If you have read part one of this article, you know my thesis that the real avenue to create change in the world for the average person is through the world of business, rather than political activism.

In this chapter, I will explain exactly how one might use the world of business and the dynamic and powerful engine of capitalism to create the sort of permanent change which really makes a difference : creating a brand new viable business model.

As with all its open secrets, the business world talks a lot about business plans and business models and makes them sound like obscure, stuffy, dull things that nobody with the smallest spark of true wit or originality could possibly understand. But at the most basic level, a business model is simply an idea for a business, developed to the point of figuring out how to make the whole thing turn a profit, or at least break even. As a concept, that’s simple enough. As a reality, of course, it’s fairly complex.

But the potential rewards in terms of change are astounding. Think of how much power Wal-Mart exerts over the marketplace. If Wal-Mart decides that it wants healthier food choices at its price point from wholesalers across the board, the winners will be those who can change their practices and get behind what Wal-Mart wants the fastest and the best. Wal-Mart, as an entity, exerts massive influence in the global marketplace. What it likes, happens. What it doesn’t like, goes away. The decisions of Wal-Mart can make or break the fate of nations, let alone thousands of businesses large and small.

Now imagine that kind of power and influence applied directly to making the world a better place.

And it all started because one man, Sam Walton. had an idea for a different kind of store, one which kept prices low all the time instead of having bogus ‘sales’ which claim to be saving you money without ever telling you exactly how. A store where they went out of their way to be a little friendlier, a little nicer, a little more accessible. A store that anyone of any background or income could feel at home in. In other words, Wal-Mart.

And he took that idea, turned it into a business and then into a business model and made them work, and despite the mutations that have happened to it since then, it’s still the most massive retail presence in the world today, and it all started with an idea for a new business model.

Look at your average strip mall, and you will see, right before your eyes, an excellent lesson in the power of successful business models that have changed modern life and how it is lived. And remember that it’s not just the chains that change things, it’s the idea for business.

Every store in that strip mall represents a successful business model. It’s easy to forget this, because we take the existence of all the usual types of businesses for granted, and it’s hard to remember that at one point, they just plain did not exist. But every one of them is a modern invention, and every one of them started, at one point, as just an idea in someone’s head.

Take, for example, the pizza place. It seems beyond obvious now that people love pizza and therefore there is a huge market for pizza, and a business selling pizza is a good idea. But at one point, pizza was foreign food, ethnic cuisine, along with the rest of Italian cuisine, and a business selling pizza must have seemed like as strange an idea to the people of that time as having a store that sold nothing but some obscure African Bushman delicacy would seem to us now.

But someone started a pizza place anyhow, and people liked it, a few at first and then more over time, until today, when pizza and Italian food are so ubiquitous and so entirely absorbed into the culture that we barely even think of them as ethnic cuisine any more, and you can get a pizza anywhere, at any time.

All because someone thought “This stuff is great! I bet other people would love it!”, and turned that idea into a business model that worked.

Or take your average dry cleaning outlet. We taken the availability of this type of service as a no-brainer fact of life, but at one point, there was no such thing. Someone invented the process, came up with a business model for the dry cleaning store, and over time, this made all kinds of clothing options more affordable for millions of people that had never been possible (or affordable) before.

And in the world of business, the key is profitability. A lot of well-meaning liberal business ventures fail because they treat profit like a dirty word, try to run their business by their ideology, or otherwise try to be in business without becoming businesspeople. But a business model is like a living creature, and profit is what keeps it alive and thriving. If a business is profitable, it can expand. If it can expand, it can grow till it becomes two identical businesses on the same business model… like capitalist mitosis. And if those businesses remain profitable, the business modem becomes a chain, the chain inspires competitors, the competitors help spur innovation and suddenly, the business idea is an industry. The success attracts more capital, and the business model spreads, and over the years, becomes a trillion dollar industry that is firmly entrenched in the very fabric of pop culture and our daily lives.

And it all starts with someone’s idea for a business that just might work.

The magic word “change” get bandied about a great deal, especially in the world of politics, and has come to represent everbody’s hopes and dreams for progress of all kinds in the public consciousness. In that context, the desire for change is universal. There is not a citizen of a democracy in the world who think the society in which they live is perfect the way it is at this exact moment. Whether the changes you desire are based on a vision of the future or a longing for a lost world of the past, everybody wants to change something.

And yet, it seems nothing ever really changes that much, and what does change doesn’t seem to have anything to do with who we vote for or what laws are passed. Why is this? The people in power, the ones who benefit from things staying the same, seem to have nothing to fear. It’s like they have tricked us into doing exactly what they want us to do and we simply can’t see the strings they use to control us.

But how could they do that, in the age of the Internet, Wikileaks, and democracy?

Easy. They get us focused on politics, and politics only affect government (and that, only weakly), and government rarely changes anything.

Now, I am no libertarian, shouting at you to forgo the evil Gubmint and all its trappings of evil Regulation and Intervention and save your freedom loving soul from a New World Order Mark of the Beast future. Government intervention is absolutely required in myriad aspects of society merely to keep the wheels of modern democratic capitalist society going, let alone make modern life worth living. People who are against all forms of government intervention should have their homes taken over by the Crips.

But despite the impression that one gets from the news media, the history books, and practically everything else in our culture, most important social change comes not from a change in law, policy, or political party, but from the people and the innovations and modifications they come up with in their daily struggles to cope with everyday life in their times.

Those who truly desire change have to go where change truly comes from : the world of business.

Surprised? Expecting something like “activism” or “public education” or “consciousness raising”? Not likely. Those have their place and historically, they have done much good. But the rate of success is very low, and for the Powers That Be who don’t want THEIR world to change, nothing could please them more than to see all the idealistic young people and change-minded parents of the world wasting all their earnestness and enthusiasm on political activism, which is based on competing with dozens of other special interest groups for the attention of a very small group of politicians for a chance to MAYBE make your case better than the extremely high paid lobbyists that said Powers That Be hired to pester politicians full time, instead of doing the other things that might actually change something.

Like learning how the world of business works. The Powers That Be’s base of power is not simply their superior access to and influence over politicians. The real crux of their power, the spell that conceals their kingdom, is the widespread belief that the world of business is boring, complicated, unsexy, uncool, conservative, and nothing that a liberal-minded person would be even slightly interested in, let alone comfortable with.

But the world of business is the world of money, and money is power. The Powers That Be don’t give a damn what we do with our votes because they control the money. The real lever of power is who has the currency to make their will be done, and right now, the vast majority of that power lies within the boring, stodgy, conformist, no-fun world of business.

As long as that remains true, nothing will truly change. The poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer, billions will live and die in wretched, squalid horror all over the world, and we will all be too busy doing fun things like having rallies and waving signs and participating in marches and online discussions, convinced we are Doing Something, when in reality, we are just doing what we like to do and counting it anyhow.

So if you are serious about wanting to change the world and make it better place, don’t protest the G6, shout things at rallies, get your degree in Political Science, or fall for any of the other easy and tempting traps for your energy and enthusiasm that the world of liberal activism innocently offers.

Instead, get a haircut and a nice looking suit, get your MBA, and take these bastards on in the world in which they live : the world of business and money.

It won’t be sexy or fun or make anyone think you are cool.

But if you truly want to change how things work, you will be willing to sacrifice all that for results.

More importantly, why do we ask?

What is is about the nature of being human that compels us to ask, as individuals and as a species, “Why are we here? What is our purpose? What are we here to accomplish? What does it all mean?”

We have to wonder why we ask ourselves these question, and indeed why these questions haunt and torment us and have done so for millennia, because in the cold light of reason, there is no logical reason to suppose there is any reason or purpose to our existence at all. This is especially true for those of us who are nontheistic and therefore have no creator in our worldview, and hence, nobody’s intentions to question, even just in our minds. Purpose, after all, implies intention, and there is no intention without an intender… no reason for an action without a reasoner. After all, we don’t ask what the purpose of an apple falling from a tree is, or ask the river why it runs. Motives are something you only find in living, thinking entities, be they gods or human beings. If a murder is committed, we jail the murderer, not his bullets or his gun.

So what is it that compels us human beings to seek a meaning to life? Why do we consistently and persistently ask ourselves what it all means and what it’s all for, and makes us incapable of being satisfied with the obvious truth of cosmic accident?

For the answer, we have to delve deep into our natures as members of a highly social and hierarchical species. We have tribal instincts that run extremely deep into the most primal layer of our psyches, instincts that drive us so deeply and strongly that, like fish who cannot see the current, we often have no idea they are guiding us.

This is why, when society breaks down, the basic unit of human society is revealing to not be the family, but the tribe. Human beings instinctively bands together for mutual protection, and even when all else is gone, they will continue to do so, whether you call them tribes, organized crime families, gangs, or nations.

Therefore, as individuals, we seek our place in the tribe. We search for a place where we have a role, responsibilities, and recognition for the effort we contribute, as well as the protection and support of the larger group (be it workplace, social scene, or fandom) in return for our contributions.

In short, we look for a place where we belong. Our entire driving for belonging is, at its root, a searching for our tribe, and our rightful, proper place in it. Modern society has broken down almost all of the sources of this much needed tribal context that sufficed through history (like social class, clan, tribe, church, and so on) and has, thus far, only come up with partial and ephemeral substitutes like clubs, social scenes, fandoms, and so on.

Our search for cosmic meaning, therefore, is this search for the place where we belong taken to the highest scale. Being social and hierarchical creatures, we cannot feel truly safe and secure unless we know where we stand in the tribal structures in which we experience our existence, and once we realized that the Universe was out there and vastly larger than anything our primate social minds can comprehend, our tribal instincts compelled us to seek our place in that social context as well.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no reason to believe that the question is even meaningful or sensible at that level. Our social instincts compel us, and they operate on a considerably deeper and more powerful level than relative latecomers like logic and reason.

That is why we cannot accept our existence as cosmic accident. In the socially constructed world of a social primate, purposeless things have no standing. Without the comfort of knowing our place in the cosmic tribe, we face the most terrifying thought possible to the mind of a social ape : that we have no place in the tribe at all, and therefore have no tribe.

A human being would rather be the lowest of the low, the untouchable of the untouchables, in a universe explicitly designed to cause them the most suffering possible, than to face the prospect of a universe with no particular place for us at all. Even Hell would be better than being a tribeless primate.

If you scratch the surface of many a nightmare vision of the world or the future, and know what to look for, you will see that the real appeal of these pessimistic, even nihilistic views of the world is that they nevertheless suggest an order in the world and a place for us in it, even if it is only as mindless pawn, feckless sheep, or cattle for the slaughter.

The only answers that, in the long run, can satisfy this tribal yearning are ones that we create ourselves. There is no grand cosmic purpose to our existence. We are not here for any particular reason any more than any other cluster of atoms swirling in the Void. There is no great and noble job for us to do, and if we but fulfill this cosmic purpose, the universe will protect us and reward us accordingly. This world does not come with a task already laid out for us, waiting for us to find it and fill it.

But that does not mean that we cannot have meaning and purpose in our lives. It just means that we must find it, indeed create it, ourselves. Once we accept the existential truth of the meaninglessness of human existence in the grand scheme of the cosmos, we are then freed from all obligations to find our cosmic purpose, as well as any potential penalties from our failure to “do our jobs”, and we are free to do, be, or become whatever it is that our inner natures need us to be.

Our cosmic search for meaning is forever doomed, but we can still find comfort, meaning, and purpose in this great big beautiful world if we just set our sights a little lower.

And nobody can tell you that you aren’t being what you are supposed to be.

Supposed by who?

One of the most common complaints in romantic life is how the other gender is so “shallow”. Women think all men care about is big tits and a skinny body. Men think all women care about is is a chiseled jaw and a fat wallet. There’s good reason why this idea is so pervasive in both genders, but what I would like to make clear is that it just is not so, and if you are willing to abandon this false impression, a whole world of possibilities will open up to you in terms of love, romance, partnership, and happiness.

First, let’s talk about where this pernicious illusion comes from.

It starts, as so much pain and trouble does, in our adolescence. The first notions we get about love, sex, attraction, and the other gender are formed in our teen years, and around other teens.

This is perfectly natural, but also terribly wrong, because in the hormonal miasma that is adolescence, we are at our most confused, least mature, least stable, and yes, at our most shallow. All the angles of human sexual response are not only brand new to teens, they are turned up all the way to the maximum they will ever bed, and hence the teen is caught completely unprepared and, for a while at least, it’s the hormones that lead them around, dragging them, often only semi-willingly, in directions they don’t understand, into places with which they are not familiar. The child they were and the adult they will be are in a terrible tug-of-war, and their sexual responses tend to be, to put it mildly, primitive.

So yes, the guys all go pop-eyed for the early blooming girls with the big boobs and the tight ass. And yes, the girls all melt at the sight of the testosterone-laden jocks with the hard bodies and the cool cars their fathers got for them. This is understandable when you realize their hormones are in charge and everyone is thinking with their gametes. The most crude, obvious, and exaggerated sexual signals will be the ones that get people’s attention the most, and this gives people a completely false initial impression that the other gender is completely shallow and only cares about these superficial things.

Even in the teen years, that’s not true. It’s what gets people’s attention, sure, but for most of us, the really sexy people are like another race, nice to look at, but they have nothing to do with us.

And as we look upon those who, through no effort of their own, happen to end up in a body that sends these kinds of strong sexual signals, we begin to see another of the causes of this false belief in the shallowness of the other gender : pretty people themselves tend to be shallow.

It’s not entirely their fault. When you have the looks that we humans are programmed to respond to when we are young, you live in a different world than regular folks. Everyone around you wants to please you. Nobody can stand to see you upset or in difficulty. People smooth the way for you in everything without you even having to ask. This is as true for men as it is for women.

And so you are never forced to develop your mind, your tastes, or your personality. Things come to you easily, and the easiest thing in the world is to just assume you must deserve them just for being you. And because you are one of the pretty people, you can have your opposite number without even trying all that hard, and so you don’t need to get over the shallow phase of attraction…. not yet, anyhow.

As a result, a lot of people have memories of approaching one of these attractive people and being cruelly rebuffed. And from this, they generalize to the entire gender of which the attractive person is merely the most obvious manifestation.

But if you simply wipe the fairy dust from your eyes and look around you, it will because increasingly evident that the entire gender can’t be shallow, or only the pretty people would ever hook up, form relationships, and get married. And nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that most people do find someone. Most people do marry at least once in their life, most people do date and end up at least in medium-term relationships, most people do not die lonely.

When you realize this, it becomes clear that this notion of the other gender’s (or your own gender’s, for us homosexuals) supposed unbreakable shallowness is not a true observation based on reality, but rather, a convenient excuse to not bother trying.

No massive generalization of a large slice of humanity can possible be true in the face of the vast scope of human diversity, and that goes double at least when you are talking about fully one half of the entire human race on Earth.

Sure, some ladies and some gentlemen are very shallow. Generally, they are the pretty ones, who have never had to be anything but shallow, or the highly immature ones who are still trapped in the moth’s death spiral, eternally attracted to the pretty flames that will only burn them again and again.

Don’t be like them. Ignore the shallow pretty ones. Their gifts are no prize in the long run, when they begin to grow old and lose their looks and realize people didn’t really love them for who they are after all, and they have no idea what do with their life now anyhow.

Strike them from your mind, and instead, look for the one thing that really matters in love : finding a person you like to spend time with. Because beauty fades in time, not just in life but in the mind’s eye, and no mater how beautiful they are, after a while it will become ordinary to you, and you will be stuck with whether or not they make you happy, and vice versa.

Stay out of the shallow end of their gene pool, and stop thinking you know what your perfect lover will look like, or even be like.

Just find someone who makes you happy. Nothing else matters at all.

The word “natural” doesn’t mean a god damned thing.

Think about it. What does “natural” mean? It means “that which is found in nature”.

But everything is found in nature. A skyscraper is just as natural as a tree. Plastic is just as natural as sea foam. That is because nature never ends. The whole idea that there is nature, or even Nature, and then there is us is completely specious. We never left Nature. You can’t. Everything in the Universe is natural, everything that happens is natural, all that is,was, and will be is equally the product of the exact same natural forces which make bees and kittens and pretty desert sunsets.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that by looking around in our grocery stores. Natural is the hottest meaningless Madison Avenue buzzword of all time, and it shows no sign of relenting in the slightest. Everything from produce to shampoo to novelty seat covers are eager to tell you how “natural” and “organic” they are in order to convince you that they are somehow better than those nasty unnatural things which violate the laws of nature their competitors are pushing.

Everything that I have said for “natural” goes double for “organic”. If a human being can derive nutrition from it, it’s organic, whether it’s an “organically farmed” mushroom or a bag of Doritos. Just as much human intervention is involved in bringing you that mushroom as in bringing you the Doritos. There is no logical, scientific, or even sensible difference between an organically grown food item and the same thing made by more modern methods. There is no “vitamin nature” we all lack.

And I think it’s this rejection of human intervention that really bothers me about this modern fetish for “natural” and “organic” products. Somehow, in the last fifty years ago, we have all become convinced that the touch of our fellow human beings is inherently corrupting and destructive, and that the less we have done to something, the better for us it is, somehow.

It is as thought the entire scientific revolution never happened. The joke is trite now, but it’s true : our ancestors a mere two hundred years ago ate completely natural, organic foods and had active, outdoor lifestyles, and they died before reaching the age of forty. We live nearly twice that, and yet we now think the progress and technology which allows that is somehow suspect.

No doubt, in the march of science and commerce, mistakes have been made which resulted in food which was less nutritious than what came before. But that was not due to the destructive and “unnatural” evilness of science, it was due to an incomplete understanding of the human body and what it needs. It was not too much science but too little that caused these mistakes to be made.

And for every such mistake, there are dozens of ways in which modern science has made what we eat and drink and use in our daily lives far healthier than the crude and disease-ridden things of the past. From the days of Pasteur, scientific progress has made what we consume safer, cleaner, better looking, better tasting, and in all ways simply superior.

If that’s the case, then where does this modern, pervasive rejection of science and embracing of the specious notion of the superiority of the “natural” and “organic” come from?

Part of it, I think, is simple historical nostalgia. When we are discontent with modern life, we seek to place the blame, and the future is frightening and uncertain, so it is far easier and more comforting to imagine that there was a time when things which were much better Way Back When, and this involved an inherent need to think we went terribly wrong somewhere.

But I think it goes far deeper than that. I think modern life alienates us from nature, and leaves us with a deep mysterious craving for the connection with nature we once had. It is a mysterious craving because it does not map directly onto our usual sense of the needs of the body and the mind, and therefore comes from that dark and disturbing realm between consciousness and the subconscious. From an everyday point of view, a craving for nature seems entirely illogical and insane. We have everything we could possibly want in modern society, right?

But I think, deep down, every creature has a sense of what their environment is supposed to be like. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. It would keep a given species in the environment to which they are best adapted, and lead them back to it when they wander too far.

With us crazy human beings, however, not only had modern society, with the best of intentions and for the most part, the best of results, has caused us to live in environments which cut us off from the complex signals that tell us we are in the right place.

We try to compensate. We have lawns and flower boxes and gardens and parks and so on. We vacation in places of “natural beauty” in order to soothe this deep feeling of being out of place. We decorate our homes with pictures of nature. We bring animals into our homes to live with us.

But still, we crave, and it is this craving that is callously manipulated by the forces of consumerism in order to get us to buy their crap instead of someone else’s crap.

Ignore whether it’s “natural” or “organic” or “naturally sourced”. That is just bullshit magical thinking. Ask whether it is good for you, and judge without prejudice.

Because having an open mind and asking questions is a natural thing for a human being to do.