That is an excellent point!

I suppose in some sense there is no separation between the individual and the society, so a personal change spreads to society like ripples in a pond.

Nevertheless, there are delays and interference patterns with other people's actions, so sometimes one may feel saddened that even after great personal efforts and seeing other people's potentials, the macro context impedes many significant advances.

For me, there is a constant focusing and refocusing on different levels of existence. When I'm working on myself and appreciating my surroundings and lucky personal situation, it brings deep happiness and gratitude. I try to spread love to those around and this fulfills me. But then I face someone else's unavoidable misery and it's hard to feel content about my own fortunes. So I wonder about how we could promote even bigger changes to avoid some of those situations.

Humans have a profoundly strong instinct for interspecies competition and we tend to let it get out of hand.

That's an interesting and well written article.

But when you speak of a new monetary system, do you mean cryptocurrencies? Because i think they are not completely void of some of the problems of old money either.
For instance, by speculative trade in currencies, you can "produce money" out of thin air, without providing any goods or services.

If you buy bitcoins or ethereums when the value is low, and sell them when the value has risen, you'll have earned money without realy doing anything, and if you are good at it, the effect is even exponential.

I think your comments are reasonable, though I think if you look at it from a broader perspective you'll be able to understand why it's more complex than that.

First of all I'd like to say that I only really believe in bitcoin. It is the only one with a fair launch, no pre-mine or initial distribution to founders. I think digital scarcity is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery that can't be copied.. Also very importantly, bitcoin has no leader, no central point of failure, is truly decentralized and is the only one that can really stand state-level attacks..

While in this moment we have a lot of random coins going up in price, I'd consider that more akin to gambling with something that has no fundamentals. It's easy to have things doing good when everything is going well, but can any of those coins really stand state-level attacks, enemies with billions of dollars trying to disrupt it from within? IMO they can't, and they won't. They are imo failed experiments in action, like alternatives to TCP/IP which have been completely forgotten, almost erased from the history books.

Also, I don't believe in trading, I believe in buying and holding till the old corrupted system has been toppled over. You are completely right that trading provides no goods and services.

That being said, regarding where the value comes from if you buy bitcoin for cheap and it raises in price, lets think about it for a moment. How does something become money ? IF bitcoin was to become true money, how else would it happen other than a volatile path upwards in value as adoption grows, before it stabilizes at the top?

Think of gold for example, it had thousands of years to become globally accepted as money. What about the first person that found gold, imagine him trying to sell it to others and people being like: "are you nuts, why would I trade my cow for this shiny rock?". At first it was worth nothing, over time it probably had ups and downs based on people believing it would work out or not. It took many many iterations of social interactions related to gold before it stabilized in value. Price discovery is a dynamic process.

Also, consider that the value increasing is not coming out of thin air, it is being drained from other stores of value. Sound money drives out unsound money, as monetary systems converge to one. Simple supply and demand at play will show that the more people want bitcoin, the more it raises in price, while at the same time people are selling other assets or currencies to buy bitcoin which means lowering of prices of these other assets.

This probably deserves its own thread but I just wanted to answer your concerns here

i often wonder that if by default, everything, the good, bad, beautiful and the ugly are not all perfectly as they should and are supposed to be for this material 3 dimentional human existence, or physical life in general to continue to exist and evolve.. we all have the power to chose, and take action to steer life in any direction we chose. without emotional pain, we would all be narcissistic, without narcissistic people to show us what our emmotions do for us we would not know their value.

Yes I am trying to remember if Terence has ever said this, if so that is where this came from: It seems plausible that DNA specifically developed human beings so that we both could and would, at some point in our development, reach the capacity to prevent severe asteroid and comet impacts.

It almost seems inevitable that due to requiring exceptionally strange and powerful technology, to reach the capacity, there would arise the burdens of corruption and that humans are causing extinctions.

As far as how DNA would know, it seems to me that DNA has known how to make every different lifeform that has ever existed, and did in fact manage to produce a species that could confront asteroids!!

without aggression we would evolve at a slugs pace

all the attributes that we use irresponsibly and cause harm with, we couldnt live without

everything is perfectly as it should and is supposed to be. it is our job to master it. we have far to go.

from an evolutionary perspective, we are still drinking our milk from a bottle and throwing temper tantrums when we dont get what we want.

I never realy had any thoughts about the monetary system. But it is true that something has changed since 2008.

I used to be very optimistic about the world we live in, but when i look at how all the crises thrown at us have been dealt with since then....

There seems to be a sort of apathy among people, especially our leaders, that i find worrying.

We're totally not prepared for other crises that are coming or likely coming.

I've heard a politician say in an interview, that we could have started vaccination months earlier, but that that would have required us to circumvent rules and regulations.

While people are dying everyday.

With the refugee crisis, wich is a big, ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, i see the same thing. It is simply being reasoned away with talk about procedures, treaties and protocols.

It radiates a kind of apathy that i just don't understand. It realy is an attitude problem in my view. I don't know what causes it, but it didn't use to be that way. People used to care more.

With that attitude i don't see us solving climate change, or preparing for a coronal mass ejection either.

So maybe i think that apathy is the root of our problems today. But there must be something causing this apathy. Is it corruption? Or has our whole system simply reached it's date of expiration? Or is it a side effect of an aging population? The older people get, the less they seem to care.

I don't know, but something has to change. It will never be a perfect world without suffering. But i think that when you stop caring, you stop living. You're basically dead.

A small but dynamic part of the preservation of apathy and missing care, is that new forms of language haven't happened yet.
Here i am definitely remembering Terence's ideas about there being new potential languages.

There would need to be forms of language that are specifically developed to maintain and enhance the ability to be caring. this could certainly be a reworked version of verbal language as it stands today, a change in the metabolism of language.

After all, there is tendency with the current language formats toward statement-making; which does not usually attempt to form a circuit with the persons' present emotional and intellectual wherewithall, rather, a depositing.
We have languages that people self-report only being able to read or speak for a given duration until they experience various emotional and intellectual frictions, as well as that these can happen throughout conversations or when reading written languages in their current format.

So, it really does seem that the parts of ourselves that would never tire of experiencing language, and would never stop caring, aren't being communicated to/with in the correct format yet!

I don't think we have such an answer yet. however through pragya aparadh, which is the mistake of the intellect. There's many ways one can fix their paradigm and give themselves reliable clarity of awareness. Delving into pure consciousness is a great way of fixing one's priorities and what should matter in life. I'd say people need to meditate more.

I was going to add that in a different way in one of my other long posts but thought it already sounded depressing (probably still did though). What you said is true though. Wars have pushed forward more advances than anything. People talk a lot about weapons made for war and how no one should own them, but there’s plenty of things we use everyday that only came about to use in warfare. Opposite is also true, things that didn’t have war written anywhere on them, found their use only for war. Most importantly though is the people that work or think this stuff up go back to civilization life and apply what they know to this side.

To the overall discussion -
I think the world is perfect. Everything works as it should. The only time people really talk about how it’s not is when we talk about the world in relation to people. It was all here operating before us and most likely will after. We don’t even know how it all works. Everyday is a new discovery. Same thing for our own bodies. I think of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot whenever I these discussions come up. Because on that scale both the good and the bad of anything we do sounds ridiculous. When it comes to the distinctions of what makes something good or bad, are these finite definitions or personal? Right and wrong all over the world is extremely flexible and in some areas reversed. It’s like the saying goes that when you hunt for monsters don’t become one.

I’d two people have violently conflicting understandings of right and wrong, just and unjust. Is there a good and bad in that conflict? You can easily say the conflict is bad but both sides will still leave with their beliefs. Would it be right to tell a people their culture and customs is bad? Despite however long they may have had them or whatever it means to them? Can you force change on someone else for a better tomorrow even if it means hurting people today? Can go for slow integration but people would still be getting hurt but for longer and the attempt may fail and you just added to what you believe to be misery.

It’s these flexibility’s in the understandings of right and wrong that I see as both a massive strength and a weakness. Because it means people are free to choose for themselves and explore ideas. But it also means some are going to differ drastically and get into some sort of conflict. I think conflict is as necessary for people as water. It’ll satisfy itself somewhere.

We talk a lot about what is right and wrong. But are those concepts the problem too? Suppose we didn’t morally label everything and looked at it as just something that happened. Might have to calls us computers and that point though. If there’s no feeling behind what we do we’d never bother doing anything. Even the most analytical has an emotional drive. They feel something.

How about making basic living necessities such as food, healthcare, water, education, and shelter free for all human beings. I suggest starting here.

I think the answer to that is automation, which will allow us to introduce a UBI.

We need to get rid of the "people need jobs" mindset and acknowledge it's money they need.
Fire people, hire machines.

In the future, only those with interesting, creative or innovative professions will have jobs - artists, designers, engineers, scientists etc. They will work because they will want to, and for no other reason.

Solving that problem will solve many other problems. The need to work is the source of a lot of evil in the world; people steal so they can retire, rape and kill because they're frustrated in their wage slavery.
A UBI will end wage slavery; it will decouple money from work, and the strong emotion around money, which for most people comes from selling their time and therefore their lives.

Greed also comes from financial insecurity and other insecurities stemming from that.
People want to be millionaires, because e.g. if you get cancer and need money for treatment, it's better to have it than not to.

A friend of mine made a social media post where he complained about automated checkouts in supermarkets replacing human cashiers.
My answer to that is if a job can be done by a machine, it's not needed.

If creating jobs for their own sake is good, regardless of whether they're needed or not, why not pay the construction industry to erect buildings and then demolish them? Or farmers to grow food and then burn it? Imagine how many pointless jobs it would create and how many people it would put in the illusion that their work is needed, if that's the goal.
But we can set ourselves a smarter goal and just give them the money without requiring them to perform silly no-ops with the side effect of wasting resources.

We're a long way from a UBI, and we'll probably get there by continuing on the path of reducing work hours, afforded by increasing productivity through automation.

If work is a virtue, designing a machine that will work for you is a virtue to the n-th power.

I think it would be better that these are not free, but abundant and fairly distributed so you can make your own living without excessive stress, like animals do.

those are already free, and it takes only a very basic survival perspective to learn and practice having them for free