by

John Wright

Every few decades we USA citizens receive what feels like a bucket of cold water thrown in our collective faces. The current economic problems in the fall of the year 2010 in the USA and elsewhere are a perfect example. The job market is poor, as is the housing market. The crash of the stock market in 2008/2009 ruined a lot of ordinary people, and many of them haven’t recovered because their stocks haven’t recovered, even with the artificially propped up market. I believe many of us, regardless of education or work experience or political affiliation, wonder how our economy could have degraded so much. It is clear that no single thing is the cause, but the confluence of multiple destructive and conflicting economic practices over many years has produced a disaster that will impact us strongly for at least another ten to twenty years. The greater fear is that the disasters we are now experiencing signal the end of the golden age for the USA.

Events and situations I discuss in this article address that reality, especially the underlying causes, but with limited specific consideration of the present economy, for that is more a consequence than a cause. Overall my topics in this article will address the reasons for periodic declines in cultures and civilizations, the root causes, and something we commonly refer to as a "standard of living" which again is a longer term consequence of what we do, individually and collectively. An undercurrent of the value of deferred gratification flowing through your mind will serve as the proper mindset for you to balance your thinking while reading about the problem of conflicting values.

What do I hope to accomplish in this article? My intent is to force some realism so that we might advance humanity instead of regress or decline or perish like earlier cultures and civilizations, or simply recycle, as we appear to have done relative to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. That seems like a worthy goal, but before I am done I expect to anger or disappoint some of my readers, for I intend to destroy some misconceptions in our reasoning processes about how we should live to advance. Conversely, I want to capture your interest in realistic pursuit of advancing humanity, and I hope that through any anger or disagreement you grow in your understanding and actually take a stand about what we need to do to advance our global culture and avoid further decline. Do note that I take off the gloves in this article and make numerous assertions that will offend. That behavior is not intended to offend but it is required to make certain points very clear. And by this time you know me well enough to realize I have no respect whatsoever regarding that first amendment violation known as political correctness.

In the current depression we have far greater and more ominous burdens than the last time around. For the first time in history we have large and expanding population segments that have no essential economic function other than to consume goods and services. Contrast that reality to the fit between the unemployed in the Great Depression and the later jobs available to them and you will immediately get my point. The educational and skill levels of the unemployed at that time in history were reasonably well matched with the jobs that would eventually return. Such is not the case now, for the unemployable are typically not sufficiently gifted to be able to learn such that they can be useful in the modern technical world, except in menial jobs. Further, many of the semi-skilled jobs that some of the unemployed might have returned to in the Great Depression are essentially gone, possibly forever. Most have been offshored, the remainder lost to advancing technology.

I have one more area of preamble to get us started in the right direction, and to get your attention. The two most distinct types of people in terms of basic human values are those who espouse only golden rule thinking, regardless of obvious failure realities around them, and those who actively espouse and pursue only natural selection, or, survival of the fittest, regardless of the damage they do to others. Both types are utterly wrong in their approach to realistic advance of civilization. They are stupid polar opposites who each reflect thinking and acting in ways that will guarantee the destruction not the advance of civilization. One reflects silly and wasteful wishful thinking about equality and equal rights and the other models the cruelest aspects of nature as if that was a desirable goal. There, that should do it. If I haven’t captured your fear of identity with the extremes of one group or the other then you aren’t really reading/understanding this article, or just possibly you should be the person writing this article.

Some will argue, as I will, that my above definition is too confining, and that we are more three dimensional in our thought processes and in application of our value systems. Maybe that is true for some individuals, but are even they effective at dealing with social cognitive dissonance, which is a powerful underlying cause of modern massive societal failure? We’ll see. One side of social cognitive dissonance is the obvious misfit between what we are told our programs to uplift the underprivileged will accomplish versus what actually results from a welfare environment. The other side is programs to undertax the wealthy/corporations that are supposed to lead to higher investment in the society and higher employment and higher overall standard of living, but which have certainly not done that as evidenced by our job market.

Does the society as a whole demonstrate three-dimensional values thinking? No, there is no such thing as collective consciousness. We are factions. Is it true about societal leaders with political and/or economic power? Let’s not be ridiculous, for that is too easy to understand and prove based on human history and our economic mess at the present time. Is it true about poverty level individuals (44 million of us, roughly one person out of seven of our entire USA population)? You already know what problems limited aptitudes create when affected individuals are confronted with conflict or inadequate resources. Think of the word, ghetto, or the expression, mean streets, or think about undernourished abused children.

What about the folks in the middle who grasp the reality of the dissonance but are too busy "living their lives" to pay close attention to societal evolution, or who feel powerless to fight laws passed by the Congress and various state legislatures? Does anyone even react to news about changing demographics that lead to ever more violence or new and higher consumption of monies, spent on an applied need basis, directed towards helping the poor? Simply consider socialism for Hispanics in California and the increasing impact on the state budget. How many of us lose our way or lose momentum in the process of considering apparently important events and disjoint details about those and apparently unrelated events, presented to us by any source other than our personal experiences? Who has the time, let alone the interest, to address the very largest questions about the progression of civilization? Who is responsible for human advancement? You are, and so am I.

Wow! That was a short but accurate and pretty complete set of statements about the overall reality of humans and human behaviors without getting mired in unproductive detail. Perhaps I sound like I am patting myself on the back for succinct, accurate perception of reality. I am not. I am an observer. Mostly I am devastated by our demonstrated inability, or the lack of will, indeed both, to understand and to accept reality, and to make lasting and sensible decisions to improve the human condition. We have mass confusion, not clarity. We have self-destructive instincts and pie in the sky values simultaneously, and obvious repetition of all the problems that have plagued humanity since the earliest known human history, some 14,000 years ago, in virtually every place.

This should not come as any surprise to any of us, yet it does when we are suddenly forced painfully to deal with unwanted harsh realities in our own lives. Alas, most of us ignore reality when conditions are less than disastrous and we focus our thoughts and our efforts only or predominately on living out our time in our place, with no plan for the future of humanity. We defer to the supernatural or to human leaders in business and government to take care of the "larger" issues. We make gestures to support, mildly, our personal values, and that is not nearly enough. What fools we are, yet, who has the ability and the will to develop humanity holistically? Are we in fact helpless or mentally lazy or typically irresponsible in our behaviors regarding the larger aspects of existence? It all depends …

With that lead-in it is clear that what we have been doing in the development of cultures and civilizations for thousands of years has inherent fatal flaws; else history would tell us a different story. It really is that simple. Some flaws are understandable based on human ignorance throughout most of history. Some flaws today are the result of the overlay of old values, ideologies and religions competing with new valid knowledge in the quest to control the present and then engineer our future. But consider and accept that multiple instances of repeating the same flaws are inexcusable when we have the knowledge of our past and its disasters. For example, war is simply a consequence of failure to learn from prior wars those behaviors that led up to the wars, and to eliminate them from human experience as products of destructive ignorance. That we tolerate the existence of war and its underlying causes today is the clearest, most obvious example of failure of human leaders to manage human development.

What does this mean? In the simplest case, there has been competition for essential resources throughout history, like water, land, and the food that can be produced. But as quickly as we harness experience, creativity, science and technology to improve resource availability we proceed to overtax the new resource level by overpopulating. Ultimately, we destroy our physical environment attempting to force expansion in what turns out to be untenable places or untenable numbers of people, which is sickly and very wrongly perceived and/or promoted as "progress." Again, it really is that simple! Add to that formula different races and cultures and the stage is set for chronic wars of expansion or hegemony based on coveted natural resources, or ethnic/racial cleansing, justified on any asinine basis imaginable. We do this rather than avoiding war or even criminally oppressive legislation within our countries, instead of facing and correcting internal population and resource problems honestly and realistically.

War, however, is one of the three best known methods for addressing our propensity to overpopulate. The other two are famine and pestilence, or in a more modern sense, death due to disease. In almost all instances the underlying problem is expanding our needs beyond our resources through overpopulation or simply foolish squandering of resources (like oil and water), and rarely, or at least proportionately, the problem may be a natural disaster. The three "correctors" to the population problem are in themselves massive problems in that they cause vast amounts of needless pain and suffering and frequently destruction of our cities and upheaval of our cultures. In short, we regress. Then the cycle repeats.

Now lets try to put ourselves in the positions of the people who lead us, so that we might see better why the cycle repeats and perhaps understand what the leaders are trying to do about that seemingly intractable problem of cyclic disaster. First, those people are not stupid, regardless of our personal feelings about specific individuals. It is true that they disagree with each other as to finding the best means to solve societal problems. That is no surprise as their life experiences and native aptitudes differ broadly from each other. For that matter, their comparative definitions of success vary widely. To point, it is always easy to take any successful common political platform and find later instances where wonderful or at least useful things resulted, and other instances where some of the implemented policies later proved to be utterly stupid. Most important, can you think of even one time in history, in any place, where you could honestly say that the prevailing leadership had the requisite comprehensive knowledge to advance society on all fronts without, in ignorance, setting the stage for future disaster?

To be fair, you can readily understand that fixing one problem can and likely will lead to different problems, and that the tools available today to manage the present and the future of society are obviously not perfect. Nor is any system of government, religion or business culture or general societal culture. But our egos and fear of being discovered as ignorant cause most of us to cling to absurd beliefs instead of pursuing reality. We universally delude ourselves into believing that our beliefs and subsequent actions define reality, rather than allowing reality to shape our beliefs and actions. Talk about a god complex! Add to that the most fundamental differences in category of beliefs and values identified at the beginning of this article and you will understand why we have an apparently permanent situation of mass confusion and obvious schizophrenia. We have both intelligent and idiotic kindness alternating and coexisting with hard but sensible practicality and undeniable cruelty; both at the same time in the same country depending on where you happen to look.

This pointless wandering and sad reality has been with us globally throughout history. All you have to do to prove this to yourself is to expand the period of history you examine and the idiocy of repetitive implemented policy "corrections" presents perfectly. Thus, we cycle, and periodically we fail completely to maintain stability in our societies. Prove it to your self by identifying any country that had a "golden" age at any time in history. What is the status of that country today? What changed? What reason(s) do you have to believe that your own country will be different? What reason(s) do you have to believe that your own country will have the typical destiny of declination?

Does the reality of our economic problems at this moment undermine your confidence, and if not, why not? Try, honestly, to avoid platitudes and superficial reasoning and create your own explanation of cause and effect and the most probable future environment that will result within the USA. Note that this is not an easy task, and seldom do total failures or total success result across any society. Gauging the probable types and degrees of change in a dynamic environment with any accuracy takes very keen analysis, relevant and sufficient facts on which to do an analysis, and quite frankly some degree of prescience. If the task were simple there wouldn’t be a need to write this article.

I would like to think that our leaders try their best to do what they believe is essential to the maintenance and development of our country. And it is realistic to accept that they will sacrifice some worthy goals in the pursuit of overall survival or even factional prosperity, which has clearly happened in the USA with bailouts recently. Their successes and failures simply reflect the limitations of their knowledge, their value systems and their power. But however true my observations happen to be it is clear that we, like so many countries and cultures before us, are failing. We are now out of control, and we know that for certain simply by the failure of our leaders and our news media to talk and act seriously about the very things that are required to return us to economic health. The prime missing ingredient is candor. The prime missing information is admission of the destructive acts our government and business leaders have perpetrated in the past thirty to fifty years. An example of a positive change would be a national stimulus program and tariff laws to force the return of manufacturing to the USA, combined with training programs to force, yes force, capable citizens to take those programs and the jobs and the rational pay that are developed. Another example would be openly stated goals and legislation tying financial assistance to resulting performance in underprivileged groups becoming self- reliant.

It is necessary at this point to destroy, once and for all, any arguments pertaining to letting the market or free market capitalism in general take care of itself and guide our country economically and specifically avoid government intervention. Essentially our experiences across the past thirty years show unequivocally that "free market capitalism, as practiced" is equivalent to saying "let roving chartered financial gangs steal everything and keep the government protection of the common citizens out of everything and all will be fine." Only the thieves themselves or unthinking fools or bought-out legislators would espouse that hands-off position. The results that we have today prove the idiocy of that assertion. We have been ruined in large part by the greed of the wealthy. The purpose of government is to protect the common good, and that means everyone, not to back off or curry favor from wealthy thieves and look the other way.

It is also necessary at this point to destroy, once and for all, any arguments pertaining to supporting our weakest citizens without total control over their reproductive and work behaviors. It is social suicide to destroy the motive of contributors to work by continuously giving away their money to those who don’t work or who are unable and or unmotivated to learn sufficiently to be employable. Is that clear? Human rights are earned, not granted, and any foundation level national documents or laws or preaching to the contrary represent absurdity. In real life we are by no means equal, under the law or by any other way of measuring us, and that is proved immediately simply by observing our comparative successes and failures. Any fuzzy thinking based on fundamentally good values of kindness but untempered with realism, to the contrary of the above points, is idiotic.

The most essential truth surrounding racism and ethnocentrism, which are both totally unfair, is that capable people by birth of any race or ethnic group succeed in establishing themselves economically within one or two generations within the USA with our past and current laws, the period of slavery excluded. The incapable, including tens of millions of white people, are forever incompetent in self-management and self-growth, economically and otherwise. Thus, there is truth to the necessity of natural selection, lest we consume excessive resources to support large numbers of non-contributors and accomplish absolutely nothing in human advancement. It is no wonder the hyper-capitalists despise our socialists, for the socialists fail to demand performance for help given and thus destroy us. We need fewer weak people, not more.

The essence of the article title, "Unnatural Selection," refers to needed changes to keep our country, indeed our world, stable with advancement and able to help develop a happier and truly progressive future for humanity. It also addresses a lethal reality. I will now embark on my mission to explain what I think is essential to accomplish the goals.

I am sure you remember the saying, "When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging." Well, it is pretty obvious that between the socialists and the hyper-capitalists no one has been minding the store relative to advancing our culture. One side consumes but does not correspondingly produce, while the other side sloughs off ever more of the non-essential people (who, by the way, are a continuously increasing percentage of the population due simply to lack of essential inherited abilities, education and thus skills relative to business needs in a modern technology world) to gain wealth and to remove themselves from the mess our general population areas have become. But, oh my, do we see a lot of posturing, indeed complicated acting, to hide the truth; ergo leaders from all persuasions lie to the public continuously to maintain stability and/or their political power.

No one is openly and actively pursuing programs to design the composition of our population and to simultaneously be responsible to that population for physical security and economic and cultural growth. There, now I’ve said it. If you have read my book, Destiny, or various of my earlier articles you know that I am a strong proponent of using genetic engineering to provide to all people superior intelligence. That can happen but not for quite a few years, for some of the worst of political/religion, anti-human reasons, and the fact that we have a long way to go in terms of scientific discovery and development and implementation of genetic control technology. In the interim we have to take steps to keep our populations stable and secure, and our physical environment healthy, not destroyed in the name of "progress," economic or otherwise.

If you are a socialist you will not approve of my assertions. I say, unless you operate a business and regularly hire the weak and suffer the consequences, then you have no right to voice an opinion through your vote. You are attempting to force society as a whole to pamper the unproductive and allow them to reproduce excessively at the expense of the rest of society. That is theft.

If you are a hyper-capitalist you will not approve of my assertions. I say, unless you lead such that the motivated population is securely employed and adequately compensated to be able to enjoy life, then you have no right to voice an opinion through your vote (or buying the Congress). You are attempting to steal as much from those weaker than yourselves as possible … you destroy the lives of your fellow humans. That is theft.

Both of you groups make progress impossible in your continuous conflict, and both of you are simply wrong, and definitely misguided relative to sensible goals for the future of humanity. Those of us caught in the middle have the powerful stealing ever more of our lunch, and giving it to the expanding population of poor people, and then the "leaders" steal as much as they can of it back from the poor through ugly regressive tax creations like lotteries.

Where we are at this moment in USA history can be illustrated by a very simple analogy. Imagine a house full of teenagers with no parental supervision. What happens? The longer the necessary supervision is lacking; in what direction and to what extent does the environment evolve? If food supplies become short, what happens? Is there any force at work to mature the occupants into productive organization? Is there any force at work to promote an environment of fairness, or for that matter, how will those teenagers define fairness? I think you get my point. Absent true leadership the USA has devolved into self-serving factions that have no sense whatever of what it means to grow the country holistically, and we thus lack the means to force the entire population into considerate maturity.

What is the answer? It damn sure isn’t economic in nature! We have focused so much on the economic subjects, which are an obvious consequence of our actions, that we have totally ignored the underlying absolute necessities for success in life as a whole. Where are our values? Who is leading us to become vastly better in both our knowledge and our respect for each other? The economic devolution we have experienced is merely the symptoms of the disease, ergo our decline in "standard of living," not the disease itself. The cure is not economic, not even remotely economic, though the economic measures will improve if we act upon and receive the right cure.

How then do we force a considerate morality within the USA and later on an entire global population? How do you force the self-serving stupid to be considerate? How do you force the self-serving intelligent to be considerate? At this point I am going to press your buttons with no apology.

Think about four things as part of a global political platform. First, we have to stop empowering any country to become strong enough to consider, even briefly, attacking other countries to steal resources, by military or economic means. Second, we have to control population and population composition by eliminating the right to reproduce except by license, where license is granted based on proven performance in life management, ergo financial health and stability and demonstrated contribution to society. Third, we have to limit wealth for individuals such that no one can unduly impact the decisions of our Congress (or other national parliaments, etc.) or even the town councils where they live. Indeed, considering only the USA, members of the Congress must not be allowed to have wealth beyond the national average to even qualify to run for office. This will eliminate the greedy while retaining the educated and moral people committed to our advancement. Fourth, the power that has coalesced within financial institutions and large corporations in terms of wealth must be decimated. The big fish have eaten the smaller fish, and all that is left is we guppies, and a bunch of goldfish, representing small businesses, and we are powerless in trying to keep the big fish fair in business privileges and practices. It all has to be broken into many smaller competing pieces.

A word to the socialists is in order. No one will go hungry or lack shelter, clothing, top-notch medical care or the enjoyment of many fun things we have in our society moving forward. We are entirely responsible to avoid cruelty to all those alive now who cannot compete effectively. We simply will not allow the chronic educational and employment problems we have experienced in the USA leading to ghetto life to repeat, and that will be done by population control that avoids conception. That is the kind version of natural selection. It will strongly and ultimately affect all races, cultures and religions, globally.

A word to the hyper-capitalists is in order. We have enough experience now in the nearly 240 years of existence of the USA to know, definitively, that the accumulation of wealth leads to too much power, which is used primarily to control government to the exclusive advantage of the wealthy. Damage done to the motivated and hard working citizenry through that process is inexcusable, thus your power, through your wealth, must be removed from you, and never allowed to return. Your motives for doing anything in life based on your abilities will be changed from greed to pride of contribution and public recognition for that contribution to society. No one will be permitted to amass wealth or power. Think of your house plus an additional one million dollars in cash and other liquid or convertible assets as your absolute wealth limit.

The larger picture of global events, winners take all trading agreements and political interference with other countries will cease. Government has proven to be the most dangerous mechanism imaginable for the realization of truly cruel political and financial motives, both within and outside the USA. The avoidance of war is to be accomplished through a very improved and vastly empowered United Nations Government. Thus, each country will be sovereign, but no country will be permitted to seek or to accomplish any action to the obvious detriment of other countries. Do you want a democracy or not?

All policies described in the three previous paragraphs will be applied globally, country by country, across the next thirty to fifty years. Global population will be forced to decline, eventually to a maximum of four billion people, to enhance quality of life and to avoid unreasonably stressing our environmental resources. There will be no entitlement programs continuing as this evolves, or any price gouging allowed by businesses, e.g. medical goods and services. There will be price controls and forced elimination of jobs that do not add value to the intrinsic purpose of a service, i.e., health insurance companies do not improve medical knowledge or practice. Families and individuals within the families will be collectively and entirely responsible for caring for all family financial and care needs, including the elderly. Tort laws will change towards the elimination of civil suits in conjunction with shrinking of business size and power, and better control of the damage large companies do today with no conscience, to the people and the environment. Deceit will be elevated in criminal law to the level of felony, whether the medium is typical media or communications within and from businesses, government, educational institutions and religions, and even each other. No one gets a free ride or a pass based on position in society. It is time to eliminate the lying and dissembling.

Are the changes listed above even possible to accomplish? First, note that the list is woefully incomplete in terms of naming practices, institutions and even general population behaviors that must change. A political platform is much more than the limited but critical issues identified above. Second, note that any massive change in how we do things will come about only through disaster, not peaceful enlightenment, in which we learn drastically and unarguably what we did wrong prior to the disaster. That means you are facing disaster now and you will experience disaster. The only unknown is the degree of disaster. The end point is the period of opportunity. What will we do? Third, belief in a fair chance to succeed in life is the driving force that will cause all populations in the main to support the indicated massive changes. That belief is what needs to be created, for without knowledge of how good life could be, we will simply continue doing what we have done throughout human history, which obviously has not worked well at all. The future can and will be engineered for success, for all countries able to contribute to the future through human development and creative accomplishments.

I hope you have gained in your perspective from my thoughts. As to practicality I am very patient, for if my thoughts and realizations are ignored for any reason, and they will be for the foreseeable future, we humans will simply continue to self-destruct. We already see major physical evidence of our poor decisions through environmental deterioration. In any event, the points that I have made within this article are not arguable. I am not interested in whether anyone likes or hates my propositions or conclusions, simply that they think through them and develop their own conclusions and communicate those conclusions for community growth. But casually denying my conclusions is like denying the existence of the Sun. You can close your eyes and stumble around forever, but you cannot wish the Sun away. My challenge to you is to create your own positions on these non-trivial subjects, and communicate them to the rest of us, indeed to a broad audience. Don’t sit there quietly. Get angry, get off your ass and contribute. Not one of you is stupid, else I would not choose to communicate, but you need to form your thesis, defend it, and help the rest of the thinkers who care about our future, for you owe that to Humanity, not me.

So, what about Unnatural Selection? It is really a slap in the face from me to invariant socialists and hyper-capitalists. It is and will be unnatural for either faction to select sensible and moral changes to the foundation benefit of human advancement. Both factions have to go, and be replaced with Destiny.