Most of the problems in the world can be tied one way or another to money, and by default to the need to keep acquiring it – it is what drives our failing world economy. We hear of the levels of money held by the uberwealthy and also the debts being incurred, not only by individuals but also whole counties. The terms million, billion and trillion are almost meaningless today because most people cannot comprehend just what they truly mean – it a lot like trying to explain the massive increases involved with the exponential function (see my much earlier post The Exponential Function). For example, if you could fold one sheet of paper (1/10 mm thick) 50 times it would be over 80 million miles high.
To illustrate further how these numerical terms are not understood, how many days is one million seconds? The answer is 11.57 days. When we think about a minute as 60 seconds it is hard to think that a mere million seconds can be so many days. How about a billion seconds, which is a mere 1000 times longer. When you are told that someone is a billionaire, we merely think they are just a bit wealthier than a millionaire, but translated to numbers of seconds, the difference is 31.7 years as opposed to 11.56 days. Quite staggering difference when put that way isn’t it? How about a person with a trillion dollars of personal wealth? Again, only 1000 times more than a billion. Put into seconds, it is 31,700 years – yes years! If two dollars is equated to 2 seconds then this equals the daily income of half of the world’s population.
As an example of just a couple of uberwealthy families, think about the Rothchild family that has an estimated wealth of 700 trillion (yes, that’s right with a T). What do the Rothchild’s do with their possible $700 trillion? What does that Rothchild wealth look like in terms of seconds (with one dollar per second)? It comes to more than 22 million years! Note that if just the Rothchild’s were to give their money to every single person on the planet today, everyone would have over $90,000 each. When the media report Bill Gates net worth as $106 billion, try not to be impressed because he spends $4 billion a year on social causes (that may have nefarious outcomes as he pushes GMOs etc.) – noting that the interest he earns on the remaining $102 billion more than pays for that. A question I always wonder is what does he does with the rest of the 102 billion that he isn’t spending on social projects. When you translate numbers into something that is comprehensible then the ridiculousness of hoarded wealth becomes obvious.
We’ve been conditioned to be slaves to a system that works for the efficiency of the system, not for us. Think about it for a moment. As humans, we are slaves to the need for energy, and who provides that energy in our daily living, whether it be food or electricity or fuel for mobility – we are kept in fear of not having enough. After the 1970s, most of this media driven fear is merely to make us accept the status quo and not upset the system. It’s a lot like a ‘Mass Hypnosis’ that keeps us believing the corporate driven nightmare. The mass media describe the world that we see and if we are not aware of anything else then we accept the media vision of this dystopian world as normal and unchangeable – it becomes our normality whether we want it or not. Note, the people who work for these mass media empires are just like you and me, but they as trapped in a paradigm of fear and bowing to corporate control as the rest of us. Hence, they peddle the negativity the media owners want as normal for fear of losing their jobs, thus accepting the illusion of stability in a chaotically changing world. Yet, the people who work within this media system have abrogated their responsibility to us all as they peddle corporate control as acceptable. If you input only negative news in to the population then you will only get negative thinking and negative reactions. If you input positive news into the population then you will get positive responses – nothing magical about that idea. Fear controls lives. Love enhances and empowers lives.
It’s not that the negative things happening in the world should not be reported, but we need to also see the positive things going on around the world as well (and there are lots of impressive and positive stories out there) The mass media as a business seem completely dedicated to the negative as the only way to ‘sell’ the news. I love how the televised news always end with some little blip of hope. After hearing about death and destruction with the world burning up for an hour, they finish with the quick story of something like a bob-scout rescuing a kitten in the storm sewer. I have friends who are journalists and they are quite convinced journalists are trying to report the truth, but they are also beholden to editors and media owners who control the purse strings of what can be reported and how people shall think. There are a few journalists who manage to write about the truth.
Consider our fixation on celebrity adoration and not least our ‘billionaire savior delusion’ that created the plutocracies that we are all starting to realize run the world we thought was going more democratic. I will cease called the controllers the uber-elites, let’s call them what they are – the predator class. In the book, “Winners take all: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” writer Anand Giridharadas says tongue in cheek, that we need to thank our billionaires around the planet for ruling us. After all their elite do-gooding is evidence of their efforts to help the world. Now go back and re-read my third paragraph above. As Giridharadas emphasizes, if the do-gooding uber-wealthy really wanted to help the world they could do so quite readily.
A great many of the world’s positive stories come from grass roots efforts to make a difference. People empowering themselves to make change happen much more readily then those waiting for the uber-wealthy and governments to solve their problems. Stories like William Kamkwamba, the Malawian who built a wind energy tower in his village, or the people of Detroit creating their own Guerilla gardens, abound but are not often reported. Just like our need to understand big numbers and concepts like the exponential function, we also need to become fixed on our ability to make positive things happen for ourselves. To Be Continued…………
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