Cav's Place

I find myself very disheartened by all the green parties and environmental organizations that claim to attempt to strike a balance between protecting the environment and ensuring the well-being of the people, or even to protect the environment and improve the people’s standard of living at the same time. That means they’re just greenwashing, because environmental health and humans’ well-being are no longer compatible and this drive to constantly improve the people’s standard of living is what got us here in the first place, robbing Earth of as much as we can and giving back as little as we must.

Though most people never seem to realize it, it’s obvious that humans’ well-being requires a healthy environment in the long run, but not the other way around. Or at least not usually, since right now the damage is so great that the environment would really need humanity’s help in order to prevent further degradation. But it wouldn’t matter so much in the end, since Earth as a whole would recover soon enough after we’ll be gone even if we wouldn’t fix this damage before that’ll happen. It’s just a pity that so many other species would be dragged down along with us if that were to happen, so we owe it to them to clean up all this mess!
But we won’t manage to do anything for the environment if we, those who are currently alive, also want to preserve and even improve our own standard of living, and that of humanity as a whole, at the same time. It’s like chasing two rabbits… We are far too many and the environment is far too damaged, so there can be no balance for a long time to come. We can’t even say that we’ll take from the areas that still have plenty to offer and give in the areas where the damage is significant, because the damage is everywhere and we currently need more than the entire planet still has left to offer anyway.

We have three options: First, fight for people’s well-being at the expense of the environment and perhaps let two or three more generations live a good life, then rapidly go extinct and let Earth recover on its own. Second, keep trying to achieve a balance and likely ensure humanity’s survival for several more centuries or even millennia, but have both our standard of living and the health of the environment constantly degrade as time passes, our only real hope being to manage to move to another planet before going extinct. Third, fight to preserve and restore the environment at the expense of humanity and hopefully manage to reach a point where an actual balance between the two will once again be possible, perhaps as little as a century from now.
From where I’m standing, the only real solution, both morally and practically, is the third one. But, you see, that third option actually requires us to focus on the environment and accept that we’ll need to make significant sacrifices for that purpose. We’ll also need to accept that these sacrifices will have to be made for at least one full century, and probably more than that, so it’s highly unlikely that any of us, those who are currently alive, will still be around by the time the fruits of our labor will truly be ripe for picking. It’s not a pleasant prospect, but it’s the only option that ensures our future. The second option might require far fewer sacrifices from us, but it will require even more from those who’ll come after us and the future it promises is uncertain at best. While the first option might require no sacrifices from us, but it also offers no future at all.

Telling people such harsh truths might not be the way to earn any popular support, votes or funding, but if those parties and organizations actually mean it when they say that they mean to find that elusive balance within at most a couple of decades, and not let people suffer during that time either, then they’re obviously not really going to do much for the environment in the first place and probably only mean to gain votes and funding by selling lies, just like everyone else in that “business”. It is also possible that they might do something, of course, but such an approach can only take them down that second path described above and therefore anything they could manage is going to be way too little compared to what’s necessary in order to really protect the environment. Not to mention that it will also cause people to suffer, and greatly, just perhaps not right away.

I wish those who see what truly needs to be done would stop trying to gain the support of those who don’t. Just do as much as you can out of what needs to be done by any means necessary and, when you need more help and popular support, get it without bothering to discuss issues with those who couldn’t comprehend them anyway.
What we do now might not make much of a difference for Earth as a whole, but many of the other species we currently share it with cannot wait any longer for us to get our act together. And, as weird as this phrase might seem, our future cannot wait any longer either. We need to stop putting ourselves above the world, or even on the same level with it. We need to stop trying to find a balance that can’t currently exist anymore and know that we’re the only ones to blame for the fact that it couldn’t possibly be restored in the near future either. We need to admit that, as the Earth had to suffer for us so far, so do we now have to suffer for it, preferably before it forces us to just as we keep forcing it…
If we start now and do not flinch from what needs to be done, that third option might still be available to us… Barely…

This post has been in my drafts since 2007, when I bumped into a study about this issue. Seems like today’s as good as any other day to actually get around to writing it, because the situation’s still the same. Something like this doesn’t change in two years; it probably doesn’t change in two millennia either. Most people have always been sheep, and sheep follow each other much more than they follow the shepherd.
This is much to any good shepherd’s advantage, because you have to put much less effort into keeping your flock heading in the desired direction if the natural tendency of most of its members is to stick together. This way, once you convince a part of them to go where you want them to go, a second group will tend to follow them, a third group will follow the second group and so on, simply because they tend to stick together. It might not tickle your ego if you’re the kind of person who wants to be recognized as the leader, but in that case I don’t have much to say to you either way. If you just want to make your flock go where you want it to, it’s a very useful mechanism, because the flock does a good part of the work for you without even meaning to.

Not that there’s any need for studies to reveal this. It’s obvious that humans are like this and those in positions of authority, or simply those who have done well for themselves, usually take full advantage of it. That’s how they usually end up where they are, after all. So it’s equally obvious that, if we are to create a major positive change, we’ll need to make full use of this mechanism as well. It might not appear ethical, but it’s the one way that works, so it has to be used. After all, if one person tries to persuade individual sheep that it’s better to go in a certain direction while another tries to simply herd the entire flock the other way, who do you think the sheep will follow?
But how do you herd bipedal sheep, seeing as the highly influenceable aren’t the kind of people who can be reasoned with? Well, the solution is to more or less do the same thing shepherds do: Make it easier for the sheep to follow the desired path than any other and, when needed, make it interesting to them as well. Bipedal sheep might not respond to exactly the same stimuli as their four-legged counterparts, but the basic principles are quite similar. You just have to see what works best and keep doing it until you get them where you want them to be, while at the same time being careful not to let too many of them stray, because in that case others will begin to follow those and break apart your flock.

But let’s move away from all those comparisons and get into specifics. How do you make a large number of influenceable people do something when you can’t exactly reason with them and make them understand that it’s the right thing to do? Quite simple, actually. If you have the means for it, you provide the necessary infrastructure and the required laws to make it easy for them to do what you want them to do and hard to do anything else. This is what those in positions of authority do, the best ones being so subtle that few realize what’s going on before it’s too late. If you’re not one of them, however, you have to resort to trends and the cool factor in order to make the highly influenceable actually want to do certain things.
Since those who already are in positions of authority have likely made full use of these principles to get there, I’ll say we should leave them aside and focus on the rest of us. If you’re not in a position of authority, you can still make a lot of people do something if you make them believe that it’s cool, that it’ll make them more interesting, or better than the rest, or happier somehow. Your claims don’t have to make much sense; those who’d think things through aren’t the ones who’d fall for such tactics anyway, they’re not the highly influenceable, so they’re not your targets. Those who actually are your targets, however, will fall for it once you manage to paint a nice enough picture and bombard them with it for some time. You shouldn’t try to reason with them and you shouldn’t try to lead them. You should just put this image out there, make it attractive enough to the unintelligent and superficial, who are usually the most influenceable, and let them chase it. Past that point, they’ll do most of the work for you.
Once your primary targets will become interested enough, they’ll create a certain amount of peer pressure, therefore enhancing the appeal of the trend in question and making the moderately influenceable desire to follow it as well. Naturally, this will create even more peer pressure, which will eventually lead the less influenceable individuals to start following suit as well. And once they do so, the staggering amount of pressure thus created could even play a part in making those who aren’t usually influenceable follow suit. If nothing else, so many people doing something tends to automatically create some of the necessary infrastructure, therefore making it easier to perform said action. Also, if most people end up desiring something, those in positions of authority might tend to appease them, which means that laws encouraging that particular behavior might eventually be passed. And even if this doesn’t happen, what people actually do is much more important than what laws say they should do if you mean to get something done.
Of course, the downside of this approach is that the rebels will automatically reject your idea, simply because everyone else seems to be embracing it. But they’re not your primary concern, seeing as they’re far fewer than the sheep. And there are ways to have them accept your idea as well. If we’re talking of the rebels without a cause, most of them tend to follow certain trends as well, so it could be possible, with some very careful planning, to create trends that appear to differ greatly from the ones you create for the highly influenceable but which actually generate the same results. The success rate would be significantly lower, but it could still work. On the other hand, if we’re talking about those who don’t rebel specifically because they want to be different but because they are actually thinking and realize that what the majority does is usually very wrong, you could reason with them and they could end up supporting your idea if it actually is a good one.

So how about we stop trying to persuade people that certain things are good and right and start using this power of the mindless masses? We’d only need to make certain things appear cool, and preferably also be easier to do them than to avoid doing so. I’m talking about such things as helping instead of harming the environment, treating other animals well, including fellow humans, informing yourself before casting your vote, being kind and helpful towards those who haven’t given you reason not to be and so on… The fact that these methods, when used by those who are currently in control, manage to keep human society on its current evil course well enough should mean that they’d be equally effective in steering it towards a new, better path.

I don’t think anyone’s going to deny that we need good international communication, both at the highest level and among regular people. But that will be very difficult to achieve as long as different people use different languages, so I believe we need to have one world language that everyone should know and use. Other languages could be preserved, of course, as anyone would still be able to learn as many languages as they want and are able to and countries could still use their own national languages in parallel if they so choose, but all of these would become secondary, everyone needing to know this one language before any other.

There have been some attempts, the most famous of which being Esperanto, but they never stood any real chance. One major problem was that nobody already knows a constructed language, everyone has to learn it, and they have to do so from books and other such sources since they couldn’t go somewhere where it’s spoken frequently and try to “catch on”. What’s more, this lack of existing speakers means that people trying to learn such a language would also be unable to practice it in “real life” situations, making the process even more difficult. And then you have the fact that such languages were created to be secondary languages, which means that people might pay less attention to them and many won’t care to study them at all just because they don’t want to bother with a language which is by definition less important than one they already know.
The world language would have to be the world’s primary language and it would have to already exist and be spoken, at least at an intermediate level, by a statistically significant number of people in as many countries and regions as possible. (Variants and dialects would be included when determining this, as long as they wouldn’t be so different as to make even basic communication difficult between those who speak them.) That’d mean that less people would have to learn it and those who would learn it would find it relatively easy to get in contact with those who already know it and practice, including in “real life” scenarios. Also, in order to facilitate this learning process, it would have to be a language that’s already being taught in schools in many countries, so the structure already exists and teachers aren’t hard to find. About the language itself, it would preferably be one that isn’t especially difficult to learn, so one that uses a common writing system, without unique or even rare characters, and doesn’t have a particularly difficult grammar. The use of that common writing system would make it hard for native speakers of languages that use different, less common, writing systems, but that can’t be helped.

The obvious first measure would be to somehow persuade all countries and territories to adopt the world language as an official language and include it into their educational programs from the earliest possible age, so new generations would learn it in parallel with what is now considered to be their native language. But something could be done even sooner than that by using computers and the Internet. If you’d find a way to discourage this current localization trend for software and websites, you could once again have a very good method of making people learn the world language, or at least its written part, as they go, through regular use.
The next step would be requiring everyone who works in a position that’s likely to put them in contact with foreigners to learn it. This is already done in many places, but different languages are sometimes required in different areas, which shouldn’t happen if you truly mean to have a world language. What’s more, this requirement should spread as time progresses, a good grasp of the world language eventually becoming mandatory for anybody who deals with other people professionally, from top politicians to the lowest salesperson. This would ensure that communication would stop being a problem both for top officials and for regular people who travel abroad, no longer forcing them to rely on translators or stick to certain touristic areas.
Later, it should be expected of all people under the age of 35 to have a good grasp of the world language just as it is now expected of them to know their native language. The countries where the national language uses a different writing system should be given a significantly longer amount of time to reach this point, but they would all have to reach it nevertheless. Then this age limit would have to be increased constantly, by at least three years for every two years that pass, eventually being eliminated once it’d reach 75, all people being expected to have a good enough grasp on the world language from that moment forward.
Once so many people know the world language well enough, it must be ensured that they continue using it at least as much as they use their native language, and eventually even more so. Everything intended for public use would have to be in the world language, formal education should see it more and more as the primary language to teach in instead of a foreign language that should be taught separately… Ultimately, people should be expected to use the world language for any communication, or at least any communication which is not specifically intended to be completely private. They should still be free to use any other language in public whenever they choose to do so as long as they don’t demand of anyone else to understand them, of course, but it should become as natural for everyone to use the world language as it is now for them to use their respective native languages, and perhaps even more so.
In the end, the world language would become everyone’s primary language, everyone’s native language, completely destroying this barrier. All other languages would become “foreign”, learned as secondary languages by those who choose to do so. If some of them would become practically extinct as a result of this, so be it. It’s far more important to be able to easily understand each other. Besides, everyone having the same native language would help people realize that we’re all in this together, we’re all citizens of the Earth, not just of our respective countries.

Currently, it’d make perfect sense to pick English as the world language, as I don’t think any other could even remotely challenge it in terms of suitability. This won’t happen overnight, especially when it comes to people whose native language uses a completely different writing system, but that’s just one more reason to start implementing this immediately.

I remember a day when Andra went to meet with one of her classmates from college, I think it was close to her graduation. When she got back home she seemed quite thrilled about something and lost no time in filling me in. Apparently said classmate brought a guy with her. I didn’t think that was nice at all in itself, seeing as she didn’t let Andra know beforehand, but she certainly seemed to have enjoyed the result.
That guy was… I think 34 or 31, I can’t remember exactly. He was wearing some very worn clothes which were also obviously too small for him and I think she also said he was unshaven and his hair was unkempt, but that he didn’t smell bad. Anyway, he talked circles around both of them and Andra seemed quite awed by all he knew, all he thought about and all the plans he had.
Eventually, after she said she got bold enough to ask, he said he didn’t bother much with schooling and doesn’t work, so his parents support him. They’re not happy with the situation, but he managed to make them get him a place to call his own, pay his bills, buy him food and the other necessities, supply him with books and make sure he has a good computer. In response to her glancing at his clothes, he said they mean nothing him, he doesn’t care about such trappings of society and would often rather go naked, weather permitting. About his place, he said that it’s small, with few furnishings and appliances, just the powerful computer standing out, and that his bedroom basically just includes his bed and the computer desk, plus a whole lot of books and notebooks and other such things piled up everywhere, so that it was quite a task to even keep a clear path between desk and bed. (That problem was one we also had at the time, actually, seeing as we were administering that on-line library.) He said he had no other need for material possessions, was happy with his books and computer and the research and plans he could use them for and just hoped that someday something truly important would come out of it. I guess I’d be nothing compared to that guy when it comes to detailed plans about changing the world…
Moving on, she said she eventually got even bolder and asked right out if him and her classmate were together. They both started laughing at that and eventually he said he’s not “like that” with anyone, but he offers his love to anyone who accepts it and accepts it from anyone who wants to offer theirs to him, though otherwise he’s really not a people person. Then went on to specify that by love he actually means love and that he finds sex quite pointless so he got rid of it from his life. I think I also remember her saying that he told her he didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t smoke and didn’t do drugs…
So she left them feeling quite giddy and got his e-mail address too, though she didn’t use it, not as far as I know at least. Said she thought I’d relate to him even more than she had so she gave it to me too, but since I wasn’t the one who met him (plus that he was a man, and you know I don’t get along with other guys), I didn’t write it down or anything, so that was that.

Now I don’t know whether anything he told her was true or whether what she told me was true. I don’t even know if we were even together anymore, I keep saying that, just seems too unbelievable that something good actually happened to me once… But she sure was right when she said I’d relate to him. This really stuck in my mind. That’s what I’d want, never to worry about necessities and bills without having anything to do with the “real world” myself, a little place to call my own that won’t need frequent repairs and which would be in an area without bothersome neighbors and preferably surrounded by a lot of Nature if at all possible, just the necessary furniture and appliances, a very good computer which I’d be able to replace every few years and a good supply of books. And the peace of mind to make use of them just like that, for plans and research and building my own (anything but) little world, hoping that someday at least a part of it will become reality. Likely such a person gets labeled a loser, wasted, a parasite, useless and other such things by the tremendous majority, but so be it, I never cared about the majority…
But… I’ll never have any shred of peace of mind without someone to share it all with. (And that sharing would include sex too, thank you very much. That’s the one part I didn’t like.) So what’s worse is that she wasn’t that someone, no matter how excited she was about meeting that guy. As I said before, getting my wish to be with her again would most likely just mean being unhappy with her instead of depressed without her. It’d be much better, without a doubt, but I’d still be between a rock and a hard place either way.
So… The thing is that, as I was saying before, nobody understands me and I don’t understand anybody. Even the few people I manage to keep in touch with for a while end up diving into the “real world” and leaving me behind sooner or later. Usually sooner. They’re looking for ways to make money, get jobs because they “have to”, go through the “expected” formal education, think of careers, enslave themselves to banks to buy what they want on credit or to others in order to rent what they can’t buy, want “normal” families, marriage, put their relationships on the back burner because of all these things, try to fit in or at least to be able to “function” within this society and ultimately lose any ideals they might have had just to become little cogs in the machine. As Sarah proved, some want children too. Of course, when that happens they die to me, but the other things are huge disappointments as well. I certainly wouldn’t want any of them to drag me along, but I’d really want at least one or two people, and preferably three or four, to stick around here with me, to shun all those things and try for something different, at all costs, do everything for their relationship(s) and their ideals. (The ideals I agree with, that is. After all, I’m looking for a friend, not just a random idealist.) Someone who’d just screw this society and its expectations and demands.

I guess another huge problem is that everyone I’ve ever felt close to didn’t feel nearly as close to me, or at least the relationships meant far more for me than for them.
There are the four I’m talking about when I mention the “list”, the only people I ever felt close to that I also met in real life, which, in order of “closeness”, would be Andra, Elena P., Jen and Elena G.. Andra left and killed me in every way but the purely physical, not to mention that even while we were together I quite obviously needed her way more than she needed me. Elena P. vanished after only a few months and it’s possible that it was all a lie anyway. Jen is really not the kind of person who’d allow me to get as close as I’d like even in ideal circumstances, plus that she can’t stomach that I’m still so in love with Andra and she’s been just a cog in the machine for quite some time now anyway. And Elena G. is just a ghost, I get in touch with her every couple of years only so she’ll vanish once again soon after, not to mention that whatever closeness I thought existed back then might have been fake too.
Then there are those I felt very close to without ever actually meeting: Kristi, Sarah and now Alina. I’m inclined to put Alina first because with the other two there was also some sort of an attempt at an on-line relationship for a while, way back then, so the closeness was partly explained by that, which is obviously not the case here. But Kristi vanished at some point, many years ago, when it became hard for her to get on-line for a while, and that was that. Things first cooled down with Sarah after finding out she’d been lying to me about something all that time, then there were some other issues later on, and now she’s really dead to me after this. As for Alina, I feel that “kinship” with her that I can’t really explain, but she has plenty of “real world” elements in her life just as well, not to mention that I feel I’ve just been shoving myself down her throat for the past year or so, likely aggravating her all the while.
And then there would be the two that I never felt that close to but who were nice enough for long enough to become somewhat important to me just as well, namely Mandy and now Andreea. Things cooled down with Mandy after I noticed that she was starting to go down that “real life” path as well, and since she now appears to be a relatively “normal” member of society I can say I was right. And now Andreea is really going down that path too, which actually is what triggered this train of thought just now.
Everyone else I ever got in contact with was either obviously a far cry from anyone I could ever get close to or left me behind even before we could get a chance to get close in any way… So I’m still just as alone in the crowd as usual… Is this how it will always be?

I recently found myself ending a conversation by saying that if some supernatural being would reveal itself and ask me to choose between making the whole world be exactly how I’d want it to be from this moment forward and being with Andra again, in a relationship which would work out well and would last for as long as we both shall live, which should at least be enough to compensate for the suffering I went through, I’d certainly choose the second option. Actually, even if that second choice would only specify being with Andra again, without any other details, I’d likely still pick it.
That’s one choice I’d probably live to regret, even if only because I wasn’t talking about having to choose between the two, that’d certainly require no pondering, but just about which one of them would be given to me on a silver platter, leaving me to worry about the other. Seems obvious that I’d have much higher chances of somehow ending up with Andra again if the world would be exactly as I’d want it to be than to change the world by simply being with Andra again. But if I’d pick having the world changed for me and then I wouldn’t manage to get back together with Andra on my own I’d regret my choice even more.
But even such a fantastic scenario would still bring troubles. Even considering only the changes I noticed when we last talked, about a year and a half ago, being with her again wouldn’t bring happiness. Not that she appeared to be particularly happy then, but she certainly seemed more at ease with a life which emphasized those parts of her that I had always been very uncomfortable with and added some new elements on top of those, hardly any of them appealing. So asking to be together again in a relationship that’d work out begs asking which one of us would it work out for. Not that I wouldn’t prefer to be unhappy with her instead of depressed without her (with the exception of the children issue, that’s not negotiable and therefore always my worst fear), but that hardly seems like having a wish granted. It should also go without saying that it’d be awful if she’d have to be unhappy to be with me…

I’m saying that I need to make myself hope because I need to hope to live, and I was too much of a coward to kill myself when the time was right so I’m stuck with living, because too much time has passed and after a while I started actually wanting to stick around as long as there was at least a theoretical chance (which means as long as there are no children involved, since that’s the only price that’d be too high to pay for being with her)… Not that I can even know whether that theoretical chance still exists or not, which makes me live in constant fear… But if not even in such a fantastic scenario could I truly hope for things to work out, what’s left?
How and why do these things happen? People lying to themselves, only to notice at some point that the lie no longer holds and that they “change”… And life holding the proverbial carrot in front of our noses until we fall off the edge of the cliff chasing it, ending up holding on to a thread of hope too weak to help us get back up, but which doesn’t let us just get it over with and fall either…
And why does society encourage hurting others when there could be other alternatives, much better ones? But no, those aren’t “right”. It seems that things that make sense are hardly ever “right”, and that it’s far more “moral” to cause pain and destroy lives than it would be to prevent this from happening. Once again I find myself wondering for the briefest moment what are people thinking, but then I remember that the tremendous majority of them aren’t thinking at all. Not truly, anyway.

But I’m babbling and this is pointless… As pointless as anything and everything else I might think, say or do. The only thing that had a real meaning and purpose in my life ended nearly four years ago, leaving me drifting as aimlessly as I had been before meeting her. Every so often I find myself trying to find a purpose to it all, but that’s just the mind of a frightened boy trying to imagine some friendly shadows among those that are constantly creeping closer and closer to him… In truth, there most likely is no purpose to anything. Life, all life, is just a quirk of Nature, its only purpose being death… But it seems to be that much more fun to utterly destroy those little worthless playthings before they die, doesn’t it?