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5/8/2009 Merit: Ever ElusiveThe merit system is arguably older than humanity itself. Observed in
many types of animals, this system has its roots in the very advanced
nature of social interaction itself. Merit is a precursor to complete
obedience, and therefore it must be handled carefully, so as not to
create a system of willing slaves. Before discussing merit, one must consider how this fantastic system could possibly come about. Primarily, it is a more just system than the current "wealth=merit" system, since there are innumerable ways to make money without using our better qualities. As people realize this, they will slowly come around to it, since there is more social security in the merit system than there is with money. In case you haven't realized it yet, the merit system replaces the money system. As large organized groups of people learn how to take more and more money for themselves, they will master the art, and their greed will destroy them. Since there is no amount of money that can satiate true greed, there is also no limit to the lengths that a truly greedy person will go to. This will eventually lead to wealthy people finding the merit system, and implementing it. Since basic goods and services for living are free, all that extra money goes straight to the top when it is no longer needed. Farming will soon become a zero labor industry, and goods required for farming will either be produced on site, or they will become free for trade. With everyone eating for free, a diet stabilization system must be implemented in order to keep everyone healthy. The public health will truly become a public matter, with all unhealthy people being organized into various treatment facilities. Once eating is free, time becomes free. You no longer have to work to keep your stomach full. Everyone in the world may now pursue their ultimate dreams and goals in earnest. Now, you might ask, what is stopping everyone from just sitting back and relaxing? The answer to that is simple. Even though you have to work for a living, you are bombarded by all kinds of ways to be lazy and unhealthy, and that is why you are so lazy and unhealthy. Once the system no longer has money to motivate you to work, it will clean up its act, and no longer tempt you with such things. You will be healthy, full of energy, and interested in fulfilling your dreams, and that is what the system will be trying to sell you. Here is where the merit system comes in. Lets verify that we understand the basics. There is no money, eating is free, and the system helps you stay healthy. There are certain things that you will still want, and they will be restricted from you, just like in the days of money. There are also certain things that the system agrees is good, like working at a job, and it wants to reward you for it, but there is no money. The answer to this is the merit system. With merit, you may earn points, and get restricted things that you want. Don't be fooled though, merit is different from money. In a money system, you must earn x amount of money, which enables you to buy goods totaling x amount of money. In a merit system, you earn x amount of merit, but you keep your merit. Also, if you work at a job, you don't steadily earn more and more merit, as you would earn money. Merit is earned by purity of character and good old fashioned workplace efficiency. Goofing off is no longer tolerated, it is punished with a bad character score, and factored in to your overall efficiency rating, which affects your merit score. Additionally, low efficiency is not punished, it is simply considered to be your ability level. If there is anything that the merit system helps solve, it is using statistical analysis to determine what you are best at, and slowly helps you to reach your peak. Of course, greed will still exist, and although it is considered a bad trait, it has some motivating factors that can prove useful, but instead of being greedy for money, people will be constantly trying to find the most efficient way to do their job, and the best character traits to use to get enough merit points for that big screen TV. Also, most of the side effects of greed will be eliminated, and here's why. In a money system, things still have value after you get them, but in a merit system, things have no value after you get them. Since merit points don't transfer to goods and services, those goods and services have no value, and therefore, there is less motivation to steal them. Sure, it will look cool in your house, but once you have it, you can't do anything dishonest with it. Also, the person you took it from won't be sad about it, since they will report their TV stolen, and get a new one. Meanwhile, you will be in big trouble, because that modern TV plugs into the internet and tells everyone who you are. An additional side effect of the merit system is that its very existence in your life will motivate you to educate yourself and improve yourself, and there will be nothing in your way to stop you. Education will be free, and since efficiency equates to merit, teachers will be constantly researching the best methods to teach, and the best teachers will have enough merit to get the best teaching aids, and they will share them with the other teachers at the schools. Also, practices that improve their merit score will be shared, and improve the merit scores of everyone else there, and eventually the world. Who is in charge of giving out merit? Simply speaking, the same people who had money in the old system, everyone. You will have limits and quotas on how much merit you may give out, and there will be many ways to determine when merit is given without any reason. For instance, parents can give merit points to their children, which will allow them to get x amount of candy at any candy store, or that bicycle, or that R/C race car set, or that young scientist set, or that backyard astronomy set, etc. Parents will be given a standard quota of merit to give out, and someone may come around to determine whether they are abusing their authority. There are also multiple merit calculation segments in your merit score that are easily looked up on the internet. Each segment has the amount earned, and the possible maximum, which is based on the subject. A part time job will not have as much maximum merit as a full time job, and so on. A child may have a segment for parental merit, school merit, extra curricular merit, job merit, and more. An adult may earn job merit, community merit, relationship merit, and more. There is also locked merit. When you get something, some of your merit is locked for a period of time. This prevents you from getting a ton of things all at once, and creating some clandestine money scheme to undermine the merit system. Some things may lock some of your merit for as long as you have them, for instance, a space ship captain may have so much merit, he can simply get a new ship every year. To prevent this, the space ship will have to lock his merit until it is destroyed or becomes useless. It is also possible to pool merit points. Managers of large corporations may pool their merit points in order to get some special equipment for the efficiency and luxury of the workplace. This brings up the nature of merit pooling. It must be completely voluntary and non-contractual. Large corporations must never be allowed to take tons of merit points from every employee by force, in order to rule the world, or some such unthinkable action. The pooling of merit points has the impact of allowing insignificant people to voluntarily do greater things than were ever dreamed possible. For instance, merit point pooling could be used to create a space station, or it could be used to overthrow the current leaders. PS: Who decides how much everything costs? Economists and politicians, of course. The merit system isn't a completely alien concept, it is simply an evolution of the money system. 12/31/2008 Assistive TechnologyAs the world gets better, it seems worse. More sick people are able to survive. As we head into the future, those ill and infirm shall take over. Perfect health has always been rare, but soon it shall be a thing of the past. Therefore, we must take more aggressive steps to assist our sick, our poor in spirit, and our physically and mentally challenged.
TESTING
The first thing that needs to be done is to have think tanks set up across the world, alongside testing facilities, in order to quickly develop comprehensive testing systems for every kind of trait imaginable. Currently, testing is expensive, and not even the most experienced of professionals really know what they're doing. The reason is that testing requires a mix of two things, those are extensive scientific data and years of trial-and-error testing.
Usually, drugs and surgical procedures are not used for these tests, and in most cases, all you need to do is fill out a questionaire. Because of this, testing should be free for anyone, paid in large part by the world's businesses gleaning all that anonymous testing data from the anonymous masses. For the smallest effect, it could keep a kid off the mean streets. For the largest effect, it could instantly get someone their dream job. In some cases, some tests may hold prize winnings for the one(s) who fit(s) the secret criteria, all you have to do is have the tests done.
TELECOMMUNICATION
In this world, there is no greater tool than telecommunication. Although it has been available for years, many people have no idea what they are missing out on.
11/15/2008 MarriageMany people believe that marriage is one of the cornerstones of society. People have even claimed biological evolution as the mother of marraige. In many ways, marriage has been a fundamental part of culture. Yet in light of all of this, it has been sickly misunderstood, and misused.
As you may have heard, many scientists believe that marriage evolved. The human brain was growing too large for the birth canal, and causing babies to be born premature in order to fit through. As natural selection goes, mothers who had to be with their newborns for all hours of the day were unable to hunt or gather enough to survive. Men who stayed around to help would then share their food with the woman nurturing the child. At a certain time in human history, people spread out, and dind't live amongst a lot of other people. This is when love between a man and a woman became dominant. At other points in human history, there were plenty of people around. These people had to work together in a cohesive way, and that is how friendship became dominant. All emotions, including emotions of love and friendship, can be traced back to when they were required for survival.
As time passed, and civilizations grew, it was only natural for the legal system to incorporate these fundamental survival systems into law because of how beneficial they are. Eventually, however, marriage was reworked in culture to give someone power over someone else. In some cultures, men were given dominance, and in others, women were given dominance. As time went by, parents were given power over the relationships of their children. Later, people were obligated to marry because they had had sex and a child was born as a result. Now, there is a split. Some people choose to have rampant sex, some people choose to live together, and some people continue to follow the old ways, whatever they may be. Now, although there are many lifestyles, and although there are many customs for partnership, there is only one law, and that is deeply flawed.
From its evolutionary origins, we may extrapolate a relationship between marriage and law. There are two things involved in marriage that the law applies to. The first concept is the agreement to cooperate in a household. The second conceptis the agreement to cooperate in order to raise a child. Without these two fundamental agreements, when applicable, having a functional family is impossible. It is also important to separate these two concepts. It is also extremely important not to limit either concept to the idea of an agreeement between two people, since in many cases, more than two people are closesly involved.
Another issue is parenting. One of the fundamental definition of parenting is having the right to make decisions for a child, and teach the child how to think, and what to believe. This is an obsolete belief, since everyone knows that when you send your child to school, the school does all of those things. In many ways, it can also be an illegal idea, since some parent may teach a child to kill, to rape, and to steal. When all else fails, there is still the option to take care of a child. This means providing food, shelter, and clothing. Legally, anyone can do this at any time, and for any duration of time. It is one of the worst legally defined components of parenting. The final, most fundamental element is the biological element. Although many mentally disturbed people have become famous pondering the implications of passing on ones genes, normal everyday people understand the meaninglessness of the genetic component of parenting. No matter what the childs origins, the end result is the same, the child will become an adult.
There are certain things that every parent is thought to want for the child. A parent wants a child to live, not be too unhappy, have a healthy parent/child relationship, share the parent's values and beliefs, and to grow up to be a responsible adult. Lets cover each one of these wants one at a time from the legal system's point of view. The legal system provides laws against having a child be mistreated or neglected, thereby reducing the chance of, or preventing the child from dying. There are many social services set up for children in most systems that deal with children, or the family in general, thta try help them with any social issues that may arise. In most cases, parents are held responsible for their child's actions. This gives parents an incentive to keep control of the child as best they can, reenforcing the parent/child bond. It is the parent's decision to take children to any institution, religious or otherwise, that may help indoctrinate the child in the ways and beliefs of the parent. Not only is there no legal way to manage this freedom, but there is also an unspoken understanding that once a child becomes an adult, the new adult may have completely separate beliefs. There is also no legal guarantee that the child will develop into a responsible or autonomous adult, one who can carry a job and provide for his or her self. In fact, all responsibility issues lay solely on adults, with children looked upon as completely dependent and unable to make decisions for themselves, then suddenly mature enough to have a role in society. No responsibility is legally set upon the parent to prepare the child for adult life and responsibilities. However, this is slowly being realised by the government.
Marriage is a decree of love between the subjects determined by religious denomination. In many cases it is a commitment to stay together to raise the kids that you accidentally had. According to (Christian, etc) religious tradition, it is a moral commitment between a man and a woman, to stay together until death. This has nothing to do with the government, in fact, government added all of those legal details to make money. Now, governments around the world are trying to push religion out of the marriage process altogether. Now on to the provocative issue of legal marriage. According to the Unted States constitution, in a very basic way, it is unconstitutional. Marriage, as it is defined today, is a fundamental component of religious freedom. It is both a statement of love, and an agreement between two individuals to cooperate in a household in a way defined by religion. It is a bond that is not legally appreciable in any way except child rearing, and only then in an abstract and clumsy way. It is most commonly created by the legal authority given to a religious leader to perform a religious ceremonial ritual, which is completely alien to, and largely unregulated by the law. It also has legal economic implications involving the separation of household value, which is not only outrageous and perverse, it is unfair to any other partners of the household, who are by default, not included in this legal union between two people.
This then is how the system of marriage is to be. It is the only way to solve all disputes of inequality, and it finally resolves the legal inconsistencies that legal marriage created. I am by no means going to outline the entire solution, as I still have hope in lawmakers, and I believe there are many issues yet to be resolved, and I look forward to seeing how the states resolve them.
All issues not covered under the law are subject to religious scrutiny and determination under the final definition of marriage. For instance, religious views on social interaction and moral ideology that do not intersect legal authority, issues of household roles and command heirarchies, religious rituals and obligations that do not intersect the law.
There is to be made a legal agreement between adult household members. This agreement automatically applies to any children who come to maturity in the household. The agreement outlines the legal power and positions that each member holds, and it assigns a piece of household value to each individual. The default agreement, which takes affect after a considerable period of time, is an equal share of the household, which may be claimed upon vacating the premesis.
There is to be made a legal agreement between all adults who have guardianship over a child for a considerable period of time. There may be permanent, temporary, or cyclical versions of the agreement. This agreement is useful for declaring responsibility beyond the customary family unit, and may be used to gain family level clearance or access in most situations. The default agreement, which takes affect after a period of time, includes personal contact with the child, miscellanious responsibilities, outside activities, legal benefits, and legal penalties. Also, the child, if old enough, should be included in the proceedings. 10/30/2008 Macro CapitalismHere I will show you what my definition of macro capitalism is, and I will frame its construction.
Capitalism is a perogative to amass wealth. It is done by first and always earning more money than you spend. The most secure way to do this is by working at a daily job for long hours. There is really nothing more to it, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Capitalism is about standing on the shoulders of others, but it isn't about despising the poor.
In stage one, you will usually work at a zero-skill job for low wages. You will feed and cloth yourself the minimum for society. You will amass a certain amount of money needed to get to the next stage. You will probably want to work on your people skills, as they will help you in later stages.
In stage two you will spend a large chunk of your savings to acheive a more secure and higher income job. This may involve going to school, or it may involve buying the materials you need to start a business. Whether this gets in the way of other life goals or not depends entirely on your ability to meet the challenges that you face, and the future challenges that you strive to face.
There is only so far that you can go on the labor track. Once you have reached a pinnacle of your labor track, you will need to go either into business for yourself, or go into politics. In both of these tracks, you will need to get a lot of colleagues or friends to support you. Watch out though, in this arena the people around you are possibly all macro capitalists. This is stage three.
Now, you may think there are no more stages, but you would be wrong. For the simple fact is, once you have all the power in the world, there is only one way to gain more power. That is to mine it and grow it for yourself. In this task, you will be stepping into the global arena, and into stage four. If you are a country around now, you will notice that unless you have prominently reached this stage, you are considered a developing country, or a third world country.
Stage five is a bit more complex, for you will have total domination over the entire world. You will be soaking all of the wealth out of the earth that it has to offer, but as a good capitalist, you will want more. The only way to get more wealth out of the world than it is already producing for you is to make the system more efficient.
To make the system more efficient, you can do many things. You can make your people into lab experiments by testing all kinds of chemicals on them. You can give them diseases so they will be more obedient. You can make them retarded so they will do only as you command. You can put your people on a diet. You can make your people carpool and live in apartments. You can put the shops and housing next to eachother. You can make people work smarter, not harder, by promoting research in science and technology. You can make your people get along better by promoting psychological research. You can also make your people healthier by promoting research into nutritional food products.
Do you dare imagine a sixth stage? I would. Stage six is the domination of the solar system. This is the stage that we are in right now, or rather, some lucky macro capitalists are in. Before we talk about how to succeed in this stage, I hope you understood which ideas for promoting efficiency were good, and which were bad. Also, I hope you got the subtle historical references, and yes, I believe macro capitalists are to blame, but they have done just as much good.
At the time I am writing this, I believe that I will not live to see the sixth stage of macro capitalism. For this to happen, people must forget about their differences, and embrace eachother as equals at all levels. Basically, everyone must act as a unit on a computer game, each starting out the same, and only being improved by the system. Racism and sexism will not be defeated in my time, along with nationalism and religious hate. Those may take many centuries to resolve, and will never really go away. Once multiple planetary colonies are established, I am glad that I will not live long ehough to see the impact of planetary hatred. 10/16/2008 Restoring Society (USA)It all started, somewhat innocently, in a small log house in the early development of the country. This was the advent of the mass education system. Starting on the small scale, a schoolhouse would often only hold five to thirty students of all ages. By no means was this required, it was simply a responsible thing to do to earn more money to make a better life for yourself and your family at some big business. Then at some point, schooling became socialized. It was no longer a respectable thing to get an education, instead, big business had squeezed all of the profitability out of subsistence labor, and everyone had to be put into a pre-formed niche.
As you may have picked up on, the begining of all of the country's problems was the advent of compulsory mass education mixed with the dominance of big business. This has a minor crime side effect that was originally thought to be due to bad parenting. Originally, parents were couped up in close quarters with their children. They had nothing better to do than to get to know them, and the children had no choice but to cooperate and make a strong enough bond in order to make things easy for everyone. Often in larger families, one or more children is able to escape the bonding rituals and always be a rebel, but that's another story. All of this bonding and connecting made for a very efficient family, and it was well needed. This was because there were no televisions, no computers, no cell phones, only hard work to look forward to. Then, big business stepped in, and it all changed.
Big business is the driving force in economy, education, consumerism, technology, medicine, agriculture, and any other industry. These are the people who can afford to pay more people to do less work, and sell products for less. The secret to their sucess is a mixture of many things, including low wage labor, complex machines doing the work of a thousand employees, and the ability to work around the clock. The downside to big business is that everything becomes more specialized. In order to work there, you must have training, and you must often have a lot of complex training that only an expert can provide. With these expectations, and by making education expensive, big business effectively closed the loop, making it impossible for for people outside the economic circle to get in. They squeezed the subsistence laborers until they could no longer support themselves, making it impossible to get an education, and often causing suicides and putting children on the streets.
The people who successfully got into the big business loop also paid a high social price. They must work away from the home for an extensive amount of time. This time is rightfully called the productive hours of the day. In the old family, the productive hours of the day were spent on social bonding tasks, such as family farming, family harvesting, family picnics, going to events such as church or parties, and playing teamwork skill building games. The basic principles of responsibility were practiced in the home, with very real concequences, and real rewards. In the new family, the parents are at work for long hours. They work as long as possible in order to get the most expensive consumer products from the biggest businesses. During the first few generations, they held on to their sense of responsibility in their children, remembering to save money to get them educated. However, they had no time to teach their children how to be responsible. There were no wholesome parent-child activities that stimulated teamwork skills. Children rarely had the opportunity to practice responsibility, with real concequences and real rewards.
Suddenly, it became obvious to everyone that children were lacking something. They simply didn't have what it takes to be a good employee or employer. They wanted to party with their friends all day, and use illegal substances. They would turn to a life of crime to get what they wanted. Their parents were nowhere to be found, and when they were home, they could be found around the television set, or sitting in their favorite chair, eating or drinking. Social skills had degraded so much that parents were no longer able to have a nice conversation with their kids. With such inept parents, it is no wonder that the children were unable to keep a polite tone with them. This created the age gaps, with everyone from each age group only understanding and identifying with others from their own group. Although, when researched, these groups were found to be fundamentally alike, with only minor social translation issues. This is not to say that everyone was this way, some families had refused to work inside the box, and had raised their children.
Then came the age of delinquency, disease, and social tension. Parents were willfully ignoring their kids because the school system was taking care of them all day. Sick children were rarely helped before the point of no return. As a natural coping mechanism, a huge populous of health-centric people developed in society. These people decided that the only way to stop this downward spiral was by using another massive institution, big government. Of course, they had no idea what the root cause was, they simply were trying to get rid of the symptoms in the quickest way possible. This quick way was to mandate that every have certain entitlements that have been shown to combat the symptoms, and people who refused would be punished according to the law. This failed many times in the past, and was also met with strong opposition because many families had reverted to the old ways and had no need for the blanket bandaid policies pushed on them by the government.
Now that you know the general history of the problem, there are many solutions that may be applied in order to solve the real underlying root of the problem. The first thing that must be done in order to combat the social degradation that started in the home is to re-integrate the family. This is being done by use of technology, and may occur naturally in good time. People are staying home, and communicating with work by internet. Children are also staying home, sometimes through homeschooling, sometimes through a new technology called cyber school. This was first developed with higher learning, but it is so useful and relatively low cost that it is trickling down even to elementary school.
Another aspect of recovery must also be addressed. Just as the traditions of the old family stuck in the hearts and minds of the earlier generations long after the constructs of the old family were destroyed, so too will the ways of the new family stick in the minds of people as they transition back to what is healthier. The rules of the close family will have to be re-written, and the new social laws that are in place must be followed. Easy ways of punishment such as spanking are now shown by many studies to cause many bad psychological side-effects. Some are even classified as forms of torture, illegal for use even for enemy combatants. Even though some may consider the difficulties of such a proposition to be great, the benefits far outweigh the challenges by every scale known to humanity. |
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