#yanggang

The two play within each other. The Sustainability of human life means more time to increase Wellbeing. Greater wellbeing means more stability as we move into an ever more uncertain future.

Sustainability & Wellbeing.

Survival & Freedom. In a different lingo.

Freedom is a word I have a difficult relationship with, as so much is carried in it, often with excess disregard for the importance of what is carried there.

Freedom to choose how to pursue wellbeing often translates into being manipulated or excluded from wellbeing. Freedom to Fail is really licence for society to fail you. What Freedom to Fail acts as a faux convergence for is Freedom to Experiment & Freedom of Non-Partisipation. Both of which require a reliable social safety net, not the absence of it.

A reliable social safety net can present a risk to sustainability, if structured poorly, because of freeloaders. So the obvious solution is to create a government system to sort the freeloaders out of the social safety net. This gradually degrades into a new kind of freeloader over time, corruption.

This very basic presentation of the territory of the Ideal of Freedom demonstrates the source of the principle split of Left & Right in America.

But this is a false dichotomy. These values aren't in some form of fundamental tradeoff. There are a Class of solutions that simultaneously reinforce both Sustainability & Freedom across time.

I don't have a final name for this Class yet. Not as a separate conceptual entity. Antifragile is a technical term for things that grow stronger under stress. That would be part of the name if the understanding is more realized.

I don't have a fully realized definition of this Class of solutions yet. UBI is a model that doesn't solve the systemic risk side perfectly, but solves much of the freedom side well. Enough money that survival pressure is hard to capture & manipulate against people to control their behavior. (Freedom of Non-Partisipation.) Not so much money that the incentive to participate in society is lost, encouraging experimentation.

If fundamental resources cannot be taken away, easily at least, then sustainability is also improved, as the loss of fundamental resources, & the hoarding of them, is a primary cause for conflict.

UBI has one weak point in that the risk of collapse is shared between all people. If we structure the model right, then we collectively encourage ourselves to do work that supports us all, and the risk is minimal. If structured poorly, we all prefer for others to do the work, and so the risk gradually expands, until society collapses. For UBI to work, it requires a simultaneous cultural revolution. A shift in collective mindset. For us all to shift gears to do productive work we enjoy, instead of productive work we get paid for, and unproductive activities we enjoy.

Whenever someone says that people don’t change I wonder what stubborn assholes you had the misfortune to meet because I’ve changed so spectacularly from who I used to be that when I begin to tell people my story they look at me in shock. 

I grew up in a household where Fox News was on all the time, Glen Beck had an opinion that mattered, and church and religion were considered the “cornerstone” of my life. I was your average goody-two-shoes Mormon, friendly, smiling brightly to hide how guilt ridden I was. My parents had converted to the faith from Catholicism, and were always asked, everywhere we visited, to tell the story again. For me, it meant a level of pride-- Mormons grow up listening to stories about Joseph Smith trying to find which church was true until a divine vision tells him they’re all wrong and to make his own. The pursuit of truth and being “in the right” was important to our family and, in very real sense, it was this desire that drove me away from Mormonism and religion in general in the end.

We weren’t great Mormons to begin with. Behind closed doors, we enjoyed thriller and sci-fi R rated films, I liked to swear (though I avoided saying fuck & God for years) and we did our best to remain open minded. We loved the Colbert Report and Jon Stewart. I invited my friends to church with me like any mormon kid does, sure, but I had no desire to force them to change or to only be friends with mormon kids, and more often than not I was more comfortable with my nonreligious friends because they didn’t silently judge me. But I tried, ya know? I would read my scriptures and pray and try to do all the things and then wonder why I was so fucking depressed and guilt ridden. I hid my doubts for a long time. I hoped going off to BYU would get rid of them. 

I BYU-Idaho for a single semester. Chemistry major, if you can believe that. I lived in the shadow of the Temple and felt guilty that I never wanted to go inside. Professors led opening and closing prayer in class. I went on dates with boys who were getting ready to leave on their missions and with men who had come back and were antsy to get married. Neither appealed to me. And then, near the end of the semester I had a nervous breakdown. 

I didn’t want to go home for the holidays. I worried that I would lose whatever spiritual progress I had made. My family wasn’t as religious as I was anymore. I was horrified with myself, I mean I didn’t want to see my family? That may not mean much to you, but I have always had a very close relationship with my family. We’ve been through a lot. And Mormons champion this message of “Families can be together forever” and I was suddenly struck by the blatant hypocrisy. If you’ve never been to a Fast & Testimony meeting, it’s basically this open confessional where you can go up to the podium and proclaim how YOU KNOW THIS CHURCH is true. A lot of folks tell tearful stories of family members cutting them off or even cutting their own family members off because they didn’t “understand” or because they were proud to make the church the center of their lives. 

By the time this happened, my brothers were already on the way out. One of them had been rebelling for years, and the other was simply trying not to rock the boat but even I was growing exhausted by the constant arguments. Since I was the oldest, I felt I wasn’t allowed to be vocal about my own doubts because I was supposed to be the “good example” and i internalized it instead. And when I came back from school, somehow, I had become the spiritual leader of the family.

My dad came to me and tell me about he regretted not having a last drink with his dad before he died of cancer, and how he had missed that opportunity to bond because of his religious beliefs. My mom came to me with her own concerns about women and priesthood. And because my brother argued the church wasn’t true, they looked into church history (you’re not supposed to read church history from non-church sources because the DEVIL would do anything to draw you away, which in of itself is such a red fucking flag) and after a lot of thought and consideration, they had begun to doubt and wanted to stop attending church for a bit.

And then, just after the new year, we sat down for a Family Home Evening. Mormons do it every Monday night, but this one was different. This time we didn’t have someone lead a lesson or read from the scriptures. Instead we talked about how we felt about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and by the end, it was official.

We weren’t Mormon anymore. 

After that I tried to figure out what I believed. I started studying religion from an academic standpoint, looking into the history, the mythology. I was curious about Ancient Sumerian myths and the origins of the bible. I switched to a community college, and when I asked myself what I believed I realized that I only ever wanted to believe things that were true and proven to be true. My faith had been taken advantage of. And If God did exist, he was such a raging asshole that I saw no point in worshiping him on a “maybe” 

So, I’m now I’m an atheist who celebrates pagan holidays because I enjoy the ritual and find comfort in nature and the passing of the seasons. I haven’t watched Fox News in years. Politically, I’d describe myself as a humanist and very anti-capitalist. I support Andrew Yang.