2015 What does Solitary Confinement reveal about our Relationship to Conflict?

solitary confinement is an interesting phenomenon in our current world because it is an example which shows us very interesting points and truths about how we as a human collective exist.

Here's what wikipedia has to say about solitary confinement:

Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an inmate is isolated from any human contact, though often with the exception of members of prison staff. It is sometimes employed as a form of punishment beyond incarceration for a prisoner and has been cited as an additional measure of protection for the inmate. This form of punishment is also given for violations of prison regulations. It is also used as a form of protective custody and to prevent in the case of suicide, restriction from items that could disrupt the prisoners health.

Reading this, you might go 'yeah, makes sense that they'd have to confine a prisoner for their own good or when they pose a threat to those around them', so this reason for why solitary confinement exists seems justified and valid.

However if you read between the lines of what this actually says about solitary confinement, then you'll see something like this:

Solitary confinement is a measure that is used as damage control because we as a society have not yet learned how to deal with the real problems that people face internally as well as in groups and relationships with others. Solitary confinement is like a teacher separating one kid from the rest of the class by putting that kid in the corner of the classroom with their head turned against the wall, or making them stand in the hallway for the duration of the class.

They do it because it is their 'last resort', because they don't know how to 'deal with' that kid or how to solve the problems that kid is facing within themselves internally and in their relationships with the other kids. Solitary confinement is proof that the human race has not learned a singular thing when it comes to conflict and how to resolve conflict, despite of all the practice and experience we've had with it throughout the ages.

 After all, what wikipedia also has to say about solitary confinement is that:

Research surrounding possible psychological and physiological effects of solitary confinement date back to the 1860s. Prison records from the Denmark institute during 1870-1920 indicate that staff noticed inmates were exhibiting signs of mental illnesses while in isolation, revealing that this persistent problem has been around for decades. The first comment by the Supreme Court of the United States about solitary confinement's effect on prisoner mental status was made in 1890 (In re Medley 134 U.S. 160). In it the court found that the use of solitary confinement produced reduced mental and physical capabilities

In other words, it has been established in the 1860's already that solitary confinement is not an actual solution and is actually more consequential because now you've got this person who was already having difficulties and experiencing conflict, coming out of solitary confinement even more mentally and emotionally (and possibly physically in some cases) broken. So that means that there is an even bigger chance of them posing a threat to themselves and society.

So the situation that we've now created is that there is a high chance that this individual will remain imprisoned for the rest of their lives or that they are released but then end up committing a crime again which lands them back into prison, because of the mental/emotional scars they've suffered during their time in prison.

Solitary confinement does not teach a person to respect themselves or the people around them. It does not assist them in any way to develop insight or understanding in relation to their crime, because the whole purpose of placing someone in solitary confinement is not education or assisting an individual to grow and learn. As wikipedia states, "It is sometimes employed as a form of punishment beyond incarceration for a prisoner and has been cited as an additional measure of protection for the inmate".

Punishment is not educational or supportive for the individual. Just like when a teacher decides to punish a child by placing it on a chair in the corner of the classroom, it isn't done with the best interest of the individual at heart because it is an act resulting from the experience of fear and powerlessness which the teacher is experiencing inside themselves in relation to this kid whom they 'don't know how to handle'.

Punishment is only something we do onto another when we don't know or understand how to handle the situation, when we in other words haven't educated ourselves enough to be equipped and skilled in resolving conflict or to at the very least have the ability to place ourselves in the other person's shoes.

As a closing statement for this blog I would like to say that solitary confinement is one of those things in our world that cast shame onto the existence of the human and the human potential. It is showing us ever so clearly that we have learned nothing from our past and that we are wasting so much of our own ability and potential to become truly great, as individuals and as a society. It is possible to manifest greatness and I believe that a first step would be to support a proposal like a Living Income guaranteed. Let's put an end to solitary confinement and find real solutions.

Investigate at livingincome.me 



Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement

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2015 The Social Media Outrage about Clock Boy and How we are Missing the Obvious

 

(CNN)When Ahmed Mohamed went to his high school in Irving, Texas, Monday, he was so excited. A teenager with dreams of becoming an engineer, he wanted to show his teacher the digital clock he'd made from a pencil case.

The 14-year-old's day ended not with praise, but punishment, after the school called police and he was arrested.

From <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-clock-bomb/>

 

This 'Clock Boy' has been a hot topic in the news lately, and included in this article was the 'social media reaction':

Outrage over the incident -- with many saying the student was profiled because he's Muslim -- spread on social media as #IStandWithAhmed started trending worldwide on Twitter with more than 100,000 tweets Tuesday morning. The school's Facebook page is roiling with sharp criticism of the way the teen was treated, and the hashtag #engineersforahmed is gaining popularity.

Now, this will not be another article discussing how wrong the teacher and the police was in how they treated him and how Ahmed deserves an apology, or about defending either side in what happened on that day, there are plenty articles on the web adding to the 'outrage' and the reactions that have been stirred in people regarding what happened to this boy.

I mean, sure it was racial profiling and yes it was unfair and things like this shouldn't happen, however reciting this over and over again and getting angry and upset about it is not going to create a solution and will not show us the way to make sure that situations like this don't happen again and that 14 year old innocent kids don't become victimized by the fears that have been brainwashed into the adults of the world, like a fear of terrorists infiltrating our lives and planting bombs and creating chaos everywhere. Fears that are, if you really look at it, quite absurd and really far out there, but unfortunately very common in people these days, considering how susceptible the human mind is to information impulses and considering how steadily the media has been impulsing this apparent omnipresent terrorist threat the last few years.

If anything, events like this one where someone is discriminated against, shunned or even arrested due to preprogrammed perceptions, assumptions and beliefs concerning race, religion and so forth were bound to happen sooner or later, and are in fact happening every moment, without any media coverage.

What this one event and the 'outrage' it is stirring up in people all across social media is really showing us is, ironically, just how little we really care about all the events just like this one and even worse which are happening all of the time. It is revealing how oblivious we seem to be to the reality of the world that we are currently living in, which is a world wherein 'clock boy' is not an isolated event, not by a long shot. In fact for many it is business as usual, just another day on planet earth, where people love to get outraged yet never quite enough to really bring about any change.

So let us then look at the real issue at hand, the one which we should be concerned about. The issue which is hiding underneath the Clock Boy situation and is making sure that those things will continue happening, that things will never change for the better and will most likely only get worse, no matter how many people get outraged about it.

Let's look at what it is that really needs changing, and it isn't the police who needs to apologise or the teacher who needs to get fired or have some kind of anti-racism therapy. Those particular policemen and that particular teacher were just in the wrong place at the wrong time you could say, because if anyone of us was in their shoes, we would have reacted in exactly the same way. And why is that? Because we have all been influenced in exactly the same way by exactly the same media with exactly the same prejudices, judgments and beliefs regarding race, religion and specifically unfortunately Muslims.

What we should be learning from this event, and how we should be approaching it, is within this realization and understanding that those policemen and that teacher are each and every one of us. Those people represent parts and aspects of ourselves which we, and specifically those of us who are reacting with the most 'outrage', are clearly in complete denial of.

I mean, of course we don't like seeing ourselves as a racist or as someone who discriminates against others based on superficial judgments of appearance, why of course not because we wouldn't be very liked by other people. We'd be seen and judged as 'bad' by the rest of society and we might even spark social outrage.

I'm sure this was the case for the teacher and those policemen. I'm sure they were 'good people', they 'meant well' and they don't generally think of themselves as a racist or someone who would discriminate against others. But in this particular situation, it just kind of 'happened'. The actual racism and prejudices which existed on some level inside of them - whether or not they were aware of it - just came out in how they handled the situation. It came out and it was there for the whole world to see.

And I am sure that afterwards, when people got outraged and social media started burning them to the stake, they wished that they could do it all over again and they would not have reacted in the same way. But the thing is, if they were really given a second chance and they could do it all over again, they would act the exact same way.

Because, the problem was never that their intentions weren't pure, or that they meant to do something hurtful to this kid. The problem was that they were not AWARE of where their own behaviour was coming from. They were not aware that there existed racial and other discriminatory prejudices, assumptions and judgments in their own mind.

And that is the unfortunate consequences of wanting to be a good person, or more specifically wanting to be seen as a good person in society. We tend to hide everything that exists inside our own mind which may be judged badly, so that we can appear to be 'politically correct' to our environment.

This is something that we are all doing, we all wear masks and we all, or at least most of us, make an effort to 'watch our words' and to place a guard in front of our mouth to make sure that we don't say anything which may be perceived by others in a bad way. It is such moments however, like in the clock boy situation, where it is our very behavior which is showing to the world what really exists in our mind. That would be our subconscious and unconscious mind coming through in our behavior, which is something we cannot simply stop in that moment because we are just not aware of any of it.

The clock boy event was an extreme and very obvious and clear example of how our subconscious and unconscious mind directs our behavior, but in fact our sub- and unconscious mind is directing our behavior in every given moment. It is our sub-and unconscious mind which is creating the world which we are living in. So even though we may consciously think and believe that we are a good person, and as long as our immediate environment agrees it is easy to believe that about ourselves, but at the same time it is our very behavior in every moment that is impacting the world we live in on every level and that is contributing to all the things in this world which we may consciously claim to be 'against' or outraged by.

It is time that we start getting to know who we are as beings on a much deeper level so that we can begin to see directly how it is that we are contributing to and creating the world we live in and so we can start creating change in that world on a real level.

There are ways to start developing this self-awareness and start nurturing the seed of change within yourself - investigate DIP Lite.

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2015 Why Understanding Conflict is to Prevent War

As I was watching this movie called Suite Française, which starts with scenes of German airplanes bombing civilian people who were walking on the road from Paris to a small town to find shelter and safety, I felt myself feeling shocked by those images of war-planes bombing 'innocent' civilians. But then I started looking at this concept of war and how it is that there is always this 'bad guy' or 'bad people' apparently without any reason or conscience killing a whole bunch of other people. Those 'bad guys' in this case being the Germans.

I suppose the modern equivalent of 'the Germans' would be like ISIS, those 'monsters' who are invading countries, killing innocent people and trying to enforce their vision and way of life onto a people.  So, just like with pre-war Germany, I myself must admit that there is very little that I truly know about how the current ISIS situation really started, why did they become militant, why are they so angry, why are they set on killing, plundering and raping across Syria and Iraq and who are they really...

When I think back to my days in high school when I learned about World War One and Two, I don't remember learning anything about how exactly those two world wars were started. All that we learned back then were random facts like, this is where they first hit, Hitler hated the Germans, they invaded all these countries, there were so many people killed, etcetera...

But the most important information, the information which would in fact show the real problem behind why those wars started in the first place, and would simultaneously also enable one to see the solution to prevent such things from happening again, ... This information was not taught in history class. I never learned why it was that Germans got so extremely angry that they were willing to go to war or what could have pushed them so far to the edge that war seemed to them like a better option than the status quo.

I mean, in war people die, families get torn apart, there is nothing but anger, hate, grief, sadness and regret that comes from war, and this is the case for either side. So war is only something that would be like a last resort, when all other options have been depleted, when you see no other way out to survive, and to live a decent life. So to simply say that 'they hated the Jews, and therefore they decided to exterminate them', or 'they just got provoked and therefore they decided to go to war', without giving the exact detail of what their situation was like before the war, is like deliberately hiding a big part of reality in order to deliberately paint a certain picture of 'the Germans'.

Come to think of it, looking back on how history class was taught, specifically when it came to those two world wars, all that I seemed to have gotten out of it was that 'Germans are bad people' and 'Hitler was a bad man', as though I had just watched a Hollywood action movie with a hero and villain character who both lack real depth, because obviously they are figures of imagination designed to entertain the minds of the public.

So, it is only now that I have matured enough as a person that I understand that in fact any conflict is more than just a 'good guy' and a 'bad guy' trying to fight this epic battle of good versus evil. In a conflict you have basically two people who both want the same thing, which is to survive and live indignity in this world and to be respected, cared for and considered by others, and conflict is what emerges when one party feels that they cannot establish or create what is needed to live in dignity. And war is what you get when that person has been pushed into that situation to the brink of despair where they can't see any other way than to forcefully take it from others who may or may not have in fact more than what they need.

Now this is actually how our economy works. It wasn't only in pre-war Germany that there was economic inequality where some had nothing or close to nothing, while others had more than they could possibly need, but also in our current climate we have severe economic inequality in countries and between countries. So much so even, that if you really stop and look at this situation, it does almost constantly feel like the entire world is on a perpetual brink of war. After all, how could it not be when so many people are being pushed into that position of absolute despair where they would consider doing anything just to be able to survive.

What many countries have been good at doing however, is dispersing and dividing this inequality in such a way that individuals whom are in this state of despair are isolated and end up lashing out on their close environment, so as to prevent those people from organizing themselves and potentially start a war or revolution. A few methods of dispersing disparity is by for example making sure there is minimal education available so that people don't have the skills to speak up and create a substantial movement, or through media which is good at creating cognitive disinformation and redirecting people's awareness away from the things that matter and from the real problems towards false enemies.

So why and how is it that we have missed this very obvious reality and truth when it comes to conflict, that the one we are fighting is always a living being exactly like ourselves, not a demon or bad/evil person or people. And I don't just mean when it comes to war, also the small conflicts we go into on a daily bases, externally with people in our environment but also internally in our mind each time we wish ill on someone. Why are we so quick to believe the propaganda done by the media and by our own mind about another person or people which deliberately paints a picture of them and blinds us from recognizing ourselves within the other?

Conflict resolution, be it in war or domestic disagreements, always starts with placing yourself in the shoes of the other person and recognizing yourself as a living being in them. It starts with learning about a person's background so that you can see and understand that if you were in their shoes you would have done and reacted the same. I am one vote for a mature world wherein we can deal with conflict in a mature way, which is not by fighting back but by ensuring that each being has a dignified life and enjoys the respect, care and consideration that we all deserve. Investigate a Living Income Guaranteed #LIG

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Prison Sentence for Collecting Rainwater - What is the Logic between Government and Survival?

  I read this article online titled:

Man Gets Prison Sentence For Collecting Rainwater On His Own Property

Pasted from <http://yournewswire.com/man-gets-prison-sentence-for-collecting-rainwater-on-his-own-property/>

And I realized a few interesting things by my reaction to reading the headline alone. Reading the headline first of all triggered a fear inside myself, which was based on a thought  along the lines of 'oh no, the government is trying to take my rainwater!' and with looking into that reaction I realized that it is essentially showing that I have a fear of 'the government' and that I seem to have created 'the government' as the boogieman in my mind. The government is not my friend, it is my enemy. It is made up of corporations and greedy people who are only after my money and who don't care about me as an individual, therefore I must defend myself from the government and be wary of whatever it is that the government is trying to implement.

That is basically the attitude that I have programmed into myself when it comes to the word 'government', and this  through all the articles that I have read over time and stories I have heard from other people about what the government apparently did to them or about how there exists corruption in government, how people are stealing our taxes, how the individual in society is being robbed of their hard-earned money by deceitful  lawmakers who misappropriate that money into their own pockets and how corporations make dirty deals with government officials to privatize public resources like water and forest land and end up polluting the area that we live in, etcetera.

So with that attitude of 'my own government is after me', I feel as though I am all alone in this world having to fend for myself and thus I am in survival mode. So upon reading an article that is about a government jailing a citizen for trying to fend for himself and his survival, I react with fear for my own survival which then results in me getting angry at this government for jailing this guy 'just because he was trying to survive'.

But it is actually fascinating that in this whole story, I don't in any moment stop to question my own reaction or question why it is in the first place  that I have come to accept that my government is 'the bad guy' and why it is that I feel the need to protect myself from my government's decisions. I mean, I immediately trust my initial reaction of fear and anger as protection and defense against the apparent evil that is threatening my livelihood but at the same time it is because of this very reaction that I am not seeing what is going on in reality and I am not seeing for example the absurd way in which things exist.

Things such as the fact that a government is supposed to be a structure of people who organize a society in a way that supports the beings in it, so that no person has to be in survival mode. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of things called 'public property', meaning that these things should go to 'the people' and serve to ease the survival of people in that society? Isn't that the purpose of the things we call 'democracy', 'economy', 'social service', 'public officers', and all things pertaining to 'social' and 'public' industry and activity, in that it should actually serve the 'public' in ways that is best for the public?

Somehow preventing someone from collecting their own water to sustain themselves doesn't fit that definition. However the fact that someone feels the need to collect their own water and to go against the law in doing so doesn't make sense either. So, looking at my own initial reaction to reading this article, it is quite fascinating to notice that we would become angry at the government for not allowing this  man to provide for his own survival but we don't even notice the underlying faults in the design of our government that this  case is actually revealing, which is that we shouldn't feel the need to pull away from the law and adapt a self-interested way of living, according to 'every man to himself', in the first place.

We don't seem to ask ourselves why it is that we have a government at all when it clearly isn't providing a supportive structure for all of us to live within and when for a great part most of us even exist in fear of and conflict with our government to the point where in the back of our mind we are thinking of ways to potentially provide for our own survival 'just in case', through for example collecting our own rain water.

And this is a very valid question to ask ourselves, of what our government is actually doing and why we even have it when it clearly isn't functioning in our best interests. So, since we do have a government that doesn't work in OUR best interest, then in whose best interest is it in fact working? Why is our government not coming up with ways to make sure that no one will ever have to fend for themselves and that each living being is supported in the best way possible? I mean, we give them that power, we place people in office which we believe to be capable of making decisions in our name and hope to have the skills  to organize large groups of individuals in ways that works out best for everyone.

Yet when people are being sentenced to jail for trying to collect resources because they aren't getting those resources from their government who 'owns' those resources, then the decisions that are being made and the ways that our government is operating is definitely not in our best interest. The judge sentencing this individual to jail should have investigated why it was that this man felt like he needed to fend for himself in the first place. He should have investigated what went wrong in the relationship between the system and this individual where a lack was created which caused a person to have to go into survival mode and make self-interested 'unlawful' decisions, which is what a judge who rules according to and based on the actual best interest of society would do. So the fact that judges don't take this approach would be our first sign that somehow the government that we have created and allowed to direct our society and our lives does not exist in the best interest of us all and thus should be changed.

Investigate a Living Income Guarantee, the only logical step any government should take to show its consideration of and care for the existence and survival of its citizens.

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Cat punching and our bipolar relationship with reality

Word about a new internet phenomenon named 'cat punching' has been going around social media lately. It started with a Facebook Page set up to publicize a Valentine's day "cat punching event", which apparently (I say apparently cause I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes as the page was taken down by Facebook already) showed pictures of a guy holding a cat and looking like he was going to punch it in the face, pictures of dead animals and comments like

"I prefer the full grown cats, honestly, the little ones can't take a punch to save their lives. It's pathetic."

Here's what the news website Mirror had to say about it:

The page was set up to advertise a cat-punching event on Valentines Day and appears to have been opened by Jamie Card, which is the name of a well-known troll known for launching online pranks.

Although the event might be little more than a sick joke, cat lovers took it very seriously.

At one point today, more than 1,000 people signed the petition against cat-punching in just one hour.

Pasted from <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/sick-cat-punching-facebook-page-pulled-5133475>

While many arguments on cat punching might be about:

1. Whether or not this 'cat punching event' is a serious proposal
2. If the cat punching implied in the pictures did in fact happen (as opposed to it being an intended 'joke' and the guy just pretending to hit the cat)
3. How sick and cruel it is to joke about and suggest harming animals and post dead pictures of cats on Facebook

...I would more like to draw the attention to the polarity play out that is hiding behind what is essentially people expressing their intense hatred for cats, also on this webpage titled 'things I want to punch in the face: cats' where someone has listed all their reasons for why they hate cats.

So this polarity play-out that I am talking about involves all the hundreds if not thousands of cat videos showing how cute cats are and websites about why cats are absolutely awesome, created by 'cat-lovers'.

 Because on the one hand there is this adoration for cats which shouldn't actually surprise us that on the other hand there are people who are going to 'hate' that which others 'love'.

 After all, isn't that how love and hate work - meaning, hand in hand? Where ever there is love, there is also hate, which actually seem to be the two major experiences that we humans get to choose from when it comes to how we will experience ourselves in this world. 

 It is easy for us to point fingers at the ones who express hate towards things in this world, but we don't seem to be willing to see where the hate originates from in the first place or consider that we might be contributing to the very existence of it by our very participation in its polar opposite, being love. This point of people hating cats, creatures whom are loved by many others, is but one example of this hate-love polarity play-out that exists within each and every one of us.

I am sure that we can all find examples of things that we 'absolutely hate' just because of how other people 'absolutely love' those very things. And the fascinating aspect about this hate experience, is that its very starting point is to in a way function as 'counter-weight' for the 'love' expressed by other people. It's as though we are all in this constant dance with each other trying to balance out the love and hate in this world.

And this is forming quite the problem as you can see exemplified by the cat punching phenomenon, be it real or not - the point is that hate in relation to cats or any other creature in this world shouldn't exist within us in the first place. And, this may come as a shock to many, but neither should love. This because the love and hate polarity that we have been participating in as though it is the very essence of who we are as human beings or the purpose of life is in actuality the very thing that is sabotaging our ability to see things for what they are.

We will either 'love' something or we will 'hate' it, or we're simply indifferent about it because it doesn't fall into these categories, but we never notice or see things as what they are. We rather have this strange tendency to want to categorize everything in our reality into how we prefer to experience ourselves, which is within feelings and emotions, positive and negative internal sensations and reactions and so we fail to recognize that reality in itself is never siding within any of those categories. Reality is just here. A cat is just a cat, it doesn't need us to love or hate it.

 If anything what this world needs is for us to just let it be what it is. We'd still need to take care of it, sure, but taking care of something or someone requires things like attention, consistency, trustworthiness and stability - not love. Love, and consequently hate along with all of our other feelings and emotions which we may want to use to define and label the world that we see around us, is something that is entirely about ourselves and our own want to experience things, to feel things about ourselves, this world, cats, … and basically our reluctance to simply do the things that need to be done to create a world that isn't as dysfunctional as it is currently.

A solution here would be to redefine the word love so that it doesn't end up creating hate. Redefining love can be done  by making sure that our 'love' for cats or any other creature or manifestation in this world isn't just a feeling and a statement anymore. Loving something should imply that you stand as custodian and care-taker and that you take responsibility, which should be an inherent trait of our existence as humans on earth anyways. As long as our 'love' is a feeling, then that 'love' is bipolar and we are in fact causing hate to emerge. So, it's time to stop pointing fingers and to start taking responsibility for what we create.

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Living Income - Cause there's No such Thing as A Free Market

There are people who would oppose a governmental implementation of a structure that will provide each citizen with a basic living income, which would be funded through for instance the nationalization of specific companies that are deemed the 'property of the public' - being for instance companies that deal with the nations resources and public services.  The argument that they would use is that government regulation and intervention in business and companies is impeding on the freedom of individuals in society to develop, expand and explore their abilities to become wealthy and pursue and achieve their personal happiness.

And, at first glance, this argument might seem somehow valid, because we have all grown up to value words and concepts like 'freedom' and 'the pursuit of happiness' and 'personal wealth' - so, if we hear someone say that government intervention in the economic landscape is a direct attack on our personal freedom and ability to design our own happiness, we will react in fear of losing our so highly valued 'freedom' and 'personal happiness' and agree with this individual without even being aware that we may not fully understand what it is that we are agreeing with. Meaning that we have been taught to value concepts like 'freedom' and 'the pursuit of happiness' but we have not been taught to understand how these concepts actually practically function in this physical reality that is shared by many beings equally as ourselves. So, when someone makes a statement that implies that our 'freedom' and 'happiness' is in danger due to for instance the government trying to impose itself on our economic structures, we will not understand how or why exactly it is that the government is posing a threat to our 'freedom' and 'happiness', because we don't even understand what this apparent 'freedom' really is or what the 'pursuit of happiness' is in real physical practical terms, but we will however react in fear because that is the primary instinctual reaction of a mind that is conditioned to value something and now believes that that something might be taken away, even if that something is in fact only an idea.

Having said this, I want to point out and show how it is that there exist many misconceptions about how our world and reality actually exist because there have been spread many ideas through means of media in the form of propaganda to deliberately have people believe in things that are not actually real. Take the word 'freedom' for instance, and lets place this word in the context of the concept of 'free market', wherein it is believed that our current economic system, which from a global perspective is the neo-liberal capitalistic system, provides the ultimate 'freedom' for the human being to express itself within its 'pursuit of happiness'. The apparent evidence of this 'freedom'  to 'pursue personal happiness' is within how our system expresses itself within and as the phenomenon of 'consumerism'.

If you'd have a look standing on the outside at our society, you would say that it is 'flourishing' because we have so many shops selling so many different things, at a wide variety of prices - with most people being able to at least make it seem as though they are 'well off' because for instance clothes and gadgets have become so cheap. And, because we so easily fall for the picture that we see and tend to never question the actual reality of it, most of us don't see that all this apparent 'freedom' that we have to 'make our own choices' and to 'choose our own way of living' as displayed in and represented by the many products available to us, actually comes at a very high price in terms of the amount of human and natural resources that it requires to produce such high quantities of goods at such low prices. There are many consequences to this image of 'freedom' that we have learned to place value in - and even though it should have been obvious to us, we have to this day never seen or realized that the concept of 'freedom' as we currently understand it is just an image and is causing and creating the downfall and decay of our real physical world.

And It is our collectively accepted gullibility to believe in this illusion of freedom that is justifying the continuation of the harmful consequential reality of our apparent 'free market' economic system. I say 'apparent', because even though many economists would claim that our current market system is 'free', they are actually just doing so because they know that words like 'free' have been given a special place in human being's minds and that we will immediately accept without question things that apparently honour 'freedom'. As specialist in economics Ha-Joon Chang eloquently explains in his book '23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism', our society would never have evolved past child and slave labor (in theory)if it wasn't for government intervention - because, if our market system was truly 'free', things like human trafficking, child pornography, child labor and slave labor would all be 'legal'.

I suppose at some point we must have seen, realized and understood that the human's desire to 'pursue personal happiness' cannot and must not be allowed to truly be 'free' - and that we need something like 'laws' and 'rules', enforced and enacted by a governmental structure to guide our economic endeavours so that no one gets hurt at the expense of another person's 'freedom of choice'.

This point thus shows and implies that any economic or other person who comes up with the argument that to implement a Living Income Guaranteed for instance and change and reform our economic structures in such a way that ensures that no being has to suffer again due to a lack of money and means to survive, would somehow be an attack  on the 'freedom' that we apparently have in our current system, is either simply uneducated or deliberately playing dumb and in both cases basically just making random statements because they have personal fears that they are trying to protect.

At the Equal Life Foundation, we understand that it is programmed into the human condition to fear change however, and that this will be the primary reason for why most people would initially resist the concept of implementing a Living Income Guaranteed and applying the necessary changes in our economic structure that would enable for such a concept to become reality - even when our reality is showing in every way how this change would be best for each and every being. It is fascinating in a way how we will resist making decisions and choices that are best for all and rather chose ways of existing just because they are 'familiar' to us - because we have learned to trust only that which feels familiar rather than trusting our own ability to stand up for what is best and to create a world and reality that is worth living in for all living things.

Join us at the Equal Life Foundation and stand for a Living Income Guaranteed if you see, realize and understand that just because we fear change, doesn't mean that we should give away our power to it - and that we can still face our fear and stand up for what we see and realize is Best. This is where true Honour and Integrity exist - in standing up for what is Best for All despite of the Fears that may come up in our own Mind.

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