How would you
design a zoo exhibit of humans?
Another technique to help you understand your incredible options
for your future, and to help you realize that we must design society according
to what is best for us rather than what we want, is to imagine
if a giant asteroid is on a collision course with the earth, and it's going
to cause the extinction of everything except some bacteria. Imagine
that some aliens from another planet decide to take several thousand humans
to their planet, and that you are one of those people.
However, they regard us as monkeys, so they are not interested
in living with us. Instead, they want to put us into a zoo exhibit.
They realize that because we are more intelligent than the ordinary monkeys,
they need to provide us with a much nicer environment than a metal cage,
so imagine that they ask you to design
your exhibit. They have much more technology than we do, so they can easily
create virtually any type of exhibit you ask for.
Would you ask for the equivalent of a "wild game preserve"; specifically,
a large amount of land that is full of animals, plants, rivers, and lakes?
Would you ask to live on that land in a very simple manner, just
like our prehistoric ancestors? Or would you ask them to build a city that
resembles those in Europe during the Middle Ages so that you can live like
our medieval ancestors? Or would you ask them to build you a city that
has some of their technology, such
as their magnetic trains, robots, and moving walkways that can turn corners?
Would you ask them for any sports equipment, video cameras, swimming pools,
or bicycles? Imagine that they will give you anything you please. What
would you ask for?
The reason that scenario might be helpful to you is because our cities
are essentially zoo exhibits. We do not live in our "natural" condition.
When we create cities, we mark the boundary for our city; kill the
animals and plants that we don't want living with us; create some buildings,
roads, swimming pools, and parks; and bring in whichever animals and plants that
we want to live with. We are doing for ourselves exactly what we
do for the polar bears, monkeys, and alligators in a zoo. We are essentially
creating a cage for ourselves to live in. However, unlike the animals,
we are allowed to go beyond the boundaries of our cage and enter the "natural
world", although most people enjoy their cage so much that they visit the
natural world only briefly and occasionally.
The people who design zoo exhibits try to understand the mental and
physical qualities of the animals so that they can create an environment
that keeps the animals happy and healthy. Our zoos are successful with
certain animals, but there are some animals that we still do not understand
well enough. We can deduce that something is wrong with their exhibits
because those particular animals either do not reproduce, or they behave
in noticeably different manners compared to their relatives who are living
in the wild. We are not providing them with the proper environment, and
the result is that their behavior is abnormal.
What about the cages that we have designed for ourselves? Have we designed
our cities in a manner that keeps us in our optimal mental and physical
health? I doubt it because our cities today have not been designed. Rather,
our cities developed inadvertently and haphazardly. We are not following
any plan, and there is no coordination.
If we create some new cities, we should not design these cities according
to what we "like". Instead, we should consider ourselves as creating a
zoo exhibit of humans, and our goal should be to design a city that will
keep us in the best emotional and physical health. We should try to understand
what would be best for the humans in regards to homes, transportation systems,
schools, working conditions, social affairs, holidays, sports, and parks.
We have to do what is best for us, and that is not necessarily what
we want to do.
For example, all of us, especially men, are very concerned about our
status, and so our natural tendency is to promote
ourselves rather than be honest about ourselves. We are afraid
to do something that we might fail at or be mediocre at because we want
to create the impression that we are better than we really are.
We behave like this because we are animals who are competing
for mates, but in this modern world, we need to control our craving
to promote ourselves so that we can be relaxed around other people and
participate
in activities.
Businesses take advantage of our inhibitions by encouraging us to become
passive
consumers of their particular entertainment products rather than active
participants in our own entertainment. They encourage us to purchase
tickets to Lady Gaga concerts, watch their television shows, and purchase
the songs that they produce for us. There is nothing wrong with being entertained
by other people, but I think we would enjoy life a bit more if the city
provided activities that encouraged us to occasionally get involved
with our own entertainment.
The business that produce entertainment create the impression
that only Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand, and a few other people are talented
enough to entertain us, but every city has lots of people with talent.
Not everybody has the talent or desire to sing or play music, but everybody
can participate in other types of entertainment, especially game shows,
as I will mention further down in this document. Some people can play music,
and lots of people can give interesting
lectures or entertaining slideshows of their work or their travels. Some
people can entertain us with cooking, and some can entertain us with snorkeling
tours in a lake. No matter who you are, there is something you can
participate in. Some people can do gymnastics, and some can put on entertaining
skits, and some can provide hikes through a forest. You have no excuse
to spend your life in front of a television, avoiding participation in
social and recreational activities.
When most people fantasize about providing themselves with entertainment,
they fantasize about a big television with an expensive audio amplifier
and giant speakers. Some people also fantasize about purchasing tickets
to entertainment shows. We are so concerned about our status that we want
to be a voyeur of entertainment, not a participant, but I
think we would create a more pleasant social environment if we would help
one another control their emotions and occasionally participate in activities.
I also think we would enjoy the entertainment more when we personally
know some of the people involved in it.
|
We should help one another to relax and participate
in activities. |
Many parents have noticed that they have to push their
children into meeting people and trying new activities because children
are naturally shy and submissive, but nobody pushes the adults into doing
anything. Is this really the best policy for us? I don't think so. In this
modern world, I think the adults should encourage one another to control
their cravings for status so that they can meet new people, experience
new activities, and discover what life has to offer.
Adults, especially men, need to be reminded that we have an animal-like
craving to impress and compete with one another. We need to distinguish
between working and socializing. Competition is valuable
and necessary when we are working, but during social activities,
we need to relax so that we can enjoy life and other people.
I think that women used to provide what we could describe as the "social
glue" to help adults and children get together, but in this modern world
the women are spending too much of their time with dogs, watching television,
shopping, and other useless activities. I think women should get more involved
with organizing social and recreational affairs for both adults and children.
Two more examples of how we should ignore what we want and
do what is best for us are that men are attracted to sexual images, and
women enjoy looking pretty. Businesses exploit these characteristics by
providing sexual titillation every day to both young boys and adult men,
and the women are spending an enormous amount of time and money on makeup,
jewelry, hair colorings, and cosmetic surgery. Men and women are doing
what they like to do, but is this really providing us with the most
pleasant life? I don't think so. I think our lives will be nicer overall
if we control our emotions, eliminate the sexual titillation, and tell
the women to look pretty only for the social affairs.
We design zoos according to what we assume is best for the animal, not
what the animal wants. For example, we assume that alligators need pools
of water, and that monkeys need items to climb on. We also provide the
animals with what we assume is their proper diet. Some animals might prefer
to eat some of our modern, artificially flavored foods, such as potato
chips, bubblegum, or candy bars, but we don't give the animals what they
want. We give the animals what we assume is best for them.
Unfortunately, we are not designing our societies according to what
we think is best for humans. Our societies are developing inadvertently
as each of us pushes for whatever it is we want life to be. Each of us
is essentially turning off our intellect and trying to satisfy our emotional
cravings.
For example, the reason every society, even communist nations, have
wide differences in income is because each of us is trying to satisfy our
emotions rather than thinking about what is best for us. Men want to be
dominant, and women want to be the center of attention. Our emotions are
not
attracted to the concept of "equality". Each of us wants to be special,
and our natural tendency is to regard other people as inferior to us. As
a result, we push for society to give us more money that other people,
and special pampering. We also want special treatment for our children,
so we push for inheritances, monarchies, and nepotism. We also push for social
affairs that provide us with awards or praise.
For another example, consider the issue of exercise.
When we create a zoo exhibit of rats, and if the cage is small,
the rats enjoy getting exercise on a treadmill. At the other extreme, when
we create a zoo exhibit of spiders, the spiders do not want any
type of exercise equipment. What about humans? When designing a city for
humans, should we do anything in particular to provide people with exercise?
For example, should we provide people with exercise machines? If so, what
type of machines, and where should the machines be located? Will people
use the machines if they have to travel a long distance to get to them?
Or should they be located within walking distance of their homes? Or do
most people need them inside their homes? Or would people be more
likely to use the machines if we put them near their jobs so that they
could use them during lunch or after work? Or would it be better to design
a city so that people get exercise from walking, bicycling, rowing, hiking,
swimming, and sports? Should we design any social activities to push
people into getting exercise? Should schools push children into
getting exercise? Or will both adults and children naturally get all of
the exercise they need?
In addition to designing a city to deal with our physical needs, we
have to design the city to keep ourselves in good mental health. Will we
be happy in apartment buildings? Or do we need single-family
homes on individual plots of land? If apartments are acceptable, how
do we design hallways and front doors so that we enjoy the building? How
much space do we need in each apartment? How tall should the ceilings be?
What type of landscaping should we have around the buildings? How much
of a difference should we have between the homes of the rich and the poor
people? Is it best to have wide differences, small differences, or no differences?
Would we be happiest with apartment buildings that are rectangular blocks,
or should we make much larger structures that enclose large courtyards?
The buildings in the image below, for example, are just towers, but
by making those buildings much larger, like medieval castles, they could
enclose large courtyards, and it would be easy to cover the courtyards
to provide year-round protection from weather and insects.
We also need to provide social activities for humans. Should
we have city festivals, and if so, what should the people do at these festivals?
Should we celebrate New Year's, and if so, what would be the most appropriate
activities? What type of recreational events should we provide? How should
we design weddings, birthday parties, and holiday celebrations?
How should we feed the humans in a zoo? Do we provide them with
unlimited amounts of potato chips, candy bars, and donuts? To do a proper
job of feeding humans, we need to understand our nutritional needs; how
our digestive system works; and the health effects of cooking, preservatives,
pesticides, and processing.
The greater of an understanding we have about the human mind and body,
the better we will do at designing a city that keeps us in optimum mental
and physical health. As of today, our cities and social activities are
developing haphazardly as a result of every person, business, religion,
crime network, and government agency who inadvertently or deliberately
tries to manipulate our culture. I think one reason people want to rush home after work
is because most of our cities are unpleasant.
I think our social
environment is miserable, and that is why there are so many lonely people,
unpleasant marriages, and people searching for happiness.
I don't think our cities today are providing us with what we need. Our
social activities are especially idiotic. For example, consider our city
festivals. They are primarily business ventures and tax opportunities.
Some businesses and government officials arrange for some simple entertainment
to attract children, which in turn attracts their parents, but the primary
purpose of the festival is to allow businesses to sell crude snacks and
gifts, and for the government to tax those transactions. Is this the type
of social affair that will keep us in good mental health? I don't think
so. These activities are not designed for human life. They are designed
for profit. I would describe all of our social activities and holidays
as idiotic, annoying, and wasteful.
We should experiment with new social activities, as if we are
starting
over with life on a new planet. Our holidays, courtship affairs, recreational
activities, city festivals, sporting events, and other social activities
should be designed for more sensible purposes, such as to provide us with
exercise or entertainment, or to help us meet people, or to allow us to
do something useful for society. We should forget about the past, and experiment
with activities that truly make our lives more pleasant and interesting.
Don't mimic your ancestors; try to impress your descendants.
What should our homes be
like?
If we were to design a home for ourselves according to our
emotional cravings, each of us would design a gigantic palace for ourselves,
and we would put it on a very large amount of land. However, I don't think
the type of home our emotions are attracted to is the type of home that
we would be the happiest with overall. I think the large homes on large
plots of land are adding to the problem of loneliness and boredom, and
they waste a lot of our time on traveling. A lot of people dream of having
a longer life, but you would have more life if you did not have to waste
so much of your time on traveling or driving your children.
|
Adults should stop being afraid of criminals and start
providing themselves and their children with a city that they can
safely wander around in. |
I think the most pleasant environment for humans is for our
homes to be primarily for relaxing and sleeping, not for spending every
evening and weekend. I think we should design a city so that there are
lots of social areas for people to be together in the evenings. I should
once again remind you that this type of city requires that we reduce crime
to such extremely low levels that children can safely wander around
without worrying about pedophiles, gangs, and bullies. By bullies, I mean
"real" bullies, not what the Hollywood celebrities are whining about. Children
need to feel as safe in their city as they did during prehistoric times.
By allowing children to start leaving home at age 12, and by forcing
them all out by age 14, the homes can be designed smaller because they
would not need separate bedrooms for each teenager. They would need only
one large bedroom for the children. I think children would be happier sharing
a room. Today there is paranoia about mixing brothers and sisters in the
same bedroom, but I think it would be better if the boys and girls were
together. They are not going to be damaged if they see one another's naked
body. Actually, I think children evolved for an environment in which they
learn about human bodies and sex while they were young and did not yet
have any sexual desires. I think it is a mistake to let children grow up
in ignorance about sexual issues.
Only trial and error will help us determine the best environment to
raise children, but I think that the families who have only boys or only
girls, or who separate their boys from girls, are denying their children
one of the necessary parts of childhood. I think we should experiment with
methods to reduce the sexual ignorance and awkwardness that is widespread
in all modern nations. For example, I would not produce bathing suits for
children. I would tell them to swim naked, and I would explain to them
that they are naked so that they can become accustomed to what human bodies
look like.
By removing all the children by age 14, the home for families needs
only one large bedroom for the children, even if they have four children.
Furthermore, since people would be expected to spend most of their leisure
time outside their home, the homes would not be designed for socializing
or visitors. The homes would be more like luxury hotel suites. They would
not need bathrooms for guests, for example. The parents would have a bathroom
for themselves, and the children would have a bathroom, but since the bathroom
for the children would be for their use only, I would design it for children.
The sink, toilet, and shower should be designed for short children, not
tall adults.
When I was a young child, one of the aspects of toilets that confused
me is that they look like chairs, and I assumed that I should sit in them
like I sit in a chair, with my back against the toilet seat cover. However,
every time I sat on a toilet, I was in a crouched position at the front
of the toilet seat. A few times I tried to sit "properly" on the toilet,
but for some reason I could not poop in that position. I assumed that the
reason I could not sit properly was because I was too small to fit. When
I became older it occurred to me that the reason we crouch on toilets is
because humans are animals. We poop
the same way as cats and dogs. Therefore, we should design toilets for
a person in a crouching position, and the toilet should be smaller for
children. It is awkward for a child to be sitting on a toilet seat with
his legs dangling above the floor. It is more natural for us to be crouched.
Unfortunately, designing proper toilets requires adults who can overcome
their inhibitions about human bodies, sex, digestion, and waste products.
How many adults are capable of designing a toilet without constantly giggling
and making childish jokes?
We also need to deal with the fact that low flow toilets don't work
properly. Why are we trying to save water in our toilets? If we can fake
a man on the moon, we can figure out how to provide ourselves with enough
water to flush toilets properly. For example, if we design a city so that
all of the sewage is sent to a treatment plant, then the water can be recycled
to rivers, farms, or toilets. In this modern era, it is idiotic for us
to suffer with nonfunctional toilets.
This brings me to another reason why I designed the City of Castles
so that nobody has kitchens, and nobody does maintenance on their bicycles,
and nobody has automobiles. Also, nobody owns their home, so nobody is
allowed to do any type of maintenance or modifications to their home. The
city handles the maintenance of bicycles, automobiles, and apartment buildings.
The reason I prefer this type of society is that it allows us to prohibit
people from having access to paint, paint thinners, cement, roofing tar,
motor oil, or most of the other chemicals that make it difficult to recycle
sewage. In the City of Castles, the sewage is primarily organic and easily
broken down by bacteria.
The social clubs will provide people with a lot of chemicals so that
they can do arts and crafts, and other hobbies, but those chemicals will
be controlled by the social clubs, and they will have their own disposal
systems. This allows us to keep much better control over our chemicals.
If people are willing to share washers and dryers, then nobody needs
their own machines. Not only does this provide ourselves with much higher
quality machines that do a better job of washing clothing, but it also
gives us much better control over cleaning chemicals and lint that gets
into the sewage. If dry-cleaning machines can be designed to either completely
recycle their chemicals, or use biodegradable chemicals, then we would
not even need to use water to wash clothing.
This type of city will put people in close contact with one another,
which would be a disaster if the people despised or feared one another,
or if they were speaking different languages, but if we created a more
homogenous society, I think it would be a much more pleasant social environment
for both adults and children. It would be like living in a luxury hotel
with your friends on an island in which there is absolutely no crime.
Which aspects of life should
society control?
Every society provides some freedoms to their citizens, and
some restrictions. As I mentioned earlier, we do not yet have the freedom
for assisted suicide. The American government also restricts our access
to prescription drugs, and forbids the use of marijuana, cocaine, and certain
other drugs. At the other extreme, we have complete freedom in regards
to consumption of food. The government requires businesses to follow standards
for food safety, but each citizen is allowed to eat whatever foods they
want, in any quantity, and at any time. Each of us has the freedom to become
as obese, anorexic, and malnourished as we please.
We have the freedom to get married to whoever we please, although until
recently marriage was restricted to heterosexual couples. We are restricted
to having only one spouse, and although we discourage extramarital affairs,
we do not arrest people for doing it.
It is impossible for a modern society to allow everybody to do whatever
they please. We must make decisions on which activities are prohibited,
which are restricted, and which are tolerated but discouraged. Unfortunately,
we are making policies on freedom primarily according to our emotional
reactions. We need to make decisions based on intelligent reasoning.
We should insist that everybody show evidence for how the law or freedom
that they propose is beneficial to society.
The policies we follow today developed haphazardly, and they were influenced
by religions, businesses, and other groups, and I don't think many of them
are sensible. For example, why are we restricting access to steroids and
similar hormones? Is it to make sports more fair? Or are we trying
to protect the athletes from harming their health? Or did this policy
come about purely for economic reasons, such as for doctors to force
us to get prescriptions, or for drug companies to be able to charge higher
prices for their drugs?
Each law imposes a burden on society because it requires some
people to waste their time on law enforcement. Every law also creates an emotional
burden on us because we do not like the government controlling our behavior.
Therefore, every law should have a benefit that outweighs its burden. So,
what is the benefit to restricting steroids, and does the benefit outweigh
the burden?
If you respond that our restrictions on steroids are to prevent people
from harming their health, then why not apply this policy to alcohol and
food? Why not require us to get a doctor's prescription for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner so that the doctor can ensure that we are eating meals with
appropriate proportions and nutrition? Why do we allow people to ruin their
health with food and alcohol, but not with steroids?
If we remove the restrictions on steroids, who among us would suffer?
Some people are low on these particular hormones, and so their lives would
be more pleasant if they had easier access to them and could experiment
with them. If an athlete has a naturally high level of these hormones,
he can hurt his health by taking more of them, but why should we care?
We do not care if a person abuses food and becomes obese and sickly, so
why do we care if a person abuses steroids?
I suspect that there are more people spreading venereal diseases
than there are people who would abuse steroids. Some of the people who
are spreading venereal diseases are athletes. Why do we prevent
the athletes from taking steroids but not from spreading venereal diseases?
If we are going to protect athletes from their stupid behavior, then why
not stop them from spreading venereal diseases? Why not require that they
get a doctor's prescription to have sex? The doctor would be able to ensure
that they and their partner are free of diseases.
There are also lots of people having abusive marriages, and many
people are having unwanted children. Therefore, why not require
us to get a doctor's prescription for marriage, and to get another prescription
if we decide to have children? Why not require women to get a doctor's
prescription for shoes so that the doctors can prevent them from causing
permanent damage to their feet?
It's also interesting to consider that we have the freedom to carry
guns, and there are thousands of accidental shootings every year.
There may be more people who accidentally hurt themselves with guns than
there are athletes who would hurt themselves with steroids.
We give Rush Limbaugh the freedom to become obese, become intoxicated
with alcohol, and to smoke cigars, so why not give him the freedom to abuse
the painkiller, OxyContin? Why do we want to stop him from hurting himself
with painkillers but not stop him from hurting himself with food or alcohol?
Humans are arrogant, and we want to impose our views of life on other
people. In every society, there are groups of people battling for control
of each policy. The policy that gets implemented is the policy that is
supported by whichever group can dominate the others. However, nobody is
designing policies according to their intellect. Instead, everybody is
trying to impose policies that appeal to their emotions. Policies based
on emotions create a lot of anger and resentment because the people who
support the policies have no intelligent reasoning, and therefore, their
opponents can correctly claim that the policies are irrational. For example,
the people who want to use marijuana instead of alcohol can point out that
the people who promote alcohol have no intelligent reasoning for
pushing alcohol at weddings, restaurants, social affairs, holidays, television
programs, and movies, while putting people in jail for using marijuana.
The people who want to use alcohol became furious with prohibition in
1920, and they demanded the freedom to use alcohol. However, they are not
providing that same freedom to people who want marijuana, cocaine, or other
drugs. They treat the users of other drugs in the same manner they complained
about being treated. They also want to restrict our access to prescription
drugs. How do they justify their drug policies? They do not
justify their policies.
Everybody is selfishly following their personal emotional cravings.
This creates resentment because nobody has any intelligent reasoning for
their drug policies. The end result is that people are fighting with each
other over which policies to implement. The policies that dominate society
are whichever policies have the most support, regardless of whether they
are rational.
American society does not merely tolerate alcohol. Rather, we
push
it. Why promote alcohol while prohibiting or restricting marijuana,
cocaine, OxyContin, and insulin? The reason is simply because the majority
of Americans enjoy becoming intoxicated, and they selfishly want to impose
their desires on everybody else. If the marijuana users were to form their
own society, then they would push marijuana on us. In their society, the
people who wanted alcohol would be the oppressed minority.
Our policies for drugs should make more sense. For example, we should
describe alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs as "recreational
drugs". Alcohol should not be described as an "adult beverage"
or as a "drink". We should be honest about what drugs are, and why
people use them. Also, if we are going to allow alcohol while prohibiting
other recreational drugs, then we should provide a more honest reason for
the hypocrisy. For example, we should admit that alcohol is a dangerous,
recreational drug, but that we tolerate alcohol because an enormous percentage
of the population enjoys becoming intoxicated on a regular basis for reasons
that we don't fully understand, such as to mask internal pains, or because
they have trouble socializing while sober. We should explain our prohibition
of the other recreational drugs as being due to their lower popularity,
not because alcohol is a "better" drug.
That type of reasoning will explain our toleration of alcohol,
but it doesn't justify pushing it on people, and it doesn't justify
alcohol abuse, such as people who become so intoxicated that they
cannot work properly the next day, or who become unconscious on the city
streets. We should not promote alcohol or any other recreational
drug, and we should not tolerate abuse of any recreational drug.
If we design a society in which each city can be culturally independent
of the others, then one city might prohibit all
recreational drugs - including alcohol - and another city might experiment
with allowing or tolerating some or all drugs. For example, one city might
tolerate all drugs, but with restrictions, such as the drugs are available
only in certain facilities, similar to how Amsterdam tolerates marijuana
and prostitution in certain areas. With this policy, there would be certain
facilities in the city that are authorized for drug use. Another possible
restriction is to require that marijuana be used as a drink, like tea,
so that the smoke doesn't bother anybody, and to reduce fire hazards. They
could also put restrictions on the hours that the drug facilities are open,
such as restricting them to a few hours in the evening during the weekdays,
and all day Saturday and most of the day on Sunday.
By restricting drugs to certain facilities, we can forbid it in public
areas, such as apartment buildings, parks, museums, and music concerts.
If people want to listen to music while on drugs, they would have to arrange
for the music concert to be at one of the drug facilities. The city could
also insist that the drug users remain at the facilities until
most of the drug has worn off. This would prevent people from wandering
around the city while on drugs, and it would prevent the problem of people
being drunk or on drugs in their home, which can annoy their neighbors.
Many people assume that if we allowed everybody to have access to recreational
and prescription drugs, there would be a significant increase in drug abuse,
such as people being on drugs while working. However, if the legalization
of drugs caused a significant increase in drug abuse, all we have to do
is evict the people who cannot control their drug use. This would
create a society in which there is much less tension between the public
and the government, and there would be no need for any of us to watch over
other people and try to stop them from using drugs.
Many alcohol users will complain that they don't want to tolerate other
drugs, but if the other drug users are keeping their drug use under control,
why should we waste our time trying to stop them from using drugs? We have
to accept the fact that a significant percentage of the population does
not enjoy reality, and rather than try to stop them from using alcohol,
marijuana, or cocaine, some cities should allow drug use. However,
I would restrict the drugs to certain social clubs, and require everybody
to keep their drug use under control so that it doesn't interfere with their
jobs or annoy other people. Also, we should prohibit the drug users from
reproducing. Eventually this will create a race of humans that enjoys life
as it is, with no need for drugs. It is better to eliminate the desire
for drugs than to control that desire.
I think we should change our attitude towards recreational and prescription
drugs. Some of the changes that I would make are: 1) Schools should teach
children that all living creatures are defective, and that each of us should
watch for symptoms of defects. Students should be told that cravings for
any type of recreational drug is a sign of a mental or physical disorder,
and so is a craving for abnormal amounts of material items, sex, food,
fame, babies, sleep, or water. Schools should encourage children to compare
themselves to other people in order to figure out what their problems are.
2) Everybody should have access to honest information about both
recreational and prescription drugs rather than sales propaganda or anti-drug
propaganda. 3) We should provide everybody with easy access to blood tests
and other medical procedures in order to keep us in good health. Society
should provide us with the facilities to do the simple tests ourselves
so that we are not a burden on the medical professionals. 4) Everybody
should have access to prescription drugs so that we can experiment with
them. People may as well also experiment with marijuana, and whatever other
drugs they want to experiment with. For all we know, some of these drugs
would be useful for dealing with cancer, migraine headaches, depression,
or other problems.
I think we are fools to promote the philosophy that alcohol is a wonderful
"adult beverage", and that the users of other drugs are evil and should
be put in jail. It makes more sense to understand why some people want
alcohol and other drugs. Likewise, we accomplish nothing by ridiculing
fat people, or reprimanding people who have excessive cravings for sex,
money, or fame. By changing our attitude from punishing strange behavior
to encouraging people to figure out what their problem is, I think a lot
of people are going to discover that their cravings for drugs, food, fame,
and other items is due to something that is partially or completely correctable
with modern medical technology, or by a change in their diet or environment.
If a person becomes a disruption to society because he is too irresponsible,
stupid, or mentally ill to control his drug use, we should evict him, not
torment him. Everybody we invite into our society should be accepted
as one of our team members. We create a miserable environment when we are
living among people we despise, punish, or torment.
This philosophy will also encourage people who have acne pimples,
restlessness, insomnia, digestive problems, bulging eyes, or other physical
disorders to analyze themselves to determine if any of their problems are
due to something that can be partially or completely corrected. For example,
Marty Feldman's
bulging eyes are one of the symptoms of excessively high levels of
thyroid hormones.
From my experiences with thyroid hormones, this hormone has an incredible
effect over all of our body and mind.
It is an amazing hormone. I suspect that millions of people
have thyroid levels that are slightly too high or too low, but they don't realize
it because their problem is not extreme enough for current medical technology
to notice. However, the abnormal levels will have an effect on their mind
and body. I suspect that a lot of these people are reacting to their problems
by turning to drugs, money, fame, sex, food, extreme sports, and crime.
Since about 10 times as many women have problems with thyroid levels, this
could explain why so many women have abnormal moods and behavior.
This
article claims that Adolf Hitler's breath was unusually stinky. Most
people react to a person with bad breath by ignoring the problem or avoiding
the person, but we should react by wondering if the person has a physical
disorder. Many people assume that bad breath is due to the food that
we eat, but I think food has only a small and temporary effect on breath.
I think the truly stinky breath is the result of people with physical problems
of some sort, such as blood sugar levels that are too high or low, hormones
that are abnormally high or low, or internal organs that are not properly
regulating some chemicals. These physical disorders can alter the composition
of the blood, saliva, and mucus. When the saliva changes its composition,
it can allow bacteria to grow in the mouth, resulting in bad breath and
tooth decay.
If everybody was carrying around a futuristic medical monitoring device
on their body, and if it was transmitting medical data continuously to
a database, I suspect that we would discover that a person's mood is usually
worse when his breath is stinky. The reason I suspect this is because when
your body is not functioning correctly, you are likely to be more irritable
and miserable. I think that eventually we will be able to do some medical
diagnoses by analyzing saliva.
The human race has to stop acting like stupid animals. When we encounter
a problem, we should analyze it, not run away from it or react with
anger. When somebody has bad breath, for example, you should let them
know. If a person were to keep track of when his breath stinks, he
might notice a pattern that can help him to figure out what his problem
is. Ignoring somebody's bad breath is like ignoring a cancerous lump on
their face. We should be helping other people to understand themselves,
and they should return the favor by helping us to understand our problems.
We should stop pretending that most people are healthy and that only a
few of us are sickly. We have to face the fact that everybody is defective.
Each of us should be trying to figure out what our particular defects are,
and we should help other people identify their defects.
The people who have cravings for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs
should admit that they have a problem rather than pretend that they "like"
the drugs, and they should consider the possibility that their craving
is due to a problem that can be partially or fully corrected. We are not helping
ourselves or the drug users by tormenting them or punishing them. Besides,
they are already suffering. We are not going to make them better
by adding to their suffering by ridiculing them, putting them in jail,
or punishing them in some other manner. We need to understand what
is causing these problems, and we need to restrict reproduction so that
each generation is healthier than the previous generation.
There is no way to create a society in which everybody has the freedom
to do whatever they please. There will always be restrictions on some activities,
and other activities will be prohibited completely. However, I think we
can come up with more sensible laws than what we have today. For example,
what is the sense of making marijuana illegal when 20% to 40% of the population
is using it regularly? This creates an enormous problem with crime.
America is wasting an enormous amount of money by locking people in jails
for marijuana use or sale. What are we gaining from this? It does not prevent
marijuana use. All we are doing is wasting our money, wasting our police
force, and irritating people.
Unless a city consists of people who truly do not want drugs, then there
is going to be drug use. We should acknowledge this problem and design
a society specifically to deal with it. Two changes that we could make
to deal with drug use are:
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1) Design transportation systems for people
on drugs.
It is idiotic to mix alcohol with automobiles. Even when people
keep their alcohol level below the limit for driving automobiles, the alcohol
will have a detrimental effect on their performance. Therefore, in any city
that permits alcohol or other drugs, we should design the city with some
type of automated transportation system, such as trains.
2) Reduce financial incentives for promoting drugs.
I am willing to tolerate drug use, but it is idiotic
to promote drug use. However, in a
free enterprise system, businesses do not merely tolerate whichever drugs
are legal. Rather, businesses push
drugs on us, such as by creating deceptive advertisements for television
that promote their sleeping pills, alcohol products, digestive pills, pain
relieving pills, caffeine products, and sexual enhancement pills.
There is an especially large financial incentive to pushing alcohol.
The reason is that intoxicated customers are more likely to spend money
than sober customers. Restaurants, social clubs, sporting events, and other
businesses have a financial incentive to push their customers into becoming
so intoxicated that they will spend more money than they otherwise would.
I also suspect that one of the reasons alcohol is being pushed by so
many men is because they want to get women intoxicated so that they can
have sex. Hopefully we can reduce that problem by providing more courtship
activities, which should help people form more stable marriages.
If we are going to tolerate drug use, then we should not provide anybody
with financial incentives for pushing drugs on other people. One way to
accomplish this is to create a society in which all of the basic necessities
are free. None of the manufacturers of drugs would have any incentive to
push their painkillers, antihistamines, or sleeping pills. None of the
restaurants, music concerts, weddings, recreational events, or other social
events would have any financial incentive to push alcohol or any other
drug. Actually, when chefs are providing their food for free, and when
musicians are providing music for free, and when other people are arranging
other events for free, they will want customers who are sober and
who appreciate their efforts rather than a bunch of drunks.
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If we allow each city to be culturally independent of the others,
then we are likely to find that each city develops slightly different policies
for alcohol and other recreational drugs. The advantage to letting each
city be different is that the cities that do not support certain recreational
drugs do not have to torment the people who want those drugs. Instead,
they can evict them to the cities that allow drug use. We will not be able
to satisfy everybody, but it will be better than what we have today, in
which a significant percentage of the population is being tormented.
Rather than try to control people's use of recreational drugs, I think
it is better to give everybody as much freedom as possible and instead
restrict
reproduction to the people who are better suited to the modern world.
This prevents the problem of babies with drug addictions and drug-induced
birth defects, and eventually the human race will evolve into a species
that can enjoy life without drugs. This requires that the cities that allow
recreational drugs face the fact that there is something
genetically
wrong with the drug users, and that drug users are cruel and
selfish to pass their problems onto their children.
Since people, especially women, have intense cravings to reproduce,
we have to face the possibility that some drug users will try to use drugs
secretly in order to deceive us about their drug problems. In such a case,
we will end up with the ridiculous situation in which drugs are legal,
but some people are using them secretly and illegally in order to pretend
that they don't have any interest in drugs. However, as I will describe
further down in this document, all types of illegal activities will be
more difficult in this type of society, so this problem should not be very
severe.
It's also interesting to consider why
the human liver has the ability to break down alcohol. The only sensible
explanation is that our primitive ancestors were regularly exposed to alcohol.
Animals that eat fruit will occasionally eat fermented fruit. Since alcohol
interferes with an animal's mental performance, the animals that had a
difficult time handling alcohol tended to have a lower success rate in
life. Through the centuries, the animals with the best ability to handle
alcohol dominated the others. When our ancestors developed containers
to store water, honey, fruits, and other items, they occasionally but accidentally
created fermented liquids, thereby increasing this problem and requiring
a liver that can break down even higher levels of alcohol.
It is important to note that our ancestors developed an ability to handle
the level of alcohol that was typical for their particular environment,
but we are no longer living in that environment. During the past few centuries,
we have been creating fermented drinks with extremely high alcohol levels,
and we have been producing them in very large quantities. Many people are now
drinking more alcohol than their liver can handle. Some of these people
are dying as a result, such as from automobile accidents, but most of them
are surviving and reproducing just like everybody else. This is increasing
the number of people who want to get intoxicated. If we also allow other
drug users to reproduce, then each generation will also have more of an
interest in marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and other drugs.
The human race is currently on a path to destruction. We need to do
what nature used to do for us. We can allow people to get drunk, smoke
marijuana, and use LSD, but we should restrict reproduction to the people
who have less of a need for drugs. Eventually this will create people who
can enjoy life without any drugs.
We should reduce financial
incentives for all
crime
Providing the basic necessities for free would do a tremendous
amount to reduce all types of crime,
except for such crimes as vandalism, graffiti, rape, and child molesting.
In such a society, money would be useful only for scarce resources, such
as vacations and truffles, and that would make money much less desirable
to the crime networks.
We can further reduce crime by eliminating cash and using only electronic
money in order to make it very easy for the police to follow transactions,
thereby making it virtually impossible for crime networks to do any type
of transactions with money. We could go one step further and prevent financial
transactions between individual citizens. The money that a person
earns would be for his use only, so
he could not give any of his money to anybody else, not even his children,
spouse, or friends. That type of money would vanish when a person dies.
Anybody in this type of society who wants money has to
earn it for themselves. This would make it impossible for people
to give money to crime networks, and it would be impossible for people
to borrow money from one another.
By making those changes to society, crime networks could not sell their
illegal items for money. They would have to trade
their illegal items for something, such as some other illegal items, sex,
better grades on school tests, or a job. Likewise, they would have to bribe
people with offers of sex or illegal items rather than money. These types
of transactions are occurring in the world today, but it is on a much smaller
scale because it is not as desirable as money. Therefore, making these
changes would do an incredible amount to reduce crime.
If we also remove the secrecy that protects people in leadership positions,
then it would be even more difficult for the crime networks to get away
with bribery or any type of special favors. When we watch over our leaders
and insist on intelligent behavior, it would be easy to figure out when
an official is doing somebody a favor, or when they got their job as a
result of a favor.
When there is very little incentive for criminals to produce or distribute
illegal items, then most of the people who want illegal items would have
to produce it for themselves. For example, if drugs are illegal, some people
might grow their own marijuana, or make their own methamphetamine. Criminals
could also make their own explosives. This type of activity is occurring
in the world today, but this problem will also diminish in the type of
city I am promoting. For one reason, everybody would have a very similar
and small home, and they would not own their home. This would make it difficult
for people to use their home for illegal activities. Nobody would be able
to justify bringing hydroponic equipment, chemicals, or other items into
their home. They could do their illegal activities in the forest, but in
a city in which there is no way for people to keep secrets, their frequent
travels to isolated areas would become suspicious.
Another reason it would be difficult for people in this type of city
to be involved with illegal activities is because the ordinary citizen
wouldn't have access to industrial supplies. We would have free access
to food and clothing, and we would be able to use bicycles, cameras, computers,
phones, sports equipment, and lots of other items, but we wouldn't own
any of the buildings, swimming pools, or material items. The city would
own and maintain all items. None of us would be allowed to do construction
on our home because we wouldn't own our home, and since we wouldn't own
any land, we would not even have access to gardening equipment. As a result,
no ordinary citizen would have access to the types of chemicals, tools,
and other supplies that are needed to do some of the illegal activities.
There would be nothing equivalent to the Home Depot retail store, for example.
The government would be in control of all of the businesses, and none
of them would be allowed to provide citizens with chemicals, tools, butane
tanks, or welding equipment. Some of the social clubs would provide access
to potentially dangerous items so that their members could engage in arts
and crafts, scientific research, and other hobbies, but all of those items
would be under the control of the organization, and the people would not
be able to take them home for secretive, personal projects. The end result
is that criminals would have a difficult time in this type of society.
How can we prevent suicide?
There are claims that suicide is increasing, and in response,
groups of people are forming to stop suicide. Not surprisingly, these people
expect us to provide them with donations or tax money. For
example, in September 2012, $56
million of tax money was authorized for suicide prevention program
that began in 2004. Some organizations are trying to alter our culture
to support October as the National
Anti-Bullying Month.
I think that if we were to study the issue of suicide, we would discover
that everybody who commits suicide is suffering from some type of physical
and/or mental disorder. The only suicidal people who can be helped are
those who are suffering from a problem that is either temporary, such as
the result of the environment, or who have a medical problem that can be
fixed. (Note: I am referring to real suicides, not
murders
that have been disguised as suicide.)
For example, when war or natural disasters cause us to suffer sleep
deprivation, stress, and improper nutrition for long periods of time, we
start suffering mental or physical problems. We should not become suicidal
simply because of poor nutrition or lack of sleep, but because we are different,
some of the people in this condition will experience more physical or mental
pains than others, and that can lead to thoughts of putting an end to their
misery. We can help those suicidal people because their suicidal thoughts
are due to a temporary and extreme environmental problem. As soon as we
give them a better environment, they will become better.
However, some people have such defective minds or bodies that they are
suffering mood changes, pains, and other problems under ordinary
environmental conditions. Unless their problems can be relieved with medical
technology, there is nothing we can do to help them.
However, if a person's mind or body is so defective that even under
normal conditions
he is suffering from mental or physical pains, then there is no relief
possible for that person. These people are in a
perpetual state
of misery, and they either have to suffer forever, or commit suicide. If
we prevent them from killing themselves, we are simply prolonging their
misery.
Another way to explain this concept is to consider bribery.
Some people have agreed to do murders for relatively small amounts of money,
such as a fraction of the typical person's yearly income. Could you
be bribed into murdering somebody?
You might think that you cannot be bribed into committing a murder, but
everybody
can be bribed. The difference between us is that we have a different "bribery
level".
Since most bribes are offers of money from crime networks,
you may not be interested in taking their bribes. Therefore, it would appear
as if you cannot be bribed. However, if some aliens from another solar
system were to visit the Earth and offer you something that you considered
more valuable than money, such as using their stem cell technology to fix
the problems with your body and make it younger, and the only requirement
was that you murder somebody, chances are very good that you would ask
such questions as, "Uhhhh, who do I have to murder?
And how do I know that you will give me what you promise?" You would
find yourself looking for reasons to justify the murder. For example, if
the person was getting old, you might say to yourself, "Well,
he is old and is going to die soon anyway." If the person was young
but lonely, you might say, "Well, he isn't happy,
so I may as well put him out of his misery."
The point I want to make about bribery is that each of us have a different
bribery level, although some of us may have a threshold that is beyond
realistic. This same concept applies to suicide. There is no dividing line
between the people who commit suicide and those who do not. Each of us
have a different "suicide level". At
one extreme are the people who are so much like animals that they will
not kill themselves under any circumstance. Suicide requires a certain
amount of intelligence, a certain ability to think, and a certain ability
to override emotions. A person has to be able to think about his life and
his future, come to the conclusion that his life is not worth living, and
then override his powerful craving to live. Animals are not capable of
doing this. Likewise, stupid people and people who have very little control
over their emotions will not be able to commit suicide, either. The ability
to commit suicide is actually a very advanced mental quality.
You may think that you would never commit suicide, but everybody who
is capable of thinking and controlling their emotions is capable of suicide.
However, we have a different suicide level. Some people have such a high
tolerance for pain, suffering, and misery that they will survive virtually
anything that is realistic. Other people
would commit suicide only for unrealistic
situations. For example, imagine if aliens from another planet were to
capture you, take you home to their planet, and then put electrodes in
your brain to torture you day after day because they consider it entertaining
to listen to you cry, similar to how we enjoy listening to birds chirp.
If you had to go through that torture decade after decade, you might eventually
come to the conclusion that there is no sense in living any longer.
Now consider how these concepts apply to suicides. When we are suffering
from lack of sleep or poor nutrition due to war or natural disasters, our
body and mind will suffer. We will experience physical pains, and our brain
will not function properly. Our mood will change; we will be much less
pleasant and cheerful. If our mind and body have been designed properly,
we will realize that the misery is temporary, and we will look forward
to ending it. However, each of us have a different ability to deal with
miserable conditions, and we have a different suicide level. If our
suffering exceeds our suicide level, then we will commit suicide.
Years ago I read an account by an American soldier who was in the Korean
War. (I can't remember where I saw this article). He said that he was with
a group of soldiers who were accidentally bombed with napalm by the American
Air Force. Some of the soldiers who were burnt very badly by the napalm
were laying on the ground and twitching, and some of them were begging
the other soldiers to kill them and put them out of their misery. The other
soldiers tried to calm them down, and I think that most of them survived.
Those particular soldiers probably didn't think of themselves as suicidal,
but they were begging for assisted suicide. You might not think of yourself
as suicidal, either, but you might have lots of suicidal thoughts run through
your mind if somebody were to spray you with napalm.
Incidentally, there are so many incidents of "friendly fire" that you
have to wonder how many of them are really "friendly". Once you realize
that Jews are instigating the wars and secretly manipulating them,
you ought to wonder how many of the friendly fire situations are the result
of their manipulation.
Suicide increases during wars and natural disasters because life becomes
miserable for us, and as the misery increases, more people reach their
suicide level. The only suicidal people that can truly be helped are those
who become suicidal under abnormal conditions. We can help them
by getting them out of their miserable situation and putting them into
a more normal environment.
By comparison, if a person is suicidal in a "normal" environment, that
is a sign that he is suffering from so much physical or mental pain that
he has exceeded his suicide level in what should be a pleasant environment.
These people cannot be helped unless their problem is due to a medical
disorder that we have the ability to fix, such as with insulin or other
hormones, or by changing their diet, or by removing whatever they are allergic
to. By fixing their medical problem, we reduce their physical and mental
pains, and that puts them below their suicide level. Unfortunately, the
people who work in the suicide prevention programs are not
providing medical analyses for the suicidal people. They are
more likely to provide pity, sex therapy, or religion.
People who are suicidal should not
talk to psychologists. They should instead check with medical doctors
to see if there is something wrong with their body or mind that can be
fixed. If they have a problem that we have no ability to fix, then
there is no sense stopping them from committing suicide because we would
simply be prolonging their misery. It would be better to offer them a method
to kill themselves in a pleasant manner.
Another important issue regarding suicide is that most of the people
who try to commit suicide don't seem to be interested in committing suicide.
I think that most suicide attempts are similar to a child's temper tantrums.
Specifically, the people are upset with their lives, and they don't know
what to do, and they are trying to attract the attention of other people
in order to get their pity and help.
There are more people today working in suicide prevention then
there were centuries ago, so if the reports are true that suicides are
increasing,
we could conclude that the suicide prevention programs are failures.
Why are we paying people to prevent suicide when suicides are increasing?
Would you regularly pay a doctor to remove lice from your body if the number
of lice was continuously increasing? We need to reevaluate our attitude
and policies towards suicide when faced with such an incredible failure.
Since a person is just a random collection of genetic qualities, there
are always going to be defective people who have miserable lives. The American
attitude is to feel sorry for the "Underdog" and the "disadvantaged", but
feeling sorry for miserable people doesn't help anybody. We should not
allow people who are living among us to suffer. Eventually we may have
enough medical technology to understand and prevent every suicide, but
until then, we have to face the fact that some people are going to be so
miserable that they will want to kill themselves. We should provide everybody
with free access to a very pleasant suicide center where they can kill
themselves in comfort, such as relaxing in a chair while listening to music.
They could drink something that first puts them to sleep, and then kills
them. If a person was too physically disabled to drink the liquid by himself,
then somebody would assist him.
A young girl in Canada, Amanda
Todd, committed suicide, supposedly because of "cyber bullying". The
news reports try to make her appear to be an ordinary girl who was driven
to suicide by bullies, but I suspect that she was a mentally defective
girl who had trouble dealing with life's routine problems, and the other
children did not like her.
She claims that one of the most emotionally distressing incidents was
when a boy posted a photo of her lifting up her shirt and showing her breasts,
but how does such a photo make a woman suicidal? Some women make money
by showing their breasts, and some women become famous when they release
video of them having sex. However, Amanda reacted to that photo by becoming
emotionally distressed, and she started cutting herself with a knife (That
photo comes from her
video).
A few days later the secretive group, Anonymous, exposed
the cyber bully. They want us to believe that they are heroes who are saving
us from bullies, but if they are heroes, then why are they secretive about
who they are? More importantly, why are they refusing to expose the crimes
that are committed by Jews, such as 9/11, the Holocaust, and the kidnapping
of the Bollyn family? I suspect Anonymous is connected with the international
Jewish crime network, and I think they are exploiting the Amanda Todd suicide
in order to make themselves look like heroes in order to increase their
popularity. I would not be surprised if they murdered her in order
to create the incident.
It may be true that some of the boys who were harassing Amanda Todd
are destructive freaks who should be removed from society, but that doesn't
change the fact that Amanda Todd was also mentally defective. Feeling sorry
for Amanda Todd is as idiotic as a gardener who feels sorry for sickly,
dying plants. A gardener should remove the sickly plants and take care
of the healthy plants. Likewise, we should create a society of healthy,
happy, honest people, not a society of freaks who hate, torment, cheat,
deceive, rape, and abuse one another.
If the anonymous group, or anybody else, was truly interested in doing
something useful, then they should help us to understand these issues,
and they should recommend policies for us to experiment with. For example,
my suggestion to reduce the problem of cyber bullying, spam, annoying email,
and related problems is to change our philosophy towards secrecy. Nobody
should be anonymous on the Internet. You would not let secretive, anonymous
people into your house while they were covered in clothing and masks. You
want to know who enters your home. Why not apply the same philosophy to
telephones and the Internet? Why should anonymous people be allowed to
contact you and your children through a telephone or computer? You would
never let secretive, anonymous people into your child's bedroom, so why
let them get into your child's bedroom through a computer or telephone?
The only people who benefit from secrecy are criminals. Don't
be afraid of criminals; don't behave like a frightened rabbit. We
should follow the philosophy that everybody has a responsibility to identify
themselves to other people, and that everybody has a right to know who
is contacting them. We should not tolerate secretive or anonymous people.
Don't let them intimidate you into believing that they have a right to
hide their identity. Instead, demand the right to know who is trying to
enter your life and influence you.
Getting back to Amanda Todd, we have to face the fact that some children
are defective, and they are having a miserable life, and there is nothing
yet that we can do to fix their problem. Preventing them from suicide is
simply prolonging their misery. We should offer them a more pleasant method
to end their life.
Some people will respond that suicide centers would cause a lot of unnecessary
deaths, especially among teenagers, because many people would kill themselves
when they were in a bad mood. My response to this concern is, so what?
If a person has such an unstable mind that he will kill himself when he
doesn't really want to, then he should
kill himself. We don't need people like that living with us or reproducing.
Our lives will be much nicer when we are living among people who are happy,
healthy, responsible, and honest, not people with wild mood swings, psychotic
tantrums, suicidal tendencies, violent rages, or fits of self-pity.
When a person becomes suicidal during wars or natural disasters,
we can help him, but if a person is suicidal while living in a pleasant
environment, and if medical technology cannot fix his problem, then rather
than stop him from committing suicide, we should make it easy and painless
for him to do it.
When somebody is frequently whining about their miserable life, we should
point out to them that they should go to the suicide center and put an
end to their misery. If they are our friend or child, we could offer to
go with them so that they don't feel alone at the center. That might be
especially nice when our parents become old but don't want to die alone.
We could even develop a custom for having a party for our old parents who
are ready for the suicide center. We would celebrate their life, and at
the end of the party, the final toast would include the suicide potion.
Many people are too much like animals to be able to calmly deal with
the issue of death and suicide, but the human race has to evolve into a
more advanced creature. Death is a part of life, and we should stop treating
death in the same crude, hysterical, irrational manner that we treat sex,
waste products, and childbirth.
We should encourage physical
activity among adults
All young animals and humans have a natural craving to engage
in physical activities. As a result, we don't have to push young children
into getting exercise. During elementary school, for example, children
have a natural tendency to spend their recess and lunch breaks on physical
activities. However, as we grow older, we become increasingly sedentary.
When we are in high school, for example, we get almost no exercise during
breaks or during lunch. Some high school students get a lot of exercise
from sports, by riding a bicycle to school, or at their jobs, but
I think that most students need more exercise than they are getting.
The situation gets worse after we graduate from school and get a job.
Most adults do not get any exercise during their breaks or at lunch, and
most of them do not want to ride a bicycle to work or engage in any type
of recreational activity during their leisure time.
Although it is natural for us to become increasingly sedentary with
age, is this desirable? I don't think so. I think we should design our
society to encourage teenagers and adults to get more exercise. I think
we are becoming sedentary with age because we want to, not because
it is best for us. We are following our emotions to
do nothing,
like a pet dog, rather than following our intellect and keeping ourselves
in good health.
How do we design a society to encourage adults to get some exercise
and maintain their health? Should we provide exercise machines for adults?
Should we arrange for a variety of sports or other physical activities
for adults? Should businesses provide employees with the opportunity to
get exercise at lunch, and if so, what exactly should the businesses do?
There are some businesses that provide exercise rooms and showers so
that their employees can get some exercise during lunch, but we could develop
that concept much further and apply it to an entire city. By designing
a city so that the transportation system is underground, the surface is
available for grass, bicycle paths, trees, and swimming areas. By providing
office buildings and factories with showering facilities, it would be very
easy for people to ride a bicycle to work, or to get some exercise at lunch
by either going outside into the grass between the buildings to play some
sports or swim, or to use some type of exercise equipment.
We could also develop some sports that are specifically intended to
provide us with exercise. I think that most of our current sports are worthless
for exercise. Our sports have evolved into intense competitive battles
for trophies. The emphasis on winning is so extreme that people are pushing
themselves to the point at which they injure their body during the sports,
and some of them risk their health with drugs. The purpose of exercise
is to help us maintain good health, but I would not be surprised if the
people involved with sports are actually doing more harm to their health.
It would be interesting to study the people involved with sports to see
what their health is like after the age of 40. How many are suffering from
brain damage, arthritis, or damaged joints as a result of their sports?
Greg Valentino
not only used steroids excessively, but he got infected when he became
careless and didn't bother with sterile needles.
I think some sports need to be redesigned so that they provide us with
some useful exercise, and other sports, such as arm wrestling, need
to be abandoned forever. Not many people want to watch or participate
in arm wrestling, and it doesn't provide any useful exercise, so why do
we bother to support it? Furthermore, lots of people break bones in their
arm from it, such as this
man. We are not going to improve the health of the adult population
by encouraging that type of sport.
Designing better sports and designing a city to make it easy for us
to get exercise is not going to be good enough. We must also become intolerant
of crime. One of the reasons that businesses and employees resist exercise
today is because crime is so rampant that employees need secure facilities
for storing their clothing, shoes, bicycles, and other sports equipment.
The steel lockers are visually unpleasant, the locks are a nuisance, and
they prevent airflow, thereby creating stinky locker rooms. Storing bicycles
in this crime-ridden society is also a nuisance.
If we were less tolerant of crime, then people could put their bicycle
on a circulating hook, as I described in a previous file, and the bicycles
could be stored in the basement. People could also store their clothing
on circulating hooks, either in mesh bags or baskets, or they could put
their clothing in lockers that don't have doors. Either way, the
people wouldn't have to waste their time with locks, and air would circulate
around the clothing, thereby reducing the problem of odors and mildew.
Our policies on crime are causing our cities to resemble jails.
If, instead, we evict criminals, we can eliminate a lot of the locks, and
this will make our cities significantly more pleasant for us, and visually
more attractive.
|
|
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Do you want to waste your remaining years of life living in fear of
people who steal or vandalize your possessions? |
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Or would you prefer creating some cities with such high standards that
you can trust the people you live with? |
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We should also look into ways of improving the problem of showering.
It would be impractical for every office building and factory to provide
each of their employees with their own private dressing room and shower.
Most businesses that provide showers solve this problem by providing a
large shower with lots of shower heads so that a lot of people can take
a shower at the same time. I think we should start experimenting with better
solutions.
I suggest we experiment with a "rinsing tunnel". It would be
similar to a car washing machine, but without the mechanical rollers. When
a person steps into the tunnel, he activates a water spray, and warm water
sprays him from all directions. The velocity of the spray could be adjusted
with a lever on the wall. He would then rinse himself off. He then steps
forward into the drying section of the tunnel where he is blasted with
some warm air to blow off the large water droplets. Then he steps forward
to pick up a towel to finish drying off, and then he gets dressed.
I should point out two concepts. First, contrary to the propaganda of
the cosmetics companies, you do not need soap
or shampoo to remove perspiration. All you need is water. Soap will remove
your natural oils and leave your skin dry and irritated. It is better to
rinse yourself with water. Furthermore, without soap, people can pass through
this rinsing tunnel at a very high rate because they don't have to waste
time scrubbing themselves with soap, and then rinsing off the soap.
Second, we should not encourage the obsessive-compulsive people who
want to spend a few hours in a shower in order to cleanse themselves of
every molecule of dirt and perspiration. People should be told to pass
through the rinsing shower fast and not worry about leaving a few molecules
of perspiration because as soon as they get out, they will resume perspiring.
It is idiotic to think that you can wash off all of the perspiration.
Some people have horrible body odors, and they might assume that they
need soap, but soap cannot fix their problem. Even when they scrub themselves
with soap, they remain stinky. The only solution to stinky people is to
restrict reproduction to the people who are naturally attractive and nice
smelling.
If we can design a compact rinsing tunnel that people can pass through
at a high rate, then it becomes very easy for us to put one or more in
every factory and office building. This would encourage more people to
get some exercise.
For example, a person might decide that the weather is so nice that
he will ride a bicycle to work. He would put on his exercise clothing,
put his office clothing into a bag, and then pick up a bicycle at the basement
of his building. He would then ride to work. When he arrives, he would
hang his bicycle on one of the circulating hooks, and walk over to the
rinsing tunnel. He would take off his exercise clothing, pass through the
rinsing tunnel, and switch into his office clothing. It would only take
a minute or so if people could get over their obsessive-compulsive desire
to scrub themselves with soap for 30 minutes.
In addition to encouraging people to ride a bicycle to work, the main
reason that I suggest we experiment with a rinsing tunnel is to make it
more practical for people to get exercise at lunch. In the northern
climates, the weather is usually pleasant during lunch, but almost everybody
wastes the nice weather by spending their lunch in a cafeteria, sitting
at their desk, or driving through traffic to get to a restaurant. If we
designed a city so that the buildings were separated with grass, bicycle
paths, trees, and foot paths, and if we had about an hour for lunch, then
more people would be interested in going outside and doing something prior
to eating, such as walking, playing a sport, riding a bicycle, or using
an exercise machine to check their heart or lungs.
In our society today, it is difficult for women to ride a bicycle or
walk to work, or get exercise at lunch, because they cannot walk or ride
a bicycle in sexy clothing and high-heeled shoes, and they don't want to
get any exercise at work because perspiration will ruin their makeup, false
eyelashes, and hairspray. However, with society in control of everything,
we can put pressure on both men and women to wear practical clothing for
school, jobs, and recreation, and wear sexy and attractive clothing only
for social affairs. Women would not be allowed to wear makeup, jewelry,
or any type of sexy clothing or shoes while at school or work. They should
not even be allowed to do anything special with their hair while they are
working. By remaining in their natural state, it would be easy for
them to ride a bicycle to work or get exercise at lunch because they could
rinse off quickly and would not need to waste time reapplying makeup, jewelry,
hairspray, and false eyelashes.
One of the advantages to letting society take control of children when
they become 14 is to make the girls become accustomed to looking pretty
only for social affairs, not for school, work, or exercising.
We should design jobs for
humans,
not for
profit
Before I continue, consider our philosophy towards jobs. The
treatment of employees has improved significantly during the past two centuries,
but most employees are still in the role of a peasant who is serving
a wealthy and pampered King. The people who dominate business do not consider
their employees or their customers to be their friends, team members, or
equals. They are still not showing much concern about the quality of life
for their employees or their customers. Rather, they are still focused
on themselves, just like the medieval Kings and Queens.
Most people go to work only because they don't know how to avoid it,
and they spend a lot of their time looking at the clock to find out if
it is time for lunch or to go home. They want to get home as soon as possible,
and they want to retire from their job as soon as possible. I would say
that this is a sad way to live.
Ideally, there would be no peasant or pampered class. A city should
consist entirely of team members who make an attempt to provide everybody
with a job that they can enjoy as much as possible. We will frequently
have to do tasks that we don't care for, but we should enjoy going to work.
We should be willing to experiment with jobs and working conditions so
that everybody's life becomes more pleasant.
Most people today are working inside of a building during the daytime,
and some of them rarely see the sunshine. When they are finished with their work,
they rush home to eat and sit in front of a television. I think we should
experiment with different working conditions, such as extending the lunch
of people who work inside a building so that they have an opportunity to
get outside at lunch. Our bodies are more interested in getting exercise
during the day rather than the evening, and by getting outside during lunch,
we can enjoy the sunshine, the flowers, and the birds.
In most cities today, it is unpleasant to "go outside" for lunch because
the outside is ugly, concrete sidewalks; noisy, filthy automobiles; homeless
vagrants; street vendors selling worthless gifts and disgusting food; and
criminals. Furthermore, many of us are working with people we fear, despise,
or have nothing in common with, and those people have no interest in having
lunch with their coworkers.
However, if we lived in a more homogenous, crime-free city with an underground
transportation system, then our city would be a beautiful park with trees,
ponds, gardens, plazas, foot paths, and bicycle paths. Scattered among
the trees and ponds would be office buildings, apartment buildings, factories,
schools, and scientific research labs. In some climates, a lot of
the park would be partially or completely enclosed to provide year-round
access to the grass, bicycle paths, and flowers. In that type of city,
when an office worker goes outside, he would be entering a beautiful park.
By extending the lunch time, the people would have time to take a walk,
ride a bicycle, play games, or go swimming in a pond. It would give them
an opportunity to enjoy the daytime, and it might make going to work much
more pleasant.
Many employees today prefer a short lunch so that they can
get home as soon as possible. However, in a City of Castles, there is no
reason to rush home. The restaurants are providing free meals, so nobody
has to waste any time shopping for food or making meals, and with a low
crime rate, parents don't have to rush home to be security guards for their
children. I think that in this environment, a lot of adults would want
to extend their lunch so that they can enjoy the daytime.
It's also important to realize that we can design society to fit our
work schedule. For example, the restaurants would not be available for
dinner until after work, and the music concerts and other activities would
not start until after dinner. In such a city, there would be no reason
to get off work early because everything would be closed.
In our world today, some restaurants are open 24 hours a day, and many
museums, theaters, and other businesses are open 10 to 18 hours a day.
By creating a society that doesn't have a pampered class, the city can
be designed entirely for the working people. We don't have to provide activities
for the wealthy people who have nothing to do during the day.
A lot of people complain that our welfare programs are allowing parasitic
people to live in society without contributing anything to it, but we could
apply that philosophy to the spouses who don't do anything. There are some
wealthy spouses, especially women, who consume a lot of food, electricity,
automobiles, clothing, cosmetics, and other resources, but they give nothing
in return. Some of them do not even raise children. These parasitic relationships
did not exist in prehistoric times. All of our prehistoric ancestors, including
the teenagers, had to take care of themselves. Today, however, a lot of
spouses are being treated like Kings or Queens. Why complain about welfare
programs but not parasitic spouses? Why not tell everybody in society that
they must contribute?
I think we will create a better society when everybody has to be responsible
for themselves and contribute something to society. In that type of society,
everybody would be working during the day. All of the restaurants, museums,
music concerts, and other activities would be closed while people are working.
Restaurants would open briefly for breakfast and lunch, and then they would
close. There would be no theaters, concerts, or other entertainment, while
people were working. I would also shut down television during the daytime.
There would not be very many people available to watch television during
the daytime because there would be no housewives in this type of society.
The adult women would either be taking care of babies, or working. They
would not be sitting at home. Some of the mothers with babies would want
to spend some of their time in their home, but most of the time they would
be doing something in addition to taking care of babies. They don't need
to sit at home all day with a baby.
Most of the transportation systems would be reduced to a low level while
people were working, and the museums and zoos would be closed, although
teachers could arrange for a group of students to visit a museum or zoo,
in which case it would open for those particular students.
Shutting down the city like this would save resources, but the main
reason I suggest doing this is because I think it would be psychologically
better if the people who are working do not feel as if they are missing
out on something. The only people who would not be working would be those
who are in bad physical health due to old age, accidents, or disease.
If a young adult was unemployed in this type of city, he would feel
isolated and alone. However, there would be no unemployment in this
type of society because the government would help us find jobs, or train
us for new jobs. Nobody would sit around their house doing nothing. If
the government was having trouble finding a job for a particular person,
then he would help with some of the simple tasks that don't require much
training. There is always work to do.
Crime would be more difficult to commit during the daytime in this type
of city because most people would have no way to justify being anywhere
in a city other than their job. Only mothers with babies, old people, and
people who work the night shift would be wandering around during the daytime.
We can also apply this philosophy to children. For example, instead
of providing children with television programs and snacks all throughout
the day and night, we can restrict their television to a narrow portion
of the evening, and we can restrict their access to food.
We need two
categories for sports
Getting back to the issue of how adults tend to become increasingly
sedentary with age, I think one way to encourage more physical activity
is to develop sports that the ordinary adults actually enjoy
playing, and which provide them with some useful exercise. I discussed
the issue of sports years ago
here,
but now I will provide some more details on the issue.
To begin with, we could define a "sport"
as a competitive physical activity. If an activity is not competitive,
then it would not be a "sport". We would call it something else, such as
exercise, recreation, entertainment, or socializing. For example, consider
bicycles. If you ride a bicycle to go sightseeing, then you are not engaging
in a "sport". Instead, you are engaging in entertainment or recreation.
If you are riding a bicycle simply to get some exercise, then you are not
engaging in a sport, either. Rather, you are engaging in exercise or recreation.
Bicycling would only be a sport if you are in some type of competition,
such as competing to ride a certain distance, or to ride the fastest, or
to do tricks with the bicycle.
Among the people who are involved in competitions with bicycles, there
are some people who have very casual competitions, and there are others
who have extremely serious competitions. For example, some employees of
a business might ride bicycles at lunch and compete to see who can ride
the fastest, but they don't keep track of who wins or loses, and they don't
give the winner any prize. Instead, their competition is intended to inspire
them to get some exercise and finish the bicycle ride as soon as possible
so that they have plenty of time to eat lunch. In that case, the competition
is friendly and beneficial because it is intended to inspire one another.
At the other extreme are the professional athletes who play sports as
a career. They play for extremely significant prizes. They put phenomenal
amounts of effort into practicing and winning, and some of them cheat,
sabotage, and use drugs. The competition among the professional athletes
is so extreme that it is encouraging destructive behavior.
We don't make much of a distinction between the sports that the professional
athletes play and those that the "ordinary" people play, but I think
we need two different groups of sports; one for the professional
athletes, and one for us "ordinary" people. We could describe these
as professional sports and casual sports.
By creating these two categories for sports, it becomes easier to understand
that we should design sports differently for the professionals. In the
world today, there is only one type of baseball, soccer, and golf. However,
the sports for the professionals should be different.
Before I continue, it's important to understand the concept that all
of our activities, regardless of whether they are sports, holiday celebrations,
birthday parties, or weddings, have a purpose.
Since our culture has been evolving haphazardly and inadvertently, the
purpose for most of our activities is irrational, or to help businesses
make money, or to promote religious propaganda. I would say that most of
our activities are worthless from the point of view of human life. When
we design a sport, holiday celebration, or any other type of cultural activity,
we should ask ourselves such questions as, what is the purpose of this
activity? What are we trying to accomplish? What value does this activity
have to our lives?
For example, most people don't think of Christmas as having a "purpose",
but that is because it has evolved for the idiotic purpose of providing
opportunities for businesses to make profit and religions to promote propaganda.
Christmas, and all of our other activities, should be designed to provide
something of value to our lives. All of our activities should be analyzed
to ensure that they provide us with some benefit that justifies whatever
burden they impose on us.
In regards to sports, both professional and casual sports should be
designed to provide us with some benefit. This requires we make a decision
on the purpose of professional sports
and the purpose for casual sports. After we agree on the purpose for each
category of sports, then we design the sports to fit those particular purposes.
I think that the primary purpose of casual sports should be exercise.
Therefore, the casual sports should be designed to create games that we
find so entertaining that we occasionally want to play, and that
we get some useful exercise when we play. By comparison, the purpose
of professional sports is to entertain an
audience. Therefore, the rules they follow would be intended
to create a sport that we find entertaining to watch. The professional
sports don't need to provide the players with exercise. When we design
sports according to these purposes, we will end up with professional sports
that are very different from casual sports. I will suggest some changes
to professional sports in Part 9 of this series. In this document I will concentrate on
casual sports.
Some changes I would make for casual sports are: 1) Eliminate the emphasis
on winning. The competition in casual sports should be to inspire one another
to get some exercise. One method to achieve this is to stop the practice
of giving prizes or awards to the winner. The winner of a casual sports
event should get nothing. Another method is to discourage people
from practicing a casual sport. Only
professionals can justify practicing their sport. Practicing a casual sport
should be considered as senseless as practicing for a birthday party. 2)
Modify sports to be more entertaining to play so that more people become
interested in participating. 3) Modify sports so that they are more useful
in providing us with exercise. This requires changing the rules so that
more of the players can get useful physical activity rather than just standing
around or exercising only one or two muscles.
To summarize the previous paragraphs, the casual sports should
be designed to encourage us to get exercise, but I don't think any of our
existing sports are achieving this purpose. We need to design completely
new
casual sports. The professional sports, by comparison, should be designed
to entertain an audience, but many of the professional sports are so boring
that almost nobody wants to watch them. The professional sports that are
boring should be abandoned, and of the popular sports, we should modify
them to make them more entertaining, less dangerous to the athletes, and
less of a burden on society.
A lot of people will be traumatized if we abandon some professional
sports, change the others, and create new sports, and they will have a
difficult time with the concept that casual sports should be different
from professional sports. Therefore, before I continue, I will provide
the following three reasons to encourage you to experiment with changes
in our casual sports.
1) We should encourage participation
rather than voyeurism
During prehistoric times, sports would have been carefree competitions
between friends, but during the past few centuries, sports began evolving
into idiotic activities. One of the bad influences on sports is the wealthy
people who have a craving to feel special. They have a tendency to push
sports into becoming expensive activities that only they can participate
in, thereby allowing them to feel special. I think this is the reason that
such sports as polo, foxhunting, yachting, golf, and tennis have evolved
into silly, expensive sports.
When the wealthy people engage in these sports, they get almost no significant
exercise. It is even debatable as to whether they should be described as
"sports". It might be better to describe them as social affairs
in which the wealthy people jerk themselves off.
When I was a young child, tennis was a sport of the wealthy, but as
the nation became wealthier during the following decades, many businesses
and condominium complexes began building tennis courts. Lots of ordinary
people began to play tennis. Today the tennis courts in the area where
I live are usually empty. I think the reason is simply because most people
consider the game to be idiotic or boring, and they don't get much useful
exercise from it. Some of the professional players might enjoy the game,
but I don't think the wealthy people enjoy the game. I think what they
are truly attracted to is being seen in tennis clothing and with
a tennis racket. They like the fantasy of being special, not the sport
itself. They are just jerking themselves off.
When Prince William visited California in 2011, he played
polo. Why didn't he play basketball, badminton, volleyball, or soccer?
Is polo truly more fun than other sports?
I don't think so. Actually, I think that if everybody owned horses instead
of automobiles, and if all of us could easily play polo, most people would
rapidly lose interest in it. Many people would enjoy riding a horse once
in a while in a forest or park, but I don't believe many people would enjoy
playing polo.
Our natural tendency is to admire people who are wealthy, and this made
sense in prehistoric times because primitive people had to earn whatever
they wanted, but today people are becoming wealthy because of crime, inheritances,
lotteries, divorce settlements, and all sorts of other idiotic reasons.
I think these wealthy people are a bad influence on our culture. We should
not admire or mimic them.
Another bad influence on sports is free enterprise. Businesses
look for opportunities to profit from sports, and so they are pushing sports
into requiring expensive equipment and supplies, and lots of expensive
courts, grass fields, or stadiums. They also want people to become emotionally
involved with the competitive battles so that they will purchase T-shirts
and other gifts that have their team logo.
Another bad influence on sports are the men who have excessive cravings
for dominance. These men push sports into becoming overly competitive
events. These type of men are like animals. They cannot play for
fun. They must win, and they will go to extreme lengths to win, including
cheating and risking their own health. These excessively aggressive athletes
are putting pressure on the sports to become even more competitive. These
men focus on winning the games rather than enjoying them.
The extreme emphasis on winning is causing both professional
athletes and ordinary people to practice their sport, and spend
a lot of money on equipment, supplies, and training. There is so much emphasis
on winning, and so much profit available to the winners, that cheating
is common. As I mentioned in a previous file, the coach of one football
team was offering bounties to his players to hurt the members of
the opposing team. These people are not "playing sports"; rather, they
are
fighting with one another like dogs.
The end result of all of these bad influences is that sports have evolved
into expensive, dishonest, and irrational competitive battles. Many people
enjoy watching professional sports, or they watch their children
play sports, but they don't want to participate in sports. Sports
are no longer casual fun, and most of them do not even provide much exercise.
The baseball player in the rightfield, for example, is almost as motionless
as a Buckingham Palace guard.
Rather than let sports evolve in a haphazard manner, we should decide
which sports we want to support; what the rules will be for each sport;
who is allowed to be a professional athlete; which of the athletes are
full-time athletes and which are only part-time; who is allowed to be a
coach; and what type of casual sports we want. We should decide whether
we want golf courses, and if so, how many, and how much labor and resources
to put into maintaining the courses; whether we want football stadiums,
and if so, what type of stadiums; and whether we want auto racing, and
if so, what type of vehicles and race tracks to provide. We should also
make decisions about whether the schools should provide training for professional
athletes, and if so, for which sports, and how extreme the training programs
should be.
Which professional or casual sports do you
want society to provide for you? I think all of our modern sports have
evolved into worthless activities. I think that we can improve all
professional sports and casual sports. I think some sports should be abandoned
completely, and all of the others need to have their rules changed. I'll
talk about sports for the professionals later in this document. For now
I will point out that we should experiment with casual sports that are
so much fun, and so easy for us to participate in, and so useful in regards
to providing us with exercise, that many of us actually want to
occasionally participate in sports.
The free enterprise system encourages
voyeurism but we should
encourage more people to participate in activities rather than watching
other people. Businesses want us to pay them to do things for us. We are
encouraged to watch other people sing, play sports, dance, go scuba diving,
explore a forest, and grow orchids. I think our lives will be more pleasant
when we provide ourselves with a wide variety of activities so that we
can occasionally
participate in some activities. I have no objection
to watching other people, but voyeurism should be an occasional
activity, not our exclusive activity.
If we could create lots of casual sports - and other activities - that
we enjoy participating in, then more people will spend more of their leisure
time participating in activities and less time watching other people. This
will reduce the demand for professional athletes, sports stadiums, and
televised sports. Parents will also have less of an interest in wasting
their Saturday afternoon watching their children play baseball or soccer.
Parents would prefer to spend their afternoon doing something,
either by themselves, or with other adults. Parents will occasionally enjoy
playing with their children, but adults should not spend several hours
every weekend watching their children play sports.
2) It is impractical to support every possible
sport
It might seem that the best policy is to let everybody engage in whatever
sport they want, but it is impossible to do this. One reason is
that some sports require a lot of equipment, but the main reason is that
every sport requires a certain amount of land. A tennis court might
seem small, but only two or four people can play on a court, so a city
would need a tremendous amount of land to provide everybody in the city
with the option to play tennis on a Saturday afternoon. Golf also requires
an enormous amount of land, and an absurd amount of maintenance.
The reason America can support so many different sports is because
only a small percentage of the population are participating in sports.
Most of the adult population in America is sedentary. Imagine living in
a city of 1 million people, all of whom are healthy and physically active,
and all except the very young and very old want to play sports every weekend.
People who enjoy arithmetic might want to calculate how much land area
would be needed for tennis courts, golf courses, ice-skating rinks, ice
hockey rinks, skateboarding, baseball fields, polo fields, and soccer fields.
And then consider that some people will want to go waterskiing, jet skiing,
automobile racing, motorcycle racing, horseback riding, and snow skiing.
An enormous amount of land area would be necessary, and that would require
spending a lot of time traveling from our home to a sports facility. Furthermore,
maintaining all of those large sports facilities would be a significant
burden on society. We should experiment with sports that don't require
much land or equipment so that we can play some of them within the
city. If we designed a city in which the buildings are surrounded by grass,
trees, and canals, then we could play sports simply by walking out into
the area between the buildings, or walking to a city park.
3) Human happiness has nothing to do with sports
It's important to understand that animals and humans have a resistance
to change. Children easily adapt to whatever culture they are
provided with, but once we become adults, we want to behave like trains
on a track. In regards to sports, our emotions create the impression that
the sports that we learned during our childhood are the only sensible sports
possible. If society changes our sports, our emotions will resist the changes,
so we have to calm ourselves down by reminding ourselves that we don't
need any particular sport in order to enjoy life.
If we were to change the rules for some sports, eliminate other sports,
and create new sports, we will create emotional trauma for all of us. All
of us will have to adapt to the new sports, and some people will have
more trouble than others. The people who have the most trouble adapting
will spend a lot of their time whining that they must have their particular
sport, and that their life is no longer worth living. It is important for
us to understand this aspect of the human mind so that we realize that
we are not hurting those people. They assume that they are suffering, and
our natural reaction is to feel guilty for hurting them, but they are not
suffering. They simply have to adjust to the changes. We have to ignore
their crying. If we feel sorry for them, we encourage more of their whining.
As soon as they become accustomed to the changes, they will continue with
life as if nothing had happened.
After we create and modify our sports, we have to observe the results.
We should then experiment with changes to make them even better. However,
every time we make changes, there will be some people who whine that their
life is no longer worth living. We have to expect this idiotic behavior
and be prepared to ignore it.
Casual sports should be...
casual;
spontaneous; carefree
Some people play games that require teams, such as tennis,
baseball, and volleyball, but since they focus on winning the game, they
have a tendency to play with the same team members over and over, and they
also have a tendency to practice the game with that team. Although
I promote the concept of becoming a team member, in the case of casual
sports, there is no point in forming teams that persist beyond one game.
The people who form persistent teams will become increasingly better as
a team, but winning the game has no value, so there is no point in forming
persistent teams.
The casual sports should be designed for exercise, so forming
a persistent team for these sports is as silly as forming teams to go to
a gym to use exercise machines. There is nothing wrong with going to an
exercise facility with the same group of friends year after year, but we
should not promote the attitude that we should form teams when we
exercise. Likewise, it is acceptable to play sports with the same team
members if you want to, but we should not promote the attitude that people
should
form persistent teams.
People should be more casual and spontaneous with sports teams. Because
humans and animals have a tendency to remain with the same group forever,
it might be beneficial if the rules required the teams to be created
at random prior to every game. This would put pressure on us to get accustomed
to meeting and working with new people. This would be especially useful
for children.
If we alter sports to make them more entertaining and more useful for
exercise, and if we stop emphasizing the winning of the game, then it would
be possible to have spontaneous sports events at public parks and beaches.
For example, a person could walk into a city park on a Saturday afternoon
by himself, and join a group of people who are playing some sports event,
even though he doesn't know any of the people, and they have never played
together.
If the idea of joining a group of strangers for a sports game seems
bizarre, consider that we already do this on a smaller scale when large
groups of people get together at a park for a party, such as when businesses
have picnics for their employees, or when families have reunions. Some
of the people at the party will pick up a volleyball, or whatever, and
then ask if anybody wants to play, and teams will form with people who
have never played with one another, and some may not have even met each
other before. They play for fun and exercise, not to win.
These spontaneous sports events could happen on the scale of an entire
city, but only if we create a more homogenous city. We must live among
people that we trust and respect. In our cities today, especially in America,
it would be unpleasant to go to a city park on a Saturday afternoon by
yourself, and then try to join a sports game with strangers, because there
is a very good chance that the people in the park will be a mixture of
religions, nationalities, ethnic groups, and races that want to remain
isolated from one another, and there is also a good chance that some of
the people in the park will be people we fear, despise, or are suspicious
of.
If we were to create a city that doesn't have a peasant class or a wealthy
class, and if membership to the city was by invitation only, and if we
evicted the people who didn't fit in, then we would be living among people
we trust and respect. They would be people similar to ourselves. We would
not be afraid of strangers, or worry that they are pedophiles, drug addicts,
burglars, or mentally ill freaks. It would be easy for us to join strangers
in a sports game. I think this type of society would encourage more people
to do something during their leisure time rather than sit in front
of a television and watch other people.
Living in a city that is homogenous would be like living in a gigantic
family. Imagine what your life would be like in a city in which there is
no peasant class or wealthy class, and there are no homeless people, retards,
criminals, religious fanatics, or mentally ill people. Imagine living among
people who are healthy, happy, honest, and responsible. In that type of
city, you would have no fear of other people, and they would have no fear
of you.
Unfortunately, creating a homogenous city of honest people requires
evicting
people who are disruptive. How many people are capable of carrying out
such a policy? No society yet even cares about removing pedophiles. For
example, on 21 September 2012, the news reports were claiming that Jerry
Sandusky was involved with a pedophile ring. Two members of the ring, Phil
Foglietta and Ed Savitz, are dead, and the third member, Lawrence Scott
Ward, is in jail for child pornography and pedophilia.
What a coincidence that Jerry Sandusky's pedophile ring consists
of two dead men and one man in jail rather than hundreds
of men who are still working in our schools, hospitals, FBI, courts, police
departments, and government. Incidentally, take a look at the description
for Ed Savitz, such as the remark that
he "told the boys to eat
cheese to make the feces taste better." We are not going to create
a safe, friendly, homogenous city when people react to pedophiles, corruption,
and other problems by hiding, like a frightened rabbit.
There are organizations, such as ECPAT-USA,
and television shows, such as To Catch
a Predator, that claim to be stopping pedophilia, and they want us
to contact them if we have information or want to help. I suggest you wonder,
are they really trying to stop pedophilia? Or are they doing damage
control?
Creating a better society requires removing the badly behaved
humans. Can you do that? If not, can
you at least support the people who are capable of it?
How do we design more useful
casual
sports?
The purpose of casual sports is exercise. This requires
we change the rules so that the players get some useful exercise, and we
also have to change the rules to make the game so much fun that people
want to play it. In an earlier file about sports, I mentioned a few ways
to make baseball become more useful for exercise. In this file, I will
show how changing the rules for soccer, (football to most of the
world), would make that game much more useful for exercise and much more
entertaining to play.
I think one method to improve the game of soccer is to eliminate the
position of goalie. The person who plays that position doesn't get
nearly as much exercise as the other players, and he doesn't make the game
any more fun. Having a person on a soccer team to guard their goal is as
idiotic as adding another person to a basketball team to guard their basketball
hoop. A "basketball goalie" would not make the game any more fun, and he
would not get as much exercise as the other players.
Actually, I think a goalie creates a bad psychological effect because
the goalie is in the position of a person who is defending his home. It
makes the sport less fun and more like a battle. To understand what I mean
about the psychological effect, consider the difference between playing
basketball with and without a "basketball goalie". Which do you think would
be psychologically more pleasant? I think a basketball goalie would make
the game slightly irritating because it would feel as if we are intruding
on his territory, and that we have to fight with him.
Soccer is an old game, so it's possible that the goalie originally served
a purpose; namely, to prevent the ball from going beyond the end zone.
Originally people played this game in an open area, rather than a stadium,
and so they may have wanted at least one person to stand at each end of
the field to prevent the ball from traveling too far. That person would
evolve into the position of a goalie.
I think the game of soccer would also become more useful for exercise
and feel more natural if we were allowed to hit the ball with our hands,
and to catch and throw it. That would give our arms some exercise, and
it is more natural to be able to use our arms in a sports game. It would
also cause more jumping, which provides even more exercise. As long
as nobody carries the ball, there would be no tendency to fight for possession
of the ball.
I think it would also improve soccer to make the ball lighter in weight
so that it doesn't travel very far, and so that doesn't hurt when people
are hit with it, catch it, or hit it with their hands. We ought to experiment
with different types and sizes of foam balls and "beach balls".
With these changes, as few as two people can play a game of soccer in
almost any area, even a city park. They can use anything for the goals.
For example, they could select two trees to be one goal, and two rocks
as the other goal. The distance between the two trees doesn't have to be
the same as the distance between the two rocks. The field doesn't have
to be rectangular, either. It could be a serpentine path through some trees.
When the players switch goals, they compensate for any differences in the
distance between the goal posts.
I would also change the rules of soccer so that when more than two people
are playing, they are allowed to increase the number of balls. For every
two additional players, they could add one more ball. With 10 players on
each team, there could be as many as 10 balls. That variation of the game
could start by giving half of the balls to each team, and having them line
up in their end zone. Then each team begins kicking and hitting their balls
towards the other goal. As they got near the center of the field, their
balls would come together, and then they would be able to kick and hit
any of the balls towards their goal.
Increasing the number of balls increases the number of people who are
actively doing something rather than becoming frustrated as they watch
other people. A soccer game with 10 balls would have so many balls flying
around that everybody would be busy chasing after and hitting the balls,
thereby providing everybody with exercise. Of course, it should be obvious
that in such a game, the balls would have to be very soft so that people
don't have to worry about being hit by one of them.
This concept of increasing the number of balls can apply to other sports,
also. For example, a volleyball game could use two, foam balls, with each
team serving to the other at the same time, or both could be served by
one team. A foam volleyball would not travel very fast, and this would
allow the ball to remain in play for a longer period of time.
We could have a variation of volleyball in which there are half as many
balls as people. It would be similar to the children's game of "hot potato".
The game would go on for a certain number of minutes, and at the end, whichever
team had the most balls on their side of the net would be the loser. The
balls that fell outside of the court would not count until they were picked
up and put back into play. Since foam balls don't travel very far, it would
be easy to get them when they went out of bounds.
Every sport is a silly game with arbitrary rules, but if we design sports
to give us exercise and entertainment, then they become useful. By developing
sports that have more than one ball, we increase the number of people who
are getting exercise. This makes the sport more useful for giving children
some exercise during a brief school recess, and for helping office workers
get some exercise prior to eating lunch.
When playing sports at night, people want intense lights on their field
so that they can clearly see what is going on. However, it is a burden
on society to provide a lot of brightly lit fields for people to play sports
at night, and the lights create light pollution for the city. It
would be better to alter sports so that there is no emphasis on winning.
There should not be any prizes for the winner. The sports should be for exercise,
entertainment, and socializing.
With that attitude toward sports, each team would wear a vest with a
different color of LED, and the balls would have LEDs inside of them. A
volleyball net could also have a string of LEDs along the top, and a couple
LEDs could serve as goalposts for a game of soccer. That would allow us
to play games anywhere rather than restricting us to stadiums with powerful
lights. The players would frequently make mistakes in dark conditions,
but so what? Instead of whining about mistakes, we should consider them
to be a routine aspect of nighttime sports.
I don't know which variation of soccer, baseball, kickball, or badminton
will be so much fun to play that we actually want to occasionally participate
in a game, but there is no risk in experimenting with our sports. We cannot
hurt ourselves, and the potential reward is tremendous. The reward is encouraging
us to get some exercise and entertainment. Some sports could also offer
socializing opportunities. We have nothing to lose and lots to gain.
The benefits
of a sport should outweigh its burden
Everything has advantages and disadvantages. Every sport provides
benefits while imposing a burden on society. Auto racing, for example,
requires a tremendous amount of resources and land. What does society get
in return? The people who participate in racing do not get any exercise,
and neither do any of the spectators. There is not much socializing going
on at the events, either. The sport could be justified if it was entertaining
people at a reasonable cost, but racing is an extremely expensive
sport, and how many people are actually entertained by it?
My impression of the audience at automobile racing is that their primary
source of entertainment is alcohol and drugs, not the sport.
Some of them seem so drunk that we could cover the race track with a giant,
oval, LCD monitor, and then have some computer-generated images of automobiles
racing around. The computer could offer
replays
of the crashes in slow motion. Some of the audience would be so intoxicated
that they wouldn't think it was strange that the officials were giving
instant replays of crashes.
The point I'm trying to make is that we need to analyze all of our sports
and other social activities. What is the purpose of the sport? Who is benefiting
from it, and what is the benefit? What is the burden on society? Does the
benefit justify the burden?
When we take control of our social activities, we can decide if we want
auto racing, motorcycle racing, bicycle racing, or horse racing. If we
decide to support auto racing, we can decide what type of automobiles to
use, what type of race track to provide, and what the rules will be for
the sport.
For example, we could design some simple, quiet, clean, slow-moving
vehicles
that are much safer, similar to those in the photo,
thereby allowing more people, including children, to participate as drivers.
We could also make the racetracks more visually interesting, such as providing
them with lots of turns, tunnels, and small hills, and by lining the track
with trees, plants, grass, and pools of water.
This brings up an interesting philosophical issue. I suspect that if
we were to alter automobile racing so that the majority of people want
to participate, we would change the sport of automobile racing into a form
of non-competitive entertainment. I think most people would want
to drive the cars for fun, not to win a trophy. I think this is
also true for horseracing. How many people want to participate in
competitive horse races? I think most people would want to ride a
horse only if they could do so for entertainment, and only if they could
do so in an attractive area, such as a forest, not at a sports track.
I think we should alter our sports so that more people are interested
in participating, but if we alter the racing events to appeal to the majority
of people, they are no longer "sports". They become "entertainment". This
then leads us to the question of why we bother to support the racing sports.
The burden on society is tremendous, but who benefits from those sports?
The audience might get a bit of entertainment, but I think they would get
much more entertainment if we provided ourselves with activities that they
could participate in.
We should review all of our sports and make a decision on which of them
we want to design for professionals, and which of them we want to alter
for participation by the ordinary people. After we design or alter a sport,
we should watch the results and experiment with changes to see if we can
improve it. A sport should be judged by its overall effect on society.
For example, if a sport is supposed to provide exercise, then we should
take a look to see whether the players are actually getting some useful
exercise.
Every sport puts a burden on society, and we have to consider whether
the burden is worth the benefit. For example, consider cleats.
Soccer players, baseball players, and other people who play on grass want
to wear cleats, but cleats destroy the grass. Furthermore, when people
are stepped on, the cleats cause more physical damage to the person's body.
What benefit do cleats provide to compensate for their destruction of the
grass and the human body?
If we choose to support professional soccer players or baseball players,
then we can justify letting them wear cleats so that they can do extreme
running, jumping, and diving stunts, but we should not let the ordinary
people wear cleats. Sports for the ordinary people should be designed for
exercise, entertainment, and socializing, and cleats do not help in any of
those purposes. Cleats do not make the game "better". The casual sports
should be designed for ordinary shoes or for playing barefoot.
Another issue to keep in mind about cleats is that they require people
to work on assembly lines to produce them and install them in shoes.
Every item we manufacture should be able to justify its use of labor and
resources. We can justify cleats for professional athletes, and we can
justify shoes with spikes for people who have to climb trees, but there
is no justification to put people on assembly lines to produce cleats for
ordinary people because cleats have absolutely no value in casual sports.
In order to make sports more appealing to the ordinary people, we need
to design sports so that we don't need expensive equipment or clothing,
and we should be able to play the game virtually anywhere so that we don't
have to travel to special stadiums, fields, or tracks. For example, by
changing the game of soccer, as I described in the previous paragraphs,
all we need is one or more foam balls. We don't need special shoes, stadiums,
or goal posts. We don't need very much land, either. This makes it possible
for us to play soccer in any grassy area between buildings, or at city
parks, or at a beach.
This variation of soccer would be so simple that children would be able
to go out of their apartment building and into the grassy area between
the buildings in order to have a game of soccer. They don't have
to travel to a large soccer field, and they wouldn't need any special equipment
or shoes. They would not need a large team, either. All they would need
is a minimum of two people.
Factory and office workers would also be able to easily play this type
of soccer during lunch. They would change into some exercise clothing,
take some balls out into the grassy area between the buildings, and get
some intense exercise in a short period of time, and with very little land
area.
You might wonder why I propose experimenting with changes to sports
if the primary goal is to provide us with exercise. Why not get our exercise
on machines instead? The answer is
that humans are sociable. The machines are useful for testing purposes,
such as to monitor your heart rate or lung capacity, or determine your
physical abilities, or to give specific muscles some exercise, but it will
be much less boring to get exercise with other people. Also, sports will
help people get outdoors, and I think that would be psychologically beneficial,
at least for men. By having a lot of very large, covered courtyards, even
if they are only partially covered, we would have year-round access to
grassy areas for sports.
Relationships with subordinates
In this modern world, most of us work in close contact with
other people, and most of us have to work in a hierarchy. An enormous number
of employees are lonely, even though some of them are married. No society
provides activities specifically to help men and women meet one another,
and the end result is that a lot of the lonely people look for a spouse
while they are supposed to be working. Their flirting can irritate other
employees, and it sometimes results in a person of authority becoming romantically
involved with one of his subordinates. These relationships usually do not
cause much of a problem for businesses because businesses react by separating
the couple into different departments, but this type of relationship can
become a serious problem in schools.
Our societies ignore the problem of lonely people, but we have to face
the fact that we are team members, and we need to help one another.
We can no longer go through life trying to satisfy ourselves while ignoring
everybody around us. None of us benefit by living among lonely people.
Everybody will benefit if we can help one another become more productive,
more pleasant team members.
As I described in other files, we should create a variety of courtship
activities specifically to help men and women meet and get to know one
another. By providing lots of courtship activities for everybody, we can
insist that everybody do their flirting at those activities rather than
while working, going to school, riding a train, or visiting a museum. This
allows businesses and schools to prohibit the women from wearing
sexy clothing, high-heeled shoes, cosmetics, and jewelry. It also allows
the businesses to become intolerant of the men who make lewd remarks
to women or who rub up against them. The people who cannot control themselves
and who insist on flirting in inappropriate situations should be evicted
from society so that they don't bother us. It is not nice to evict people,
but consider the effect on society. It would make life very pleasant for
those of us who are capable of controlling ourselves.
The problem of people in leadership positions flirting with their subordinates
is most significant with schools. This problem will become more significant
if we switch to an electronic education and let the government provide
us with jobs and training programs because there will be more people in
the role of a teacher, and there will be lots of adults going through
training programs. The adult training programs will often expose adult
students to teachers who are the same age, or younger, thereby creating
the opposite problem that we have today in which older teachers are becoming
romantically involved with younger students.
We need to experiment with changes
to society, such as creating courtship activities. Then the teachers have
no excuse for flirting with their students. If a teacher continues to flirt
with his students, then we should evict him from society. In the
case of adult teachers who are teaching adult students, if they are interested
in getting to know one another, they should agree to meet and flirt at
the courtship activities so that they don't create a disruption.
Our current policies towards this problem are being designed according
to our emotional reactions. Specifically, we become angry when teachers
become romantically involved with their students, and our anger causes
us to want to punish the teacher. Our emotions are especially upset when
a teacher behaves in a manner that is abnormal. For example,
Brittni
Colleps, a 28-year-old female teacher, was sent to jail for five
years for having group sex with four of her 18 and 19-year-old
students. Why does she have to go to jail for five years for having sex
with adult men who wanted the sex, when church officials who have been
accused of child molesting may not even be investigated? There are also
accusations
of pedophilia in Hollywood, but nobody cares.
Why is there so much anger towards Brittni Colleps?
I suspect that we are more harsh on the female teachers because they
are behaving in a manner that is very abnormal for women. Women
are supposed to take care of children, not be sexually attracted to them.
Furthermore, Colleps had sex with four
men at the same time, which is also unusual for a woman.
Animals and humans are like trains on a track. When we encounter somebody
who is not following the track, we regard them as a potential danger. For
example, Brittni Colleps had sex with four 18 and 19-year-old men, and
that puts her on a completely different sexual track from the rest of us.
Our natural emotional reaction to anything that is out of the ordinary
is fear, caution, and suspicion. We regard anything out of the ordinary
as a potential danger. As a result, we are more disgusted by the people
who do something unusual, such as eating dog meat, than with Hollywood
directors who rape children.
If a 28-year-old male teacher were
caught having sex with four 18 and 19-year-old female
students,
would he have been sent to jail for five years? Not necessarily. He
would not evoke the emotions of fear that the unusual people evoke.
Our emotional reactions to him would be more mild, and most people would
interpret those milder emotions as evidence that he is less dangerous to
society than Brittni Colleps. I think a 28-year-old male teacher would
be considered more of a danger if he behaved in a more abnormal manner,
such as having sex with 80-year-old women, dogs, young children, or other
men.
We have to stop using our emotions to set policies. We need to develop
more intelligent policies for relationships. To begin with, we should classify
relationships into one of these four categories:
1) Relationships with children
Any sexual contact between adults and children should be considered
unacceptable on the grounds that the children don't have a fully developed
brain and are easily taken advantage of by adults. However, I suggest we
lower the age of adulthood to 16. We should not encourage 16-year-old boys
and girls to think of themselves as helpless children. They should be told
that they are "young adults", and they must be responsible for themselves.
They should not be allowed to misbehave and then use the excuse that they
are just children. They know what they are doing at that age.
By taking the 14-year-old children away from their parents, they can
be put into an environment where they can be provided with information
about society, relationships, sex, and other issues, thereby reducing a
lot of the confusion and frustration that the teenagers today are suffering
from.
2) Forced relationships
We don't want men to rape anybody, but as with everything in life,
there is no clear dividing line between issues of rape. For example, is
it possible for a husband to rape his own wife?
Is it possible for a boyfriend to rape his girlfriend?
I don't think it is practical or desirable for society to get deeply
involved in people's relationships, regardless of whether they are marriages
or friendships. Society should only deal with the extreme cases, such as
couples who fight so loudly that they annoy their neighbors, or who destroy
property.
I think the best way to reduce the rape between couples in a relationship
is to change society. For example, some women are getting involved in miserable
marriages because they want a man for financial support. Therefore, by
providing everybody with the basic necessities for free, women will have
no reason to marry men for financial or political reasons.
Another problem in the world today is that people are allowed to be
secretive
about themselves and their history, and this is allowing dishonest, psychotic,
and disgusting people to deceive one another into marriages. We can improve
this problem by putting everybody's life in a publicly accessible database,
evicting the destructive people from society, and by providing lots of
courtship activities so that people can easily get to know a lot of people.
By making those changes to society, the healthy, normal, respectable
people have an excellent chance of finding friends and a spouse. If they
end up in a unpleasant marriage, they can easily get a divorce and find
somebody else. Nobody would have any reason to remain in a miserable relationship
and cry about it.
However, there will be some people who are either too stupid, too much
like an animal, or too psychotic to form a stable relationship. For example,
some crude women will get married simply to have babies and to get affection,
not because they want to form a relationship with a man. Some crude men
will get married simply for sex and status, not because they want to form
a relationship with a woman.
It is very possible for people with crude personalities or mental illness
to form abusive relationships and torment one another. What are we supposed
to do with these people? Should we put cameras in their homes and try to
figure out which of them is abusive, or, if they are both abusive, which
is the most abusive? Even if we could figure this out, what would we do
about the situation? How do we stop a husband and wife from abusing one
another? And who among us wants to watch over these people? Would you
want to do that for a job?
I think a better policy is for society to tell people to be more responsible
for themselves. If a person gets involved in an unpleasant relationship,
and if they choose to stay with that person, that is their
decision. It is not our concern. If they become so disruptive that they
annoy people, we can evict them from society, but we should not bother
trying to stop them from doing what they want to do.
Furthermore, we should not allow women to lie about being raped.
There are already cases of women doing this for various reasons, such as
to explain their pregnancy, or to get revenge on a man, but lying about
rape should be considered just as disgusting and
detrimental to society as rape itself.
3) Pressured relationships
As I previously mentioned, there is no dividing line between what is
and is not "rape". Another example is that there are some men and women
who do not technically rape a person according to our current legal definition.
Instead, they use emotional pressure to manipulate a person into
a sex act. We do not consider this as "rape", but we should consider it
just as disgusting and detrimental as rape.
For example, some students try to manipulate their teachers into giving
them better grades by offering them money, by crying and pleading, or by
offering
sexual favors. If a teacher takes one of the offers for sex, he will
get in trouble, but why is he the only person who gets in trouble? The
students who behave in this manner should be considered as
bribing
a teacher. Bribery should be considered abusive and disgusting, and we
should not tolerate people who behave this way.
If you think this problem is insignificant, imagine it happening on
a large scale. Imagine that you are
a supervisor and all of your employees were routinely trying to
manipulate you with tears and offers of sex. You might be able to resist
their offers, but would you enjoy working with those people? Imagine that
when you ride a train, the passengers are routinely offering to perform
a sex act on you if you will let them have your seat, or give them your
coat, or scratch their back.
There is a lot of behavior that you will tolerate on a small scale,
but which would irritate you tremendously if it were happening on a large
scale. When we allow disgusting behavior on a small scale, we are allowing
it to grow and eventually become worse.
4) Voluntary relationships
Brittni Colleps had voluntary relationships with those 18 and 19-year-old
men. In fact, those men defended her in court rather than complain about
her. Their relationship was unusual, but if we are going to punish Colleps,
why not also punish all of the men
that she had sex with? None of those men were forced into traveling to
her home, taking their clothes off, and participating in an orgy. They
did so because they wanted to do so. Everybody in that relationship
was a willing participant, so how does society benefit by putting Colleps
in jail?
Our reasoning for putting a teacher in jail rather than the students
is because the teacher is in a position of authority, and the students
are children, but in her case, her students were 18 and 19 years old. Those
are not helpless boys. Those are grown, adult men. They knew
what they were doing. Why should a woman be responsible for the sexual
behavior of adult men?
I agree that teachers should refrain from forming relationships with
students, regardless of whether they are romantic relationships or friendships.
An exception to this rule would be when the adults are going through brief
training programs with other adults. This occurs frequently in businesses,
and it would occur even more frequently when the government is helping
us to get jobs and providing us with training programs. Unless the news
reports are not telling us something, it seems like there is an abnormal
amount of anger towards Brittni Colleps.
If we were to remove the secrecy that is protecting everybody, I think
we would find that there are a lot of single people and married couples
who are lonely, or suffering from some medical disorder, and who are reacting
to their problems by getting involved in strange sexual activities with
other people, or with dogs. I think Colleps is only one of many unhappy
people. Should we watch over everybody's sexual activities and put people
in jail when they get involved in an activity that we regard as weird?
We are not solving any problem by putting these people in jail. It would
be better to understand why they behave this way; make changes to society
to help us form stable relationships; and to restrict reproduction to the
people who are better suited to this modern world.
Give people as much freedom
as possible
I think the best situation is to try to give adults as much
freedom as possible, and when people behave in a manner we regard as inappropriate,
we simply restrict them from reproducing. In the case of Colleps, who had already
reproduced by the time she had the orgy with the young men, we would be
extra finicky with her children, and if they showed any signs of strange
behavior, they would be prohibited from reproducing.
I think the reason we are so concerned about sexual behavior rather
than more serious crimes is because sex has a stronger effect over our
emotions, and we are designing our policies according to our emotional
reactions rather than our intellect. When fully grown adults voluntarily
get together to have unusual sex acts, our emotions are triggered, but
putting them in jail doesn't provide any benefit to us or them. Meanwhile,
there are men in the churches, government offices, schools, hospitals,
and apparently even some police departments, who are routinely raping children
and getting away with it. Our priorities are irrational.
Some people seem more upset with Colleps than with Jerry Sandusky and his
pedophilia network.
We have to face the fact that teenagers are going to experiment with
masturbation, and that many people are going to experiment with sex. Rather
than worry about what type of sex acts a person engages in, we should ask
ourselves such questions as: "What would happen if
future generations become more like this person? Would that create
a more pleasant world for the human race?" For example, imagine
if future generations of women were like Brittni Colleps. Imagine if all
of the women were getting married, raising children, and having orgies
with young men. There is nothing right or wrong about that, but we have
to decide if this is what we want the human race to become. However, even
though Colleps is showing signs of undesirable behavior, we have more important
people to worry about. She should be among the last of our concerns.
These concepts apply to more than just sex. For example, consider food.
We all have cravings for food, but some people have trouble controlling
their cravings. Furthermore, people who are unhappy will often stimulate
themselves with food. We all enjoy titillating ourselves with food, but
there are some people who are doing this to excess, and we could describe
them as having "food orgies". If we are going to put people in jail
for sex orgies, why not put fat people in jail for having "food
orgies"? Furthermore, some people could be described as having excessive
cravings for money or fame. Why not put billionaires in jail for having
"money orgies"? Why not put some of the Hollywood celebrities in jail for
having "fame orgies"? Why do we consider excessive sexual activity to be
a problem, but not excessive cravings for money, food, or fame? Some people
build houses that are excessively large. Why don't we put them in jail
for having "house orgies"?
Putting people in jail for excessive cravings for sex will not help
them or us. The most appropriate reaction to people who display unusual
or self-destructive behavior is to first consider whether their problem
is caused by something that we can correct, such as diet, allergies, or
hormone disorders. For all we know, some of the female teachers who are
having sex with their students are suffering from something that can be
corrected with modern medical technology, but they don't understand that
they have a problem, and they are using sex to bring themselves some relief.
However, we make no attempt to understand the cause of strange behavior.
Instead, we react to problems with our emotions.
If Larry Ellison was having sex orgies every day, people would consider
him to be emotionally disturbed, or suffering from low self-esteem, but
how is his intense craving for money or status any less psychotic or disgusting?
Why do we reprimand people with sexual problems but not other types of
emotional disorders? I think the reason is because we are not thinking
about the issue. We are simply reacting with our emotions.
Instead of focusing on sex acts, focus on what the world would be like
if more people were like a particular person. For example, imagine if all
of the men in the future generations were like Bill Gates. Imagine all
of the men in the future trying to isolate themselves from other people
in a gigantic mansion. Is that your idea of a healthy society? We put Brittni
Colleps in jail for five years while admiring what I would describe as
seriously
disturbed billionaires. Britney Colleps has abnormal behavior for a
woman, but she is not a threat to your life or my life. By comparison,
the neurotic billionaires have a significant and destructive
influence over the world. It would be better if our first priority was
dealing with the people who are the most destructive to society, and after
we dealt with those people, we worry about the people who are less significant.
Don't judge a person by his sexual activities. Judge him by his effect
on society.
The billionaires are behaving like medieval Kings and Queens. Enormous
numbers of people are pampering them with mansions, yachts, and other items,
but what does society gain from this? We can accomplish much more by working
as a team and for the team. We could be building beautiful cities for
ourselves, developing better transportation systems, and providing ourselves
with greenhouses.
These concepts also applies to adultery. We need to understand adultery
rather than react emotionally. We need to develop policies according to
what is best for society rather than what our emotions want. Adultery is
not a right or wrong issue. From the point of view of evolution, adultery
is beneficial because it causes more genetic variety in the children. We
need to understand adultery and make intelligent policies about it. If
we were to analyze all of the people who are involved with adultery, I
think we would find that they can be classified into three primary groups:
1) Affairs due to misery.
This type of affair is the result of people who are unhappy, such as
a person is suffering from some mental or physical disorder, or because
the person is becoming confused and frustrated as they go through the transition
into old age. These people are reacting to their misery by trying to find
some relief. When some people are miserable, they react by eating, shopping,
drinking alcohol, or playing with their dog, but some people sometimes
react by looking for affection or sex.
These type of affairs are detrimental and miserable, and most people
react to these type of affairs with disgust or anger, but I don't consider
these people to be any worse than the people who react to unhappiness by
eating excessively, going shopping, or struggling to become famous. Rather
than react with anger, we should tell all
of the unhappy people to consider the possibility that there is something
wrong with their body that they can fix with medical technology, or that
there is something wrong with their attitude towards life which can be
fixed by thinking more often, changing their goals or expectations,
or becoming more educated.
2) Affairs due to incompatible spouses.
I think a lot of people are unhappy with their spouse, and this is
causing them to occasionally fantasize of meeting someone that they are
more compatible with, and this in turn can sometimes lead to extramarital
affairs. Becoming angry with these people for having an affair is worthless
because they are already suffering. Nobody benefits by tormenting them
even further. I think these type of affairs can be significantly reduced
by making changes to society. For example, by providing a variety of courtship
affairs, single people will have the opportunity to meet and get to know
a lot more people, thereby increasing the chances that we find somebody
who is compatible with us.
However, courtship affairs are not enough to stop these unhappy marriages.
I think we also have to change everybody's attitude towards life, marriage,
and human behavior. Some of the people who are in incompatible marriages
may actually be in very compatible marriages, but they don't realize it
because they are expecting something unrealistic from their spouse. For
example, the feminists are fooling a lot of women into expecting men to
behave like women, and this can result in a woman becoming upset with her
husband for being a "normal" man. I think it is unrealistic for a woman
to expect her husband to be excited by babies, or to be with her when she
gives birth. A lot of men would be fascinated to watch a birth, but from
a man's point of view, it is only a curiosity that rapidly becomes boring.
I think there are significant differences between men and women,
and these differences prevent us from spending a lot of our leisure time
together. I think society needs to provide lots of activities for us, and
husbands and wives need enough confidence in their relationship to allow
their spouse to engage in activities on their
own without becoming paranoid that their spouse will leave them
for somebody else. The people who are afraid that their spouse will abandon
them should be considered as neurotic.
Men and women need to understand one another and deal with our differences.
For example, women like to dance much more than men, so a woman should
expect
her husband to have less interest in dancing than she has. The women should
dance alone, with other women, or with whichever men enjoy doing it. This
requires people change their attitude towards their spouse and stop treating
their spouse as a personal possession. There is nothing wrong with a man's
wife dancing with another man while he is at some other activity. She does
not have to avoid contact with other men or give him reports on who she
has met.
Many people have the attitude that their spouse is their personal possession,
and that their spouse should not have any contact with people of the opposite
sex, but I think this is a crude, unrealistic attitude. There is nothing
wrong with men and women enjoying one another at social affairs.
I think the reason some couples get divorced when they are free to flirt
with other people is because many people foolishly believe that when they
encounter somebody who is entertaining, that the other person would be
a more exciting or compatible spouse. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily
true. You might laugh at a comedian, but that doesn't mean you would enjoy
living with him as a roommate, marrying him, taking a walk in the
park with him, or being his neighbor. Just because a woman enjoys a man
as a dance partner doesn't mean that she would enjoy living with him, having
dinner with him, or raising children with him.
Our primitive ancestors could form relationships based entirely on their
emotional reactions to one another, but we have to be much more serious
because we have more leisure time, and life today is much more complex.
You might enjoy flirting with somebody at a social affair, and you might
enjoy doing it on a regular basis,
or you might enjoy riding horses together, or going scuba diving together,
but just because you enjoy some activities together doesn't mean that you
would enjoy living as a married couple.
It's important to note that most people have very little control over
their emotions. This is why most people eat excessively, drink excessively,
gamble excessively, and avoid responsibility. They want to titillate themselves,
like children or animals. They don't want to think or control themselves.
When these crude people encounter somebody that they find entertaining,
they may abandon their spouse and marry that other person, and later, when
they meet somebody else that they find entertaining, they may repeat the
process. When these crude people see a donut, they may eat it, even if
they are already full. We cannot worry about these crude people. We have
to design society for the more advanced humans.
We should provide ourselves with lots of activities, and we should encourage
men and women to let their spouse enjoy activities on their own. Our attitude
should be that if you are incapable of forming a stable relationship, that
is your problem. By restricting reproduction to the people who form
more stable relationships, we will create humans who are capable of enjoying
other people, including flirting with other people, without the jealousy,
envy, hatred, and marital problems.
Most people give me the impression that they are looking for a spouse
that they enjoy; a spouse that they can have fun with. They
are like children looking for somebody to play with. Most people seem to
think of a marriage as endless amounts of romance, sex, and entertainment.
However, most of the time that a husband and wife spend together are on
the "boring" aspects of life, such as waking up in the morning, getting
dressed, going to sleep at night, and dealing with children. Therefore,
people should concentrate on finding somebody that they want to live
with. The person you prefer to live with is not necessarily
the person that you want to dance with, sing with, or even take a bicycle
ride with.
In prehistoric times, people knew each other intimately. They knew when
they woke up in the morning, how many hours they would sleep each night,
and whether they snored at night. It was easy for them to pick out a spouse
that they would be happy to live with. Today, however, instead of seriously
looking for somebody to live with, both men and women are trying to impress
and titillate one another. They each put on a phony image
of what they are, and they try to make themselves appear exciting and entertaining.
They are trying to deceive one another. This is an idiotic
way of meeting a spouse. We need to know people much more thoroughly. We
need to know if we have compatible sleeping hours, and we should have some
leisure activities in common. We need to know if we are going to enjoy
being with them during the "dull" moments in the morning and at night.
One of the advantages to putting teenagers in Teentown is that the adults
can arrange for a lot of activities for the boys and girls to get to know
one another. Although the girls and boys would be separated in different
buildings, the adults would be able to experiment with lots of activities
to help them get to know one another. They could even experiment with camping
trips together.
I think another reason that marriages are unstable today is because
husbands and wives are spending too much of their time together in their
homes. One reason is because we are living in houses that are far away
from our friends, and that makes it difficult for people to get together
for activities. The solution to this problem is to live in apartment complexes
that give us easy access to the social activities in the city, and to allow
us to move freely from one apartment to another so that we can live among
our friends. Although single-family homes are very desirable, I think we
would be happier overall in apartment complexes.
Another improvement would be to remove the people from leadership positions
who promote toilet humor and who portray women as sexually promiscuous.
This is giving teenage boys an unrealistic impression of what to expect
from girls. A lot of television programs also portray the men as incompetent,
infantile idiots, and the women as leaders. We need to be more realistic.
3) Natural affairs.
Some of the adulterous affairs seem to be due to human nature.
Women are extremely resistant to sex, but they are not resistant when they
encounter a man who is high on the social hierarchy. Take a look at women
when they encounter a Hollywood celebrity. They are willing to line up
and offer themselves sexually. We have to face the fact that humans are
nothing more than intelligent apes, and that women have a tendency to offer
themselves to the dominant men. Men were not designed to resist such offers.
Actually, it is a man's fantasy.
These type of affairs are likely to be unnoticed because both the men
and women are enjoying themselves, which means that nobody is complaining,
and both men and women have a tendency to have their affairs discreetly
and then return to their regular lives. However, in the world today, a
lot of mentally disturbed men are becoming rich and famous, and they have
a tendency to have wild and disgusting affairs, often in front of other
people.
These type of affairs can be reduced significantly by treating men in
a more equal manner. Our emotions do not want equality, but I think it
would be better for us. When none of the men are rich or famous, then the
women will not offer themselves to anybody. This requires designing a society
so that all of the men have virtually the same homes, and nobody is treated
as a "celebrity".
You might wonder how it is possible for nobody to be famous or a "celebrity".
Recall that earlier I mentioned that we could modify the award ceremonies
into a more useful social affair. If we were to regularly have social affairs
that honored gardeners, factory workers, carpenters, scuba divers, and
everybody else, then everybody would occasionally get some attention.
It would also remind people that everybody is doing something of value
to society. I think this would help reduce the problem we have today in
which a few people are being treated as better than the rest of us.
I think it is important to note that the type of adulterous affair that
I'm describing as "natural" may not be very common today, but I think it's
going to become an increasingly significant problem as soon as we start
creating homogenous cities and restricting reproduction. Imagine living
in a city a few centuries in the future in which all of the people are
intelligent, nice-looking, nice smelling, well behaved, and have pleasant
personalities. You would be surrounded by people that you are attracted
to, and who consider you to be attractive, also.
In our world today, most of us live and work around people that we have
nothing in common with, and we dislike, despise, or fear many of them.
Almost everybody today is in contact with thousands of people, but
there are only a few of them that we want to be friends with, and
there are even fewer that we want to have a romantic relationship with.
We can easily walk around our city, go shopping, and meet our neighbors
without becoming interested in forming a friendship with them or becoming
their lover.
Imagine living in a future city in which all of the people are healthy
and happy. Imagine walking into a city park, office building, factory,
restaurant, or recreational area and finding yourself surrounded by women
(or men, if you are a woman) who are physically attractive, have adorable
personalities, and are intelligent, honest, and responsible. In that type
of a city, you wouldn't have to search through very many people to find
a friend or spouse. Actually, you would be constantly encountering
people that you would like as a friend or spouse.
Imagine adorable government officials. |
Imagine adorable nurses. |
Imagine going outside at lunch and finding adorable office
and factory workers. |
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The future generations will have to deal with the opposite
problem that we have today. Today most people are very lonely, and they
are struggling to find friends and a spouse. We have trouble finding friends
because we dislike most of the people we live with. Our cities today
are essentially a human garbage dump. In the future, the people
are going to have to deal with an excess of potential friends and
spouses. They are going to have to turn people away.
The people in the future will be more attractive in both their
physical appearance and personality, and so they will have greater temptations
to form adulterous relationships. Therefore, the people of the future are
going to need a much better understanding of human emotions and relationships.
They must be capable of developing courtship activities that truly help
them meet people and find a spouse that they enjoy living with. They have
to do a better job of analyzing potential spouses for compatibility. They
must also figure out how to form more stable, more satisfying marriages.
Our prehistoric ancestors could easily survive and enjoy life simply
by acting like monkeys, but modern society requires both men and women
to develop a better understanding of their own emotions and
that of their partner. This is especially true of sexual issues. People
must become less inhibited, less dishonest, and less ashamed of themselves
so that they can understand their own sexual feelings, and learn how to
satisfy their partner.
|
Imagine being a teenage boy in a school in which all
of the girls are intelligent, well behaved, and beautiful. |
This upcoming problem is also one of the reasons I suggest
that we separate the teenage boys and girls in school and at work.
In the world today, there is not too much of a problem with mixing the
boys and girls because most of them do not like one another, but imagine
yourself in a classroom in which you are surrounded by girls, or boys,
that you find attractive. Would you
be able to concentrate?
In the world today, there is sexual titillation in all of the advertisements,
television shows, and movies. Many businesses deliberately design outfits
for waitresses to be sexually titillating. I think this causes trouble
today, and I think the problem will become even more significant in the
future when the women are even more adorable. Imagine being a teenage boy
in the future when all of the girls are adorable, and you are being stimulated
constantly
by television, businesses, newscasters, and waitresses.
In a free enterprise system, businesses benefit tremendously from sexual
titillation, but nobody else benefits. Allowing businesses to titillate
boys and adult men is as destructive as allowing businesses to create the
impression that money brings happiness, or that diamonds are a girl's best
friend. This is creating problems for society. Nobody benefits from this
type of manipulation.
Why are quiz
shows so popular?
Television has a lot of popular "game
shows" and "quiz shows", such as Jeopardy
and Wheel of Fortune. What is it about these
shows that people enjoy? I suspect that we are titillated by these shows
because they provide us with the opportunity to solve a simple puzzle.
All animals are titillated by solving certain problems. For example,
when you tie a piece of string to a stick and move it around for a cat
to chase after, the cat has to figure out how to catch the string. If you
move the string behind an object, the cat has to figure out whether it
will come out on the other side of the object, or remain on the
same side. Dogs love to chase after balls, but what they are really doing
is capturing the ball by predicting where the ball will be when
they try to grab it. When a dog jumps up to catch a ball, it cannot jump
at what he sees. Rather, its mind has to perform a very complicated
analysis of the motion of the ball, its jumping ability, and how much
to flex each of its muscles so that its mouth will arrive at the ball at
the proper time.
Pet cats and dogs enjoy capturing objects. They put a lot of mental
and physical effort into the activity, so this implies that they are receiving
emotional
titillation for solving this particular type of problem. They are not
doing this because of hunger, or because they feel obligated. I think they
are behaving just like young boys who are throwing a ball to one another.
They are titillating themselves by solving the problem of predicting the
motion of an object in 3-D space.
It's interesting to note that our robots, even if they had the mechanical
ability to move like a dog, would not be able to capture objects as quickly
as a dog. Our robots have to process a lot of information and do a lot
of math calculations in order to predict the motion of an object, and the
computers of today cannot perform the calculations fast enough to match
the performance of a dog. MIT has developed
an airplane that can fly around obstacles, but it has to be preprogrammed
for the area that it is flying in. It is not capable of processing information
fast enough to allow it to go into an uncharted forest and fly through
tree branches, as a bird can do.
Our robots make movements according to precise math calculations, but
animals may be doing approximate, analog operations. For example, the closer
a cat is to a mouse, the greater the tension will be on the cat's muscles
that tilt its eyes, and the greater the tension will be on its cornea.
The faster the mouse is moving, the greater the activity will be of the
muscles that are moving its head as it tracks the mouse. It may be using
that information to set its muscles for pouncing. Animals may not
do complex math operations. Since this analog circuitry would have to be
"calibrated" after birth, that would explain why the young animals play
with one another so often. Perhaps the only way we will ever get robots
and drones to make decisions as rapidly as the animals is to provide them
with similar features.
Humans get pleasure from solving certain types of problems, just as
the animals do. Another reason we enjoy solving puzzles is because it makes
us feel intelligent and educated. We love feeling special, especially men.
Therefore, solving a puzzle allows us to imagine that we are special people.
Unfortunately, the emotion that causes us to enjoy solving
problems was not designed for this modern world. It has no concern
for whether the problem has any value to us. This emotion works
properly for animals and primitive humans because the problems that they
must solve are truly important to their lives. However, in this modern
world, we can create an unlimited number of artificial and completely worthless
problems. Some examples are the Rubik's cube, jigsaw puzzles, and crossword
puzzles. These problems are essentially dildos, except that we use
them to stimulate a different emotion.
Some people believe that some puzzles are educational, and perhaps
a few are, but some of them may be as worthless as a cat chasing a piece
of string. When people solve problems that have no value to them, they
are merely titillating their emotions. Furthermore, these people are usually
doing this alone in their home. They are doing "emotional masturbation".
The activity makes them feel good, but they accomplish nothing.
As we get a better understanding of our emotions, we can do a better
job of designing activities for us that are both emotionally satisfying
and somewhat useful. We can certainly design puzzles for children that
help prepare them for society or help them to learn a useful skill. We
could also create puzzles for children that require the children to work
together in some manner so that they meet other children, get some exercise,
and get accustomed to working in teams. I think it is foolish to encourage
children to sit for hours by themselves and titillate themselves with a
Rubik's cube, jigsaw puzzle, or crossword puzzle.
If a person were to spend hours a day sitting at home alone and stimulating
himself sexually, we would consider him to have a problem, but what
is the difference between stimulating yourself sexually and stimulating
yourself with crossword puzzles, Rubiks cubes, or mathematical puzzles?
Businesses profit by selling products for self-stimulation, but do any
of us benefit from it? Does society?
I'm not suggesting that everything we do have a value. There is nothing
wrong with relaxing once in a while by yourself or with your friends, and
doing something as useless as watching the clouds blow around, watching
children play, or watching a hummingbird. I am not opposed to people who
stimulate themselves sexually, either. I am simply pointing out that we
should not mindlessly do whatever brings us some emotional titillation.
We should try to understand our emotional cravings and think more
often.
Children are more interested in games than adults, and we certainly
have the intelligence to design activities that are at least partly
useful for them. I don't think they are benefiting by sitting at home for
hours with the existing puzzles and games. We certainly have the intelligence
to create some puzzles or games that are more educational, and we can create
activities that get them out of the house, help them to meet other people,
get some exercise, and possibly learn something useful or do something
useful. If we start thinking about our activities and start experimenting
with changes, we will certainly develop activities that are just as much
fun, but more beneficial to us, as individuals, and to society.
Getting back to the issue of quiz shows, notice that they tend to provide
a lot of simple problems rather than a few very complex problems. A typical
Jeopardy program, if the advertisements are removed, has about 20 minutes
of questions. During that time period, they might ask as many as 60 questions.
Would jeopardy have been popular if they had provided only one question
that took 20 minutes to solve? Or how about four questions that took five
minutes apiece? Would an audience want to watch the contestants do research
on an issue, discuss the issue, and think about the issue? Some people
might, but I think most people would lose their interest in the show because
we don't want to think. Our natural tendency is to behave like an animal.
We want to look in our memory, and then make a very rapid decision based
on what we find. We do not want to spend any time researching, thinking,
or discussing.
The Wheel of Fortune requires a few minutes to solve each puzzle, but
the people do not have to spend any time thinking or researching.
A television murder mystery might take an hour to solve, but it doesn't
require any serious thinking or research. The audience is provided with
clues every few minutes, and all the audience has to do is make a simple
decision about which of the clues is intended to confuse them. They don't
have to put much effort into solving the puzzle. A murder mystery is more
like a jigsaw puzzle than a complex, intellectual problem.
The game and quiz shows provide a lot of entertainment for very little
resources. However, I think our free enterprise system is a bad influence
on the quiz shows. The television businesses want to profit from their
shows, and their primary technique is to attract people to their show by
offering very significant prizes, usually of money. I think it would be
better if there were no prizes at all, and the games were purely for fun.
In my discussion about sports, I suggested that we encourage more participation
and less voyeurism. The same concept applies to game shows. Instead of
watching the shows on television, a city could have several shows happening
at different locations, such as at theaters, at restaurants after dinner,
or in a park. When there are no prizes, nobody has to be concerned about
winning or losing, and so people don't have to practice for the events
or worry about failing. The game shows would be more spontaneous and fun.
Instead of sitting in your home alone and watching strangers on television
compete for money, you would go to an event in your city and watch some
of your own friends, neighbors, and coworkers participate in their own
version of Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy. These local, community game shows
would be for fun, not prizes. Some people would volunteer to be contestants,
some would volunteer to be hosts for the show, and some would volunteer
to create the questions that the contestants have to answer.
In addition to entertaining people, I think the shows would be beneficial
by helping people get over their inhibitions about participating in activities
and doing something in front of other people. Initially most people will
only want to watch other people play the games, but since we will occasionally
know one of the contestants, we will eventually notice that none of the
contestants are suffering as a result of participating. That will cause
some people to find the courage to participate in a game, also. The more
people that participate, the easier it will be to convince other people
to give it a try. Although it is enjoyable to watch other people, voyeurism
should not be our only leisure time activity. I think people will be happier
when they occasionally participate in activities.
The free enterprise system does not want us to arrange for our own game
shows. We are encouraged to pay other people to entertain us, but is that
really what is best for us? I don't think so. Most people today would probably
refuse to participate in a game show as either a contestant or as a host,
but I think that most people would eventually get over their inhibitions
and give it a try. It might take some people a few years, but it would
eventually happen.
I think the primary reason that people are afraid to participate in
activities is because they worry about doing poorly in the contest, and
a minor problem is that many people are embarrassed about what they look
like. However, these fears are ridiculous. First of all, the people who
are afraid to participate because they worry about their appearance are
foolish to worry about this because everybody who knows them already knows
what their physical qualities are. They are not going to fool anybody by
hiding in the back of the room. For example, if a person is ugly or fat,
he may be afraid to be in front of a group of people because he worries
that other people will regard him as ugly or fat. However, everybody who
knows him will already regard him as ugly or fat, so he should stop worrying
about it.
A fat person who worries about his fatness has two problems. First,
he is fat, and second, he is self-conscious about it. It is better for
a fat person to ignore his fatness. A fat person who is self-conscious
or inhibited is a neurotic fat person,
and that is much worse than a pleasant fat person.
The same concept applies to people who worry about doing poorly in a
contest. These people are worried that we will discover what they really
are. They want us to believe the image that they have created for themselves,
and they worry that if they participate in some activity, we will discover
that they are less talented than they claim to be. These people are making
themselves look arrogant, or neurotic, or inhibited, or suffering from
low self-esteem. They should relax and accept themselves for what they
are rather than create a phony image of what they want to be.
One of the problems with society today is that people who do poorly
in a contest will be ridiculed by some of the audience members who have
a nasty, bitter, sarcastic personality. The other people in the audience
will remain silent. There is nothing wrong with laughing at people's mistakes,
but the people who make sarcastic, bitter, envious, or angry remarks should
be forced out of the audience. Don't let them intimidate you.
People should also be encouraged to participate in making questions
for the quiz shows. This would allow us to create quiz shows for specific
groups of people, or about the city we live in, or for specific events.
For example, at a children's birthday party, the adults could arrange a
quiz show in which the children have to answer questions about all of the
people who are attending the birthday party. People could also arrange
for a quiz show at a wedding or anniversary.
I think that if a city were to encourage us to experiment with holding
our own game shows, there would initially be a lot of embarrassment and
awkwardness, but we will get used to it. I think that most people would
discover that they prefer watching live shows in which they know the contestants
rather than watching strangers on a television. After a while, a lot of
people would relax enough to participate as contestants or hosts.
How do we design better entertainment
activities?
In addition to experimenting with new sports, I think we should
experiment with new social activities of all types. I don't think
there is much value in our birthday parties, city festivals, wedding ceremonies,
Christmas holidays, or Valentine's Day holidays.
To create a more useful activity, we first have to decide on what the
purpose
should be. Every affair should provide us with some benefit, such as exercise,
socializing, entertainment, education, or something beneficial for society.
If an affair requires equipment or supplies, then we have to consider whether
the burden of producing those items is worth the benefit.
For example, what is the purpose of a child's birthday party?
In a free enterprise system, businesses exploit the parties to sell gifts,
cakes, ice cream, candies, candles, and other items, but when we provide
the basic necessities for free, there is no point in giving gifts. When
we take control of the economy, we have to decide if we want to produce
items for the parties, such as candles or ice cream, and if so, that means
some people have to work in the factories that produce those items. Is
the burden of producing those items worth the benefit? What exactly is
the benefit of a birthday party?
The typical American birthday party, without gifts, is just an orgy
of sweet foods. How do the children benefit from that? We should not try
to please the children. The children will love having excessive amounts
of sweets, but they don't benefit from that. Actually, we could say that
they suffer from it. We have to ignore what the children want and experiment
with a birthday party that has some value, such as entertainment, socializing,
exercise, or education.
In order to do a good job of designing birthday parties, holiday celebrations,
sports, wedding ceremonies, and other activities, we need to understand
the needs of the human mind and body. We cannot design activities according
to what our emotions want. A child would love to have candy, ice
cream, and cake at a birthday party, but that is not what his body needs.
Likewise, adult men want to feel important, but that doesn't justify providing
them with thousands of award ceremonies, and adult women like to be the
center of attention, but that doesn't justify providing them with
thousands of beauty contests.
Our city festivals and holiday celebrations are opportunities for businesses
and governments to make money, and for religions to promote propaganda,
but these activities should serve a more useful purpose, such as encouraging
people to try some new activity; providing entertainment; providing people
with exercise; getting some of the people who like arts and crafts to contribute
to an artistic project for the city; or giving teenagers some practice
with talking or performing in public. After we decide on the purpose of
a particular activity, then we have to experiment with methods to achieve
that purpose. This will be a trial and error process, but we have nothing
to lose and lots to gain.
Designing entertainment activities
requires that we understand what the human mind finds entertaining, and
why. The remainder of this file will discuss the subject of humor. I cannot
provide much of an explanation for the subject, but hopefully I will inspire
other people to think about the issue and add to it. As we learn more about
such issues as humor, we will do a better job of figuring out how to design
"entertainment".
What is "humor"?
As I mentioned in part 7, the more we know about a subject,
the more divisions and subdivisions we create. The subject of humor
has no divisions. This is a sign that we haven't learned anything about
humor. We cannot make any distinction between different types of humor.
We cannot figure out if there is a difference between laughing at a slapstick
comedian, laughing at a sexual joke, or laughing at a person who falls
down.
|
Why are some potentially dangerous accidents amusing
while others are upsetting? |
What causes us to laugh? What causes us to groan at "puns"?
What is the difference between a joke and a pun? Why do we consider some
types of accidents to be amusing while others are frightening or
sad? Why do some people laugh at certain jokes, while other people complain
that the joke is stupid or insulting?
Automobile accidents are sad and frightening when we witness them in
person, but when watching them on video, we sometimes laugh at them. We
are not laughing because a person may be dead or injured, so what are we
laughing at?
You might find it interesting to watch some of the compilations of automobile
accidents and notice if you react to any, and if so, which ones. I think
the Russian drivers provide some of the most bizarre accidents. For example,
here
is number 27. At the one minute mark is a strange accident, and seconds
later is an even more bizarre accident. Try to relax and be honest as you
watch those videos. Notice which accidents are most likely to cause you
to laugh, make noises, or shake your head. I am most likely to laugh or
make noises about the most bizarre accidents, and more likely to feel saddened
by the more "typical" accidents.
Why would we laugh at bizarre accidents? I suppose it is the same reason
we laugh at slapstick comedy. My guess is that as our mind watches
the automobile or the slapstick comedian, it is trying to predict what
is going to happen in the future, and when something completely unexpected
happens, it creates what we refer to as surprise, shock, or amazement.
For some reason, we are stimulated by the unexpected. Perhaps this
developed for safety purposes. During prehistoric times, if something
unexpected happened, even if it was just an unexpected noise, we would
be alert to danger, but when watching slapstick comedy or video of automobile
accidents, we realize that there is no danger, and so we seem to enjoy
the stimulation rather than be worried about it.
If you have already watched a lot of automobile accidents, then you
may not have much of a reaction to them, which is a sign that we are reacting
to the surprise of what happens rather than to the accident. In
other words, we are not laughing at the accident; rather, we are
laughing at being surprised or shocked by it.
The type of laughter we do when watching automobile accidents is not
the same type of laughter as when we listen to a comedian tell jokes. We
also make more noises and body movements when watching automobile accidents.
I think the human mind has more emotions than we have ways of expressing
them, and so laughter is being used by more than one emotion. This creates
confusion because we cannot be certain why a person is laughing.
We know almost nothing about the subject of humor, and so the category
is very broad and vague. As we learn more about humor, we will create subcategories
of humor, and we will be able to distinguish between different types of
humor and laughter. We will also find that some jokes are amusing for a
variety
of reasons, and other jokes are amusing for only one specific reason.
I think the main reason we find jokes amusing is because we receive
some emotional titillation for solving certain
types of problems. The jokes that we regard as "funny" are jokes
that require we solve a problem, and when we solve the problem, we are
momentarily titillated. The reason a joke is not as funny the second time
we hear it is because once our mind has decoded it, it doesn't have to
do any significant work the second time, and so the portion of our brain
that enjoys solving puzzles is not triggered. By comparison, if we like
a song, a food, or a recreational activity, we will enjoy it over and over.
The fact that a joke becomes less funny each time we hear it is an indication
that the funny aspect is in the decoding process,
not in the joke.
Children cannot think very well, and they don't have much experience
with the world, and so their mind will be titillated by problems that adults
consider obvious. This causes children to giggle at jokes that are meaningless
to an adult. An example is the proposal by NASA to send scuba divers into
the Pacific Ocean to explore the sun when it sets in the evening. To many
children, that is an intellectual puzzle, and therefore, they will be titillated
by solving it, but most adults can solve it without any effort.
It's also important to note that whether we consider a particular joke
to be funny depends mainly on the context of the joke. For example, if
a political candidate were to make that joke about NASA during a serious
speech, it would likely be regarded as a sarcastic remark about NASA rather
than a joke.
A song is always a song regardless of whether a political candidate
uses it in one of his campaign speeches, or whether construction workers
are playing it while they work, or whether a person is listening to it
while he is relaxing at home. The same is true with a pizza. It's always
a pizza, regardless of the environment. However, a joke can change from
funny to disgusting to sarcastic simply by changing the environment that
it is presented in. This is another indication that jokes are not "funny".
Jokes are "interpreted", and so they are only funny if we interpret them
in a certain manner.
For another example about how the context changes a joke, imagine some
friends sending text messages to one another on their phones, and that
one of the friends, Ling Wu, has a strong Chinese
accent. We might find text messages like this:
|
John: |
No, I'm not suffering from confusion. I love
every minute of it! |
|
Jim: |
LOL! |
|
Ling Wu: |
ROR! |
|
Bob: |
What is ROR? |
|
Ling Wu: |
Raffing Out Roud! |
In that particular context, most people would consider that
remark to be amusing rather than insulting because, for one reason, a Chinese
person made the remark, and for another, they are friends with each other.
Actually, I think most people would consider Ling
Wu to be clever if he had been
the first person to think of that joke. However, that same joke would be
regarded as insulting if somebody made it in a sarcastic manner. In that
case, the momentary titillation that we receive from decoding the joke
would be overpowered by the intellectual realization that the person was
sarcastic.
The emotional titillation that we receive from solving a problem is
momentary,
whereas our intellectual conclusions can be persistent, and so our
intellectual interpretation of a joke can easily dominate the brief emotional
pleasure that we receive from a joke. The more we think about a
joke, the more our intellect will dominate our interpretation of
it. Jokes will be funnier if we relax and try not to think about them.
Comedians have a difficult job because every joke can be interpreted
as funny, insulting, or stupid. Only certain people are successful as comedians.
From my casual observations, they are the people who excel in presenting
jokes in a very amusing manner, and they often have a visually amusing
appearance.
Their behavior and appearance puts us into a particular mood. They cause
us to relax and expect jokes, and this causes us to become
biased in the favor of interpreting jokes as amusing rather than as insulting.
They make us less likely to "think about" the jokes and more likely to
enjoy the "visual slide show" that appears in our mind as we decode their
jokes. Most of their jokes, if presented by somebody else in a serious
manner, would be considered stupid, rude, insulting, or disgusting.
The type of jokes that we are most likely to interpret as funny are
those that have no reference to anybody in particular, and merely require
that we solve a problem. We especially find jokes amusing if they decode
into images or concepts that are slightly unrealistic, such as the automobile
bumper sticker that says, Honk if you love peace
and quiet. I suppose we find these funny for the same reason
that we find slapstick comedy funny; specifically, they decode into images
that are "abnormal", and that alerts us to danger.
The safest way for a comedian to make jokes about people or about human
behavior is for him to make the joke about himself or an imaginary friend
rather than a real person. For example, you might be momentarily amused
if a comedian told you that he is taking some adult education courses in
statistics, and he has just figured out that 3 out of 4 people make up
75% of the world's population. However, what if he told you that Al Gore
was just awarded a Nobel Prize for making that discovery? If you admire
Al Gore and the Nobel prizes, you would likely interpret that joke as an insult,
but if you are disgusted with Al Gore and the Nobel prizes, you might consider
the joke to be somewhat amusing.
An insulting version of a joke will be more amusing than a non-insulting
version if you are angry with the person that the joke is about because
in that case our minds get stimulated in two, separate manners. First, we
get some titillation for decoding the joke, and second, some other section
of our brain is titillated by the insult. We might describe that other
section of our mind as the area for anger, resentment, or disgust. An example
are the jokes about groups of people that we don't like, such as politicians,
lawyers, and Jews. The people who consider these jokes to be amusing are
the people who dislike the subject, whereas other people will consider
the jokes to be rude or insulting.
The insulting jokes frequently change according to current events. For
example, did you hear about the high school football player who was unusually
quiet and sad as he was putting on his uniform in the locker room? A teammate
asked, "What's wrong?" He replied, "Both of my parents died in a car accident
last night." His friend suggested that he see the coach before the game
begins. "He'll make you feel better!", to which he friend quickly responded,
"Oh, no! Sex is the last thing I want right now!" That joke would probably
have been considered idiotic prior to the exposure of Jerry Sandusky.
A lot of people complain about the insulting jokes, but they all developed
for a reason. Therefore, when a politician, Jew, or lawyer complains about
the jokes, we could respond that it is their own fault for providing source
material for the joke. It is not a coincidence that there are more angry
jokes about lawyers and Jews than there are about airline pilots and Eskimos.
If more football coaches are caught raping boys, then there will be more
jokes about pedophile coaches. At the other extreme, if everybody would
behave properly, nobody would feel a desire to express their anger about
a group of people. We could say that these jokes are an indication of a
problem with society.
Another example of these insulting jokes are the references to Arabs
as "towel heads" or "sand niggers". Our mind has to decode those phrases
to understand them, and we would normally be titillated when we figure
them out, and children may consider them amusing, but most adults will
quickly realize that the person is expressing his disgust of Arabs rather
than making a joke. We will receive a bit of titillation when we decode
the joke, but that will quickly fade and we will interpret the joke as
an insult. The people who dislike Arabs will be titillated by the insult,
whereas other people will be irritated by it. It would be very difficult
for a comedian to use these insulting type of "jokes" in a manner that
we regarded as amusing.
I think that another reason some jokes appear to be funny is because
they are actually embarrassing us.
Disregarding the fact that we don't understand what "embarrassment" is,
the sexual jokes are an example of this category. I would not describe
many of the sexual jokes as "funny". These jokes seem amusing because our
reaction is to giggle, which is similar to our reaction to a funny joke.
However, our giggling at sexual jokes is not exactly the same type of giggling
as for amusing jokes. It's an awkward, self-conscious giggle. The sexual
jokes are titillating some other section of our brain, and so they should
not be described as "funny".
I previously mentioned that Joe Biden and I were reacting to some of
Paul Ryan's remarks with smiles or giggles. Why do we sometimes smile,
giggle, and laugh at what are supposed to be serious remarks? It
might be because some of their remarks are titillating that section of
our mind that causes us to feel embarrassed.
Humans have a lot more facial and body expressions than animals, but
we seem to be using some of the same expressions for different reasons.
For example, we giggle from the enjoyment of learning something new and
from figuring something out, but we also giggle when we are embarrassed
or feeling awkward. There may be several other reasons that we giggle.
When a person laughs at something you say, he might be laughing
because he considers your remark funny, and/or because your remark embarrassed
him, and/or because he is embarrassed for you
for saying something like that in public.
I think a sexual joke causes us to giggle when it triggers the emotion
that we refer to as "embarrassment". One reason I think this is because
these jokes seem to be most amusing to people who are easily embarrassed
by sexual material, especially children who are going through puberty.
These jokes are the least amusing to the older adults who are not easily
embarrassed by sexual material.
I suppose embarrassment could be considered as a "quality control feature"
of the human mind. Unlike solitary animals, we are concerned about what
other people think about us. The emotion that we call "embarrassment" seems
to review our thoughts, and if it considers our thoughts as possibly detrimental
to ourselves and our relationships, it gives us an unpleasant feeling in
order to stop us from doing it. Emotions cannot speak to us, so we do not
hear voices in our mind giving us such commands as, "Don't behave in that
manner, you idiot!" Instead, each emotion tries to influence us by creating
feelings, which we describe as nervousness, awkwardness, pleasure,
fear, or embarrassment.
Whenever we feel nervous, awkward, or embarrassed, it is because your
mind is trying to stop you from doing something. Rather than ignore or
suppress the feelings, you should ask yourself, "Why is my mind so worried?
Why is my mind trying to incapacitate me?"
These emotions had a very important purpose in prehistoric times. Today
they are frequently getting confused, but we should not dismiss them. Sometimes
our mind is trying to warn us to stay away from a particular person or
a particular situation. You will especially notice this emotion if you
try to do something that you know you should not do. It doesn't
matter whether the activity is legal. If you know you are not supposed
to do something, this emotion will try to stop you.
Unfortunately, this emotion doesn't understand modern society, and so
it frequently tries to stop us from doing things that are acceptable today,
or even necessary. For example, it is necessary for people today
to stand in front of a group of people and talk to them, but this emotion
considers that type of behavior to be abnormal, and so tries to stop us
by making us feel nervous. The more unprepared we are for giving a talk,
the more strongly this emotion will try to stop us. Also, the larger the
group is, the more nervous we will be. Our prehistoric ancestors regularly
talked to one another, but they did not stand on stages in front of thousands
of people. They talked to one another just like friends talk to one another.
Our emotions were not designed for giving lectures to large groups of people,
or for singing on a stage. We have to become accustomed to this type of
activity through practice.
I think another category of humor are jokes that trigger self-esteem.
These jokes require us to have some special knowledge in order to "decode"
it. The people who have that knowledge can then imagine that they are special
people because they "get" the joke. For example, the two T-shirts to the
right would be meaningless to most of us, not amusing or attractive.
These jokes provide two amusing qualities. First, we are titillated
by solving the joke, and second, the people who solve the joke can titillate
themselves by telling themselves how smart or educated they are. In a sense,
these jokes encourage emotional masturbation. In other words, after you
solve the joke, you titillate yourself for being smart.
If we were to keep track of which T-shirts we are attracted to, and
which jokes we laugh at, we would find patterns that would help us to understand
ourselves. We would also find that our reaction to jokes changes throughout
the day and as we grow older. When we are upset with Microsoft Windows,
for example, we will laugh at jokes about Microsoft that we would otherwise
consider as idiotic.
I cannot explain humor, but the point I am trying to make is that as
we learn more about the human mind, the better we will do at designing
a society that fits our mind, controlling ourselves, and planning for our
future. Do not underestimate the significance of understanding the human
mind.
Prehistoric humans didn't need to understand anything about themselves,
but today we need an understanding of our mind and body so that we can
understand and control our cravings for food, material items, money, pornography,
drugs, sex, fame, children, and trophies. We need to understand why we
laugh, why children torment misfits, and why we become embarrassed.
Control your tendency to
blurt out answers
We have to be aware that we have a tendency to solve problems
rapidly by looking in our memory for information, filling in any missing
details, and then creating a conclusion based on that real and falsified
data. Men also have to be aware that we love to feel important. We have
to keep our arrogance under control, and we have to remind ourselves to
do research on issues, and spend more time analyzing them. For example,
why does the moon look larger when it is low on the horizon?
At different times during my life I have heard children ask that question,
and if there is a man in the area, he will blurt out an answer within microseconds.
A man will be proud of himself for solving the problem immediately, but
has anybody actually put any serious effort into studying this issue? Most
of us don't even have enough of an understanding of optics, the effect
the atmosphere has on light, or how the human mind interprets visual images,
to do a good job of answering that question. Most people are answering
the question simply by looking in their memory and making a rapid conclusion
based on what little information they find.
Most of us have heard that the moon only looks larger because our mind
is misinterpreting the visual image when the moon is low on the horizon.
I don't know much about optics, either, but I suspect that this explanation
is incorrect. I suspect that the atmosphere is having an effect on the
image.
Did you know that NASA claims to have sent 11 Apollo crews into either
earth orbit or to the moon? They were Apollo 7 to Apollo 17. All of the
Apollo astronauts could have told us whether the moon looks larger when
it is near the horizon of the earth, and the astronauts who circled the
moon could have told us whether the Earth looked larger when it was near
the horizon of the moon. They might have helped us resolve this issue of
why the moon looks larger near the horizon.
Both the moon and the sun look larger and more reddish when
they are near the horizon, but I don't think this is because our mind is
misinterpreting the visual image. I think the atmosphere is affecting the
image. In the diagram to the right, when the moon or sun are at the horizon,
the light has to travel through much more of the atmosphere, and that will
cause more of the light to scatter. This would increase the diameter of
a beam of light. This has the effect of magnifying the image. The larger
image will be blurry, but because it is larger, it will activate more of
the cells in our eyes, thereby creating the illusion that the moon and
sun have become larger. Since more of the blue light will get scattered,
the image will also have a reddish tint.
Furthermore, I suspect that the change in density of the atmosphere
causes the atmosphere to behave like a glass lens. The way to test this
theory would be to put some air in a glass container that is the shape
of a lens or a prism, and then put the glass object in a vacuum, and shine
a beam of light into it, as in the three images below.
In the images below, a hollow, glass
prism is filled with air and put into a vacuum.
Ignoring the effect of the glass walls, would
the air have an effect on the light?
Light changes direction.
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No effect at all.
|
A spectrum is created.
|
|
|
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What is the difference between
crying
and producing
tears?
Why do people cry? What is the difference between crying and
producing tears? Why don't men cry as much as women and children?
We associate tears with crying, but I think there is a subtle difference
between the two. For example, some people cry when they fail at something,
such as when Honey
Boo Boo cries after losing a beauty contest, but they do not always
produce tears. Some children cry when they don't get what they want, but
they don't always produce tears, either. Actually, some of them become
angry and violent.
It is also interesting to note that tears are sometimes produced from
intense physical pain, but a person doesn't necessarily cry from the pain,
and tears are also produced over pleasurable events, such as weddings,
and that doesn't always produce crying, either. Why would our eyes produce
tears for both pain and for pleasure?
The act of crying seems to have originally developed for babies
to manipulate parents into providing them with assistance. However, the
production of tears may have developed for some other reason, such as a
reaction to any intense emotion as a way of ensuring the eyes remain clean.
Perhaps the production of tears became exaggerated in humans so that it
could be used for expressing emotions.
Some people promote the theory that the men who never cry are actually
suppressing the desire to do so. This theory implies that there is only
one type of crying, and that men all throughout the world and all throughout
history have decided to suppress their desire to cry. However, this theory
requires explaining how and why
men around the world, who do not know each other, and over thousands of
years of time, would suppress their craving to cry even though millions
of them do not suppress their craving to steal, rape, or lie. The most
sensible explanation for why adult men rarely cry is that we have less
of a desire to cry because the mind of an adult man is slightly different
than that of a woman and child.
Furthermore, even though most adult men never cry, it seems that every
man is capable of producing tears at emotional events, such as weddings
and deaths. As of today, we put all displays of crying and tear production
into the category of "crying", but I would separate crying from tear production.
I would describe crying as a signal for help, and tears as an emotional
display.
Crying is a regular activity for babies. A baby will cry whenever
something bothers it because it has no idea what to do. This type of crying
developed as a signal to let the adults know that something is wrong.
Crying could be described as "manipulative"
because babies do it to stimulate other people's emotions and manipulate
them into providing assistance. Babies cry whenever they want pampering.
With babies, this behavior is necessary because it is the only way
that they can deal with their problems.
Crying is primarily an audio display, although children often
use physical displays, also, such as hitting, throwing objects, and pinching.
The production of tears is optional with crying.
As children grow older they develop a greater interest in solving their
problems on their own and less of an interest in crying for help. When
a boy becomes an adult, he should lose his desire to cry for help, although
because people are different, some men retain that desire to some extent.
The production of tears, however, is different from crying because it's
not a signal for help. When men cry over a death, song, or at a wedding,
they are not pouting or looking for somebody to help them with a problem.
They are not trying to manipulate anybody. They're not looking for handouts
or assistance. The production of tears by itself, without the crying, is
just an emotional display, similar to a facial expression.
Why do I bring up these issue of crying and tears? Because a better
understanding of these issues will help us design a better society. As
of today, we are not distinguishing between the different types of crying,
and the end result is that men are embarrassed to produce tears at emotional
events, and we often struggle to prevent tears from forming, but why should
we try to suppress tears? Producing tears over emotional events is not
the same as the crying that babies do. We need a better understanding of
our emotions so that we can make a distinction between crying and tears.
Otherwise we will make the assumption that a man who produces tears at
a wedding is behaving the same as a baby who cries when he is hungry.
I would restrict the word "crying" to the manipulative behavior
that we see with babies. The production of tears during emotional events
is completely different, and we should create another word to describe
it. When a man produces tears at a wedding or a funeral, we should not
describe him as "crying". We need some other word because he is merely
displaying emotions, not trying to manipulate us. The production of tears
should be in the same category as facial expressions or tones
of voice.
It is silly for adults to produce tears during emotional events,
but this characteristic developed for a reason. However, we may not consider
the reason to be very sensible. For example, the proboscis monkey has a
giant nose, and male peacocks have elaborate feathers, and the reason is
to titillate the females. Perhaps male humans produce tears because it
titillated the females.
We were not designed by a loving god. We were designed by random changes
to DNA, and there is no way evolution can overhaul the design of any creature.
Once a feature develops, it may remain that way forever. For example, we
have a nerve running along our elbow, which is idiotic, and men have testicles
dangling between their legs, which is even more idiotic. Unfortunately,
nature cannot overhaul our design.
It's interesting to consider that if a god had created living creatures,
he could have given us some amazing features. For example, imagine if the
cells that produce sperm were taking some of the information in our memory
and encoding it into the DNA, and then inserting it into the sperm. Babies
would be born knowing how to speak a language, perform math, operate a
computer, or whatever the man happened to have learned. And imagine if
we had conscious control over this process. This would allow a father to
decide which information he wants to pass on to his children. He might
want to provide them with some images of his grandparents, for example,
or some information about where he used to play as a child. And imagine
if women had the ability to encode information in her eggs.
A loving God could also give us the ability to erase information from
our minds that we don't want to bother remembering, and write-protect the
information that we want to save.
Getting back to the issue of why men don't cry, if we define "crying"
as manipulating other people into helping us deal with our problems, then
it should be obvious as to why boys lose their desire to cry as they become
adult men; specifically, the men thousands of years ago had nobody to cry
to. The men who were best adapted to a primitive life were those who reacted
to problems by looking for a solution. The men who reacted to problems
by crying or having temper tantrums were significantly less successful.
Today natural selection is no longer functioning properly. Men who react
to problems with temper tantrums, crying, or giving up in frustration are
being taken care of by women, other men, and by society. Eventually this
is going to create a lot of child-like men.
Distinguish between crying
and learning
Understanding human emotions can also help us distinguish between
when a man is "crying" and when a man is "learning". For example, if a
man is failing to accomplish some task, or if he is accomplishing it at
a very slow rate, and if he stops to ask for advice, some people will react
by telling him to figure it out himself rather than "crying" for help.
There is no dividing line between anything in life. We have to learn more
about our emotions so that we can make better decisions about when a man
is trying to
learn how to do a better job and when he is giving
up too easily.
When a person is looking for advice, he is trying to become a better
person. If he succeeds, he will become a more valuable member of society.
People should not be embarrassed to ask for advice. They should instead
be embarrassed to fail over and over. However, people who ask for
advice "too often" can become a burden on other people. When should we
give up and ask for advice? How many times should we fail before we look
for help? There is no answer to these questions. As life becomes more complex,
everybody needs to become more intelligent and better able to analyze themselves
and one another. This modern world requires that we think a lot more often.
Why are some people more successful in life than others? I'm not referring
to success in making money. Rather, I am referring to being successful
at setting up a nice life for yourself. Some men have acquired a lot of
money, but if they are not happy, then they are failures in life. One of
the reasons that some people are more successful at enjoying life seems
to be that some people are better able to analyze themselves. We
have to make good decisions on which information to learn, and which to
ignore, and when to give up on a task, and when to continue struggling
with it. Being successful in life today requires understanding and controlling
your emotions, thinking more often, and making better decisions about what
to do with your future.
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