there. It is not easy.
Obviously, the first thing is to get together everything you can and learn to do as much as you can for yourself. Teach these skills, survival skills, cooking skills, growing skills, building skills, weaving skills, sewing skills, whatever it is, teach any and all who will listen. Start by doing as much as you can for yourself. Get the people around who are doing the same and share your work, share your knowledge, make each other better. Will all industries crash? No. Will there be resistance? Yes. As more and more people turn away from the production/consumption paradigm, those who stand to lose wealth and resources will resist, they already do in some places. If enough people can band together and set up a communal system to provide for the needs and well-being of all, they can break free of the system entirely. If enough communities do this, eventually they can break the stranglehold capitalism has on society.
When enough communities become self-sufficient, that is when industries will crash. It is difficult, it is hard work. It is going without, it is sacrificing. But why would anyone do this? Why would to sacrifice your comfort, to end all this? Well, if the moral argument hasn’t swayed you. If you are unmoved that equality is impossible in a system dependent on inequality, then perhaps a more practical matter can move you to action.
Let’s consider the idea of a system depending on infinite growth of production and consumption on a limited world. Let’s ignore all the massive environmental warning signs we already see everywhere and the challenges we face because of them. Let’s just say that all these things like climate change and extinctions and rising seas and everything else we see that’s measurable and real is a huge coincidence. Let’s just look at the growth of the system. The system must keep growing, every day more and more wealth is created and distributed. Let’s think of it like a game of monopoly where the bank can never run out of money. Eventually, someone owns the whole board, leaving the rest of the players poor and starving right? In a normal game of monopoly that’s where you win. But in this modified game, the people left destitute must continue traveling around the board paying rent, we could say buying food, gas for their car, whatever. How are they getting money to do this?
The “winner” is lending the money to the bank, at a high interest rate, because he can. The bank is then lending that money to the people at a higher interest rate, the bank needs to try and make money too right? But what’s actually happened in the modern world is that the bank is loaning itself money, then loaning it to the people. Well, of course they don’t always directly loan it, they give money to “business owners” by investing in stocks. In turn they pay the people to work at producing something so they can pay the money back to the business owner. They then pay the bank or investor back as a dividend.
So then what are the players making? With what materials? The board, it’s the only thing left. They have to take the board apart and keep making things out of it, to keep making money, to keep paying back the loan, that keeps getting loaned out, so the interest just builds. Where’s the problem? There’s only so much board, as more of it is destroyed to be turned into profit so the wealthy can own more of the board, what is left? Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
On the good news side of that, the Earth is not a cardboard game area. It is a living organism, and it has defenses against that which would try to destroy it. And that’s what we face now, and as I said, if you don’t want to believe we’re facing it now we will in the future. There is only so much we can take from the Earth without returning before it breaks down.
Imagine a library where no one ever returned books and no one ever gave new books. It would be empty in no time. That is our current economy, our current society. A Monopoly game with no end where the other players are forced to make things out of the game pieces and board until it is completely used up and unsustainable. A library where no one ever returned a book. This is what we face. There is nothing but doom at the end of this road, even if there are struggles down the other path.
We are fed the lie that capitalism is the best system we can think of that works. It’s not that we know this, it’s that we’ve not, in the modern age of man, tried any other way. “But they tried socialism in…” not really. A ruling oligarchy, or dictator has forced some people to live by some tenant of some philosophy, but no one has actually ever abandoned capitalism. That is why the USSR failed, until the recent coup in the United States, I do have to admire the brass balls with which Putin did that. But even there they don’t hide their capitalism anymore.
So we’ve always just accepted this idea that some people deserve and others don’t as gospel. We ignore the suffering we cause. We ignore the warnings systems beyond our control give us. We generally just meander through, pigheadedly, under the delusion that somehow having more money insultes us, because we have done what is right in our current society’s view of morality. The just, the righteous make money and can sustain themselves, those who have not enough to survive are bad, they have done something to deserve it, and this is their punishment. That is how we see the world.
We need to change it. We need to move away, we need to look at ourselves no as a consumer, a producer, or a product. We need to see the inherent value of all things, and look at ourselves as explorers, learners, creators, equals of all of creation, not better, not worse, just different. We are not bare animalistic beings like the philosophers who created this system would have us believe. We are amazing beings, wired for empathy, wired for compassion, spoiled by bad ideas who’s times have long since passed. We have to rise above and bring ourselves into the future economy, the future society, or surely we shall all perish.

“I walked the streets until I lost my mind
And that was
The best place to be
When I lost my mind the truth set me free”

Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!

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