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What It Means To Be Human

Dec 102021

December 10, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:15 pm Finance Tagged with: Assange, children, CIA, COVID, human, independent, Julian Assange, lemmings, mRNA, sheep, vaccination 18 Responses »

William-Adolphe Bouguereau Whisperings of Love 1889

What’s the difference between Julian Assange being robbed of his freedom for 12 years and you being robbed of yours for two? From a legal point of view, very little. Because both are based on, “justified by”, no existing laws. They are based on people who happen to have grabbed power, interpreting existing law in their own favor, aided and abetted by their respective judicial branches.

Assange being told he can have no life, or freedom, today, despite never having been formally accused, let alone convicted, of a crime, is no different than someone in Austria threatened with being imprisoned because they don’t want to be vaxxed with an experimental substance. Neither will have broken an existing and valid law, still both will end up behind bars.

I support people who say it should be everyone’s own choice whether they want to be vaccinated with mRNA or not, but I doubt that more than 2% know even what that is, what it does, and what it still may do to them, and to their children. Informed consent is not just some abstract idea, even if it is treated as such.

The vast majority of people who are coerced into being jabbed, are undoubtedly the same ones who pay no attention to what is happening to Julian Assange. They just read and watch the media they always have, and their media tells them only what the owners and sponsors of the channels and papers want to let them know.

Nothing to do with what is important to their lives, or their freedoms, just a narrow passage way in which their lives are “allowed” to take place. And nothing to do with what that may mean to the lives and freedoms of their children, or to Assange, whose “crime” is he tried to warn them about all this coming.

You cannot talk about what government agencies, like the army or secret services, do behind the curtains, that is against “the law”. And if you do, they will say that itself is against the law. It isn’t, but who cares if they find some judge who says it is anyway?

By the same token, you cannot refuse to be jabbed with some untested thing, and then again and again, because some judge will declare that refusing it is against the law. Even if there’s no such law, but there are plenty laws -including weighty international ones- that say it is not.

All three branches of government, along with industry -in this case the pharmaceutical industry, in Assange’s case the secrecy industry-, are lined up against you, just in case you might want to express an opinion that doesn’t coincide with the narrative they have devised for you, your family, your community.

You are now no longer a human being. Not in the sense that western democracies once defined it. You still have two legs and a nose, but your brain has been switched off beyond the point where it is (was?!) capable of original and independent thought. Yes, that is you, today.

You never realized it, and how could you, but you are now among the first specimens of a whole new kind of “human” being. Which historians of the future will be sure is proof of a cross between humans and sheep. Either that or a very serious deterioration of brain power, even if no such thing might show up in an autopsy.

Letting your 2 year old child be injected with spike proteins is the exact same thing as letting Julian Assange rot in some prison because the CIA doesn’t like their secrets spilled. Both signal the end of your ability to think for yourself, to make your own decisions, and down the line, obviously, to protect the people, your spouse, your kids, your family, who are dearest to you.

Because no, you do not protect them by giving in to illegal demands about either what you are free to say and do, or to your freedom to not get inoculated with some commercial chemical product. You may think there is safety in complying with the behavior of the crowd, but the bottom of the sea is full of lemmings who had that exact same thought.

Standing up for Julian Assange equals standing up for the rights and freedoms of your children. Who you, make no mistake, surrender to the wolves if you don’t speak up. We do not live in times where these is safety in crowds or in silence. That is not an option.

Or it is, but then we must give up all that makes us human, all that is essential to being who we -potentially- are, essential to your beautiful kids living up to their full potential. Which they cannot possibly do if they follow your example and not use their voices to voice what their brains tell them. You’ll end up halfway murdering your children, just like you’re actively murdering yourself today.

But I have a successful career! I have smart kids! I have a nice house! I have a great car, and the next will be an electric one! Yeah, we know, we know.

It’s just that the essence of a human being is to not be a sheep or a lemming. The essence of a human being is not a house or a car, it is courage, and empathy, and love, and independent thought, independent living.

If we fail to defend the best and brightest and bravest amongst us – that would be Julian – how can we hope to defend the less bright and brave, our very children, and what would it even be worth if we do?

What the Assange sorry story, and the blown out of all proportions Covid debacle, make me think is that we live in a turning point of history. The information age has grown up faster than we have, than we ever could.

And it’s leaving us behind. The only defense mechanism we have left is a deep notion of what it means to be human, and how that divides us from other living species, or even from machines. And we are failing.

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Debt Rattle April 11 2018

Apr 112018

April 11, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: airstrike, bitcoin, Facebook, Greece, human, jamming, missiles, Russia, Syria, targeted ads, Trump, war, Zuckerberg 11 Responses »

Jan van Eyck The Last Judgement (detail) 1430

• Hussman’s Script For A 60% Tumble In The Stock Market (MW)

• World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart – Lagarde (G.)

• Eurocontrol Warns Airlines Of Possible Missile Strikes Into Syria (R.)

• Russian Envoy: Any US Missiles Fired At Syria Will Be Shot Down (R.)

• We All Need To Unite Against War In Syria (CJ)

• Zuckerberg Deflects Senators’ Questions, Gets $3 Billion For The Effort (MW)

• Ban Targeted Advertising (Dayen)

• EU Top Court Backs France Ban Of Uber (AFP)

• Barclays Says Bitcoin Behaves Like An Infectious Disease (BBG)

• The Failures of Anti-Trumpism (NYT)

• Save the Children Faces Formal Investigation Over Staff Misconduct (G.)

• Greece at Bottom of Eurozone Growth Rate (GR)

• More Than Half Your Body Is Not Human (BBC)

“Investment is about valuation. Speculation is about psychology,” Hussman said. “Both factors are unfavorable here.”

• Hussman’s Script For A 60% Tumble In The Stock Market (MW)

Enjoy days like this while they last, warns longtime bear John Hussman, because the volatility we’re seeing on the Dow and the S&P 500 only serves to reinforce his pessimistic view that the stock market is careening toward a painful drop of at least 60% and a decade or more of zero to negative returns. “We’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market,” the Hussman Trust president wrote in his latest missive. “To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.”

For those of you feeling a bit queasy because of what Hussman describes as the “rather minimal level of volatility” we’ve seen lately, it’s time to make some changes and rebalance your portfolio with some hedges, or at least lighten up by adding cash. “But do so knowing one thing in advance: you will experience regret,” he says. “If the market advances after you rebalance, you’ll regret having sold anything. If the market declines after you rebalance, you’ll regret not having sold more.”

The driving factor he frequently cites for the top-heavy market is that the Fed’s quantitative easing has inflated valuations to unsustainable levels, and as the free money goes away, the bottom will fall out, leaving a trail of blown-up investors in its wake. “Investment is about valuation. Speculation is about psychology,” Hussman said. “Both factors are unfavorable here.” He used this chart or the median price/revenue ratio of S&P components to show just how overvalued stocks are at this point, even after the recent tumble:

Because the trade system benefits everyone, right?

• World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart – Lagarde (G.)

The head of the IMF has warned of “darker clouds looming” for the global economy amid simmering trade tensions between the US and China, urging governments around the world to steer clear of protectionism or face negative consequences. Christine Lagarde said the current system for world trade was “in danger of being torn apart”, with the potential to upset the present global economic upswing and make consumers poorer. Speaking in Hong Kong amid signs the standoff could be abating, Lagarde said it would be an “inexcusable, collective policy failure” for world trade to break down with nations erecting punitive tariff systems against their rivals. “Let us redouble our efforts to reduce trade barriers and resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures,” she said.

[..] Using language that could be interpreted as a veiled attack on Trump in the speech ahead of the meeting, Lagarde said nations could make domestic policy changes to address trade imbalances and use international forums to settle disputes. “We can all do more – but we cannot do it alone,” she said. “Unfair trade practices have little impact on a country’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world. That imbalance is driven by the fact that a country spends above its income.” Identifying the US as an example of a nation that could benefit from reforms, she said Washington could help tackle its trade imbalances by gradually curbing public spending and by increasing revenue, which she said would help reduce future fiscal deficits.

Jamming.

• Eurocontrol Warns Airlines Of Possible Missile Strikes Into Syria (R.)

Pan-European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol on Tuesday warned airlines to exercise caution in the eastern Mediterranean due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria in next 72 hours. Eurocontrol said that air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles could be used within that period and there was a possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment. U.S. President Donald Trump and Western allies are discussing possible military action to punish Syria’s President Bashar Assad for a suspected poison gas attack on Saturday on a rebel-held town that long had held out against government forces.

Trump on Tuesday canceled a planned trip to Latin America later this week to focus instead on responding to the Syria incident, the White House said. Trump had on Monday warned of a quick, forceful response once responsibility for the Syria attack was established. The Eurocontrol warning on its website did not specify the origin of any potential missile threat. “Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR area,” it said, referring to the designated airspace.

Clear as that.

• Russian Envoy: Any US Missiles Fired At Syria Will Be Shot Down (R.)

Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted, a step that could trigger a major escalation in the Syrian war. Russian Ambassador Alexander Zasypkin, in comments broadcast on Tuesday evening, said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff. The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria, targeting any missiles and launchers involved in such an attack. Russia is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally.

The United States and its allies are considering whether to hit Syria over a suspected poison gas attack that medical relief organizations say killed dozens of people in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on Saturday. “If there is a strike by the Americans, then…the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired,” Zasypkin told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV, speaking in Arabic. He also said a clash “should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations”.

Yes, we do. But it’s very late in the game.

• We All Need To Unite Against War In Syria (CJ)

Last night Fox’s Tucker Carlson did what may have been the most amazing thing that has ever happened on American television. As the drums of war beat louder than they have in years, Carlson stared right into the camera and did the exact opposite of what every mainstream US pundit is doing right now: he told the truth. He told the truth about Syria. He told the truth about Yemen. He told the truth about the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. He told the truth about the bipartisan war machine which drops all pretense of opposition the instant it’s time for bloodshed. He told the truth about what war is, what it costs, and what it does to our world.

He stood in stark, unequivocal opposition to the trajectory the Trump administration appears to be moving along. And he did it on Fox News. I have a deep and abiding hatred in my heart for Fox News and all things Murdoch. I will never forget nor forgive the key role the Murdoch press played in deceiving our world into the unimaginable evil that was the Iraq invasion. But if I’d held a reflexive rejection of anything with the Fox News logo in the corner, I never would have seen Carlson’s epic monologue, never would have shared it with my social media following, never would have embedded it in this article, and this bright flash of truth would have been diminished by that much in the impact it was able to have on public consciousness.

And I know that there are many leftists who declined to help spread awareness of that Carlson monologue based solely on the fact that he’s a conservative pundit on a conservative network who has said things they disagree with in the past. This is stupid. We should be able to throw any weapon at all at the war machine, not fight with one hand tied behind our backs just because we don’t like conservatives.

It was even worse than imagined.

• Zuckerberg Deflects Senators’ Questions, Gets $3 Billion For The Effort (MW)

Mark Zuckerberg has come far since the early days of Facebook, and that growth was extremely apparent in how deftly the chief executive dealt with several hours of inscrutable questioning by U.S. senators Tuesday over the social network’s role in presidential election-meddling and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Wearing a conservative suit and light blue tie, an outfit he would rarely wear in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg sat ramrod straight in his witness chair for most of the many hours of questions. He responded to each questioner by first addressing them as senator or chair. He looked earnest and serious for almost every question, even during some of the laughable questions from some of the less tech-savvy members of the Senate, such as the one by Sen. Orrin Hatch, who asked how Facebook makes money if it doesn’t charge users anything.

“Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg said with a smile. That calm response was in marked contrast to when Zuckerberg faced another type of grilling, at the All Things D conference in 2010, when he gave vague and rambling answers about Facebook’s changes to its privacy controls at the time, and had to take off his famous hoodie while wiping sweat from his face under the lights on stage. Part of his preparedness for the Senate hearing, where he managed to repeat several core phrases that the company has been perpetuating in the media, came as a result of Facebook’s information bombardment over the past month.

Some of the company’s obvious talking points have been repeated throughout the past weeks, such as how sorry Zuckerberg is, how much control Facebook users actually do have over their own data, how Facebook is trying to build a positive community and constant reminders of how the company started in a Harvard University dorm when he was 19. According to the New York Times, Facebook hired a team of experts to give Zuckerberg — who can be combative and defensive — a crash course in humility and charm ahead of the hearing in sessions that included mock hearings with its communications team and outside advisers. That preparation paid off: After the first two hours of questions were nearing an end and there was a call for a potential break, Zuckerberg took a sip of water and said he could keep going for a bit longer.

Exactly. Stop that and all the Facebok nonsense stops. But those in power don’t want it to stop.

• Ban Targeted Advertising (Dayen)

For the first 35 years of my life, like most Americans, I was exposed to lots of advertising. I absorbed billboards and print ads and direct mailers and television commercials and radio jingles. I learned about available products and services, and chose which ones I wanted. Some businesses I patronized survived and others didn’t. The economy mostly proceeded apace. Then, over the last decade, this form of marketing became seen as insufficient—or rather, the rise of digital media made a more invasive form of marketing too irresistible. Instead of having to cast a wide net in searching for potential customers, advertisers now could know every intimate detail about those customers beforehand.

They began targeting people geographically and behaviorally, based on common interests or things they liked in social media or what they wrote in emails to friends. The surveillance economy was born. The surveillance economy should die. This manner of advertising doesn’t serve the public and it’s not even clear it serves advertisers. It facilitates monopoly, as those with the biggest data troves receive all the ad dollars. That centralizes the potential for and magnitude of abuse, with Big Data used to discriminate against groups, steer vulnerable people to financial scams, and meddle in U.S. elections.

Cambridge Analytica’s scraping of 87 million user profiles through a simple personality quiz, and then weaponizing that information on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, revealed how information on social media is inherently insecure. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is appearing before Congress on Tuesday to explain how this won’t happen again. But instead of leaving regulation to Facebook, or devising one Rube Goldberg scenario after another to try to protect consumer data, the U.S. can take one simple, legal step to roll back this dystopian nightmare: ban targeted advertising.

App or transport?

• EU Top Court Backs France Ban Of Uber (AFP)

The EU’s top court on Tuesday backed the right of member states like France to ban a service by ridesharing firm Uber without notifying Brussels, in a fresh setback to the US giant. The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of France’s ban of the UberPop service, which links amateur drivers with customers, comparing it to a December decision backing traditional taxi firms in the Spanish city of Barcelona. “Member States may prohibit and punish, as a matter of criminal law, the illegal exercise of transport activities in the context of the UberPop service, without notifying the Commission in advance,” the European Court of Justice ruled. [..]

Uber France is facing criminal proceedings in a court in the northern French city of Lille for its UberPop service. It argues that member states like France were required to notify the European Commission about the criminal legislation under which the case was brought because it concerned a technical regulation of an information society service. But the court of justice said the French case resembled one it ruled on in December when it classified Uber as an ordinary transportation company instead of an app and should be regulated as such. “In the Court’s view, the UberPop service offered in France is essentially identical to the service provided in Spain,” the court of justice statement said.

True or not, a nice angle.

• Barclays Says Bitcoin Behaves Like An Infectious Disease (BBG)

Is the rise of Bitcoin analogous to the spread of an infectious disease? Analysts at Barclays saw enough similarities to develop a pricing model for the cryptocurrency that takes its cues from the world of epidemiology. Their diagnosis: Bitcoin has probably peaked. The Barclays model divides the pool of potential Bitcoin investors into three groups: susceptible, infected and immune. It assumes that as prices rise, “infections” spread by word-of-mouth (nobody likes missing out when their friends and colleagues are getting rich). Barclays analysts led by Joseph Abate in New York explained the rest in a note to clients on Tuesday:

“As more of the population become asset holders, the share of the population available to become new buyers – the potential ‘host’ population – falls, while the share of the population that are potential sellers (‘recoveries’) increases. Eventually, this leads to a plateauing of prices, and progressively, as random shocks to the larger supply population push up the ratio of sellers to buyers, prices begin to fall. That induces speculative selling pressure as price declines are projected forward exponentially.” A similar dynamic plays out with infectious diseases when the so-called immunity threshold is reached, “the point at which a sufficient portion of the population becomes immune such that there are no more secondary infections,” the analysts wrote.

Does David Brooks realize that anti-Trumpism, of which he’s a proud supporter, is what won Da Doland da election?

• The Failures of Anti-Trumpism (NYT)

Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure. We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40%, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along. We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less. We have not dislodged him.

For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration. We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. 89% of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59% of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party. On trade, immigration, entitlement reform, spending, foreign policy, race relations and personal morality, this is Trump’s party, not Reagan’s or anyone else’s. A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way.

I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train. National Review was once staunchly anti-Trump, and many of its writers remain so, but, tellingly, N.R. editor Rich Lowry just had a column in Politico called “The Never Trump Delusion” arguing that Trump is not that big a departure from the Republican mainstream. The surest evidence of Trump’s dominance is on the campaign trail. As The Times’s Jonathan Martin reported, many Republicans, including Ted Cruz, are making the argument that if Democrats take over Congress, they will impeach the president. In other words, far from ignoring Trump, these Republicans are making defending him the center of their campaigns.

Et tu, Brute?

• Save the Children Faces Formal Investigation Over Staff Misconduct (G.)

Save the Children, the global charity mired in allegations that it failed to investigate sexual abuse and inappropriate behaviour by staff, is to be formally investigated by the Charity Commission. In a statement announcing a statutory inquiry, the commission said it had been prompted by “concerns about the charity’s handling, reporting and response to serious allegations of misconduct and harassment against senior staff members in 2012 and 2015”. The commission describes a statutory inquiry as its “most serious form of engagement” with a charity.

The news, announced on Tuesday night, will be another blow for the charity two months after it emerged that both Justin Forsyth, its former chief executive, and Brendan Cox, the former policy director and widower of the MP Jo Cox, left the charity in 2015 following allegations of misconduct. The two men knew each other from their years working for Gordon Brown and the Labour party. After he left Save the Children, Forsyth went on to a senior role at Unicef. He resigned in February after the reports of inappropriate behaviour emerged. Cox also resigned from the charities More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation, set up in the aftermath of his wife’s murder.

The commission, which itself has been criticised for failing to follow up allegations involving the charities it polices, has been working with Save the Children since the facts about Forsyth and Cox emerged in the wake of the scandal involving Oxfam workers in Haiti. Save the Children is already reviewing its workplace culture and the implementation of recommendations made by a previous review. But the Charity Commission said its recent work with it, and new information from other sources that has recently come into the regulator’s possession, meant that the commission wanted to make further inquiries.

It’s crazy to think the Greek economy is growing.

• Greece at Bottom of Eurozone Growth Rate (GR)

Greece’s growth was the lowest among eurozone countries for 2017, with a GDP rise of just 1.4% while the eurozone average was 2.3%, according to European Central Bank figures. The ECB annual report released on Monday showed Ireland at the top of the growth chart among eurozone member states with a 5% GDP increase. Overall, 2017 was a year of growth for the whole of the single-currency bloc. According to the report, the main reason Greece fared so low in 2017 was that it showed only 0.1% growth in private consumption, compared to an average 1.6% increase in the rest of eurozone states.

At the same time, Greece showed a 1.1% decline in government spending, while the average in the euro area was a 1.2% increase. In terms of per capita GDP at current prices and adjusted for the cost of living, Greeks have an average annual income of €19,900 ($24,527) compared to €54,600 for each Irish citizen. In Portugal, average income amounted to €23,100, compared to €18,100 before the economic crisis. In Cyprus, the average income was €24,600 compared to €29,900 before the crisis. The “before the economic crisis” figures refer to the 1999-2008 period. On average in the euro area, per capita GDP stood at €31,700 according to the latest figures (2016), compared to €24,400 before the crisis.

Bugs as drugs. “Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.”

Well, our genes are outnumbered 1000 to 1.

• More Than Half Your Body Is Not Human (BBC)

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists. Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists. Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s. The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result. “They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”. No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels. Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.” Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says. But genetically we’re even more outgunned. The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes. But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

[..] Antibiotics and vaccines have been the weapons unleashed against the likes of smallpox, Mycobacterium tuberculosis or MRSA. That’s been a good thing and has saved large numbers of lives. But some researchers are concerned that our assault on the bad guys has done untold damage to our “good bacteria”. Prof Ley told me: “We have over the past 50 years done a terrific job of eliminating infectious disease. “But we have seen an enormous and terrifying increase in autoimmune disease and in allergy. “Where work on the microbiome comes in is seeing how changes in the microbiome, that happened as a result of the success we’ve had fighting pathogens, have now contributed to a whole new set of diseases that we have to deal with.”

The Meaning of Your Life is Other People

Jan 022015

January 2, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:06 pm Finance Tagged with: climate change, economic, education, human, predator, Sartre 9 Responses »

Gordon Parks A scene at the Fulton Fish Market, New York Jun 1943

In his 1944 play Huis Clos (loosely yet officially translated as No Exit, or Closed Door), French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Or: Hell is (the) other people. Which can be very true. And Sartre makes his point in a masterful way. He describes a group of people locked up together with no escape, and for eternity, who have a bitter go at each other. Something we all recognize. People can be a nuisance, and even drive one as far as suicide.

But then, the opposite is just as true. In more ways than one. Not only is hell the absence of other people (though I know there are monks who choose full separation), but heaven is the other people too. Or, as normal mortals would say: ‘(Wo)men, can’t live with them, can’t live without them’. Or something along those lines.

It’s who we are. We are social animals. Lions, not tigers. We’re tribal. We cannot give our lives meaning of and by ourselves, we need the other people to give it meaning. Though you may have gotten a different notion in your lifetime, the meaning of your life cannot be measured by something as fleeting as the size of your bank account. It cannot even by measured at all by ‘you’ yourself. Our lives derive their meaning from other people’s lives.

Over the Christmas season, many versions of Dickens’ Scrooge passed by our screens again. He’s a good example to use. In the beginning of the story, Scrooge is wealthy but his life has no meaning. That is Dickens’ core message. His life means nothing. It isn’t until he starts caring about others, and in the process giving – some of – his wealth away, that his life becomes meaningful. This is not a value judgment, and it isn’t for any religious or even philosophical reasons, it’s simple biology.

Religious leaders like Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, get it. The ebola nurses and doctors get it. But that’s not nearly enough. We should all realize who we really are, and why. We all resemble Scrooge much more than we’re willing to admit. Problem is, we have no education system left to tell us about it. Our schools and colleges instead tell us to compete: our education focuses on the ‘Hell Is The Others’ side of our brains. The ‘Heaven Is The Others’ side is out of fashion.

And the education system is not the only problem. We also have a very big problem in that our present economic system doesn’t reflect, or fit in with, our natural-born psychology, our inbuilt mental set-up. Our economic system reflects, and appeals to, the part of our brain that tells us to outdo others, not cooperate with them.

Of course this is a complex issue, if only because our brains just happen to be made up of different parts. Still, if we are ever to enable the newest part of it, that which makes us human, and sets us apart from our non-human ancestors, from the simplest amoeba to far more advanced primates, to take control, if we are ever to achieve that, we will first have to recognize things for what they are. And then act on that.

Endless and forever competition from our earliest childhood days all the way to our graves clearly doesn’t seem the way to go. Look around you. It makes us destructive beings. It makes us unkind to each other, and distant from one another. Those are the very things that tear apart the social fabric our very biology says we need. If we don’t make a strong conscious effort to allow our ‘human brain’ to control our ‘animal brain’, we have no chance, we will be lost. Today, what we do is use our human intelligence to amplify the destructive properties of our animal brain.

This is evident in what we are doing to our living environment. We are at present no better than the yeast in the wine vat, who multiply at fast as they can until all the sugar is gone and then die off in the blink of an eye. Only, for us, the earth itself is both our wine vat and our sugar, and unlike the yeast we can do grave danger to our entire environment. We’re not just killing ourselves, we’re murdering just about everything around us.

A wonderful image of how this works, one that should make us think, was painted last week in the LA Times by James K. Boyce, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

• Amid Climate Change, What’s More Important? Protecting Money Or People?

[..] .. it is too late to prevent climate change, no matter how fast we ultimately act to limit it. [We] now confront an issue that many had hoped to avoid: adaptation. Adapting to climate change will carry a high price tag. [..] Because adaptation won’t come cheap, we must decide which investments are worth the cost.

A thought experiment illustrates the choices we face. Imagine that without major new investments in adaptation, climate change will cause world incomes to fall in the next two decades by 25% across the board, with everyone’s income going down, from the poorest farmworker in Bangladesh to the wealthiest real estate baron in Manhattan. Adaptation can cushion some but not all of these losses. What should be our priority: reduce losses for the farmworker or the baron?

For the farmworker, and a billion others in the world who live on about $1 a day, this 25% income loss will be a disaster, perhaps the difference between life and death. Yet in dollars, the loss is just 25 cents a day. For the land baron and other “one-percenters” in the U.S. with average incomes of about $2,000 a day, the 25% income loss would be a matter of regret, not survival. He’ll find a way to get by on $1,500 a day. In human terms, the baron’s loss pales compared with that of the farmworker. But in dollar terms, it’s 2,000 times larger.

Conventional economic models would prescribe spending more to protect the barons than the farmworkers of the world. The rationale was set forth with brutal clarity in a memorandum leaked in 1992 that was signed by Lawrence Summers, then chief economist of the World Bank. The memo asked whether the bank should encourage more migration of dirty industries to developing countries and concluded that “the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Climate change is just a new kind of toxic waste.

The “economic logic” of the Summers memo – later said to have been penned tongue-in-cheek to provoke debate, which it certainly did – rests on a doctrine of “efficiency” that counts all dollars equally. Whether it goes to a starving child or a millionaire, a dollar is a dollar. [..] A different way to set adaptation priorities is to count each person equally, not each dollar. This approach rests on the ethical principle that a healthy environment is a human right, not a commodity to be distributed on the basis of purchasing power, or a privilege to be distributed on the basis of political power.

This equity principle is widely embraced around the world, from the affirmation in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that people have an inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” to the guarantee in the South African Constitution that everyone has the right “to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being.” It puts safeguarding the lives of the poor ahead of safeguarding the property of the rich.

In the years ahead, climate change will confront the world with hard choices: whether to protect as many dollars as possible, or to protect as many people as we can.

It’s obvious. The choice is, as I wrote above, between human terms or dollar terms. In which dollar terms stands for choosing the primitive parts of our brain. Most likely, given the way we have organized our societies, our education systems and our economic systems, the rich part of the world will spend hundreds of billions protecting their sea-side villas, while entire poorer nations, and the people living in them, threaten to disappear.

In our own countries as well, that choice will be made, favoring well-to-do over poor. After all, what are the economic reasons for water-proofing a slum? Where 10,000 people can each afford to maybe contribute $100 to the work, while a ‘baron’ can easily afford $10 million to secure his summer home a few miles away?

In today’s world, it’s not even a question. But then in today’s world, money rules the political system, which should in an ideal world be holding a society together, not tearing it apart. Which it very much does. Our political systems separate the rich from the poor, like they’re not of the same species, like there’s nothing that ties them together.

It probably doesn’t even sound as a actual choice to you. You most likely think that these things go as they do, that ‘they’ have all the power anyway and there’s nothing you can do. But that doesn’t seem very human, does it, and certainly not very American, to just give up without a fight. And it’s starting to look as if you don’t stand up now for your self, your progeny and all other people, you needn’t bother anymore.

Then again, perhaps it’s not all that hard. We have a spectacularly failed economic system anyway, and we’re in dire need of a new one. So why not catch two birds with one stone (sorry, Tweetie, just an expression) and redo both our education systems and our economic systems, and make sure our adaptation to climate change gets organized on a one man one vote, instead of a one dollar one vote basis? It’s a place to start. Try and recognize which part of you, yourself, is a dumb predator and which part is a ‘social being human’. And pick the latter for all of your future decisions.

And teach yourself, and your kids, that Scrooge is you, we are all Scrooge, that’s what Dickens meant to say, and that the meaning of your life, too, derives its meaning from other people’s lives, not from itself. Once you got that down, you’re halfway there.

We tend towards thinking our ‘elected’ political leaders should, and will, take care of issues such as these, and in a fair way too. But in fact they’re the very last ones who will do so. Because they owe their positions to the very educational and economic systems that have ‘designed’ the way things are running out of hand.

We need to move, our societies, and the entire earth, need us to move to a ‘people’, as opposed to a ‘dollar’, point of view.

The separation between rich and poor doesn’t of course only come to the fore in climate change adaptation issues. We’re living today inside these narratives of an economic recovery, at the same time that poverty even in western societies rises fast. The rich are doing well, and that’s what we see reflected in ‘official’ economic numbers. But it’s all just pure predation.

What you can do is perhaps to vote for another party, but in many countries that’s not an option, the status quo has far too firm a handle on the entire political system. So you’re going to have to come up with something else, and if need be, take to the streets. Or the internet.

And as you do, think about Scrooge, and about to what extent his fictional, intentionally over the top caricaturized, persona reflects the real life you. As I said, once you got that down, you’re halfway there.