We could have had Mars colonies and flying cars in the 1980s. But we have chosen instead to Dull Our Senses With Valium. Oversaturate the "intellectual" labor market via some hastily approved dissertations that told us things we already knew, so that perhaps R&D funding could be directed towards the discovery of a new brain altering molecule not found in Nature. You saw to it that hundreds of cohorts of strong soldiers were paid in tax dollars for two decades securing the region where the majority of the worlds opium poppies grow ("democracy implementation"). Seventeen years before the Chernobyl/Challenger explosion, a generation of Brood X Cicada emerged after a battle group of impressively engineered UH-1 Huey Gunships dispersed Agent Orange all over the Lungs Of The Earth (but not the Strategic Rubber Trees necessary for Your Car Culture). Virtual reality has provided the healthcare for thousands of people who keep their warm bodies at a desk creating a fake world for someone to "experience" in the "safety" of their Climate Controlled Box. This very moment, a digital animator is getting paid Greater Than or Equal to the salary of a plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder, or robotics engineer to draw some aliens and spaceships, all day long, telling an imaginative story filled with information that adds nothing useful to the knowledge pool of an audience. "Art".
Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem".
Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2].
Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3].
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men.
You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars.
When an upper class mind is a derivative of "old money", they will naturally be less creative than their forefathers. This idea affected Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is the reason the richest man that ever lived (Rockefeller) would not buy Christmas gifts for his offspring.
When arbiters of economic gain birthright are handed the dividend generating assets of yesterday, without sufficient character-building world experience [0], useful creativity development (naturally possessed by the starving artist) will be stunted, and their blue chip asset portfolio will begin to include the "basic needs of the worker" - economic proxy wars of the free market conducted with existing supplies of citizen prerequisites like housing, education, and healthcare.
This is part of the reason Elon Musk is one of the darlings of the Internet - fresh, unconventional enterprise development, dodging traditional hedge (synonym for protection/security/safety) fund procurement. A portfolio absent of the soybean futures, railroad ownership, hospital shareholder spreads (fueled by things like artificially priced $10 Advil capsules), guaranteed road-tire decay dividends, pipeline infrastructure, et al that make up the core Maslow's hierarchy "operational cost" of the productive worker. He is instead situated on the front-lines of R&D progress which require the aforementioned preliminary basic services & goods to keep employed minds healthy enough to produce or gather high-hanging fruit.
The natural duty that falls into the dividend collecting "hands" of the few million >2nd generation resource commanders dispersed across the planet (whose own base hierarchy needs are equal to everyone else) is meant as hiring/guiding "fuel" to determine which citizens are being allowed access to industrially produced basic goods stored in warehouses, and skilled services of other citizens as described in the article, so that they may carry on with the specialized skill set for which they are selected. This sacred dispatch duty is what drives the discovery of new industries and the continued propagation of civilization.
Adam Smith suggested that the gluttony of the rich serves to feed the poor. (Although symptoms of poorly raised nobility include the perils of pride, envy, wrath, lust, sloth which could trickle down throughout their legions as wasted labor).
"The rich ... consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand [emphasis added] to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus [unintentionally] ... advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for."[1]
It is what happens when an entire society keeps to themselves for ~17 years and makes it acceptable to binge watch television and eat junk food.
The Brood X Cicada comes out of the ground ~1y after human "induced" disaster:
1987 After competitive rush of capitalism fills the mind of Diatlov with aggression causing Chernobyl
2003 after 3 NYC commerce office buildings fell Perfectly into their foundations, Iraq war begins, and first social media surveillance tools deployed
2021 after natural/deployed respiratory illness for stagnant daily routines for bodies that quit moving. "Zombie" media entertainment uses these citizens as reference.
"Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt." -Juvenal
We used to be pioneers but the machines made us docile.
Back in the day when we were running around the Savannah foraging, fat and grease would have evolved taste buds to prefer these inputs since they are such concentrated energy sources.
Fast food takes advantage of this, and it would not be too much of an issue if not for preservatives (find a French fry under your car seat from 5 years ago and it looks the same as it did the day you bought it - we should want to eat things that will rot within a week of room temperature).
I sop up all the grease of my homemade dishes ( "Food what nearly all people eat, to me it is harmful and dangerous. Sometimes I visualize that chefs in the world are all in conspiracy against me …" Nikola Tesla thought chefs were conspiring against him [1]) because I refuse to let anything to go to waste, and I welcome all the energy I can get (fuel for the tractor). I also do not clean dishes after every meal (blender included) because I want to see what nature can throw at me tomorrow. So far so good, although my stool once smelt like sulfur after cooking with boiled/stored creek water - duckduckgo tells me giardiasis, waterborne pathogen, which my gut promptly destroyed after one digestive cycle (well rehearsed and diversified, daily probiotic reinforcements).
At this point I have an iron stomach, and I was inspired by quite the lean healthy "homeless" girl I met who was eating out of dumpsters. I refused to partake in the dripping salad offering she presented me, but I could understand that because of this lifestyle - she would be far less of a liability to the healthcare system. Meanwhile, the "housed" people are stuffing themselves with their Precious TV Dinners (Tom Green, Stealing Harvard), sanitizing every surface they can think of, and finding it acceptable and even preferable to sit in their favorite chair with their "free" time to fawn over streaming media that depicts other people living their lives.
We want to blame it on the food, but the propaganda on phones and public wall-mounted screens is orchestrated by those who themselves are fearful of the world around them. The ones that follow suite are going to acquire a gut, high blood pressure (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers), and dulled senses.
Excellent, yet another stream of text that must occupy my information grapevine to define a virtual value system utilized by people who are not creative enough to park their economic gains as deployed assets.
One BTC is currently a post-tax yearly salary, a third of a tractor, at least one Bridgeport CNC lathe, 12 metric tons of cold rolled 304 stainless coil, or two springtime paid internships for folks out of high school (including their brand new Lincoln welders).
When the price goes up, it means even more people do not know what to do with resources available to them.
Kilowatt hour upon kilowatt hour that must be sequestered only because someone desired to "invest".
A modern metric to measure mediocrity, stagnation, and indecision (a hockey stick graph).
Classical territory signaling, rather than example for the working class.
The small territorial footprint of Japanese economic/military prowess nearly conquered the known world and still remains the only productive society contained by weaponized fission (big stick).
Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem".
Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2].
Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3].
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men.
You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI
[1] https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/
[2] https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-...
[3] https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679
Tyler Durden's Rubber Band