The Big Bang

Hello and welcome.

This is how my blog begins - with a big bang, like everything else does, if you think about it. Like you did, to make a crude sexual reference. Slowly but surely the particles that are hereon forth identified as letters will come together to form one whole and will the evolve entry by entry from primitive nonsense to either something superior, or a mess that will destroy itself with advancements it's not ready for. Either way we can't tell the outcome until we reach it.

Here I will use the liberty of the fact that nobody is telling me to shut it (yet) and, from lack of better term, blog about topics I feel passionate at the moment. If you are looking for celebrity gossip, pre-teen hormonal rambles, or poorly written haikus this is probably not the best place to look, but then again never say never. Currently, I feel like telling people what to do, so I will proceed to do so at my leisure starting with the next paragraph.

I think a lot in my spare time, I have a lot of spare time, and thus, I think a lot in general. Some things I've been thinking about today included the government, change, the environment, money, and greed. If there's one thing I learned in the relatively small number of years I'd spent on this planet it's that the government wants us to change so that it can help the environment, but they really want money because they're greedy so they say the stuff mentioned prior to the coma as a reason to take the money. Also that if you want to find a fully functionable communist society you should proceed towards the nearest anthill, but I digress. Day to day we are fed these storie about how if we do this and this and contribue thus and thus we will all be part of some kind of solution to some sort of problem. We all eat it up with a spoon of course, because guilt trips are probably the best weapon anyone's ever used. Your mother knows, ask her. What we fail to understand is that everyone out there has some sort of personal interest in some sort of gain, with very very few exceptions, if any at all. People will seldom question reasons of famous people for doing or saying something because if they have fancy charts and quotations then clearly it's completely non-biased and beneficial - nobody questions famous people unless it's regarding their fashion sense or some kind of politically incorrect act/statement that makes the general public say 'well I never'. God forbid a movie star forgets to wear makeup and/or gets an abortion.

A common misconception we make as a species is forgetting the fact that humans are the most developed, highly evolved race of idiots ["Well I never!"]. Pardon my language, but it's true. On the whole we ignore important stuff and focus on irrelevant details. How else do you think computers, telephones and money would have gotten invented? Not if we were focusing on food, water, and shelter. By no means am I suggesting that all that stuff is bad, I am currently enjoying a wonderful piece of technological advancement as we speak, I'm just pointing out facts. On the whole we like to believe information that sounds appealing to us without making any effort to consider other possibilities, perspectives, or playing out alternative hypotheses because we're a bunch of lazy pro crastinators too. A simple example would be to skip a class because at the time when you are offered free booze that seems like a more interesting alternative, but without the consideration of possible motivations of the second party or how that class may affect your scholarly future can possibly lead to a grave error in judgement, resulting in potentially catastrophic results. ie, you could potentially get killed by the offerer of free booze, or just miss something important in the lesson that interferes with your pristine record later on during exams. Which option you choose highly depends on your paranoid tendencies, but you see what I mean, I hope.

Now, leaders come in two extremes - those that assume responsibility and those who pretend to assume responsibility. Within this bellcurve chart, the middle bulge contains the rest of the public who avoid any mention of responsibility. What is interesting is that the pretenders are more likely to be followed, because they sound more convincing. Because people are, as I have previously mentioned, biased and self-centered, everything can be calculated as a priority. Even altruists can be put in with the rest; they only appear selfless because acts of kindness, charity, or whatever else that can be thrown in there give them satisfaction, and is thus a personal priority - like income to a corporation. Again, I'm not against it, I'm just pointing out a vital part to understanding human nature and using it for the processing of information.

To get back on track of what I originally planned to do, that being telling other people what to do, I would like everyone to spend some time thinking about themselves and before they do something, think about why they're doing it, what their motivation is, and what the motivations of the contributing parties, if any, might be. If you want to be successful, start by learning to play chess. There are skills used in that game that translate directly into anything and everything you will ever do. The ability to think rationally is probably the most useful skill ever learned by a human being. It helps make decisions, deal with problems, sustain relationships, and many more amazing, helpful things. Once you have learned to do that, then you can start analyzing information all around you properly, and stop seeking gratification, but feeling it.

Some information that is currently a floating all around us regards saving the planet. Not a bad topic, but most people don't realize what it is that we're trying to save it from . There's too much choice - are we saving the Earth from terrorism, poverty, illness, pollution, or UFOs? Tell me please, I'd like to be given a direct answer. Different leaders say different things, but as far as I'm concerned we're saving the planet from "not me". While some claims are entirely reasonable, others are ridiculous fancies of people who don't know better. These are the leaders that pretend to assume responsibility. In reasonable cases such as illness, leaders that actually assume responsibility for the task at hand - doctors, say, and nurses, commit to doing as much as they can to address and fix the problem. In other cases such as ethnic cleansing, leaders come up with a problem, which they then find a solution for that appeals to the masses, and then get them to do the dirty work as they stand by and supervise. This is oh-so relevant to this whole save the world campaign, because in order to tell the difference between a pretend leader and a real one you need to learn to think rationally. When that's done you will stop sitting around waiting for a pretend leader to come and motivate you off your la-z-boy, or admit to yourself that you really don't want to get anything done all that much at all, else you'd be doing something to help achieve your goal.

On the topic of changing the world, I'd like to bring up pants. You don't contribute to putting on your pants in the morning, you put them on. You don't wait for the government to begin taxation for time spent pantsless before you (collectively, as a community) put on your pants, you just put them on. You may wait a bit before you do it, but you know you must, so you put them on. The same applies for any form of change. Let's pretend that the global problem is your bareness waist-down, and that needs to change. Will you wait for a council decision? Probably not, because you can just take the pants and put them on. This is also done in the process of trial and error, despite the high success rate of getting dressed. If you are in a hurry and you accidentally pick up your wife's pants and find that they just don't fit, you will remove them and go find your pants, then put them on. Now I may speak in metaphor, but it's true and applicable to 99% of all human functions. If you didn't try to put the pants on, even though you may not have succeeded the first time, you would not have gotten any pants on at all, which would most likely result in embarassment at the workplace or something similar. Sometimes a little failure is acceptable, and that's another fact you learn to come to terms with rational thinking - if you try and never fail, you're probably just lucky. If you never fail by default, you never learn what not to do, you never get anything done, but hey - at least you have a clean record, right?

To draw a conclusion after all those seemingly unconnected ideas: if you want to be a part of a movement - move! Don't wait for superman to come and do it for you. Do your own research, form your own opinions, come up with a rational action plan, and for the love of some sort of higher entity, put your pants on!

So long and thanks for all the fish.