Let's inspire the world

Our technology allows a small number of people to provide an entire nation with food. The majority of us can spend our time on other tasks, such as building beautiful cities, developing even more technology, and studying ourselves to understand how food and chemicals affect our health.

Visitors to America should be impressed by our cities, our schools, our legal system, our economy, and even our government leaders. We should be inspiring other nations to become more like us. We should be setting an example for other nations to follow.

Unfortunately, the only American cities that are beautiful and where people are healthy and happy are in the imagination of artists, such as the man who created the drawing above. 
More of his drawings are at:transfuture.net

Some people blame America's problems on incompetent or dishonest government officials, corporate executives, and school officials. Other people blame America's problems on Republicans, Democrats, Mexicans, Christian Fundamentalists, Jews, blacks, or Satan.

Regardless of who you blame America's problems on, the dilemma nobody wants to face is, why don't we improve our situation? Why do we continue to suffer from deteriorating trains, traffic problems, crime, chaos, and wars?

Our natural tendency is to trust authority

One reason we resist improving our world is that we resist facing the possibility that our leaders are corrupt or incompetent. Our natural tendency is to trust people in positions of authority; to assume they are protecting us and providing guidance to us.

Children offer the most extreme example of this. The natural tendency of a child is to assume his parents are wonderful people. A child will trust his life with his parents, and he will resist accusations that his parents are bad people.

This tendency to trust authority persists even in adults. In fact, some people have noticed that simply by pretending that they are important they can get people to regard them as an authority. People who are promoted to management positions are sometimes advised by other managers to put on an aura of being a leader. The reason is simply because we don't judge a leader by his ability to lead. Rather, like an animal, and like a child, we judge a leader by his visual appearance, posture, tone of voice, and -- most important -- according to whether other people consider him to be a leader.

Our tendency to trust authority is allowing mentally incompetent people to remain as leaders in government, universities, business, and news reporting.

We must be forced to do something unnatural

Humans and animals resist doing things that are unnatural for us. For example, horses resist wearing saddles. This is a sign that carrying objects on their back is unnatural for them. However, a long time ago somebody discovered that by forcing a horse to wear a saddle, it will become accustomed to it. We refer to this process as "saddle breaking" the horse.

Homosexuality is also unnatural for most of us. However, judging by the accusations of Kay Griggs (at HugeQuestions.com), if military leaders are forced into it, especially with the help of alcohol, they become accustomed to it. We could refer to this as "homo breaking". Apparently, the younger the man is, and the more alcohol he is given, the easier it is to "homo break" him.

The same concept applies to authority. Our natural tendency is to trust the people we regard as authorities. In order to become suspicious of our news reporters, government officials, business executives, school teachers, and NASA scientists we must become victims of their incompetence or crimes repeatedly, or watch other people become victims. We could refer to this as "trust breaking" a person.

Questioning authority is like homosexuality

Telling your friend that our government was involved in the September 11th attack is equivalent to telling a child that his parents are awful people, or putting a saddle on a horse for the very first time, or asking your friend to try homosexuality (or heterosexuality for some of your friends).

Your friends will resist you, but you should not let it bother you. Instead, you have to keep pushing, and eventually you may "trust break" them.

If we must be pushed, it is unnatural

If it were natural for us to question authority, we wouldn't have to push people to do it. When we find that virtually everybody has to be pushed into a particular activity, it is a sign that the activity is unnatural for us.

Conversely, activities that we do without encouragement are likely to be natural for us. For example, nobody has to push us into eating food, except for foods that are unnatural to us, such as dirt, grass, and wood.

If it were natural for humans to distrust each other, we would do it even as children. The fact that it takes a long time to become suspicious of authority is evidence that humans were designed for respectable leaders, not corrupt leaders.

Our world is a mess

Most people in leadership positions seem to be either corrupt, incompetent, or afraid to stand up to the corruption. 

We should give ourselves a more pleasant life, and that means providing ourselves with leaders we can trust and respect.

So instead of tolerating our situation, how about helping to move the human race beyond this condition of endless wars, crime, and chaos?