By a lot.
Sure I had a totally rad idea for tonight’s blog entry earlier today. But it’s gone, gone, gone. The river of time has flowed onward since then and the little raft which I semi-pilot on it has traveled a million miles since then.
A sensible person would write these things down, but of course, I am not a sensible person. I try to be, but there is only so far common sense can go to conquer my wild and elusive muse and past that point, I do what it wants, not the other way around.
So as patient readers know, I can’t do the sensible thing of writing down my amazing ideas when I have them, becase if I do, I will lose all impetus to actually follow through and write the thing, and in fact, before long, I will begin to loathe and resent it.
I have to write from the moment, out of inspiration, and inspiration, alas, cannot be bottled up and saved for later.
Not for me, anyhow.
I sometimes feel like I got the wrong muse, truth be told. Before I ever tried to be an actual writer, I would have guessed that I would be the sort of writer who plans out everything and then meticulously executes that plan.
After all, that fit with what I knew about myself back then.
But nope. Not a chance. I just can’t operate like that. If I was to make said plan I would immediately lose all desire to actually write the thing, and it would, in fact, become odious to the extreme to me.
Like, used underwear level odious.
I guess we don’t always turn out to be the people we want to be, do we? Instead, we take our best guess and figure shit out from there.
Nobody gets to decide who they are. They only get to discover it. This simple truth has enormous implications for the way we evaluate and judge people.
We judge people’s character as if they had a say in it. As if they decided to be obnoxious or boring or impatient. As if before we are born, there’s a character generation screen where we pick absolutely everything about ourselves, and it is therefore acceptable to judge said choices.
But we didn’t have a choice. We were born with whatever basic temperament we get and can do precious little to alter it.
A shy person can’t become a bold person – only boldER. An impatient person can’t become a patient person – only learn to be more patient. Someone who loves math and hated English class can’t transform themselves into someone who loves English class and hates math.
All we can do to correct our character flaws is move ourselves closer to what we want. And give ourselves time to change, and be realistic about how far we can go.
I will never be the super well organized hyper competent person I wish I was. That’s just not in the cards for me. I can become more organized and more competent, but I will always be a sloppy fuckup to some degree.
Luckily, I have other good qualities that make up for it.
For one thing, I’m cute.
Getting back to judgment, we can now see that judging someone by their character is problematic at best because arguably, they didn’t have any choice in that.
We can only judge people by their behaviour because that, they choose.
It’s true that character is the source of behaviour, but there’s a little thing called free will that happens in between.
Otherwise, our modern idea of morality would make no sense whatsoever.
I am getting really tired of hearing people talk smack about capitalism.
The problems in the world today do not stem from our economic system. They stem from governments spectacularly failing at maintaining law and order in the face of monetary temptations, and while that does involve money, it does not defline capitalism.
If a corporation bribes a legislator to loosen environmental regulations, that’s not capitalism. That is corruption, and all economic system have that.
One of the strongest parts of the con job the evil fucking bastards wrecking the planet and dooming us all use to shield themselves from accountability has been convincing us to use their definition of capitalism, which is basically “this exact system we have now and everything in it”.
Once we have swallowed that, it’s not hard to convince people that any substantial change would be anti-capitalist.
But that’s bullshit. Capitalism is what we we the people say it is. It is our game and our rules and we can goddamned well change the rules if it seems like things are not working out in our favour.
And if that deprives powerful people of the money they never should have had in the first place, I am extraordinarily okay with that.
Capitalism can be as powerful a force for good as it can be for evil. but not if us liberal intellectual types with the right ideas go around saying “I hate capitalism!”.
Nothing could empower evil more efficiently than that. It makes your rhetorical position extremely easy to destroy and that, in turn, destroys popular support.
What is needed is liberals who wholeheartedly and publically embrace capitalism and use its power to destroy the people intent on destroying us.
Make a profitable product. Use those profits to expand the business. Franchise out. Start a business empire to rival Amazon’s. Use your money to influence legislators to make the right decisions for a change.
Lather, rinse, repeat until you save the fucking world.
Elon Musk gets it. He knows that products change the world far more than people do, and that change takes power, and in today’s world, that means money.
As long as the people with the right ideas continue to turn their nose up at capitalism and refuse to soil their hands by pursuing profit, change will never come.
But if the side of the angels embraces profit and power,. there is no limit to what we could do with this crazy world of ours.
We could make this world a paradise.
But only if we stop hating capitalism and start making it work.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.