Son of the Ford Foundation

Son of the Ford Foundation (SFF): This is Zach.

ALL: Hello Zach!

Zach: I eat when I find things.

Me: What is going on?

ALL: [talking over one another]

SFF: We need to dazzle the riddle!

ALL: Huzzah!

Me: Look, I bought a ticket at the bus stop in Minneapolis and got on this bus because it said "Albuquerque." Why are we riding down a dirt road in Kansas?

SFF: We have to find out what came from where and then smash it before it tumbles into everything else.

Me: Who are you?

[The man sitting in the seat next to me who earlier told me his nam was Sam tells me that the man standing in the aisle proclaiming things is the Son of the Ford Foundation.]

Me: I have no idea what that means.

Sam: He took over the Ford Foundation when it gave birth to him.

Me: You’re insane.

Sam: I’m not going to object to that, but going for broke is what we do now.

Me: You’re all followers of the Son of the Ford Foundation?

Sam: We’re all people, if that’s what you mean.

Me: No, that’s not what I mean.

Sam: He speaks in riddles!

ALL: [cheering]

SFF: Finally, we can dazzle the riddle! Bus driver, find the cliff and drive over it.

Bus Driver: There are no cliffs in Kansas.

SFF: Well then step on it!

[The bus driver speeds up down the windy dusty road.]

SFF: You there, what is your name?

Me: I’m Michael.

ALL: Wrong!

SFF: Let’s call him “Toad.”

ALL: Toad!

Me: Sam, when we first started talking back in Minnesota you seemed like a normal guy. You said you were a podiatrist. Please tell me you’re not with these Hare Krishnas or whatever the fuck they are.

Sam: You constantly make demands on me. Is that part of the game? Do I have to say things back to you just as you say them as a matter of—“

SFF: We’re getting behind ourselves. Next one to jump in the air gets to warble!

[No one jumps.]

SFF: Whew. I thought I was going to vomit. Now that we have some semblance of a grasp of are narnary, let’s set about to make cluck-cluck noises in our minds.

[Silence]

Me: [whispering to Sam] I’m really freaked out right now.

Sam: [screams] Congratulations!

SFF: Ah, very well done! Bus driver?

Bus driver: Yes?

SFF: Are we there yet?

Bus driver: [long pause] Yes! [slams on the breaks as passengers are thrown from their seats].

SFF: [Stands up] That was very dramatic!

ALL: Huzzah!

Sam: [finding his seating again] *whispers to me* When I read the written “Lol” with the first letter capitalized I sound it out in my head, “LAUGH! … out loud.” 

Me: [sitting down again] Whatever you say.

Sam: No, no. I don’t say it. Whatever, either. Well, when I do, I do.

Me: Whatever.

SFF: Is everyone shook up?

ALL: Yes!

SFF: Very, very timely time to be shook up. Bus driver!

Bus driver: Yes?

SFF: Open the door!

ALL: [shuffle out the door onto a dirt road surrounded on either side by waist-high wheat as far as the eye can see. The land is flat and, thus, the horizon does not stretch far at all.]

Me: There’s not a hill anywhere in sight.

SFF: Yes. Let the claustrophobia begin!

ALL: Zuzzz

Sam: Have you ever been anywhere so dry or dusty?

Me: No. Maybe the desert, but even the desert isn’t this dusty. This is hell.

SFF: This is where riddles are dazzled! And you are still the riddle!

Me: Me?

SFF: Who else?

Me: You’re the riddle for me.

SFF: Mighty kind of you. Have you any apples?

Me: No.

SFF: That’s a problem. No matter, we’ll count Marcia’s abundant supply of shoes!

HALF: Coco!

OTHER HALF: Chanel!

Sam: *whispers* I ate a tomato yesterday.

Me: So?

Sam: *whispers* Don’t analyze; just translate.

Me: What do you mean?

Sam: [alarmed] I don’t mean anything! Why would you accuse me of that?! [walks away in a huff]

Me: [walks over to woman chattering to herself] Do you know what’s going on?

Turnip: I know I’m a turnip.

Me: I don’t know what that means.

Turnip. I don’t, either. Are we supposed to know?

Me: I just want to figure out why the bus has stopped in the middle of nowhere.

Turnip: This is nowhere? I always wondered where it was. Hey, everyone, we found nowhere!

ALL: Huzzah!

Me: [walks over to bus driver] Why did you stop here?

Bus driver: Because I was ordered to stop here.

Me: Who ordered you to stop?

Bus driver: The Ford Foundation.

Me: The Ford Foundation ordered you to stop?

Bus driver: That’s what I said. Now you said it, too! [cackling laughter]

Sam: [runs back to me] It wasn’t the Ford Foundation. It was the Son of the Ford Foundation.

SFF: Yes, Sam?

Sam: He was asking who ordered the bus to stop. I told him it was you.

SFF: That’s a silly thing to say.

Sam: I know! That’s why I said it! [runs into a wheat field, laughing]

Me: What the hell does it mean to be the Son of the Ford Foundation.

SFF: I try not to think about it, but I’ve been told it’s one of the most important things to be.

Me: Who told you?

SFF: Everyone has told me. Well, not you, but everyone else. Not just on the bus, either. Everyone I’ve ever met throughout my entire life.

Me: What? Shit, I don’t even know what to ask.

SFF: Oh. Maybe you should make a statement instead.

Me: Really?

SFF: Yes. Questions are tiresome for those who have to answer.

Me: Okay. We’re in the middle of nowhere, a wheat field, Kansas, I guess. You made the bus driver turn on to this dirt road for no reason.

SFF: I had a reason.

Me: Tell me the reason.

SFF: There you go! No question, just a hard-and-fast command. You might be a leader.

Me: Tell me the reason.

SFF: I can’t do that.

Me: Yes, you can.

SFF: You’re wrong.

Me: Does it have something to do with the Ford Foundation?

SFF: That’s a question. 

Me: [fuming]

SFF: Very well, I’ll answer. It is for the good of the Ford Foundation.

Me: How so?

SFF: You and your questions!

Me: [flabbergasted] Fine! Tell me how turning onto a dirt road along wheat fields in Kansas is good for the Ford Foundation!

SFF: You’re very insistent. You pretend to be polite by asking questions, oblivious to the obligations you are creating, and then you make fierce demands which are even more taxing! You are overbearing and rude. I’m not used to that. I might like it, but I can’t tell yet.

Me: Okay, I’ll admit, I’m asking—and commanding—a lot from you and everyone else. But the reason is that I expected the bus to go to Albuquerque when I bought my ticket. 

SFF: Maybe we’ll still go to Albuquerque.

Me: No other Greyhound bus drives off-road away from their destination. It’s never happened. But this time it did. And it’s apparently because of you … and a busload of crazy people.

SFF: You don’t know the veracity of your statements. Greyhound buses have detoured in the past. I have ordered many to drive to different destinations or, at the least, to travel to alternative destinations before the final destination. I have that power. The Ford Foundation granted it to me.

Turnip: He has all of the power. All power that exists flows through him.

Me: How do you know that?

Turnip: Because someone told me and I believed it.

Me: This is ridiculous.

ALL: Huzzah!

SFF: Everyone, Toad says this is ridiculous!

ALL: Huzzuzzah

SFF: Toad, not every way of comprehending is logical or rational. You may want to try to listen for irregularity more often. Patterns will betray you.

Me: How can patterns betray me?

SFF: By not being useful. If you translate Spanish, word-for-word, into English, it’s a bunch of gobbledygook. If you try to translate irrationality into rationality then you come up with the same ridiculous result. So, yes, this is ridiculous. That’s the first thing you’ve gotten right all day.

Bus driver: Will we be digging holes for the CIA today?

SFF: No, that will be Tuesday.

Me: What is the bus driver talking about?

SFF: He believes that the Ford Foundation is a front for the CIA.

Me: Is it?

SFF: No. If anything, the CIA is stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

Me: Like gum.

SFF: Yes! Everyone, it's safe to dance!

Amsterdam Eighty-Eight: Recovery

I never learned their names. After we ate breakfast they did more coke. We listened to music, talked only a little, and once the sweater was dry the women bought a gram of coke from me and took a cab to wherever the hell they were going. I was glad they were gone. I was exhausted and didn’t want any more blow. Just sleep. That was all. Just sleep.

…

I couldn’t sleep, though. I kept waking up wondering how I had gotten into a situation like that. It was all too easy to say yes when someone suggested a shot or offered a line, an invitation to keep the connection going. With even the slightest hint of saying no, I could see a shroud of darkness forming between us. It was as if we were being transported to a distant past when they were about to set sail to America to embark on new lives and new futures while threatening to leave me behind in a war-torn or famine-plagued land. I would be creating a permanent gulf between us if I said no.

It had been that way for longer than I could remember. I suffered from a perfectionism of heightened connections. Rejecting an opportunity for a shared experience? Perhaps I had been raised in the Great Depression of Relationships. It seemed likely; I came of age in the United States of Reagan, a time when communities collapsed, families split, and migrations began. I went a decade without seeing friends and family during my childhood. There was no way to pick up where we had left off once we reconnected; there was only starting over. But that didn’t happen, certainly not in the same loving ways.

Migration had been my way as an adult, too. I had learned by then how to meet people, make friends fast, and then allow them to drift away as, inevitably, either they or I migrated onward. The globalized economy had made humanity nomadic again. The civilization that the agrarian revolution began had been toppled in a unique way. The world now existed as an economy. There was a big difference between the two. One had been rooted in the land while the other was bound to technology. 

All of these things made connections between people fragile. The most unstable relationships in the contemporary world were between friends. It was difficult to maintain relationships. The world’s economy under advanced technology made humans move like electrons in excited states. We were more often colliding than connecting. Under these modern laws of economic and technological physics, it was a real risk to turn down an offer to do another shot and part ways for the evening. Weird, but the world had not adjusted its ideas about what was dangerous. Most people still thought it was drugs or violence, but conventional wisdom was no longer conventional nor wise. It had become risky to pass up a chance to merge with another at a time when opportunities were dwindling.

…

I woke in the evening and still felt disoriented. Smoking pot seemed like the only good idea so I loaded a bowl and puffed, boiled a can of soup, and ate straight from the pot. I put in a load of laundry, mostly sheets and pillowcases, took a shower, replaced the bedding, and slept.

…

I felt human the next day. Groggy at first, but happy to feel somewhat like myself. I wondered about the bender again and realized I had made no real connections. The excitement suggested there were, but once that passed there was nothing left but foggy memories and strange worries about what I couldn’t remember. If Amsterdam had provided me anything it was a multitude of opportunities to connect with quality people. Why did I waste time with the fashionista party patrol when I could have gone to see Daniel or Kasper, friends who provided genuine connections rather than the fleeting variety? 

The Schuim woman. That was why I had gone there after finishing the index. I was work-free for the rest of my stay and was expecting to hook up with the woman who had passed by my window when I was shrooming the previous week. When I didn’t find her there, the opportunity to “clean the pipes” after all that work seemed irresistible. I had met so many other people who became friends through happenstance meetings while in Amsterdam so why not try it again? I realized there was something to what I had thought in my fits of sleep the previous day, something related to an insecurity regarding relationships. 

Was it possible I didn’t trust the relationships I had made, that they would last? Did I think I needed to endlessly meet more and more people “just in case”? I sat with that for a while and realized that this was exactly what I wanted to learn about myself and the reason I thought of my stay in Amsterdam as a vision quest. I didn’t like what I was learning in this case. I had a fundamental insecurity about relationships. What I couldn’t yet figure out was whether I didn’t trust others to maintain connections with me or that I didn’t, down deep, believe I was worthy of truly fulfilling relationships. The emotions were too powerful and too jumbled. I couldn’t think clearly and I definitely wasn’t going to be able to solve this rubric quickly so I unleashed the hounds, detonated a neural bomb, and made my way to the shower. 

I wanted to go out for breakfast and I needed cigarettes, but I wanted to see how much money I had spent the previous days. The damage wasn’t terrible, but it was certainly more than I ever intended to spend. The biggest chunks were from cash advances—most likely for the blow—with a few bills from cafes and clubs. I was still solvent, though, so I bundled up to go out.

It was windy and cold with overcast skies. I walked to Utrechtsestraat, crossed the street, and turned to the south so I could hit the mini market first. I bought an energy drink and smokes from the Moroccan fellow behind the counter. I had been there how many times, but this guy never remembered me, rarely even looked at me. Not every Moroccan was like this. There was a little eatery down the street to the north where two young Moroccan guys worked. I only ever hit that place in the evening for fritjes or a kebob. The first couple of times we didn’t really interact and I bought the food to go. But one night when I was tired and just wanted easy, cheap eats and a place to sit, I ordered there and began reading the newspaper. I listened to the guys speak in their language, but mostly tuned out.

What I noticed, though, was just like the first two times I was there: I was the only person present. So I asked one of the guys if it was always so slow. They looked at me as if they were shocked I could speak. One asked, “Are you American?” I said yes and, surprisingly, they became excited and we got into a conversation. They said most of their business came at lunch and late afternoon. I asked them why they were so excited about an American eating there. They said they didn’t usually get Americans, but when they did they were always more friendly than the Dutch. 

I found that surprising, but they explained the status issues, the immigration issues, that things had gotten worse since Theo Van Gogh had been shot. The Dutch that ordered were sometimes rude and the others, well, they didn’t engage. But the one guy pointed out to the other, “Yes, but they are hungry. They want food to go, not to talk. They do not care we are foreigners.” The other guy disagreed and then they began arguing in their native tongue until I started laughing. They stopped and the guy behind the counter said, “We disagree here. He is innocent, thinks Dutch are good.” The other guy spoke up, “They are good. We welcomes to the country, we are free, it is good.” Then the other guy went off in their language again and I ate while enjoying the show. 

I would have gone to their shop to buy some food and smokes, but they didn’t open until eleven. When I left the market I looked up and down the street, trying to figure out where to have breakfast. I walked north, past Kerkstraat again then past Keizersgracht. Halfway down the block I came across a place called Zuivere Koffie. I peered in the window. A narrow shop with bright walls, the tables and chairs were made of light-colored woods, and there was a black-and-white checkered floor. I saw a couple of empty tables so I stepped inside. The smell of coffee and a quiet chattering of Dutch filled the air. I sat down at a table for two. A server came with a menu and I ordered an Americano. After looking over the menu, I decided on an omelette. The young woman, relaxed and friendly, brought my coffee. I had already pounded the energy drink I had purchased so now I just sipped at my drink. I noticed there was an outdoor patio in the back. It would have been enjoyable if it hadn’t been so cold. 

I swam in lazy thoughts, happy the intensity of my emotions had abated and that the wildness of the weekend was behind me. The overcast skies felt cozy, almost as if it was a purposeful fixture within the cafe. Zuivere Koffie was homey and warm as if it was made for these days. It dawned on me that I didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. The indexing work was finished, both barrels had been emptied celebrating, and I had the rest of my stay to myself. Everything was downhill now. On this day, at least, I didn’t care to make anything happen. Things as they were felt how they should be.

I ordered an apple tart after I finished my omelette then covered the check and left a tip before heading outside again. The wind was blowing harder. A couple doors down from Zuivere was Barneys. It was a weird coffeeshop, but it had a great reputation. Like the Green House, they had won quite a few Cannabis Cup awards over the years. There was not a lot of room to purchase weed, but at least there was only one other person buying. The woman who was serving? A silky milk-chocolate-skinned mixed-race goddess. I stood for a moment in awe. When I ordered I just pointed at the G-13 Haze on the menu and said, “Three grams.” Then I pointed at Laughing Buddha and said, “Four grams.” I fumbled with my wallet, managed to pay, then ran away before I made a fool out of myself. 

It never ceased to amaze me that on one day I could have two hot women in bed and be bored with them while on another I could barely even get a word out of my mouth when in the presence of a beautiful woman. Maybe it had something to do with clothing. I seemed to do just fine when women weren’t wearing clothing. Put a coat and a scarf on a woman, though, and I could speak nothing but gibberish. 

That wasn’t entirely true, though. I couldn’t explain it and, back outside in the cold wind, I didn’t care. I was glad to be loaded up on buds again, but I just wanted to get home and out of the cold. 

The Examined Life: Mass Murderers vs. Serial Killers

Mary Ann and Kathy are drinking decaf while sitting next to one another on the living room sofa in Harold’s and Kathy’s four bedroom triplex on Evermore Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s a Saturday evening in January of 1973. 

“I’ll tell you what, Mary Ann, at least there’s not going to be all this sex going around any more.”

Mary Ann lit a Virginia Slim. “What do you mean, Kathy?”

“Well, Nixon, of course. Now that he’s been re-elected there won’t be any more sexual revolution. He’ll get rid of those damn birth control pills and the dirty hippies won’t be able to fornicate like wild monkeys any more.”

I used to be the president of the United States of America. Now I’m a serial killer. I consider it an upgrade even though my body count is minuscule compared to the deaths I caused while president. Why is it an upgrade then, you ask. I didn’t know at first, but then I realized that I, like all of you, had been duped into believing that numerical counts of things such as murders meant more than the personal aspects of murders. 

When you hear about Ted Bundy you learn he’s a serial killer and that he killed X number of women. You know nothing of the women he killed, though. The story is about Ted Bundy. That is the narrative provided by the media. I know the name Ted Bundy, I know some aspects of his life, I know he killed women, I know he was caught and put in prison, I know there was a television interview with him hours before he was put to death, but I don’t know the names of his victims or anything about their lives other than that they were women. 

Why should that be? Because killing is more interesting than being killed? I suppose that’s true. I’d certainly rather kill than be killed. That was one of the reasons I became a serial killer. But there’s something more to it than that. It’s also that the exercise of power is what fascinates humanity. That’s why the media tells the stories of the powerful, including serial killers, rather than the stories of the powerless, such as victims of murder.

It was the same when I was president. I was talked about by the news media related to the bombs I dropped on civilian targets. “Accidentally,” of course. But there were no stories about the tens of thousands of people I killed. No individual stories, anyway, no personal stories. There were just reports, often conflicting, about the numbers of people killed. That was to my advantage as people have difficulty becoming enraged by numbers or, really, having strong emotional responses to numbers as a matter of course. That’s because humans are more interested in the personal. If you combine that with a proclivity for favoring stories about power, whether it is used for heinous acts or for beauty and kindness, then it’s easy to understand that dropping bombs on people will result in stories about numbers of victims and stories about the person in power who created numbers of killed persons. 

That’s why I got off easy and won a re-election. I didn’t completely understand at the time, but I eventually understood what had happened and why. To an extent, at least, an extent certainly not known by most people, or if any really. Well, it’s never been discussed publicly, anyway. Not to my knowledge. Which is incomplete, naturally. But I think I’m right about this and I’m going to trust my experiences of not having seen nor heard such insights in reports or discussions. 

What’s important, though, is that I eventually understood and this gave me an even greater power, especially because it was a power that others didn’t realize existed, the power of personal stories over stories about numbers. By making myself the story, I elevated my status above the numbers which, unaware though they were, persuaded people to believe in me, to have faith in me, to trust me. I used words instead of numbers, words to define myself and create a story that fit the templates of personal importance that most people carry within themselves, within their worldviews, within their identities, within their meanings. Could be analyzed as neural networks or psychological makeup or cultural norms or whatever labeled lens one might want to use to explain such a phenomenon, but that’s inconsequential for my purposes.

My purpose, of course, was to not be blamed for things I did, but to be celebrated for the things I might have done but didn’t do. The numbers of the dead had no radio or television panel interviews and the images of the catastrophes were not seen except as dust and smoke from explosions. The images of body parts were rare. Photos and videos me, my body, my posture, my gestures, and my facial expressions were of a human being, smiling at times, weeping at others. I had “humanity” attached to me through these visuals. Then there was the audio, on radio, TV, the Internet. I spoke with sadness when it served my interests, with confidence when I deemed it necessary, and with whimsy when making others feel light-hearted was to my benefit. My weeping, my laughter, my solemn stare, these all worked to make me a person in a way that no number has ever been or ever could be. 

I had a researcher find out how many times I was shown or heard in various media formats compared to the number of times images of bombs exploding or detached limbs were shown as well as the number of times “death counts” were cited. The ratio was nearly 10,000 to 1 in my favor. It’s easy to win the storyline with odds like that. I was clearly the main character and the dead were extras who weren’t even credited at the end of any of the stories. Who weeps for extras?

And yet, here we see numbers being of importance in providing information about the story, about why I was the main character and the dead were inconsequential. Such information is useful when making reasoned decisions or coming to intellectual conclusions. But I was the only person who knew these numbers and their meanings in terms of explaining my dominance of the story. Well, my researcher knew as well, but I killed him and destroyed his research so that no one else would ever know. Being a serial killer can be very useful. 

But there’s the thing about being a serial killer. I don’t care about the number of people I kill. I care about the killing. That’s what interests me. I like looking at the fear in a person’s eyes and seeing the sweat form on their brows. I like being aware of their awareness of my total power over them and I like finishing them, ending their lives in painful and gruesome ways once the thrill of dominating them begins to ebb. There are always more people available for killing.

But those who follow serial killers, who hear about them and are fascinated or horrified by them, they always want to know the number of people killed. They want to hate or glorify the killer and somehow the number of kills provides the fuel rather than personal information about those killed. However, the numbers alone are not enough. The portrait of the serial killer combined with the number of kills is necessary to round out the story. And a critical part of those portraits are the methods used for killing. You can see a person’s eyes light up or perhaps cringe in horror when he or she learns that 13 women were strangled with electrical cords or 28 children were dismembered by meat cleavers.

The only personal aspects of the victims that come to light or are made to be important in stories—whether books, television, or other media—are things like hair color (“He only killed redheads”) or professions (“All of Mr. X’s victims were prostitutes”) or age (“He only killed children under ten years old”) or gender and sexuality (Dahmer chose only gay men as targets) and so on. So even when something somewhat personal about the victims is discussed, they are pointed out only if there are shared traits with other victims which further depersonalizes them. 

The fascination the public has with profiling of criminals, serial killers in particular, leads them to look at victims through patterns (categorizing, similar to numerical measures in their own way). It’s a game to play, a strategy for winning (to catch a thief). Even as I type this last sentence I feel a chill go up my spine. How horrific! How horrible to depersonalize the dead for the sake of the glorification of the killer! And, yes, it is glorification, even in the case of everyone hating a killer. Hitler, the world’s most successful and notorious mass murderer, is glorified everywhere. How many more movies about Hitler and his Nazis have their been compared to movies about Einstein, Jesus Christ, Moses, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, or any one else. No one can compare. If attention measures interest then Western society is more interested in Adolf Hitler than any other person who has ever lived. How is that not glorification? It’s certainly our obsession. 

The very odd thing is that I am more alive, more a person, as a serial killer than a law enforcement officer is as a profiler. I live in the flesh; she lives in numbers and categories. As the president, even though my narrative to the public was imminently human, my killing was not. It was statistical and strategic. This is the real reason why I say I have upgraded from the President of the United States of America to becoming a serial killer. I’m alive while I’m killing now whereas before I was functioning as a computer, a machine, and my experience was technological rather than personal. There’s no joy in the data of killing, but there is in the feeling of a knife piercing flesh and the sound of the screams. 

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” Were Socrates’ powers of imagination so great that he was able to experience living an unexamined life simultaneously while living an examined life? Without experiencing both, how could he have coherently made such a declaration. Blinded by his own ego, he made a declaration of what ought not to be rather than humbly declaring, “Having lived an examined life, I can say that it is worth living. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what it’s like to live an unexamined life, though. Perhaps it is not worth living although it may be worth living or even more worth living than an examined life. Turns out, I can’t declare much of anything about anything outside my own experience. Logic suggests otherwise, but then again logic is not experience, is it?” 

It boils down to sensory experience versus numerical or categorical knowledge. I can know that you have died without creating your death, but where is fun in that? Comparatively pitiful. Every kill I create will be personal for me and those who are being killed. The shared moment of killing cannot be adequately experienced through quantification.

Meanwhile, an entire city has become sterile. Well, not the city itself, but the residents of the city. All of them. Which city, though? That is unknown. But then … how can there be a claim that all of the residents of a city became sterile? It’s just the way it is. This is the first step toward the obsolescence of causation.

Words are more powerful than numbers. As descriptors. If I ask how many people you have killed, you may say “13.” But if I ask you to tell me in numbers how you kill people and you say “42” then I won’t know shit about how they died because “42” does not provide a description of how people are killed.

But if you hack my bank account and remove the numbers from my savings account then I will say that numbers are more meaningful than words in this case. That partially explains why economic systems alienate everyone from their trading value, purchasing power, and what have you. If you can’t feel in the flesh what you have earned then you will always be disconnected from your physical, emotional, and intellectual efforts in relation to being able to obtain clothing, shelter, food, transportation, and so on. This is why I have said we are overdue to create a new form of economics. Neither capitalism nor communism is an answer in this regard. So-called “primitive” tribes had forms of trade that were physical, that existed in the world of flesh. That’s not feasible for masses of people, though, such as a 100 million people in a nation. But then, who is to say that nations of 100 million people are better than tribes that exist in the hundreds? 

Well, someone was able to say so. Many someones. Better for who? Better for how many people? Better in what ways? If these questions could be answered then the development of a new economics could begin. The idea that such an economics could be defined at the outset of such an endeavor is absurd. No, it’s only by the end of such study and research that an economics would take shape and become knowable, understandable. Without telescopes, what would we have known about the stars and yet that never prevented people from telling stories to one another about what stars were or how they formed.

Starting with a pre-existing notion and rigidly adhering to it is dogma. Or doctrine. Or fundamentalism. The idea that human nature is inherently selfish or self-centered is an eighteenth and nineteenth century Western notion that persists today even though so much research and evidence suggests that anything that might be called a “human nature” is malleable based as much on cultural beliefs as anything else. To be told from birth that kindness and affection toward others is most valuable and to see it modeled in families and communities would lead to a powerful belief that human nature is kind and affectionate. You practice what you want to become and model what you want others to emulate. Seems so simple. It is simple. But it’s also a choice. Which means decision making is how “human nature” is created. If it was just genetics then no one could possibly be responsible for any action because no action could have resulted from a decision. 

Okay, I’m beating a dead horse. But sometimes I like to beat dead horses. More often I like to beat live humans until they’re dead. I don’t know why that’s not a saying: “Oh, enough already, you’re beating a live human to death.” I’ll try to get that saying going in the next couple weeks. Maybe it will spread like wildfire online and everyone will be saying it by Christmas. Then we can have a countdown for how long that idiom can last before a person can be beaten to death for using it. Maybe 90 days after Christmas. So a daily countdown. Because people like numbers in their stories even if they don’t want the story to be about numbers.