The State of Man

Cultural and technological evolution have accelerated at a phenomenal rate for humanity over the last ten thousand years or so. It is harder to quantify the cultural aspects however the technological ones seem to be somewhat exponential in the rate of their growth. Within this time frame biological evolution, as it is understood for other species, has all but stood still. In many ways the changes to our culture and technology are either negating biological evolution or directing its path with alternate conditions where the “fittest” no longer means the same thing. Humanity has been equipped by nature to live much like the stereotypical idea of a cave man. Certainly much of what made cave man an evolutionary success is the foundation of humanities flourishing. The ability to cooperate and coordinate in groups, complete with a good ability to problem solve. Equipped with these tools humanity began to create ecological niches for themselves rather than slowly evolving to suit those around them. Compare the present issues faced by people and the environments in which they live to those faced by the earliest humans. You may be able to find examples of humans which still live in similar ways to their distant ancestors but for the most part, certainly in urban areas there is little overlap in lifestyles. Certainly we still make exception use from our cooperative and reasoning skills however many of the tools nature equipped us with are no longer useful in the same way and some may even be to our detriment.

I do not refer to the physical formation of our bodies for they are a highly functional, well evolved versatile, vehicle for our minds. Our bodies are good all round in terms of physical attributes when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Other than our brains, the only area in which we could be said to excel over any other species is in dexterity with our opposable thumbs however this is fairly questionable and too tangential to bother discussing. Our jack of all trades bodies suit us perfectly, particularly as we are in the habit of creating environments to suit us and not the other way round. It is our minds that I feel are becoming out dated technology no longer well suited to the environments we find ourselves in.

It is perhaps a little ambitious to call natures greatest accomplishment inadequate, especially given that we do not really understand the working of the brain. As such I cannot call upon any precise scientific data to suggest an inadequacy and will have to make do with observations and common sense. An obvious example to lead with is the ever increasing number of cases of mental illness and similar issues such as depression that afflict humanity. Many dismiss the lower counts of these issues found historically as undiagnosed rather than non existent, and assuredly non-diagnosis would be a factor but as to it being the only one I am less convinced. It may also seem absurd to try and compare the number of instances of mental difficulties in humans with those found in animals, both wild and domestic, but I would contend this is a highly relevant thing to look at. If you can show that humans minds are failing at a rate correlating with technological or cultural evolution and that other wild species have a consistently small (relative to humans) or non-existent rate of mental illness over time then you can be fairly confident in saying that our lifestyles and culture are detrimental to our minds.

To show that an animal's state of mind is comparable to a human with noticeable mental issues is scientifically very tricky. I have encountered domestic animals that act in unusual and atypical ways that could easily be interpreted as animal equivalents of human mental problems. Almost all of those for which I knew the history of had been treated poorly in some way however they would not be eligible to count against the non-human species in our attempt to show that technology and culture are in some way damaging. This is simply because they are domesticated and therefore suffer many of the advantages of our cultural and technological advances. The life of a pet dog is in many ways more removed from that of a wild dog than the life of a modern human is from a cave man. What these troubled domestic animals does give us is the ability to recognize what a mental issue might look like in other animals. Although I have had basically no opportunity to get to know any wild animals, from the many brief observations I have had of them I can say none have appeared to be at all disturbed or atypical in behaviour nor have any appeared alike to the neurotic domestic animals I have encountered. As you can see this is not the most scientific of results, my sample sizes are far too small to assert than humans are madder than wild animals and my methods or simple observation are not confirmable or repeatable. I however find it sufficiently compelling to explore the possible ways in which our lifestyles are detrimental to our minds.

In order to do this we need to pick apart the differences between life as a social hunter gather and life as a modern human. Even when language and tools were fairly well developed early man would have still lived lives almost identical to most other pack animals in the wild. Most of the hours of the day must be spend fulfilling the basic requirements of living. The amount we now need to eat and sleep hasn't changed much however the time taken to obtain suitable places to sleep, security and sufficient food has fallen from nearly all of the spare time to a fraction of the hours in a day. In advancing our technology and expanding our borders we have made surviving easier and more efficient which has given us lots of spare time to fill for which evolution has not prepared us.

Animals are purposive beings which are given impetus to act from this drive. The higher animals have increased awareness and move away from purely reflexive actions. After the purely reflexive life forms such as the single cell organisms and flora you have some instinctive animals such as fish and reptiles. Above this you get birds and mammals which are more considered, actions are based on experience, emotion/instinct, reflex and reason. Humans are of course in this last category and are the most refined example. We not only have the capacity to reason but can also imagine in many dimensions and use this like a pseudo-experience. We have the tool of language to consolidate and communicate meaning while conceptualizing unreal things that aid in imaginative problem solving. Despite all this we are not so far removed from the other birds and mammals and have much the same base motivations towards actions. We still exist to survive and reproduce and this is what still predominantly drives us. One of the big problems faced by man is that we have solved so many of our base drives so that they require very little time investment leaving us with much spare time that is entirely aimless.

We do several things to combat this severing from our natural drives. One is to use our imagination to create things to aim at and give us some meaning where there would naturally be none. Another is to pour all our drive into the few tasks we still have enough overlap with life as a cave man such as raising a family or sexual conquest. Sometimes people will transfer the instinct to hunt for food and provide and protect a family into economic terms and sink their drives into the earning prowess. Some people instead of finding new avenues for their drives or expanding existing ones simply give up and suffer a wide array of mental problems such as depression. The problems caused by our vast improvements to survival efficiency and our removed part in performing them range from boredom, to depression, to lunacy, to a lack of any emotional satisfaction in our day to day routine, to the more subtle effects of misplacing or incorrectly weighting an emotional outlet or source of gratification and purpose.

It would impossible to go into any specific detail regarding these effects as it would need an understanding of the interactions between consciousness, will and emotion to demonstrate any mechanisms in play. I can at least describe the various outcomes caused by our inadequate solutions to the broader problem of having derailed our evolved suitability for life with our improving living conditions. With an over investment, a misplaced one, a derived one or a purely imagined investment in an action to gain cohesion with our animal drives, our emotions and our consciousness we a creating a fragile mental framework that can very easily lead to the state mentioned where we give up on satisfying our drives and sink into apathy, depression or madness. If you gain all your satisfaction from your work and then lose your job you will also lose your purpose in life. If you have decided you exist to be beautiful then the trials of time will wither the soul as well as the body. These are two examples of how it is easy to put too much weight on something you have little control over and that are not in them selves reasons for being alive.

You may be lucky and create a fragile structure to keep you sane, satisfied and happy that is never struck by the events in your life and this will mean you are likely to avoid depression and the like however it does not mean you will be unaffected. By basing ones reason for living on a spurious notion you will be making choices using these false or exaggerated principles. When you make a choice with incomplete, or worse, false information you are liable to often make the wrong one. Defining the wrong choices for an individual is rather subjective but could be reasonably described as a choice that is not in the best interest of the individual making them. The difficulty here is that a life choice made on a false assumption is only wrong when you appreciate the inaccuracy of the assumption. While you still hold it to be true the choice will likely be the right one for you. It is not for me to say that any ones understanding of their purpose in life is wrong, this must be a relative thing. Each person must find their own self consistent framework to act upon. It is not so important to follow any way of life that is preached by others who have found their solution as it is to find a self consistent one that fits you well. A mental framework that is inconsistent in some way is the only way to get around the subjective nature and allow you to assert that it is provably wrong. By acting upon an inconsistent frame work you are effectively playing a game of Jenga with your mind. You reinforce certain ideas you have and put more weight onto the top of the increasingly fragile structure, this means that if it does collapse you will be faced with a much more cataclysmic breakdown. This reinforcement by use entrenches the framework and makes it more rigidly adhered too and harder to regress away from. You are not only making the potential breakdown more severe you are also making it more probable when you act on poor foundations.

To summarise, there are many possible mental frameworks we can build up to guide us in decision making and to give us purpose. These can be divided into two broad categories, those which are inconsistent and those which are consistent. Consistent to does not automatically mean good however, I am sure many of the more abhorrent characters have wholly consistent mental frameworks, they are just far removed from those of socially well adjusted people and are either devoid of morals or take a very odd stance on them. It would not come as a surprise to me to find out, if it were easily measurable, that criminals typically had higher consistency in their mental frameworks. This is in part due to the more primal nature of crime and in part because the life is in some ways less complex than that of socially integrated person. This is not to say that a life of crime is easier, far from it I imagine, just that it has less parameters and subtleties to it. To act on a socially unacceptable yet consistent mental framework has much the same reinforcing and stiffening effect as acting on an inconsistent one however this makes it less liable to collapse in addition to its already low chances due to being consistent. Society creates an environment that does not favour people adopting frameworks far from the norm. For those that do slip through the cracks society tries to force a change by punishing and ostracising certain behaviours. A rigid consistent mental framework can only be brought down by choice and so societies actions make it more in peoples self interest to try and adopt new values and ideals that fit the current social tone. I am digressing again as sociopaths might be a burden to society but it is likely they are less afflicted by the problems being highlighted in this essay.

If we create a hypothetical spectrum of consistent mental frameworks along just one axis and then perpendicular to that we create an overlayed spectrum from inconsistent mental frameworks that is a dimension greater. On these spectra we can say that proximity represents similarities in the frameworks. On this graph there would be most density for any given society around one point near or on the line of consistent frameworks. As this is a bit of a scatter graph to represent the density it would look like a bell dome rather than a bell curve. On the flat part of the bell curve I suspect there would be only a couple of percent at most of the rest of the population however I also suspect that they would fall closer to the line of consistency simply because they are not able to learn and copy from others about them so easily and will have to build the whole framework themselves. It strikes me that this method will lead to a higher rate of consistency. Regardless of this we are not concerned so much about the tiny minority found on the flat of the bell dome. We are concerned about those who fall in the parts of most volume yet who lie off the line of consistency. Normal people with normal values and morals who have not yet had to reconcile their whole belief system and will suffer to some extent if they do.

Presently the solutions to these problems lie in philosophy, theology and psychology as we know too little about the workings of the brain to attempt a medical, genetic or chemical solution. As we are each alone in our quest to find a way of living in a human world with our animalistic reasons for being our best hope is to educate people about this problem. By having the causes straight and the consequences forewarned people will be in the best position to be able to construct their own internal solutions. This does rather lead to the bigger question as to what the purpose of intelligent life is beyond simple survival. This question will be the subject of an upcoming essay “The End Game”and will be a macroscopic partner to the published individual scale article “The Meaning of Life”. When society has a specific purpose it creates an environment where more people can engineer that purpose into themselves and as a result will be happier, more grounded, more robust and saner people than those living in an aimless society. By educating people about how the mind works we can put them in good stead to make themselves sound minded individuals but if we lived in a purposive society we are set to have most people being sound minded from the outset. Purpose does not have to be found within but can also diffuse in from the outside making this an issue for society as well as the individual.

A lack of alignment of ones natural drive for life and ones lifestyle is not the only problem that is a result of the workings of the brain. Our imagination can be a great aid in problem solving, making choices and in the creation of things however it can also become a burden on us, like a tumour growing out of control and trying to dominate the whole being. This is manifest in our worrying about things or in obsessive compulsive tendencies where we try and control all things we have been able to imagine. It can make people into nervous wreaks unable to do anything for fear that their imaginings will become realities. The most afflicted people live a struggle where by they are perpetually trying to fight back the overwhelming tide of their imagination with the limited actions of the body or is some cases even reason. This however is not a social problem in the same way as it is not strictly caused by how we live. I could try and argue that it is inconsistent mental frameworks that lead to this kind of behaviour however I have no reason to think this other than it is a neat answer, I have no evidence to suggest this is the case of any kind and wouldn't even know where to start in trying to prove the theory either way. What this and other foibles of the human mind not directly onset by social changes show more than anything else is that we don't know very much about how the mind works. Consciousness, emotion and the brain itself should be one of the major avenues of medical and more general scientific research as it is so little understood and so important to our well being. I believe psychotherapy to be of great benefit to people and a worthy pursuit however in analogous terms it feels like having to perform an operation on yourself in a dark room while given only verbal pointers from a trained surgeon. Our other avenue of defence against mental issues are drugs however these do nothing to cure the causes and only help in suppressing symptoms.

With the internet and computing we are entering a new age of removal and isolation that seems likely to further many of the concerns discussed in this essay. As we continue to improve our environment we must work to keep our minds up to speed. Evolution has been left standing with its pot luck-by the numbers approach to our reason, language, cooperation and imagination. With our cultural and technological advances we have left evolution standing still in our wake, the price we must pay for this velocity of change is finding our own solutions for those that evolution used to do for us. Our approach thus far is to ignore the evolutionary aspect and focus on correcting individuals, be it with anti depressants, therapy, laser eye surgery fertility treatment and so forth. This is a good approach in terms of increasing quality of life within a society but used in isolation will make things worse in the long run as classic evolution if further bypassed. Ideally we want to find ways of not treading on the toes of evolution while still increasing the quality of life for individuals. Not too much further down the line of this tangent we reach eugenics which is not at all the intended scope of this essay. It does tie in again a little with my mention of the upcoming essay “The End Game” in that this problem if looked at from far enough out needs not one but two solutions. It is not just how is this problem caused and how do we solve it but also the very important question; to what end are we solving it? With the eye and reproduction it is fairly clear cut, we understand how they work and can easily identify why and how they aren't working. As such you are able to correct not only with glasses or surgery but also you are able to identify what genes affect eye sight giving the possibility of solutions for the long term too. With problems regarding consciousness we don't really know what the working model looks like and so find it much harder to realign problem cases, both for individuals and for the species. If it it our lifestyles in part causing many of the various mental issues it is imperative we get a better understanding of the mind so as to get longer term solutions. It would also inevitably help to get better immediate solutions for individuals at the same time. As it stands, with stab in the dark therapy, generic suppressing drugs and an ever more wonderful yet removed society we are set to become quite a lot more mentally unstable  

The Malthusian Problem

There is much concern over population growth at present. I cannot say with any certainty but the impression I get is that this concern is mainly coming from the more developed areas of the world where quality of life is better. This somewhat stands to reason as the quality of life attained in the more developed areas of the world is not sustainable. Not only is the world population growing but it is also becoming more developed as well, both of which put more strain on finite natural resources such as oil and space. As such those living least sustainably will find themselves under most pressure to change. This might just be an economic pressure but it could escalate to conflicts. Although lowering populations is only a short term solution to having an unsustainable lifestyle it is often still the favoured option of those living comfortable lives. The only real solution is living a sustainable lifestyle which would be a much bigger sacrifice to them than it is for the rest of the world hence our relative aversion to it.

People seem to forget the advantages a vast population bring when presented with the problem of unsustainable living. A huge part of our ability to live luxuriously is the efficiency brought about through division of labour. The less people we have the lower our potential efficiency in this regard. More people also means more geniuses to bring us wonderful things and advance humanity further. Scientific progress is the other major factor contributing to our present luxury. On top of this a large population helps to provide for minorities. Imagine a population so small that there was only one blind person and only one in a wheel chair, how much support would be in place and available for these people? Certainly no companies would exist making products to aid them as they would not be economically viable. More people comes out significantly ahead in pros and cons compared to less people, which can only really argue lack of space and other resources in its favour.

Simply put, any time there is a debate about the problems of population levels and growth it should always be made abundantly clear that it is part of the bigger problem of sustainability and that there is only one actual solution to which population levels have no real bearing. We could have a potentially infinite population that would survive to the end of the universe if we all lived sustainably and spread ourselves across the stars. We could have a vast population here on Earth that live as long as the Earth remains and, again, we lived sustainably. The only limit would be space yet we have proven fairly industrious at utilizing space above and below. The question the developed world dares not ask is what they would have to give up in order to actually live sustainably. Many think of returning to the land and having to live like people did a millennia ago, which is a fairly good way towards living a sustainable life yet not the only path open, which is just as well as it is a very space inefficient way to live. We either have the technology or it is at our fingertips to live very closely to how we do now and remain sustainable. The problem is that there is no infrastructure or significant government policy that supports and enforces sustainable living. As such, most of the technology has remained out of reach or undeveloped thus leaving it woefully inadequate to compete in the market. This in turn makes matters seem worse and ensures it will be harder to make a transition to a sustainable lifestyle. If someone tells you there are too many people in the world you should tell them to go and live a sustainable life themselves before they complain about population. Any reasoned logical argument against high population must concede it is only a delay tactic at best and that the only long term solution is sustainability.

There are other arguments against population beyond maintaining our current lifestyle as long as possible in terms of consumption. While some people thrive in city life and love to be surrounded by others it is not for every one. Overcrowding reduces the quality of life for people who enjoy space, nature, peace and quiet. Fortunately we are a long way of this being a valid argument against population levels. Roughly half of the global population live in crowded built up urban areas yet these area's combined only occupy about three percent of the total land area of the Earth. The population of the planet would have to drastically increase for their to be insufficient rural living areas to meet demands. We would hit the cap of natural resources and growing land as a limiting factor to further growth before we would start to run out of rural living land.

The real irony is that we think we need to control our own population levels as we have advanced beyond our environmental and evolutionary constraints. This is an arrogant and somewhat dangerous position to hold. Calling it a food chain is misleading, it, like every other natural process, is a cycle. Many things feed from humans despite the fact that we place ourselves atop the food chain. We claim we have no natural predators yet succumb all the time to various diseases. Yes, our predators are vastly smaller than us and for the most part don't consume that much of us. You might say we have antibiotics and other medicines within our arsenal against the very small predators however we operate in entirely different worlds. The very small live and die so fast that mutate far quicker than we are able. Vast populations will spring up and just as quickly die off again , like who civilizations rising and falling within just a few days. The evolutionary process for those that are very small and live very quickly relative to us happens much faster. As soon as a successful strain of something mutates it quickly multiplies and spreads. The tools we use to combat harmful bacteria and our other micro-organism predators expediate their evolution, we kill off swathes clearing the path for the few survivors to flourish. As soon as something evolves to be immune to our defences it will spread like wildfire among us. We cannot rely on evolution to protect us and are as a result locked in an ongoing scientific battle with micro-organisms to develop cures, effective antibiotics and immunisations.

You may recall from biology at school we were shown a graph for natural variation in populations over time for rabbits and foxes called the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system. They both would undulate up and down like a sine wave however they would be slightly out of phase with one another. The fox population would rise and eat more rabbits causing their population to decline. This in turn would reduce the food supply for the foxes who would in turn start to decline in number. This would then allow the rabbits to thrive again thus restarting the whole cycle. This simplified example shows a trend that is applicable in a wide sphere of events not limited to just biology. As humanities population and density increases we improve the odds for the micro-organisms in evolving a resilient or impressively contagious strain. A graph against population levels of known human diseases and parasites and of humanity over time would not look much like the neat fox and rabbit relationship however a similar process is going on. The success of micro-organisms is far more based on adaptations than it is on resources, particularly when those resources entail human hosts which are typically abundant. While the fox and rabbit will respond more directly to the population levels of the other, the prey of the pathogen will be more inclined towards stability until an adaptation occurs in the pathogen which is then more liable to cause a sharp and rapid decline in population of their hosts. The way in which disease spread and mutate is more random and spontaneous than the slower more continual change of larger organisms. Human ecosystems are hard to isolate in the same way a rabbit and fox system is, they are also dependant on far more factors such as war and scientific discovery than it is on our predators abundance. Even so, you would see spikes and troughs such as the effect of the bubonic plague or black death in the mid fourteen century if you were to create such a graph.

It may look as if the global human population has been growing continually for a long time and is picking up pace. This is understandable and somewhat masks the very real relationship between humans and their natural predators. In the distant past humanity was more isolated into smaller ecosystems like the rabbits and foxes as our ability to travel was much more restricted. With many isolated ecosystems the undulations in human population due to the efficacy of predators would tend to average out so as to seem non-existent. As our ability to move about increased the number of effective ecosystems we occupied in regards micro-organisms fell quickly. In the modern day we effectively occupy just one huge ecosystem with the odd tiny pocked of isolated indigenous peoples such as Amazonian tribes. One of the best reasons to leave these tribes undisturbed is that they may one day be the key to the survival and continuation of our species due to their isolation from potential pathogens. Despite our ecosystems merging and falling in number we have not had an epidemic in a very long time. This is a result of the vast scientific progress occurring alongside our ability to travel more quickly and freely. By merging our ecosystems we lose the ability to average out any undulations in population as a result of our natural predators however there having not been an epidemic for such a long time means we should not expect to see any undulations any way. The only thing our prolonged and steep population growth ensures is that future epidemics will be far more severe in the ease in which they spread and the numbers that they affect.

All this is to say that population levels are not the most worthy or relevant subjects for debate. We live in an effectively closed system that is highly effective at self regulation which is often described as the Gaia hypothesis. We are not yet so above this system that we need to burden ourselves with performing its role. We can happily go on breeding and living with total disregard for the consequences and sooner or later Gaia will rebalance the scales for us. Living sustainably is one key way to limit the number of potential mechanisms by which we can upset the balance an incur a rebalancing change in the system. This however does not solve the issue of our natural predators for which we probably need to populate more isolated ecosystems to ensure our ongoing safety. In the modern world this really means populating new planets which is some way off. We may well encounter some serious epidemics that wipe out significant portions of the global population before we get round to populating new worlds however it is very unlikely that any would completely wipe us out or basically reset all progress as would be the case if only isolated human ecosystems survived. It is not in a parasites best interests to efficiently wipe out all of its hosts as that ensures its own demise as well. Natural variance within species also serves as good protection against such outbreaks.

I shall simply conclude by reiterating that attempts to limit human populations solve no long term problems and would mostly just limit our capacity as a species. Living sustainably is the only solution and ironically facilitates and maintains a greater population. A greater population also theoretically reduces the time it will take us to populate new worlds with more great minds able to work on the problem, more division of labour to make that work efficient and more pressure on space generating a demand for more. This in turn is the most obvious way in which we can escape the restraints of Gaia which will ultimately limit our population of it's own accord thus further making attempts to limit our population seem like wasted effort.  

Sandy Hook and Star Craft

There have been many school shootings all over the world for the past one hundred and fifty years. While I cannot deny that they are on the increase in nominal terms, both in frequency and in death toll, if one considers the population growth over that time frame and measure incidents per person it would be a more more stable figure, it may well even be in decline. The frequency has remained more constant over the time period and it tends to be the death toll which is rising which could be attributed to technological developments just as easily as social ones. Even if school shootings are on a relative decline it is not fast enough. Each has had the impact of a once in a life time tragedy such as the Twin Towers yet the memory of Dunblane was still vivid when Colombine occurred. Being British our media is highly focused on UK and US events but the rest of the world has had its fair share as well with Germany having two double digit death toll school shootings since the new millennium. The Sandy Hook shootings in the latter part of last year being from America were getting a lot of media attention which brought the memories and feelings back yet again. It is profoundly sad yet also exasperating. Most crimes are unpleasant, most tragedies seem cruel and senseless yet most crimes have motive and most tragedies have at least an explanation. Where one cannot see motive or reason there can be no solution and this was how I felt about school shootings.

The school shootings where a single person was shot are more likely to have been like any other shooting and with much of the same fathomable motives, just located at a school and so bolstering the figures. It is the incidents where people indiscriminately shoot at anyone that are most concerning as they are so abhorrent yet so seemingly insoluble. While struggling with the problem as to why people would commit such a atrocious act it hit me like one of those hidden image visual tricks that you stare at until you lose focus and a three dimensional shape emerges from the page. The problem itself was the reason, it is simply because it is so atrocious that people are drawn to it, like climbing the highest mountain. Shooting up a school indiscriminately is about the most damaging, inhumane, immoral and cruel act that can be easily achieved by people without control over armies or munitions stock piles. It is an act of individual terrorism against society that lashes out hitting everyone around them. Should a person become removed enough from society to feel both isolated and persecuted then they could harbour enough hatred to take action and would not be fettered by morality, only motivated by impact. It is because schools are such an obvious target in terms of ease for effect that they are a social weak spot which means that there will be those that try to exploit it. Does this mean we need to increase security in schools? No, probably not, it would be very hard and expensive to make it effective and would then only shift the most viable targets to shopping precincts or theme parks.

It is not helped that the media lay all the cards on the table and show the world what a devastating blow it is to society. This in effect showcases the idea to others, which is the best solution I can find as to why there are so many recurrences of school shootings. Does this imply we should censor the media? No, probably not again. Censorship is an ugly business and in these situations it would seem to somehow deny the grief of those who lost people. Censorship is also more likely to make people mistrust and fear the state which in itself would help create an environment where people are more likely to want to damage society. While advertising the idea of a school shooting is not great it is far better than the alternative which is a world of more secrets and less freedoms. Free speech, as with any freedom, comes with dangers and responsibilities which we have not yet mastered. This however is no reason to about turn on an important principle.

It is all to easy to blame the media for many of the modern social ills but one of the downsides of a democracy is that you must reap what you sow. The media only provide what we want, capitalism ensures this, if media is successfully pandering to our more base interests then it is we who are weak and immoral and not them. The media may help to enable us and our morbid lusts but we the people are very much the primary enabler in that relationship. To solve the media problem we need to go far deeper and improve the whole of society so that they no longer are able to sucker us in with sinister details, tribalism, figures to hate and sensationalism. I am not suggesting that in an “improved society” such events as school shootings would not be broadcast due to a lack of interest nor am I suggesting that it is immoral to take an interest in a horrific event. I believe the opposite in fact, that open information and an empathic sharing of grief is a great aid in the healing and improving process both on a personal and social level. I am simply trying to illustrate that the media, while far from helpful, is not a single solution to stopping school shootings.

One area I do still hold the media both responsible and in contempt is factual accuracy or simply the reporting of opinion as if they were facts. In the recent Sandy Hook school shooting a major American news network suggested that Star Craft II could be in part responsible for the culprits actions. The idea that any game really makes people more violent in real life is fairly thin and frankly laughable but the idea that Star Craft II is making people more violent is like saying the same about chess. The painful irony is that Star Craft is preventing far more school shootings than it is inducing. Criminal satires that are said to glorify violence such as Grand Theft Auto tend to be light relief played casually or with friends in private. Star Craft however has a huge community and following. It is a way young people can meet and interact with like minded folk and share in something where they are accepted. There are professional tournaments going on all over the world and conventions where players can transcend the online communities by seeing each other in the flesh. There are big stars and the all important fans and then there are sponsors who provide the money to fuel much of this. Unsurprisingly it is both quite a geeky community and quite a young one too however this makes them highly accepting of others and the perfect environment for the more disenfranchised youths in society. Most people are entirely unaware that all this goes on and would be amazed at what they found if the delved into the hidden worlds of the less mainstream social communities. Players winning hundred of thousands of dollars and being revered like sports legends complete with thousands of people looking unusually comfortable in themselves. Although I am not really involved in the Star Craft scene I have been fortunate enough to be involved in a very similar one for a card game called Magic the Gathering. Being a part of the Magic scene is one of the most instrumental and significant parts of who I am, it provided valuable support and experience and it allowed me to meet some of my dearest friends. There are huge cultural benefits to being part of a global scene as well, especially one that is friendly and accepting by nature. I am not good in social situations, the less well I know people and the larger the group the worse I find the experience. At a Magic tournament I am surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands of other Magic players and I am completely at home, able to hold a conversation with anyone as if I had known them all my life. Having personal experience of how such a community helped me in so many aspects of my life and knowing that it has done the same for so many others makes me highly defensible when they are demonized or stigmatised by more mainstream culture. It is not only morally unsavoury to implicate things we know very little about in atrocities but it is very damaging to the growth of the communities. If parents see media coverage condemning an activity they are far more likely to stop their children from getting involved. This will deny them the opportunity to find alternate communities within society that might best suit them. This in turn could lead to them becoming the kind of isolated disenfranchised individual that could massacre a school.

As a society we are rather hypocritical when it comes to the youth, either we forgot what it was like being young or we convince ourselves times have changed enough that children need treating very differently. We try to shield the young from drugs and sex and other dangerous freedoms however we do relatively little in the way of alternatives. Being young is about trying things and making mistakes so that you may be a wise and sensible adult with valuable life experience. In the early teens we go from being children to wannabe adults. You see this transformation in many animals too. We poke around trying out grown up things for size trying to gauge where we fit in to the world and what sort of person we are. As a society we seem to quash many of the opportunities teenagers might have to do much of this valuable growing.

While I offer no single solution to preventing school shootings I strongly believe that the various non mainstream communities represent one of the best buffers we have against it. They are less known and harder to stumble into than the more obvious communities within society and need all the help they can get in promoting their existence and benefits. The internet is helping many of these communities grow but there are also some concerns that the internet is contributing to the feeling of isolation within society. The kicker for the gaming communities is that they encourage events such as tournaments and conventions where people travel too and meet in person. They get the best of both worlds, lots of people with lots of connections all without distance constraints from the internet complete with real social intercourse and cultural experience all with the protective fall-back of the activity in question. They are the the kinds of community that are most likely to be suitable for those feeling isolated within a more mainstream environment and therefore are more important than things like baseball clubs and school discos for preventing internal attacks

upon society. The cultural idea of the geek has changed, or more the emotional response the concept of a geek evokes. Within my lifetime it has gone from being a label that comes with some stigma to being an acceptable norm. While the geek might be recognisable based on appearance cultural acceptance has not gone quite as far as the activities of the geek, or other similar term. Most would probably say that geeks do stuff on computers which might well be accurate but is hardly specific. It is no longer the label of the geek that comes with stigma attached but rather the activities that they are more likely to do. The media rather than fuelling current popular opinion on games would be doing society a big favour if it kept to facts and relevant information. Perhaps even going out on a limb and showing what a positive force these underground communities can be for our under catered for youth would be one of the best things a media outlet could do to make up for years of blame.

The internet has helped bring small pockets of gamers together into large worldwide communities but it is also having some rather significant effects on the physical world. It is changing our town centres, certain shops are becoming obsolete and others are taking their place. I have spoken a lot about the merits of having activities suitable for youths and promoting underground communities. One of the best places for both of these things is the local games shop which not only sells a wide array of different gaming products all with their own associated communities but also serves as a meeting and mingling place for people of all ages. They are typically places to play games first and shops second, often they have back rooms or upstairs where tables and chairs fill the room purely to play games. They provide real social interaction and activities within a safe environment and serve as a gateway into bigger more global communities. Games shops offer society a service by providing what is essentially the equivalent of a pub or bar for gamers. The internet however is a better place to get gaming products from and so these shops are losing business. Games are not consumable like alcohol. If the shop fails then with it goes the places to meet and socialise. Personally I think such places are so valuable to society that I would subsidize them centrally to ensure people always had a local games shop to go and play games in regardless of where people bought their games. As I am not in charge of government spending I instead vote with my wallet and support my local business. I buy all my games from my local shop instead of online in the hope it will keep its doors open till 10pm most nights, have enough interest to keep putting on events, to keep its store copies of games up to date and have enough floor space to allow for at least thirty gamers to freely play games. One of the best instances to shop local is the games store because of all the incidental benefits that they bring with them and so I dedicate this article to Clifton Road Games for helping to improve society and preventing acts of social terrorism.

Felony Disenfranchisement

In the UK inmates are not allowed to vote, in the USA those convicted of a previous felon are not allowed to vote even when released. Countries that do afford the right to vote to inmates are in the minority. If one is to have any faith in democracy, and holds similar ideas to me as to the mechanics of society, the concept of felony disenfranchisement is wholly counter productive.

The main premise upon which I base this criticism is that the people are moulded by society. When there is poverty and injustice you will also find higher crime rates. I have spoken before about the most effective way to reduce crime in my essay “Crime and Punishment” and it had little to do with law and enforcement. If approached using game theory it is clear that people on the whole are not going to commit crimes when it is not in their best interests. Making the punishments more severe may curtail a small amount of crime but it is only tackling a tiny fraction of the picture. If society raises the conditions of the poorest people in that society with education, welfare, minimum wages, health services, good employment opportunities and so forth you also change the equation in a more productive fashion than by increasing punishments. The risks of committing crime increase when you have more to lose. If you always measure society as an average of all its people then you will never know if things are improving for a specific group of people. Society may appear to be getting wealthier however it could be the case that the poorest were becoming poorer, just at a lesser rate than the rich were getting richer. Reducing crime is a case of improving society at the bottom rather than at the top, or as an average of all spheres. It is mostly those near the bottom of society for which the risks of crime are worth taking. This is the relevant mechanism of society which I have assumed in my statement that felony disenfranchisement is counter productive.

I am not suggesting criminals are not to blame for their actions however I do also hold society accountable. By removing the vote from those who are incarcerated or have criminal records you are stacking the deck against things improving. For the most part those with criminal records are those who could be said to have been let down by society. By removing their chance to vote you eliminate the voice of those for who society is not working. This smacks horribly of the practices of the Communist Party in a large chunk of the twentieth century who would silence those who spoke against them. To look at it in another way it is like being put somewhere to live against your will and then only being allowed to move should you actually like where you were first placed.

The argument in favour of felony disenfranchisement speaks to the social contract and that criminals have chosen to brake it and therefore should not have a further say in matters. This would be a reasonable argument if at some point we had each entered into this contract consensually however we do not, we are simply born into society and expected to accept the contract by which it is operated. With no way to avoid the social contract those who dislike it are almost forced into breaking it due to their being no other exist strategy. Social change is slow, democratically or otherwise, you need the input of those with experience of what is wrong to help avoid those situations for future generations. Giving votes to criminals will not really benefit them as they have already shown the system is not suited to them by resorting to crime, it is all too late and too slow to do much for those society has already let down just by giving them a vote. It will however help future generations of people who share things they dislike about the social contract and social conditions with today's criminals.

Society is already very top down in terms of how it is shaped, capitalism ensures that those with most financial power have much more impact on things. The votes we have when we spend are presently more relevant and effective than the democratic votes we make come elections. Society ideally wants to have an equal momentum of change from all spheres so that it is not distorted out of shape. Capitalism generally increases the wealth gap and this is because it is not an even mechanism of evolution, it is weighted heavily at the top. Democracy is intended to be even and allow for consistent growth however felony disenfranchisement takes much momentum away from the essential shaping of society from the bottom up. Top down evolution is great in terms of scientific progress, innovation and the creation of infrastructure however it neglects things such as crime rates, unemployment rates and, even to a certain extent, life expectancy.

We do not even need to enter into a moral argument as to whether criminals should or shouldn't have a vote as it is so vital to the proper workings of democracy. Sadly very few democracies, if any, exist that work properly regardless of any felony disenfranchisement. Until such time that democracies do work well it is a far less pressing issue ensuring that criminals may vote. I sympathise with British leaders going against the EU and not instating ways for inmates to vote. In theory it is essential but in practice it is going to cost a lot and have very little impact. Even if it were enacted in a sufficiently functional democracy the effects would take years to be noticeable. This however does not mean we can just sit pretty and ignore the problem, it should be a sign that democratic systems have more serious problems at their core that need fixing first. I have detailed the key failings of those systems that are used today in my essay “Utopian Democracy”.

I am strongly against felony disenfranchisement in theory however in practice it is of minor social concern and our efforts should be focused on creating a functional and sustainable economic system and a democratic system that is more than just symbolic. Once we have these core social systems in place we can start to reap the benefits of simple yet obvious improvements such as voting for criminals. Although I am critical of present democracies I do have faith in the concept as the best theoretical method of governance. This is why felony disenfranchisement is still an issue which I care about despite deeming it to be presently fairly irrelevant.  

Mass Transit

Our ability to move ourselves and goods quickly and easily about the place is one of the most important aspects of human development. Without good ways to do this the global economy would come to a slow crawl. Mass transit (for which I am including personal motor vehicles and the road network in this essay) is an essential part of modern life. Mass transit operates on many levels for a variety of purposes. There is air travel which offers greatest speed but is expensive. There are cargo ships, liners and tankers which can carry vast quantities of bulky and heavy goods cheaply however they are slow and restricted to seas and oceans. We can use trains which are expensive to set up and consume quite a lot of land area but then offer a good all round package of decent speed, high efficiency and a large capacity. Last but not least is the motor vehicle which is cheap to the point of most people in the developed parts of the world owning one, they are also quick, versatile and very convenient. Most journeys for both goods and people will at some point involve a motor vehicle, even if the larger portion of the distance was spent on a boat or something else.

It is because of the cost and convenience of motor vehicles that they have been so successful. This has meant that there is a lot of infrastructure to support them which in turn has further increased the convenience and practicality of the motor vehicle. Although far more flexible than trains and railways you still need to have roads for your motor vehicles which take up a lot of space as well. Roads have been an integral part of society since its beginning and they have adapted to societies needs. Roads have become more abundant, less sightly and more dangerous, not to mention more crowded as humanity has grown and advanced and exchanged horses for motor vehicles. Hopefully humanity will continue to advance but this will put greater strain on the forms of mass transit that now exist. Typically people focus on the fact that basically all forms of modern transit use fossil fuels which are likely running very low and this can overshadow some other issues which should be addressed as well. While a loss of fossil fuels would make aviation much more expensive* it would still allow for trains, road vehicles and boats to operate electrically, which with the appropriate infrastructure to go with it would not be that much less practical. Bio fuels may also become viable, especially if we manage to manipulate micro organisms into making it for us out of our waste products. There are many scientific options available or just on the horizon that allow us to continue using our various forms of transport beyond the era of fossil fuels. The free market will start to invest in these alternate options more and more as the price of oil goes up. This will gain momentum with each advance in alternate fuels making them more competitive alternatives to oil. Provided we run out slowly rather than overnight I don't think there is too much to worry about in this regard. Things might change a little but the way of life should remain relatively similar. We can safely leave the way we power our transport systems in the hands of the free market, it has done a fantastic job with the far more important task of keeping us fed after all.

* (You would need a fuel with lots of stored energy compared to its weight to power flight, electrical propulsion would weigh far too much with present battery technology. As such we would need to chemically produce a fuel equivalent to high grade engine fuel which is a very costly process, especially if you are not powering that with fossil fuels either. )

What I deem to be a more concerning issue for our transport going forwards are linked more to efficiency, congestion and the negative impacts it has in its current forms on the places in which it passes. This is not something that the free market is so adept and solving. Traffic is one of the biggest inefficiencies in modern life, the economy must lose billions just in the man hours lost with people sat in traffic. There are benefits of living in groups, humans seem to like cities and the more we develop the greater our cities become. Population growth is not always linked with development and discussing the trends of such things is another essay entirely. We can at least say that for now there is still both growth in development and in population, meaning more cars on the roads. There are already many places that have far too many cars for the infrastructure to properly support. Per person the space taken up by a car is far far more than any other kind of vehicle - to support the need for more roads in many cities there would not be any space left for buildings!

Physical space is one big problem for motor vehicles, another is the required coordination to smoothly keep things flowing. Each person controlling their own vehicle makes driving in high volumes of traffic painfully inefficient. For one thing the stop start nature of driving in traffic is incredibly fuel inefficient but it is also needlessly slow. It is impossible for each person to be able to drive so as to optimise the flow of the local road network even if they try and be a considerate and efficient driver. It would however be quite an easy task for a computer to coordinate traffic. Then it could continually integrate and flow without ever needing to stop, cars would join a flow traffic from junctions like meshing cogs. You don’t need to reduce the number of journeys people are taking, nor the number of people to reduce traffic, you can simply reduce the time each journey takes. It would almost certainly be a safer system than trusting the control of cars to the public to have a computer network controlling speeds and direction on the roads.

Even if computers could perfectly coordinate traffic to optimise efficiency there are still concerns over both the volume of the traffic and to the affect it has on the surrounding area. While it may seem a little precious of me and hold less weight than some of the more practical concerns addressed in this essay, I dislike cars on roads. They are fast, heavy and consequently dangerous. They are noisy and dirty and unsightly. They act as vast barricades to the wild, cutting up ecosystems into fragile isolated pockets. Many roads get so fast and wide that they literally must be bridged in order to cross them within our cities. The motor vehicle dominates the road and makes using them for any other mode of transport (bicycle, horse etc) very unappealing. A road can ruin an area simply by proxy and while not the greatest ill in the world, is none the less certainly not a good thing and deserving of thought towards improving them.

Solutions exist with present technology however they would require vast initial investments to set up and would need an infrastructure rivalling road networks to be comparably convenient. It is not certain that humanity will abandon roads or personal vehicles by any means and not just because of the set-up costs of any alternatives. Although the free market will find an alternative to fossil fuels when required it is under no such pressure to solve congestion, pollution and other unwanted inefficiencies from personal vehicles. With the infrastructure already in place it will always be more appealing to work with what we have in economic terms. Solutions to congestion that keep roads will be found first and probably retained for the foreseeable future, perhaps people will spread more evenly. Taking a transport system either above ground level or below it does a great deal to tackle the problems of dissecting ecosystems, of being unsafe and unpleasant, and for coexisting with current roads. Unfortunately it increases the cost substantially and poses far greater engineering challenges.

It would not be practical to either set-up a new mass transit system overnight, nor would it be possible to simply stop using cars and so any new system would need to overlap with the road networks without disrupting them as they were built and then slowly adopted. This means the new system would have to be better in almost every way than cars as it would be competing with them. This is another huge reason why it is unlikely that we shall move away from personal motor vehicles and roads any time soon, if ever.

The image in my mind of such a system to rival cars and roads is like a mono rail with lots of individual carriages, all small but of a few sizes, some decked out to take a loaded pallet while most carry people. They are roomier than cars due to having no controls, no engine, no fuel and the seats facing inward, yet they occupy less space than cars being narrower and shorter. They run on a rail network that laces through the city out of the way of normal goings on. They run on electricity so are clean and quiet as a result. These rails weave through the city, sometimes along the side of wide roads, sometimes suspended above them and occasionally even going underground. There are stops in many more places than you would find for buses or trains, in the busy areas they are like pit lanes that won't hold up any other traffic by stopping in them while on the quieter routes the pods will stop any where to let people on and off. Each stop simply has a button which summons a nearby empty pod, some simply circulate around empty waiting for calls while other sit in holding bays out of the way awaiting peak times. The wait for a pod to arrive is never more than a minute and often much less, they arrive, open their doors and await for passengers to embark. Each has a control panel that is simple to use and allows people to quickly plug in their destination. Most people will have a card, rather like the Oyster card used in the London Underground that can simply be swiped to deal with any charges. They would also have pre loaded frequent destinations to further increase the ease of use. Once the destination is selected the pod moves off, it's route will be planned by a central computer that knows all of the journeys going on within the network. It will be able to adjust speeds and routing to ensure that the journey is as quick as possible while having the least acceleration and deceleration of the pod to reduce energy consumption too. Special pods could be called upon, the goods ones for easy city stock deliveries, larger ones for family trips and space for shopping or perhaps even high speed ones capable of going on motorway tracks that eventually link cities together. It is very optimistic to think that a network capable of operating within a city would also be capable of safe high speed intercity travel and conventional modern trains and mag-lev like they have in Japan and China might still be the best way to go long distances quickly and cheaply on land.

This brief description sounds all rather sci-fi and fanciful but it is well within our technological capabilities to produce one much like it. It would be safer, cleaner, quicker and more efficient than cars and roads, it would allow people to read or work while going places rather than having to drive and it would consume far less space in urban areas. It would combine the personal freedom and convenience of the personal motor car with more automated and efficient train style of transport. Although I have said that it is economic forces that make this idea impractical rather than technological difficulties or because it would be a downgrade on the present system, I have a perfect analogy for how these economic forces hinder it which I must share. Anyone familiar with chemistry will know that reactions that produce energy still need an initial investment energy to get them started which is called the activation energy. Petrol burns with air to produce lots of energy however petrol does not explode or burn with exposure to air, it needs a spark to start it all off. The transit system I have suggested yields more economic energy than the one we currently use as it more efficient, if it were already in place the economy would be better off as a result. The set up costs for the infrastructure however provide a vast activation energy investment that makes us quite stable where we presently are, we would need a lot more than just a spark to get us over the hurdle.

Such a spark is unlikely to come from the private sector, perhaps an ambitious company could pioneer an example system in a single town but getting permission to build all the places it would need to, as well as the time it would take to offer any return on this investment all make it highly unlikely to happen. The only way I can see a serious attempt to improve upon cars within society is for the public sector to initiate the massive undertakings. If cars were still around to compete it would be fine for private companies to own networks for towns as they would be forced to offer competitive prices however if personal cars vanished and no comparable alternative was there private sectors could not be trusted to properly maintain networks, keep prices low and so forth. In the UK we have some excellent case studies of how you can ruin a service by failing to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of private and public sector control. This is particularly the case with geographic monopolies such as a transport network. As a result even our present train network struggles to compete with cars on most fronts. The best solution to this is a joint affair of ownership and control where the state owns all the networks and rents them to companies which are responsible for maintaining and running them. The terms of the leasing would be dictated by the performances of the most efficient companies, with fines imposed for things going wrong which would allow for a form of competition to keep things running optimally and an incentive to maintain the infrastructure. Companies that could offer lower fares would be those that were more likely to get the contracts to run networks and this would keep prices low even without cars to compete.

It is an undertaking of this magnitude which is one of the best ways for a nation to progress out of the economic turmoil presently faced by many developed countries. It would put them in great stead to remain developed for the next chapter of humanity. Sadly this is this kind of radical long term thinking that is somewhat lost in most short term democratic system. The stagnation of transport methods serves as a nice example of the present situation of humanity. We are stuck in a functional but inefficient rut that is not well suited to the obvious challenges facing us in the future.

The wider economic, political and social problems aside, mass transit remains one of the foundations of modern society. My aim with this essay is to highlight issues surrounding our present systems which seem to fall under the radar of public debate. The proposed solutions were more of an attempt to show how good things could be. It is hard to appreciate the failings of our roads when having a car is so much better than not having one for most things. Even if we compare our present system to those in our history we will get a good feeling about what we have. Imagine never sitting in traffic again, never having to take your vehicle to the garage or find somewhere to park again. Imagine never having another crash or getting a fine for speeding. Imagine living near a main transport route and still enjoying a peaceful home life or being able to relax around them with your children and dogs while out and about. As we cannot rely upon the free market to provide us with better transport systems our best hope is that someone in the rare position of being able to implement a better system, even if only in a very localised area, has an urge to make a difference, driven not by profit by by their loathing of sitting in traffic and the other various inefficiencies of roads. Simply by talking about these transport problems we increase the odds that the right person has said urges to improve things.

People moan about traffic on a local scale plenty I'm sure but I fear we are often missing the main reasons why and are therefore taking action that is not the most appropriate. It is the uncooperative nature of driving on roads, the size per person that a car takes up and the stop start nature of town and city driving that causes roads to become grossly inefficient rather that just the sheer volume. We need to see the problem on a bigger scale that also takes the long term future into account. Buses and trains will help to reduce the volume on roads but can't ever replace the door to door on demand convenience of the car and therefore don't solve the problem very well, they simply ward off symptoms. There are few distinct and measurable correlations with the progress of humanity, one would be life expectancy and another would be our ability to move things about the place. We have reached a point where we are getting worse at moving some things about, most notably the hubs of society – the cities. This situation of regression should ring alarm bells that something should be done. It is not so much fuel that threatens our ability to transport things effectively but the actual mechanisms we employ to do it.

The Value of Life

We act as if human life is beyond monetary values in the west, as if we will pay any cost to preserve life but this is evidently untrue. This is an illusion that both society and state are happy to go on pretending or believing as it brings comfort and keeps order. We may well give anything and everything to preserve our own lives or the lives of those we love but to what lengths would society go to preserve those lives? While society may in some cases go to extreme lengths to preserve a few lives in exceptional circumstances this is not the norm, we may personally go to any lengths to avoid death in some situations but, as I shall attempt to show, this is not always possible and we must place a value on our selves so as to guide us in many of our choices.

In economic terms the value of a life is an easy calculation based on estimated remaining working life and that persons salary. This assumes that each person is just a tool capable of performing useful work and does not take into account the affections other people might have for the person in question. This more sentimental angle would bring us to a different figure based on how much each of our friends and family (including ourselves) would give to keep us in their lives. Even if in each case it was everything that people would be willing to give the final figure is still a finite monetary figure, as is the economy's way of evaluation. The concept of sparing no expense in the pursuit of saving lives is paradoxical as part of the cost of everything is made up from pieces of peoples lives, be that the time invested in the work or any risks involved in that work. We could only permit the top of the range safety features in cars as an example of how society could be more focused on saving lives and less so on saving money. The problem with doing this is that it is a lot more work and resources to produce only vehicles with the best safety features which would mean people have to invest more into getting them. Safer cars cost more and this cost is paid for in life, the only fundamental currency people have at their disposal. The argument boils down to something like would you rather sell some additional hours from your life now or risk not having those hours later. In neither scenario are the hours really yours. You can even work out which is the correct choice based on the risks, your earning capacity and the cost although this does assume at best that you don't enjoy working and at worst that it is comparable to being dead. Almost every choice we make is a gamble with some or all of our life with the returns being a bit more life or some enhancement to it. We buy the cheap car to save some life in paying for it at the risk of having an accident and losing it all.

It is in this regard that we often seem more callous with our own lives than those of our friends and family. We must do most of our gambling with our own lives, each time we cross the road or eat something it is ourselves we put at risk, however small. Certainly our friends and family can support us financially or invest in reducing risk on our behalf (such as a parent buying their child a bike helmet) but this only accounts for a portion of the gambles we take on a daily basis. As I already asserted we not only have an economic value but also a sentimental value to those close to us and so it is in their interests we minimise our own risks, however it is far less at their expense if we conform to their wishes than it is our own. In essence we are both at risk if I am careless with my life yet only I am really able to pay the costs of lowering our shared risks associated with my life. This is why our parents often seem overbearing and patronizing, generally we are a very important person in their lives and so they advise us continually to reduce our risks while often not taking their own advice. While a bit of an obscure statement and entirely unconfirmable I would assert that if a parent were to become one of their offspring somehow they would act either as themselves or the child but certainly not as per the will of the parent towards the child before the transmogrification.

For those we don't know it is easier to ascribe a monetary value upon their life but it may seem impossible to place one upon ourselves or loved ones. When asked what value we would place on our own lives and those of our loved one we might well say priceless, not measurable financially. and we might truly believe that however our actions would betray this statement. Earlier when I gave the example about the car safety I suggested you could work out which was the correct choice (the expensive safe car or the cheap dangerous one) given various bits of data. We can use a similar method to work this backwards and calculate what people actually value their own lives at in a monetary sense based on their actions. To do this we need to assume that people are always correct in their choices which is a risky assumption that cannot be relied on, however with the average of your values from many different choices you would get a good approximation. This leads to some unpleasant conclusions, the most notable being that, from what ever angle you look at it, richer peoples lives are worth more than poor peoples. Those who earn more are more valuable to society, if not directly to the majority of people then certainly towards capital. Those with more money will make choices that show they value their life and those of their friends and family highly in monetary terms compared to the actions of poorer people. This is not a law but a strong trend, there will be plenty of exceptions where wealthy people live very recklessly but not enough to upset the correlation.

When asked about the relative values of human life most westerners will say that it is equal for all people, or if they do differentiate it will be based on age, health or perhaps even potential such as a very bright person or a very good person. They will not entertain the idea that wealth begats a more valuable life despite the fact that our capitalism directed choices indicate exactly that. Morally we try and act as if we were operating within a communist state and economy. I am unsure as to why we cling to this belief against all the clear evidence. It could be that it undermines our self esteem if we accept that wealthier people than us are more of a person than we are. It could be that it is very hard to value other people due the the simplifications and assumptions of the methods I suggested making people unwilling to try, people value things differently and so it is far simpler to make everyone equal. It could be religious tradition that has kept these values of equality strong within society. It could be the stigma of fascism that has steered society away from accepting a reality where we do all have values like any other commodity. More likely it is a combination of these factors and perhaps others too.

The real question is does this illusion matter? Does it cause any inherent problems in society? This issue causes me difficulties as I am a lover of truth yet I too, despite the evidence, believe that life is precious and worth more than the monetary value we can place on it. I also believe that we have an equal right to exist regardless of your wealth. ( The right to an existence within a society is a slightly different matter as it does depend on your actions, which should they be criminal starts to pose problems but we can assume in this instance that all in question are not impinging on the freedoms of others). I live with the paradox that means I think the well paid doctor is worth more than the layabout however I think they have an equal right to exist. The justification of this paradox is that they are measured in entirely different currencies which are not directly linked. The value of a person is an economic concept which applies only where money is relevant. Beyond that scope this method of valuation has no uses. In areas where money is not a factor you should be using a moral currency to assess the value of people. You are able to relate in this manner what the present exchange rate is between moral currency and real money however you are unable to infer things about one based on the values given by the other.

Each society will have a different country wide average value of life based on the opulence of that nation. You will find this very apparent if you travel to a range of countries, the more developed ones will have much more health and safety regulations, rules will be stricter and better upheld. This is for the simple reason that it is not economically practical to invest more into preserving life than it is worth, the country will become worse off, the people it is saving are costing them more than they are returning to the society on average. As a country develops and its people command more wealth the whole nation become more precious regarding life, the state will be seen to go to greater lengths to preserve it and people will act more cautiously placing a higher premium on themselves. Certainly much of this is due to an aversion to being sued rather than the higher values of life directly but this amounts to exactly the same thing, it is because the values of life are increasing that people are willing to invest in legal protection against loss of life, injury and so forth.

By increasing the wealth of a nation you not only make life more valuable in economic terms but you also increase the value of morality. This is why it is often said that some people are only moral because they can afford it and some are only immoral because they cannot. This does not mean that the rich are more moral than the poor in action or belief nor does it say anything about the morals themselves, all it does is illustrate that the exchange rate between moral currency and real money changes as monetary wealth increases. We have no tangible or quantifiable way to redeem moral currency and so things are related in monetary terms which distorts our perceptions of morality a little.

Most of how the world works is inseparably linked to money and so the moral value of a person is generally less relevant than their monetary value. The social illusion of wealth not relating to how we treat people at least helps to preserve the important idea that there is a value outside of wealth to which we can give each life in this ethereal moral currency. It supports the idea that there is more to life than money. I therefore see little problems with having this social illusion despite it having the feel of misinformation and the occasional noble yet impractical actions of people. The correlation between an increase in wealth, efficiency, technology and productivity of a nation and an increase of the economic value of life of its citizens gives us some evidence that life and morals are more important than money as we invest ever more into them as and when we get more to invest. We give what we are able to in the pursuit of such things and so this too should give direction for the evolution of society, to place itself in ever better positions to be able to give more towards life and morality. We should not be advancing in production and technology not so we can have more stuff but so we can have more morals and more life.

I have bitten off rather more than I can chew on this topic which really deserves a book rather than an essay. There are many areas which I have not touched on that are relevant to this topic and those which I have included are given in the briefest possible terms. The value of life spills into many different disciplines from philosophy to economics to psychology which I have not explained when they crop up either. All of these factors muddy the waters and make it hard to make any clear statements about things without resorting to gross assumptions.

A quick example of a psychological effect which complicates my assertions is that we a beings of relativity and of experience. We become used to how life is and are less able to give up things we have. If life gets steadily better we remain content yet if it gets worse we quickly become miserable. Some people are obviously better or worse suited to changes and will react in different ways but if we accept the general premise we can draw some conclusions about the overall trends in society. It implies that although life gains monetary value as its situations improves it loses what I can only describe as used value. A new car is worth some amount but after it has been used it will be worth less, some cars hold their value far better than others. When the life of a rich person in some way becomes “used” due to some misfortune that diminishes the quality or value of that life it loses far more value to the person wielding that life than would be the case if the same misfortune occurred to a poorer person. I am not sure as to the relevance of this observation, nor to where it fits in exactly into the whole picture of the value of life. In some respects it warns against advance in society which is preposterous. The remedy hopefully lies in the sphere of psychology as one commensurate with the advance of society cannot exist in a purely economic form. I shall explore this concept a little further in an upcoming essay on the state of man which I am presently working on.

To conclude I do not think the illusions of life being invaluable are a concern for society. They serve as a reminder that life and morality are more important than money and therefore as a pointer to the direction forwards for society. We would all do well to avert the misinformation of the illusion and remember there are two distinct currencies to evaluate people. When money is involved in the equation it is unwise to forget the monetary value of people however distasteful. Any attempt to use the monetary value of people outside the scope of things relating to money, such as philosophy or theology, will lead however to moral bankruptcy. It is hard to say what the value we should use is even if we can give this currency a name and is really the subject of yet another essay. We can at least be content to say that we can make assumptions regarding the moral currency and theoretically tinker with it entirely without affecting the monetary values of life. We can be happy to know that there is no direct link between each persons moral and monetary worth. If we believe that people have equal values in the moral currency then you should be strongly in favour of minimising the wealth gap. If you believe people have different moral values you would be illogical to assert that anyone doesn't deserve more if it were practical to offer more.

Rage Against the Machine

Emotion is to the organism as morality is to society. Both emotions and morality act as a guide towards actions in the best interests of the appropriate bodies. Neither morality or emotion however are able to act as a comprehensive informant of the best course of action, largely because of the complexity and difference of life now as when compared to that of the very first humans. Indeed emotion and morality are often at war with one another guiding towards different actions. It becomes even more complicated and chaotic when emotions are sparked that are based on morality such as guilt over a selfish action. The conflict of internal opinions is not helped by the fact that morality is shifting all the time as society evolves. There is no solid grounding on which to work, it becomes easier to look to the rules of society for moral guidance than it is to reason ones self as to what is best for society. The law safeguards against most kinds of immoral action and acts a little like a stopping block for many peoples moral compass. There is a grey area both sides of the law, one of legal things that are immoral, or more precisely detrimental to society, and on the other of legal things which are moral or certainly of no detriment to society.

As a brief aside I think that law should be much more open to interpretation rather than attempt to be precise and all encompassing. We would likely be a more moral people if we were to allow a jury the trust and freedom to assess what is right and what is wrong for each specific situation that arises rather than following the letter of the law. People would have to think more about right and wrong rather than what loopholes they can find in the system. This would mean that both society as a whole was more morally aware and that justice would be more appropriate in the courts.

So returning to the conflict of emotional and moral impetus towards action it is hard to say which will win out in any given situation for any individual person. Which drive wins will depend on so many things from mood, to beliefs, to will power, to previous experience and so forth. It is far more appropriate to look at it on a macro scale rather than at a personal level where we can make some much safer assertions. The first safe assertion being that a higher proportion of people will perform an act detrimental to society if it is legal than they would the same act if illegal. In practise this is not always the case, I believe the UK has a higher per capita use of illegal drugs than other European countries where they are legal however I would suggest this trend is down to other social differences as other anomalies would also be.

When faced with a choice that is beneficial to the individual there will be emotions promoting that action, when there may be some detriment to others there will be some morality opposing that action. The tie breaker in such situations may well be whether the action is permissible by society or not. We get very angry with individuals and groups of people who are seen to do immoral things however I cannot lay too much blame at their feet. It is the system which is at fault, the people merely fill the roles society lays out to be occupied. It is almost always the system which is to blame for the problems in society, from crime rates, to the recent financial crisis to political corruption. It is not the greed of the bankers who caused the financial crisis, it is the relaxed and unsustainable policies controlling the finance sector that are the real cause. You could put the most moral upstanding people in those positions who may refuse to do certain things on principle however the demand placed on them by the rest of society would quickly change their methods or see them replaced by others with less scruples.

Big companies and rich people would be foolish not to seek the best ways to reduce expenditure through taxation and expenses loopholes. It is not done because these people are immoral but because the people have a natural drive for self interest and have that drive condoned by society. The competition so desired from capitalism ensures that every loophole will be exploited by industry as those that don't will fall by the way side over time. It is not our duty to castigate those that legitimately take immoral actions in their own interests for we would likely do the same. It is our duty to safeguard against ever being in that position by changing the system so no such position exists.

Legislating against exploits in the system is one way to improve society however it is only part of a more general method towards improving society which is to align the emotional and the moral responses in people. This means by way of incentive and disincentive making each choice an individual might face have an option that is both in the best interests of the individual and of the society simultaneously. There is a lot of misdirected anger floating about the societies of the world today, we like to have things to blame and we seem to have a preference for these things being people. Our anger would be much better use if directed at the system which lead to these events rather than the unfortunate people having to work within a faulty system.