Beyond 2020_Working towards a New World Order

The great political movement of our time, is for the formation of an official world government - a global federation. Don't fight it outright please, because we need it. Fight for its correct structuring. 

There are 3 major 'missing links' in structural politics, on the highest levels. Until those links are installed, politics will always be problematic.

1. The need for a world government, with strictly specified and contained powers.

2. The need for the mass-decentralisation of our democracies. (many more nation states - much smaller).

3. Self governing, private villages.

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1. The need for world governance. 

If the libertarians had their way the entire world would be free to do what it wants, with everyone living in a super prosperous free-market harmony. The problem is they're right that freedom induces prosperity, but wrong in their assumption that that is all we need to worry about.

With real prosperity will come an inevitable rapid population explosion, in particular within the Islamic and African worlds.

If every Muslim has the potential to actualise their ideal of about 4 to 8 children per-couple, then they will quickly breed the rest of us out of existence (my video here). The hard truth is population must be balanced to resources, when and as required. This will take a given level of world government in the end. Population stability is a global game and it will finally require global cooperation and enforcement.

We can't forget that without active population control, we can then only get passive population control, eventually, and that would be ugly.

There's also the need for global environmental defense, and probably the need for a degree of fertility control to the end of resisting dysgenics. The latter is an incredibly sensitive topic of course, and I talk about it here, but it's irresponsible not to ask the question on eugenics. Dysgenics may well be a long-term threat to our species. It is also ultimately a global issue as we are in fact one great gene pool. There are no more islands in this world.

Building a global government, if we do, should begin with nations that are not clearly backwards, and then it should expand out from there. That is, it should only accommodate countries that know what basic human rights are, such as not abusing children with brutal circumcision, for example.

The current United Nations has become contaminated by giving voice to nations that are backwards, and this has eroded the UN's credibility. I believe we need to start again with a new organisation. The United Western Nations (of the world) sounds like a good idea to me.

Backwards nations should not be allowed to join the Western union until they have raised their game. Until then, they may need to be controlled to a degree, to the end of enforcing the most basic human rights, fertility management, and basic environmental defense.

Note: I know this looks arrogant, but when nations are committing sins on the level of chronic culturalised child abuse and gross environmental damage, etc, and refuse to reform in spite of the facts, then there's a place for so-called arrogance. In my view, the serious violation of human rights - and ultimate necessity - are issues that go beyond the geo-political abstractions of national borders, cultures and religions. On these levels, I believe outside nations have the right to take invasive action as required. 

However, absolutely no world government should be given power to intrude on domestic policy that does not need to be their concern. The strictest of constitutions must be laid down to ensure that this does not happen.

Also vital, is the freedom of nations to abandon the western union without undue consequence of sanctions. This is very important to ensure that any given world government can be held to account by the collective, and ultimately abandoned and dissolved as required. The threat of "mass-Brexits" should always be on the world governments mind. To reinforce this, it could be a good idea to mandate opt-out referendums say every five years, for member states. A bit like an ongoing performance review with consequences.

We should never forget that positions of power are notorious for attracting people who want power for its own sake. Again, major institutional protections are essential.

2. The need for the mass decentralisation of democracies. 

My included image below says it all. It's foolish to think that democracy on its own is the way forward, as it only protects people from the very worst excesses of government. The truth is, pure democracy equates to power to the propagandist at least as much as power to the people.

By far the best way to hold any institute to account is to provide alternatives. If we introduce the dynamic of real competition between democracies then the power of foot-voting will hold them all to account.

For example, we can let communists build their communist ideal if they believe in it; and when they fail, quickly and badly, it will induce them to immediately reform. Let them learn the hard way, fast, and be done with their economic naivety. And let them make an example for the rest of us to note and learn from.

Political decentralisation complimented with foot-voting will fix any bad idea quickly, and the need for long-winded political dramas will be put to an end. (Indeed, decentralisation will promote any good idea quickly as well).

In the competitive commercial world, failure is comparatively fast and swift, with reform following immediately and with results that are not too devastating for anyone in the long run. It can be that way for democracies as well. There will be no more Venezuela's with this structure, and it will be the end of much of the childish politics as we know it.

3. Self governing, private villages.

You don't have real freedom until you can choose your world - socially and structurally. When you can build and live in your own village, by your own select ideal, you have a kind of freedom that has become largely alien to us in the modern western world. My included video below is a comprehensive expression on this idea.

We are a tribal animal, not a mass-society animal, and if we want strong communities then we need to let them develop - bottom up. Not as a prescriptive government project, but as a commercial freedom born from natural demand.

However, the 'village' political dimension is the least of our concerns for building an ultimate ideal political structure, because if I'm right then the private village will develop all on its own, just as soon as our democracies are decentralised and forced to compete.

When honour-real-demand-or-fail is the name of the game, like it is in the commercial world, then what is best can only win in the end. So if the private village is best, your nation state will have no choice but to facilitate them to hold onto its people.

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A final note.

As I have been interested in politics and public policy for a long time, you can ask...Why do I think about taboo topics like population control and, God help us, eugenics? The answer is because I have no right to not think about these things, if I am to have a credible opinion on where I believe our political world needs to go.

Is dysgenics a real possibility? Yes. Is overpopulation a real possibility? Yes. Ouch, I have to look at these things then.

So what, to the best of my mind, should be done to address these issues? I have of course written my answers here and more comprehensively elsewhere on my blog. But again my point is, I have no right to make policy suggestions as though these sensitive concerns do not exist. If I worked like that then I would be just as illegitimate as the extremist-Left that believes in, and promotes, policy that cosmetically looks good though in spite of hard facts. I will be better than that, and so should all of us be better than that, because a failure to be realistic is simply dysfunctional and ultimately dangerous.

Confronting the Islam issue

The Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamic fundamentalist organisation, invented the term 'Islamophobia' to suppress the conversation that the West needs to have. Sadly, Islamophobia-shaming has had a lot of success. Even with the best of intentions too many people are now afraid of talking about Islam.

However, we can get around the Islamophobia trick by asserting the simple truth. The truth that our common enemy is the radicalisation process - not Islam or Muslims as such.

No one halfway sane can ignore the fact that Islamic radicalisation is a real and dangerous thing. And no one can call you an Islamophobe for simply asserting the obvious, that far. But we need to get in early with the assertion before we're successfully labelled Islamophobic...and then hater, bigot, racist, etc, because once that happens no one is listening. Hence, as you can see my soundbite is right there at the top of the page. This is where I'm at - not Islamophobia.

So let's get to it.

How then does the radicalisation process happen? How do benign Muslims get turned into dangerous extremists? I'm not an expert myself and I don't need to be. My job is to open the book before it gets closed. From here, I will simply list some factors that, to the best of my mind, contribute to the radicalisation process.

1. The cult-dynamic. 

The hallmark of a cult is isolation. Seperating yourself into a group where others are seen fully as 'outsiders', and to the point where the dehumanisation of outsiders can occur. In a cult, interaction with outsiders is suppressed to ensure that the in-group sees things only through their own internal eyes, making cultural reform difficult if not impossible, and giving leaders within the cult perverse power over their group.

The cult-dynamic, as I understand it, is more likely to occur where too many Muslims are brought into a host nation too soon, so they tend to create isolated communities or even 'no go' zones. This is a great foundation to breed extremism.

Another way to facilitate the cult-dynamic is to legalise the burqa. This is a direct way of enforcing the interpersonal isolation of Muslim women from the wider society.

The solutions to this problem are obvious. Compulsory non-Islamic schooling for young Muslims (leave religious studies at home). No burqas. Modest rates of Muslim immigration. In other words ensure that progressive assimilation happens - not isolation.

2. A lack of transparency in Islamic teachings.

Mosques should be monitored to ensure that we do not have extremist teachings occurring. Islam should have nothing to hide, right? We should not expect too many complaints.

3. Study the Quran and Muhammad's life.

(Mohammed's life is the example that all Muslims are supposed to emulate, and the example by which the Quran should be interpreted).

It may be an uncomfortable truth that following Islam to the letter means acting like ISIS, when the time is right. I'm not totally sure on this. But we must be prepared to study Islam without politically correct blinkers. The truth is what it is, and we need to accept it be what it may.

4. Psychological status of the people getting involved with extremist Islam. 

People who have been seriously abused in childhood will be more prone to radicalisation, because they're looking for the family they never had (cult), are simple minded and are filled with rage.

We need to look carefully at the kind of people we're importing into our nation. Have they been heavily damaged?

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These are just some insights. The point is, that this is what we need to be talking about. And again, we cannot let extremists (or foolish people) stop us from having this important conversation.

The people who have the most to lose from our failure to talk, are the moderate Muslims most of all. Just one Islamic terror attack in New Zealand and their lives will never be the same. And that alone would help to drive them into isolation.

Stopping any given potential for radicalisation today, with the right policies, right now, is far easier than dealing with an extremist mess tomorrow. It makes sense to talk - today.

                                           -Andrew Atkin

Should we all be working for ourselves? Reforming professional culture

The proper role of government is to support the free market - not replace it.

New Zealand's current Labour-led government, driven by union interests, is doing nasty things to employment law which serve to advantage a few (select unions) in the short term, at the long-term expense of nearly everyone. However the situation may not be as depressing as it appears. The final result of over-prescriptive regulations, between employer and employee, could be a kind of progressive backfire as employees option to sell their labour as private contractors, only. This could trigger an excellent evolution.

The model that I'm thinking of is the same as what we have today, with tradesmen. Many tradesmen today link to a website which acts as a hub for people looking for a worker (example here). The customer search is efficient, and examples of the tradesman's work can be viewed online, with customer feedback also presented.

This is the free market in action, at its best, backed by the internet which serves as an excellent communion tool and, so importantly, a medium for comprehensive transparency. People win the reputations they deserve, positive and negative, which directly impacts what they can charge for their labour. As always, quality goes up and costs go down, as the performance-pressure is on (I must say, the opposite situation of a state monopoly,).

So here is the question. Why not have all workers act as private contractors? Why not have a colourful open CV selling yourself, online, based within a go-to hub for employment so you can be continuously headhunted? Your open CV would have pictures, video presentations of yourself and maybe your work.

The real question of course, is what would the effect of this be...if everyone is to effectively work for themselves and on the same level of a tradesman?

Well for a start, you would be able to set your own wage (for any given job) as the legal minimum becomes irrelevant. Technically you are a business - not an employee. This is great for people who would otherwise be forced out of the job market, such as the only commonly skilled, disabled, or slow. Increased labour participation of course equates to higher productivity, which is the foundation of general prosperity (carving up cakes never works - growing cakes always works).

I think it's particularly good for the elderly. For example, if they can work 15 hours a week on a low performance-pressure wage of, say, $10 per-hour, giving them an extra $120 after-tax adding to their pension, then that could be an invaluable monetary boost while staying in contact with others, and keeping physically and mentally active for health.

It's also great for people who are working part-time, or otherwise not at all, yet who want to boost their income a little with their skills. Mowing lawns, gardening, homecare, etc, or basic mechanical work?...anything. Once the system is in place, anyone can broadly market themselves with a few clicks on their website, to update their profile.

As for employee-employer relationships, it would work wonders. Employers would be under constant pressure to respect wanted staff, because if the employer tolerates abuse or other problems in their workplace, they can then know that all their current contractors need to do is maybe lower their price a little, on their open CV's, and they will have others offering them roles elsewhere - maybe immediately. They can be constantly 'tempted' with an easy transition.

[Note, it should be law that no employer can demand that a given contractor cannot directly advertise themselves to other potential employers, online, via the main site. The competitive dynamic needs to be protected].

Transparency must go both ways:

We should also make it mandatory for contractors to assess their employers, via a government online survey, with the results displayed online so we can achieve the [currently missing] proper workplace transparency, which will then drive every employer to be sure that their workplace is relating to their staff as they should. It should be costly for an employer to fail to respect staff...

-Employers that tolerate abuse of any kind would find that they cannot get good staff at a good price, as they develop their reputation which is openly and immediately accessible to anyone, via a single click on a screen. Bluntly, who would accept a job with an employer who has "a-hole" written all over their open assessment? You see what I mean.

[Note, with an accountability system like this the employer must have their right-of-reply included, and rankings should be taken as medians, not averages, to defend against unfair assessments. Needless to say the system would need to be developed carefully, with the template probably created as a state service. If an employer can be a referee for an employee, then surely it should work the other way around too? In both cases employers and employees should be able to present an open right-of-reply in response to any given assessment].

Concluding:

Transparent, accountable, free markets with plenty of competition are by far the best form of protectionism in the workplace. It empowers employers to quickly remove inappropriate workers, and workers to quickly remove themselves from inappropriate employers.

The far greater flexibility, along with an absolute minimum state regulation, makes for more commercial investment and likewise rapid economic development (replacing handsaws with chainsaws, basically. See here) as New Zealand becomes a better place to invest in.

But what about job security? Being an honourable contractor is all the security you should need. No company wants to lose good workers, and with this system you will find it won't so much be about finding work, but simply the price you can charge.

-In saying this, sometimes middle-managers want to get rid of highly talented workers, as they may be seen as competitors or personal profesional threats. But I predict this can and would change. The enhanced need for internal transparency within companies (driven by the need to quickly identify and solve problems, to avoid developing poor open assessments) would clean out a lot of that kind of politics. Abuses of power would be dealt with quickly as they would naturally need to be.

As employers must compete hard for staff, the market will precisely decide the prices (wages). As the system induces more rapid economic development, you will find that wages alround steadily rise. Productively growth is the universal bottomline for prosperity.

And finally, as I stressed previously, we will evolve workplaces that ensure people are happy. More people will go to work smiling - not dreading - because an employers failure to respect people will come at a hefty price. So they will. And also, employers will be free to remove toxic contractors quickly, as we're using accountable markets to make things work like they should, which is far more effective than state regulations that too often make things worse, not better, as they are notorious for unintended consequences.

Employers in general should have no problem with this change. The new demands that they would tolerate are the same demands that their competitors must tolerate. All it does is change the game a little, and as I believe only to good effect. There's nothing for employers to fear unless they should be afraid.

However one key change we should see, is employers approaching prospective employees when seeking new staff, and not so much the other way around. Employers will search for contractors and make offers, as opposed to openly advertising for staff to come to them. It would be a headhunting game, like when people seek out a tradesman to build a new addition to their home.

Ultimately contractor and employer relationships will become more mature, professional and progressive. All staff (including cleaners!) will predictably be treated like co-professional, and employers will simply be seen as what they are - a contractors given customer. It would, hopefully, be the end to the parent/child relationship that we see in New Zealand employment culture today.

Another reason why we should all work for ourselves, or simply start thinking like this, is that the administrative side can be taken care of seamlessly via the internet. There's no [theoretical] need to fuss to be self-employed. Once you're on the system, taking on different jobs should typically be as simple as logging-in and logging-out, with a few clicks of an icon.

                                            -Andrew Atkin

Related Posts:

Achieving meritocracy (here):

Building training videos (particularly good for new contractors): (here)

The Market for Private Ownership in a Driverless World

Well, the automotive industry is freaking out. They're wondering how they can survive when nearly all transport goes driverless-Uber style. And so they should, because soon enough most (traditional) cars will go the way of the cathode ray tube - not even be worth the real estate that they consume.

However, there is hope for the private-ownership model still, I believe, but it will need to move more heavily into a recreational structure as opposed to the commuting structure.

The idea, is that in a driverless context people will want to travel a great deal more for general recreation, and the basic structure I suggest, to accommodate that demand, allows people to take holidays or short weekend trips at minimal cost, yet with excellent convenience.

I believe there will be great developing demand for this. Only private ownership can make a car "home", and again I believe this is where the demand for sustained private ownership will be.

The above included image gives my best guess, example, and structural suggestion. It's still a car, but a camper-car. You can sleep in it, and sleep well, yet unlike a campervan it's economical to run and buy, and as mobile as a car. Like a car you cannot walk or stand in it, though it still caters for the essential functions.

Note, the camper-car of tomorrow will be supported by complimentary facilities, like micro-cars that cheaply deliver meals. The driverless context will change how a campervan/car should be formed. The rationale for a full kitchen in a campervan for example, will not be there in the future.

Description:

The front section is like a fold-out double bed, though it also supports seats and a dining table. It will have block-out blinds, a small heater (integrated with a heat-exchanger for ventilation), and employ electronically-controlled temperature. It also has retractable mechanical stabilisers (see yellow on image) to remove all notable movements from wind gusts, and the stabilisers adjust to keep the vehicle near-perfectly horizontal on moderately variant terrain. All of this is meant to ensure that the vehicle can be well slept in, which is essential before anything else. On holiday you have plenty of time to fuss a little with trivial inconveniences, but a bad nights sleep can ruin your day.

The vehicle will have at least level-4 autonomy. The driver will take control, as needed, with only a motorcycle-structured steering system, with integrated twisting accelerator, and a hand-mounted brake (again, just like a motorcycle). No foot controls. There's no mechanical link for the over-ride controller - only electronics.

Note, manual override is only employed when necessary. 99% of the time the car will do all the driving.

The car will be electrically powered, with a modest battery pack, though employ a diesel-electric 20kw range-extender. Naturally it will be highly efficient.

Immediately behind the front seating is a very large storage space, for whatever.

At the rear of the vehicle (accessible when the pop-up door is open) is a small sink, microwave, and gas-cooker to the left. And to the right is a sit-in toilet, and also a shower hose which can be used with the fold-out tent. The rear door opens out and up, to form the frame and roof for the tent so it can be rapidly erected.

The result is a camper-car that's cheap and mobile enough to use wherever, and whenever, and of course it removes the cost of hotels. It can also function as a spare room for guests when stationed at home, as the sleeping section should prove to be excellent with the cars perfect climate control.

Because camper-cars built in this structure would be, presumably, anywhere from about NZD$30,000 - $100,000, they would be accessible to the mass-market. Remember also, the far-reaching impact of driverless cars will make the mass-market considerably more wealthy in its own right, which in turn impacts the nature of future demand.

Concluding:

By my perspective, if car manufacturers simply move closer to the direction of turning the humble car into a mobile extension of the home, they could well find themselves surviving and thriving in a (mostly) driverless commuter-taxi world.

The demand for recreation will naturally explode in a driverless world. Mass-market car manufacturers can take the opportunity to move with that demand.

                                           -Andrew Atkin

Democratic Immigration?

I think there are two fundamental parts to immigration.

The economic factor and the human factor.

Economic factor: 

If we opened the floodgates to immigration we would have high unemployment regardless of the rate of economic growth, because human-supply would race ahead of commercial expansion, no matter how aggressive the economic growth.

Because of this, I like the idea of engineering precise immigration control, that directly relates to the immediate employment climate. As unemployment goes up we should stoke immigration back - but not crudely.

Firstly, we sometimes have the outlook, at is seems, that people who do menial jobs are "not worth that much" as expressed by their low pay. But I would argue that their low pay is at least as much an expression of excessive worker supply as the inherent value of their work. (Like oxygen. Oxygen has huge inherent value, but its market value is zero due to its abundance).

Low pay is often engineered by deliberate worker over-supply via immigration. We do this in New Zealand by stacking our economy with an abundance of foreigners who have limited english literacy, and who therefore cannot compete for more professional jobs. The result is intelligent people stacking shelves in the supermarket and the like, for low pay. Probably lower than what is truly fair, relating to the inherent value of their labour.

But the way to solve this problem is not with high minimum wages, that cruelly stop people from selling their labour at the price it will be bought for (forcing them onto the dole), but by developing a responsive immigration system that ensures a respectably tight job market for those who are specifically dependant on non-professional employment.

Wages should be bidded up - not legislated up.

However, there should be an allowance to this. Where there is pressing demand for specific skills we should allow for more immigration, for those who have those skills. This will not increase unemployment. It will only facilitate faster commercial expansion within those areas of the economy that are pressing to grow.

Too much immigration too soon also dilutes domestic capital per-capita, and maybe to the point where high immigrations natural advantages of scale, competition and diversity, are overwhelmed.

For example, New Zealand could not ram a million poor-people from China into Auckland within a decade, and expect to not take an economic hit from it.

Human factor:

There is no such thing as a 4,000,000 population community. Communities are small-scale structures. New Zealand is a society made up of many communities.

So, as long as your society is strong on freedom-of-association and also freedom-of-disassociation, somewhat high immigration rates shouldn't be too much of a problem as people can (and will) assemble into their own idealised communities - be what they may.

People who don't want to have much to do with immigrants, for whatever reason, do not and should not have to.

But the health of New Zealand, as a society, is still of course dependant on the quality of the immigrants it grants residency to.

So how do we determine quality?

Currently the government makes all the decisions based on their technical criteria. There is a place for this. We need the government to screen out those who are clearly inappropriate for basic reasons, such as criminality, extremism, and age. But in my view the system of technical approval is too dehumanised. I think there is -- or could be -- a place for relating to immigrants like we relate to job applicants...

An employer makes a short-list based on the CV, but from there he makes a final decision based on an interview. In an employment context, we trust our ability to get a feel for someone and we trust our ability to measure qualities that cannot be technically accounted for.

So why don't we do this for immigration as well, and give the public the opportunity to perform a kind of interview?

The model I'm thinking of is a akin to a jury service, only it would be based on voluntary participation and be conducted over the Internet.

The government, after a basic screening, would video-record a 2-minute interview of any foreign applicant, which may be viewed and rated by as many as 100 New Zealand citizens, online.

Immigration approval will be based on the online ratings. You could find, say, that maybe 1 in 3 people have their residency accepted, based on the top percentage of the people's ratings.

The weighting of the interviews in decision-making would be determined by how strict the governments requisites are (for preliminary screening) at any given time.

The advantage of this system is it allows for human factors to be given weight. If someone comes off in an interview like a nasty, angry person, for example, or with seriously poor English pronunciation, then it would be good to have a system that can respond to the fact of it.

But also it has a psychological advantage. It allows New Zealanders to directly have some say on who they do and do not let through their own front door, and at their own discretion. As they should, I believe.

It's also good for the immigrants themselves, as they can feel more that they've been personally chosen by the New Zealand people, and on more personal grounds, as opposed to being chosen only by some abstract government policy - which opens up the threat of developing resentments.

My proposition would actually be an extremely welcoming system. It is truly inclusive.

                                            -Andrew Atkin

The Argument for Surgical Punishment

Cutting off a persons body part, even under anesthetic, sounds barbaric and it is. But you can ask yourself, would you rather have your foot surgically removed or spend 15 years in a miserable prison? I'm sure many would prefer to lose their foot. I would, myself. So as far as human rights go, I don't think there's a good argument to resist surgical punishment, because what we do already to serious offenders is at least as bad. Indeed, suicide is not uncommon in prisons. For many, imprisonment is effectively a death sentence.

So what are the advantages of surgical punishment? The most obvious is that it's cheap. In New Zealand it costs about $100,000 per-year to imprison a single inmate. That's a lot of money that could have been spent elsewhere. Removing a foot might be more like a one-off $5,000.

Also, an amputee can still be productive soon after their operation, whereas we lose the productive capacity of an inmate. So with physically implanted electronic tagging, the violent amputee-offender can be put to work.

The other advantage is that it may prove to be a more effective deterrent. One of the problems with prison, is that for some people prison is almost as good as life on the outside. Inmates are with their friends, are maybe safer, and are often better cared for than on the outside. Indeed, it's well known that some people reoffend specifically to get back into prison.

Cutting off body parts as a deterrent goes straight to the heart. Only a true freak would not be notably deterred with a threat like that, because it only has a downside, not up, and everyone--including the most simple mind--can visualise exactly what amputation means.

Now, if this is so--that is, if the threat of amputation proves to indeed be a more effective deterrent--then amputation might well represent an improvement on human rights, because the rights of victims to not be victimised in the first place is better actualised with a better deterrent.

Imagine for example, if the punishment for violent rape (not questionable "date rape") is castration. Now if this has the effect of dramatically reducing rape, through deterrence first and then impotence to block recidivism, then can we really argue that the surgical removal of the testes is such a bad or inhuman idea? You could argue that it would be more inhuman to not castrate a violent rapist, if the alternative is to stand back and let more rapes happen.

My conclusion is that if we can get past the 'yikes' factor with the cosmetics of surgical punishment, then there's enough of a positive argument behind it to justify exploring the possibility. At the least, we can consider giving prisoners the option. Allow them to trade time for a body part? It could be their choice.

                                          -Andrew Atkin

The THREAT to Globalisation

We don't know what we don't know, and the fact of this is inescapable. This is why those who we rely on to inform us--or at least those who might empower us to inform ourselves--have the heart of real power in a democracy. As with incomplete information, you can induce nearly any assumption you like, no matter the intellect you're addressing.

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We say that democracy is power to the people. But observe democracy for a time, and it becomes clear enough that it's mainly power to the propagandist. Those who control what you will or will not know, what you or will not think about, and what your kids think about, etc, will dictate your socialised opinions within a prescribed (safe?) arena. That is power.

This is why democracy on its own is weak as a tool for good governance. Democracy needs an important complement to be truly effective, and that complement is the empowerment of foot-voting.

Your government is forced to do a good job--in spite of the propagandists, be they right or wrong--when you can easily leave your home state for a better one, at the point where your home state comparatively fails.

To illustrate the power of foot-voting clearly, imagine this. Imagine New Zealand was broken up into 10 mini-states, say 500k population each, with domestically governed borders, though unified under a small federal head in Wellington that performs centralised functions only where that makes sense...

This would put each mini-state under strong pressure to perform, because as soon as one state begins to fail, with say stupid policy or corruption, the political pressure for reform would then become intense. It will become intense not only from the locals not wanting to see the decline, but from people--especially the young--leaving too easily for better performing states. They won't waste their time with a loser country if they don't have to - and the vote won't save a nation from that. Hence with responsive competition ideological public policy has no choice but to answer to bottomline reality. Or your country becomes a ghost country.

We see the power of foot-voting in action, clearly enough in New Zealand. Since forever, New Zealand politicians have been worried about losing vital young workers to Australia, due to New Zealand's comparative under-performance. And rightly so. Easy access to Australia is the best thing that ever happened to New Zealand; without it, the country may well have devolved into a socialist state, driven principally by the propagandised ignorance of the common voter.

However, for the power of foot-voting to perform its magic in keeping democracies straight, it needs to be a strong force. And alas, within the western world at least it's no longer a strong force. Using New Zealand as the example again, we can see the housing market has been rigged (by political engineering) to inflate the cost of housing by a factor of 3 or more, with crippling results...

Now how can this happen if the affordable housing demand could have (should have) bled off to Australia? The answer is that Australia has enacted the exact same appalling policies that New Zealand has enacted. Alas, when the competition is just as bad over there as it is here, competition is then of course a useless dynamic. There's no way out, and in turn bad policy festers as opposed to reforms.

The New Zealand property market is, before anything, a failure of competition - a failure of functional foot-voting. In turn the power of propaganda reigns supreme, as it has. Most New Zealanders still support blocking urban expansion (the supposedly dreaded "sprawl") because they don't know that only 0.8% of the nations land is urbanised, that sprawl can promote more garden than concrete, and that as cities spatially expand the result is less congestion per-capita, not more. Hence the propagandists win and the housing market does not get fixed. Yet if Australia were still building good homes for $200,000, the New Zealand housing market certainly would get fixed and no matter what the propagandists have people believe. But again, the natural competition is dysfunctional. Australia's housing market is as tragic as New Zealand's.

Now let's look a little further. It's fascinating that the Western democracies have largely lock-step embraced the same public policies amongst each other over the previous 70 years, or more, suspiciously linked to the United Nations, which has had the direct effect of making all the western nations essentially the same. I can't say where it comes from, but we've seen remarkable centralisation in social and economic policy for even where those policies are highly contentious, or just plain bad. And the result, like with the New Zealand property example, has been the same. We see perverse levels of power to the propagandists, due to weak foot-voting, due to the absence of respectable inter-state competition. Want to tell your politically correct country to go jump in the lake? Sorry. They're all politically correct.

I describe the trend that we see as Globalisation. Or Global centralisation, to be specific. And again, it's effect is not 'power to the people' - it's power to the propagandist. It's power to the mass-media, schools, advertisers, big money, and even hate speech laws, etc. That is what democracy on its own is - and all it is. If I may be crass, pure democracy isn't much more than a sheep herding exercise.

So how do we get out of over-powerful propaganda, to achieve government directly 'for the people'. As indicated, you can do it by aggressive political decentralisation, and that's probably the only way you can do it. You do it by breaking countries up into many more micro-states, similar to the Swiss model, and with the focused intent of empowering foot-voting to the maximum.

Globalisation:

We see creeping globalisation clearly enough, but the question is why exactly do we have it? In whose interest is it to hyper-centralise the world? I can only speculate, but my best 'conspiracy hypothesis' is that it's rooted in the need for global fertility management.

Global population control is an ultimate necessity, and who knows...maybe the powers that be have been working for a long time behind the scenes, to make sure it happens? It may not be an accident that all major culture and policy changes over the last 70 years have had the direct effect of suppressing fertility, throughout the industrialised world. I've written on this before (here).

The threat to Globalisation:

Secession movements are the threat to globalisation - and maybe the only true threat. And secession movements seem to be treated as threats.

For example, the powers that be have done everything they can to resist BREXIT, though some exceptional British talents have allowed Britain to succeed in secession nonetheless. A more awful example is with the attempted secession of Catalonia, in Spain. The referendum to leave was declared illegal (as though greater Spain had the moral right to make such a law), and when the Catalan citizens participated in the referendum to secede, they were met with violent police.

You can see why secession is threatening to globalisation. What happens when a micro-state leaves and makes a better life for itself? Secession becomes a dangerous idea that can quickly catch on.

-Note that secession actually has a strong instinctive appeal to people as well. It's not a particularly difficulty sell. This contributes to the threat.

I myself support the need for global fertility management, and even the need for a democratic world government though with strictly limited powers. Population control is a mathematical necessity. But, I do not support under-handed policy that makes life unnecessarily tough, and I obviously respect the need to establish competition between democracies to make democracy work like it should. We don't have the power of foot-voting like we need it today, and I would like to see that change.

                                       -Andrew Atkin

Crawling out of the age of Savagery - One generation at a time

Nadine Burke Harris is doing a great job promoting the most important social issue of our time. Child abuse: Its impact, prevalence, and near overwhelming importance. But frustratingly, most of us do not want to go where Nadine is trying to take us, and may I say that is our shame.

The result, is that we see people still circumcising their young boys, putting kids through bad birthing practices (unnecessarily), farming out kids to daycare centers too young, hitting children in anger in the name of 'correction', pushing kids to live in scholastic ambition by threatening them with rejection if they don't, and depriving children of privacy and freedom because we twist ownership with love...etc.

We do all of this and more, because we believe we already know how kids should be brought up. And when people "already know" they will not even think to test their assumptions. They don't need to.

Today, we now know some facts. Facts that serious research over decades has made plain. Nadine Harris is a champion on this topic, and that is why I like to link to her talks. She brings attention to the issue of adverse childhood experiences (ACE's) in the right way, and on the right level, to impact people today which is anything but easy. You always have to start where the open people are at, or you'll lose them before you get anywhere at all. And again this is what Nadine does, and very well.

Anyway, what Nadine points to is how trauma from childhood leads to high-stress over-reactions during childhood and later in life as well, which in turn damages our wellbeing and our health - badly. It knocks literally decades off our lives.

What Nadine expresses is true, but the picture of the impact of trauma is more complicated than what her looking-glass is thus far telling us. From here I would like to model what really goes on with trauma, on a psychological level.

Second-level versus First-level psychotherapy:

What makes trauma, trauma, is a pain so great that it's experientially blocked outright. By definition, we don't feel trauma. This blocking of great pain is the reason why it continues to affect us later, even once the original traumatic event has long gone. Repressed trauma acts like a constant force on the mind, making the past drive our present. It imprints itself because the traumatic information cannot be updated due to the mechanics of repression.

Let me give you an example of a Vietnam war veteran. The war veteran, once home and safe, still feels like he's living in a dangerous context. He still feels like there might be a sniper out there just around the corner, waiting to shoot him. Intellectually he knows that the threat is no longer there, but he still can't help feeling this way nonetheless. So his traumatic past is pushing him around in his present. However, if his defense system is working well he will not feel his fear directly. He will act in a way that keeps the perceived threat under control. He will ultimately act like he's still in Vietnam...

Now, if that same war veteran sees a shrink, the psychologist will probably help him to boost his defense system, so that he doesn't over-react to his perceived threats. This way his heart palpitations and periodic gross stress-responses will be subdued. That's all good and well, except what we're looking at with this game is what I call second-level psychotherapy; which is controlling over reactions, though not getting to the root cause of them. If second-level psychotherapy is working well, the war veterans' over-reactions will calm down. He will then only tend to over-react in his sleep (night terrors)...

However, we can see from this example that the war veteran is still living in the past - because he still feels the snipers are out there. Second-level psychotherapy does not touch this. It only touches the over-reactions (at best) and it's notoriously high maintenance...those over-reactions keep on coming back. First-level psychotherapy is what touches this. First-level psychotherapy moves in the opposite direction of second-level psychotherapy. Rather than boosting defenses, it carefully weakens them so that the real fear (repressed traumatic fear) can be brought to consciousness, for emotional processing.

Note, the prior-repressed pain must be felt to be resolved, otherwise the brain literally doesn't know what it's dealing with. Think about it: How can the brain process information if it doesn't even know what it is? When you feel a repressed trauma you're actually feeling it (and therefore knowing it, and potentially dealing with it) for the first time. It's specifically the original repression of the trauma which created the enduring problem. It's the reason why the past was not left in the past.

With first-level psychotherapy you don't just relieve the over-reactions, you also get rid of the emotional delusion itself that was driven by original repression. In turn you get rid of the need to act-out, and you get rid of the constant tension created by the repression as well. Alas, it's the only way we can really leave the past in the past. You must feel it.

-Are you interested in this possibility? I recommend Arthur Janov's Primal Center to learn more. If getting to Los Angeles is impossible, I recommend purchasing France Janov's legacy programme, online. [Note: I am in no way professionally associated with Arthur Janov's Primal Center. I have no financial incentive in promoting their therapy or their educational products].

Pulling ourselves out of the age of savagery:

Levels of child abuse in times past--for all cultures--were almost beyond imagination. Killing, copulating, mutilating children was once so commonplace that it was not even culturally taboo. How was it that we were once so deeply sick? I don't have a time machine but I can make a logical speculation...

It's only a matter of time that a given group of humans will expand out to the limits of the given resource base. Then what? From here the tribes have two choices. You can watch your children starve or go to war in brutal competition. Inter-tribal brutality then leads to massive trauma, which in turn creates sick and violent cultures...eventually, as a norm. Because humans are extremely intelligent they have the ability to survive in spite of their then-created madness, and so the inter-generational trauma-chain goes on. Brutality is basically the historic way of maintaining the balance between population and available resources. (Yes, we can do a lot better).

The western world in particular has come farthest, in pulling itself out of the age of savagery. Modern western society is the most humane of all cultures, and the least repressed. It's also the most intelligent and successful of human cultures because it's the least oppressive, abusive, and traumatised...

However! We still have a long way to go, and we're still much too bull-headed in our resistance to learning what we need to learn. Science is clearly ahead of our culture today, because the latter continues to put tradition ahead of facts. But we will get there - and we are indeed getting there. Maybe in another 50 to 100 years we will have a society with nearly no serious trauma and its problematic effects - or even a whole world with no serious trauma. But we do need to keep on keeping on with this.











Psychotherapy is great. It can ultimately do a lot, but more importantly is can teach us a lot. It can help to bring light on what does and does not matter. Though no force will do more for our species as a whole than prevention, and this is where we need to focus before anything else. My included video is about prevention.

Mobile Robots in the Real World_A practical example

The following is a basic example of how mobile robotics can and will replace human labour, for countless operations:

1. A small truck breaks down on the side of the road. It has a flat tyre.

2. A special vehicle repair service is alerted. Two small mobile robots (that work in unison) are sent to the truck. The robots are riding on a driverless platform.

3. When the robots reach the truck, they walk off the platform and approach the flat tyre.

4. A drone attached to a mobile robot detaches, and explicitly scans the immediate environment around the wheel. The 3D map developed by the drone is then uploaded to the robots.

5. A robot then scans the QR code on the truck, so the robots can know exactly what they are dealing with.

6. The programme for the robots to replace this particular trucks wheel is then immediately downloaded.

-The program has already been developed by the trucking company that made the vehicle. Using remote controlling, the wheel replacement sequence was prior acted-out and recorded, and put on a master robotics server. In effect, the robots only need to press the 'reply' button to know exactly what to do to replace the wheel.

7. The robots come across an unidentified component on the wheel, which stops the robots. The robots in turn dial-up a human remote-controller. The remote-controller then observes the problem --in this case let's say it's a stripped bolt-- and in turn over-rides the robots, and actively manipulates them, online, to attach a different gripper-tool to remove the stripped bolt.

-The remote-controller can do this quickly due to ultra-fast (almost no latency) 5g Internet technology, and also with the robots built-in boundary detection systems which effectively removes human clumsiness.

8. The remote-controller then hits a continue icon, which orders the robots to continue the wheel replacement sequence. The remote-controller then addresses a new task requiring human over-ride from a different robot, in a different location within the city (the remote-controller does not waste time waiting for anything).

9. After replacing the wheel in full-automation mode, the robots then post the broken wheel to an appropriate facility, via a driverless platform.

-Human intervention required 7 minutes (~$2) of remote human labour. Everything else was fully automated.

Ends.

The effect would be that traditional car breakdown services go bankrupt, because they cannot compete with new (and probably international) start-up's based online, that use human labour only when and as required, because the cost savings from automated systems are overwhelming.

The technology for all kinds of Internet-based services is already here. We're just waiting for driverless platforms to be distributed, which opens up the economic feasibility of moving into mobile robotics.



Ultimately, there will be no material need for anyone to leave their homes to get anything done in terms of living and working. The impact of mobile robotics will become even more extreme, when infrastructure is specifically built with easy robotics facilitation kept in mind.

From this point, the level of automation achievable will be remarkable. Progressive leaps in automation will only be a software upgrade away, and the demand for expensive on-site human labour will steadily fall away.

There's no reason to believe that this progression will not happen quickly. Again, all we are waiting for to start this revolution off is the implementation of driverless platforms, which will be the critical economic driver that makes the mass-implementation of mobile robotics make sense.

                                                  -Andrew Atkin

Note: There is also the possibility of location-based searching.

So, once you have gone through an operational sequence with a robot (let's say opening an industrial door), the video and robot command sequence is saved along with the location, down to about 1-foot accuracy. Hence, when another robot later comes to the door, you can command a video search based on the location, and the door opening sequence will be presented.

It will simply allow us to avoid unnecessary command repetition, and allow robots to move more quickly as they smooth-out their operation.

This would allow us to rapidly develop a 'hive mind' effect, and it would also be highly practical for developing certain kinds of training videos for people, etc.

The Myth of the Public Sector

Take a look at our public hospitals. Public is a nice sounding term because it sounds like "ours", as opposed to some greedy shareholder who only wants to rip us all off...right?

But take a step closer. That public hospital pays people who take home a private wage, pays private contractors to maintain the basic infrastructure, and supply and maintain all the equipment. Sure that hospital may be tax-payer funded, but behind the impression of "public" lies an enterprise that might as well be described as private, nearly as much any other.

The people who run and supply a public hospital are as driven by personal interest as much as you and I. In fact I would argue that calling a hospital public is pretty much just a PR thing. At the heart of it, everything in the for-profit world is private.

To be practical, I think the best way to describe the public sector would be "the protectionist sector", because the moment competitive pressures are removed everything starts to get political and commercially twisted. The (so-called) public sector begins to write their own cheques - because they can. They win for the wrong reasons.

From here, the private interests in the public operation can and will find the rationale to be paid more than what a competitive market would normally allow, while believing that they deserve it and more. People won't usually know how privileged they are, after spending their working lives on the inside of a protected bubble. And hey, everybody deserves at least $100,000 a year, right, especially if they're doing God's work?

So how is it that, so often, gross over-payment for comparative under-performance can happen in the public sector? Why is it tolerated? Crony capitalism, of course. When the public sector unionises it becomes politically powerful, and in turn it inherits the capacity to fund and influence politicians. And so naturally, elected officials will then make private decisions - not public decisions - at the point where it makes political sense to do so. It's the unions job to make sure it makes sense - that is what their members pay them to do.

So this is what protectionism is about. At base, it's about screwing the wider society because you can. Though, of course, it's all poetically rationalised to the wider society. PR is extremely important for the public sector. A public backlash that could swing the polls to an anti-protectionist political party is the greatest terror, of course. Hence the public always need to be reminded of how incredibly important doctors, nurses and teachers are, etc.

In New Zealand the process is so transparent that Labour, the union-leftist party, has openly sold itself to key New Zealand unions within the public and private sectors. The select unions now have direct official influence over the governing Labour party (observe). You heard me right. New Zealand is now run by crony capitalism officially. Lucky for Labour almost no-one will read this article. Alas, the mass-ignorance in the Western world today has become almost dangerous.

The best solution to protectionism--in fact the only solution--is to openly privatise our establishments, as much as practical and possible. The waste, false privilege, and lost opportunities in innovation is almost depressing in the public (protectionist) sector. The public sector sees innovation more like a threat than an opportunity. It's the private sector that has no choice but to innovate, to maintain market share.

There is of course a place for state run services in highly specific areas, but that absolutely does not include areas such as health, where the focus on efficiency and performance should be paramount. These guys should be whipped hardest by commercial discipline, more than anyone else. Having an under-performing and over-paid health system, hostile to innovation, is obviously not in the public interest. [link of interest]

Of course we can look at tax-payer funding for the poorest of people, but the funding should go to private enterprises - not protectionist enterprises.

Really, all we have to do is bust that self-interested big-money-driven delusion that there's such thing as a public sector. There isn't. It's a very private world made up of very private interests, irrespective of the political cosmetics. And we've got 200 if not 2,000 years of hard evidence, demonstrating that nothing delivers for people better than the natural controls provided by free and accountable markets. In the free market world, no one gets unless they equally give.

                                                   -Andrew Atkin

The Mechanical Argument for Life after Death

It's not about opening minds. It's about testing assumptions.

The heart of the atheists faith lies in how they see the universe. Their primary assumption is that everything that exists boils down to a product of space, atoms, and pieces of light. With this view, the concept of some kind of God or an afterlife is logically absurd, and so their faith is reasonable based on those assumptions. But their assumptions are what need to be tested, because there are natural clues that they should be.

The idea that a consciousness can be somehow born out of a giant counting machine (also described as a computer, or biological computer - a brain) is objectively absurd to the human mind. Yet, the materialists assumptions demand that it somehow must be so. In turn, they embrace that faith. They have to.

However, due to the absolute incomprehensibility of a counting action experiencing itself, the computer-consciousness problem should in turn be respected as a profound anomaly (as it is) that should then drive us to test the simple materialist assumptions, as we know them.

-When things don't work you're supposed to take a second look, and assumptions by definition should always be open to challenge. Otherwise they're just dogmas - or religions.

There are other clear anomalies, the most obvious being the blunt fact that anything exists at all. Existence itself is actually absurd...yet, here it all is and here we all are. Clearly, the human mind cannot even touch ultimate reality of which is totally beyond us. This most basic insight alone should humble us.

We also know that there are a great number of anomalies based on decades of now stringent paranormal research, which has led to many interesting findings.

--Mark Gober offers a comprehensive overview on this, and postulates (questionably!) that consciousness 'dreams up' the material world, as opposed to the other way around.

Getting back to the materialists assumptions...

In my view, Einstein, though apparently believing in some kind of field, did the faith of raw materialism a major service by getting rid of the idea of an aether. Sensible minds have struggled with Einsteins abandonment of the aether, because Einstein effectively claimed the impossible - that is, the idea that a wave of light could travel through nothing (absolute space). To compensate, quantum physics postulated the idea that light is a particle and also a wave....somehow? Questioning physicists of the past believed that the aether, which is the material of the field, must exist. As the reasoning goes, if the aether doesn't exist then how can fields exist? It's like believing in the existence of sound waves without believing in the existence of air. A field can't be made of nothing. And no, "space-time" is not a something - it's a mathematical abstraction.

I can't tell you what Einstein was smoking, but there's a problem when physicists get so absorbed in their maths that they forget to think in real physical terms (the same problem that economists sometimes have!). It's important to remember that maths, ultimately, is only a mechanism by which we measure quantities. Maths cannot in itself tell us anything that a slide-rule can't tell us, because an elaborate slide-rule is all that maths really is. If the maths tells you that time speeds up and slows down, for example, then you can know that the technicians have missed the plot. No 'slide-rule' can validate the absurd. And note that measuring a phenomena--which is what maths does--is not the same as understanding it. Quantum physics (quantum maths, really) is still a world of often wild speculations. Sure we know what subatomic stuff does, but truthfully we still don't know how it does it - or even what it is.

So now let's look at the new (old, actually) faith -- that is, the faith of the field, as supported by some kind of material medium which we will call the aether. When we embrace the idea of the aether, it opens a grand new world of legitimate theoretical speculation.

We know that matter is deeply linked to the field (as experiments in quantum physics have in fact validated) so we can comfortably speculate on the idea of the consciousness being based within the field, not the brain, as a tangible hypothesis. That idea is as structurally reasonable as the idea of computing via the cloud as opposed to the desktop (perfectly possible). In fact, 'field physics' opens the plausibility of many interesting things investigated by paranormal research, such as:

-Past lives (logging on to another terminal when the given physical body dies? No problem in a 'field based' reality).

 -The existence of other experiential domains, loosely [though erroneously] called 'other dimensions' (Logging on to a different group of harmonic frequencies, of which compose gross matter as we know it? No problem).

-Psychic communications (via the field, again no problem).

-Psychic predictions of future events, assuming that the field--or whatever is within it--can compute (simulate) cause-to-effect like the brain does, though only to a far grander and maybe more accurate degree. (Note, the far reaching computational power of any system based within the field may be incomparably more vast and powerful, as compared to any known or even theorised computer, be it mechanical or organic).

-Remote viewing, which has been apparently validated and even exploited by the US military over a number of decades.

-Tens of millions (literally) of Near Death Experience accounts, with remarkable reported consistencies, and countless bedside apparitions, etc.

However, all those asserted phenomena are silly if you dismiss the idea of the aether. I assert that the death of the aether was always a theoretical mistake, and a strange one at that. Everything that we have observed in physics absolutely reeks of being supported by an aether, with the physical world as we experience it being a collection of harmonic vibrations born out of it. In fact the aether model is the only way the material universe can operationally "work" in terms of how humans could possibly understand it at least. It's only the institutionally-enforced faith in 'superman Einstein' that stops people from seriously considering what Nicola Tesla, a true technical genius (he practically invented the 20th century), considered to be obvious -- the existence of the aether.

So far my structural argument is about reconsidering the universe's potential in terms of communications and computation, in an aether-based reality. I'm suggesting that the consciousness could be anywhere within the field, and that humans can communicate, potentially anyhow, as the aether can function as (or simply be) a direct extension of our nervous systems.

However, I have not explained the consciousness itself on any level, or even suggested how it could be explained. Field or no field, the hard truth is we cannot even begin to understand how a structural system can experience itself. Again, the idea that counting machines can experience themselves is completely absurd to the human mind. Though the consciousness may be based within the field, the consciousness is still not necessarily composed of the field, itself. Again, mechanistic wave behaviours alone cannot conceivably experience themselves, no matter how complex.

Finally, if we can at least appreciate that a brain cannot experience itself, which is our best objective thinking, then we can rightly say that the physical death does not necessarily lead to the conscious death - that we can know of.

Anyway, I myself am inclined to see reincarnation as the most reasonable and even evidential option. My arguments are more complex on that, and I have made my case in the following video. Regardless, what I can say conclusively is that the materialist-atheist should not be so bold as to assume that basic materialism as we commonly know it is the name of the game. That position is in fact quite irrational and there's a lot of robust evidence against it - both philosophical and empirical.

                                           -Andrew Atkin

The Mask of Sanity

I remember watching the show, the dog whisperer. An emotionally unstable dog was introduced to a placid pack of dogs. The dogs in the pack immediately sensed the instability of the newcomer, and barked in unison to reject the new dog. The unstable dog later had to be put down.

We know what unstable dogs are like. They bite and snap with impulse for no apparent reason or in gross over-reaction. So what makes dogs emotionally unstable? The same things that make humans unstable. Trauma, abuse and neglect, especially at the earliest periods of life.

However, we do not usually see humans acting-out with aggressive or uncalled for impulse, unless the internalised trauma is chronic. This is because humans have what dogs don't have - a giant neocortex. The neocortex is a major player in repression and emotional control. It allows us to mask emotional madness, and likewise mask the worst effects of a problematic childhood.

But like dogs, other humans sense our madness instantly, though we don't worry too much about it because it's so common, not usually dangerous, and we usually come to be skilled at dealing with 'difficult' people. And indeed, in our world there's almost not a single human that can say they are without trauma and its effects. We're all a bit "rabid dog" to some degree.

However, that giant neocortex is both a blessing and curse. It allows us to carry the species on in spite of ourselves, which is kind of great, but at the same time it can stop us from getting rid of mental sickness as well. You could crudely argue that it would be better for heavily damaged humans to kill themselves off, so healthier specimens can take over the resource base they're occupying. Indeed, some would argue that wars--at least some of them--are an unconscious form of mutually-assisted suicide, to achieve exactly that end. Life is usually cheap in highly damaged societies...but that's another story.

There's a point where the controlling neocortex fails us, in part. That is, conditions where the social pressures are weak, which in turn makes us free to overtly act-out the private madness that's really there. That is in the private home. This is where the madness within can let itself loose - and on the people we can get away with losing it with. Mainly, our children.

This is how child abuse becomes inter-generational. You can't rehabilitate someone out of a nasty childhood. That would be like rehabilitating someone out of autism. It sadly doesn't work that way. When mum and dad don't have to be nice and socially acceptable, they let it all out for better and worse. In turn their children will end up pretty much like them - damaged.

The mask of sanity is created when we're under pressure to play it cool in public life. And we have a pact of silence between each other when it comes to our private truths. Indeed, the very conversation I'm trying to provoke is in itself politically taboo. No one wants to talk about it. We only like talking about child abuse at its most gross extremes, not so much the normal-level abuse which is too close to home. Hence, though people don't typically argue against what I'm talking about, trying to get a conversation going on abuse, neglect and infantile damage, is like trying to start a fire with wet wood. It falls flat. We don't want to know. We would rather just preserve that mask of sanity.

                                                 -Andrew Atkin

Note: I do not want to appear too black in this article. There's a lot we can do to step by step, generation by generation, liberate ourselves from our damage - especially the worst of it. I made a video on this [here] and have written a lot throughout this blog on mental sickness.

Nadine Harris has made an excellent video on mental health, as well.

What Compulsory Education Needs To Be

From 200 years back, compulsory education was by the industrialists - for the industrialists. Times have changed. It now needs to be by the people - for the people.

I'm right into liberation in education. But realistically a civilization needs a compulsory component, to teach the important basics to lay down a sustainable society.

The most obvious example is the need to teach the language of the civilization, so people can communicate efficiently with the masses beyond their local tribe. There's a reason why your parents were so anal about your spoken and written English - it was to ensure that your tendency to 'devolve' to the wayward local dialect did not get the better of your need to be universally understood. This acquired discipline is an example of 'civilization training'.

Another excellent (and pertinent) example, is the need to teach the young the basics on how economic development works. They need a factual explanation on why we are materially rich in the modern industrialized world, and how exactly it happened. If that education were given--and in the right, honest way--it would be very difficult for socialists to gain traction in the free world. This is because the masses, in first understanding how economic development actually works, would not need to be told what questions to ask when idealists try to sell them a dubious ideology. They will already be asking them.

The young also need to be taught about the humanities, such as the facts on child abuse and serious deprivation, and more specifically how it affects the developing brain and, in turn, the far-reaching social impacts of generating anti-social personalities. This is a well overdue 'update' for our modern Rome - education culture is still well behind science. So compulsory education needs to be about more than creating tax-payers, it needs to be about creating good people, and people who know how to create good people.

A nationalized compulsory sector also needs to teach on the right level, to avoid politicization. For example, in New Zealand today there's a push to teach about the historic New Zealand land wars. This is asking for trouble, as the room for political blame-gaming is obvious. It would be best to keep this kind of education strictly scientific. For example, talk about how over-population drives resource insecurity and in turn the drive for geographical expansion, which in turn leads to wars which are (usually or originally) a competition for resources. Also talk about the psychological impact of war and how it traumatizes and represses a society, which over time leads to militant and even savage cultures, etc...

Compulsory education should focus on developing an impartial understanding of humanity and history. That is what a sustainable society should want - and need. Again my point is that compulsory education needs to operate at the right level. Keep it strictly objective and fundamental - no partisan politics.

When you don't teach the young what they need to know, to protect themselves and their society, and to facilitate its intelligent progression, you obviously risk degeneration. All of us have a duty to pass on essential wisdom to youth. But in saying all of this, we need to teach for real. I assert that this will only happen when the young (and old) are free to think and digest important material in a real way.

The following image makes my point bluntly.

In our current education system we remove appreciation. Appreciation is where we don't just comprehend, but sit back and think about the material and maybe discuss it. It only happens when we care about more than scoring points on a test, and when we're not responding to immediate time pressures. Unfortunately, as it seems, our existing education system is designed to create the somewhat sterile mind fit for a bureaucracy or a trade. Information in modern schooling is only superficially learnt and does not induce a mature world view.

We like to say we're educated because we have certificates that tell us that, but I do not believe modern education means what we tend to think it means. Information must be genuinely digested to achieve the kind of education that goes beyond crude materialistic objectives. And again our current system is if anything designed to suppress that process. It's about creating economic soldiers for the economic machine.

So not only do we need to rethink the content of compulsory education, to preserve our civilization, we also need to rethink how education should functionally work. Do we really still need that giant army of narrowly-tuned institution workers? Maybe we did in the past, but with modern [and rapidly advancing] automation we don't need them now, or certainly not at historic scales. Again, we can rethink education, and in my view doing so would be timely and wise. If we don't want to end up like Venezuela or some kind of Nazi Germany, that is.

                                                   -Andrew Atkin

Pricing out the Poor - Deliberately

In the 80's New York had a massive crime problem. It was so bad that people were leaving in droves. The New York council finally solved the problem but they did so, in part, in an interesting way. They created laws that deliberately increased the cost of housing, and quite drastically. The effect was that the criminal class was (largely) priced out of New York. They moved on to cheaper 'victim' cities elsewhere.

This is what happens when you need to discriminate but can't, due to given anti-discrimination laws. You have to use indirect methods to discriminate, which may be much more destructive than just kicking the criminal class out of town outright, via force.

However, inflating the cost of housing to drive out criminals does nothing for general prosperity. Yet if it's the string in the bow that you must use to master a greater priority, then you will use it. To say, I myself would rather live in my car than tolerate a gang moving in next door. Social discomfort is amongst the worst kinds of discomfort. It's serious.

In Houston for example, which offers truly affordable housing and is the most prosperous city in America, the crime rate is steadily increasing because the city is comparatively attractive to the criminal class. Houston is beginning to suffer from toxic immigration because being attractive to poor people means attracting poor people, who are far more likely to be criminal as a statistical group.

Now, if Houston were allowed to be racist and make the law of "no blacks allowed" then this would largely solve the problem, albeit in a blunt and ugly way. This is because it's a fact that blacks, as a group, are far more likely to be criminal and create problems as compared to others. Indeed, William Levitt, who innovated the affordable post WW2 suburbs, did not sell the houses within his developments to blacks. This was not because he was a racist, but simply because the white people of the time did not want to live amongst blacks; and so, in response to consumer demand, he restricted access to whites only to keep the sale price up. Back in the 1940's and 50's people were ruthless. Racism kept the crime down, but again in an ugly and crude way.

On a more subtle level the same thing happens in Australasia today. Australians as a whole are somewhat openly racist (in culture - not media) and they have a reputation for it. Likewise, they suppress Polynesian immigration from New Zealand as Polynesians are afraid to move to Australia out of fear of open rejection. If Australians were not openly racist, I would say Brisbane would be the largest Polynesian city in the world - not Auckland. Again, as a group Polynesians are much more likely to be problematic than others coming from New Zealand. The blunt tool of racism keeps Australia's immigration problems (potential and real) in check.

Now let's go back to the New York example. Respecting how serious the need for social discrimination is--relating to criminals and the grossly uncouth--we might recognize, if I may speculate, the real heart of the drive towards engineering housing unaffordability. It might ultimately be nothing much more than a crude tool to preserve an idealised social atmosphere, as every district is forced to compete with other districts, and even nations, to keep the criminal class away of their areas.

Ok. Now look at Australia today. They have urban land containment policy in place that makes housing outrageously expensive, as restricted land supply forces land prices up to the point of ridiculous. If New Zealand did not play the same game (and it does) and retained affordable housing, then New Zealand would be a magnet for the least ideal people that Australia has to offer. So maybe it's so that New Zealand employs Rural Urban Boundaries, like Australia, specifically to inflate housing costs to in turn block [toxic] Australian immigration?

I have long preached that if we go back to affordable housing policy, then we may also need to adjust immigration controls to block unwanted people. But the problem is, in today's world that's difficult to do because it's just so easy to be accused of racism and "discrimination" by the political hit-squad of our time (that is, the extremist-Left) if you dared move in this direction. And to aggravate the problem further, the upper middle-classes are not too concerned about bad immigration because they, personally, do not have to deal with it. They work and live in areas well isolated from the criminal class in any circumstance. Alas, it's easy to have a nice opinion on immigration when you don't have to eat your own cake.

The great losers of the modern game are those struggling to buy a home, and especially the non-criminal poor. People with more limited means are deprived of an affordable house, and people who are somewhat poor yet civilized are nonetheless forced to live amongst dangerous and depressing people. I'm not a fan of any of this.

There's a better solution to this difficult problem. We can allow new, private developments to be built, where the residents have the power to filter people in and out of their areas at their discretion, using online video interviews. This way if someone has tattoos all over their face and speaks with hostile tension, people will be free to act on the obvious where our legal systems would otherwise not. This can give people affordable housing and a good social climate combined. We would just have to stand up to the extremist-Left, who will naturally try to stop it in the name of their simplistic idea of 'rights'.

I have written about this before. See link Here.

New Zealand would also need to revise immigration policy with Australia, when and if it introduces affordable housing. This is sensitive, but do-able and necessary.

                                               -Andrew Atkin

Addition: Levittown - Achieving affordable housing.