I’m right, quite a lot of the time

The entire story of this blog can be summed up in one word.  Confidence.  From the day I went from a disparaging stranger to first commenting to Wolfe in an effort to initiate the conversation we never had, almost six years ago now, the entire episode was all about confidence.  Why would a keen thinker even bother trying to explain herself to a promiscuous dude selling health food in the first place?  It all comes down to confidence, and in my case familial abuse.  I thought for a long time before I even tried talking about my ideas to him, and then a lot of emotional upheaval took place which has led me to where we are now.

 

There are good elements and bad, in terms of consequences.  I offer up a far more well rounded and arguably useful package now, since I have always been reasonably good at breaking down complex subjects into terms that even my not-particularly-interested friends could understand.  I am less inclined to be flashy for a small audience, rather than down to earth and faintly comedic for a slightly larger one.  You may not listen, and you may choose to block it out, but at least I now get a hearing in the first place.

 

There are several things which came to my attention have assured me that I was right and David Wolfe is/was wrong to ignore me:

A report, possibly two relevant reports, have indicated that GMO has failed to do anything at all for world hunger, as predicted in the writing he did not care to discuss with me.
Yanis’ view indicates that I am right in my thinking in relation to the ethics of allowing corporations to legally challenge governments. We have been at the mercy of false information via discreet lobbying for years, and now we are to get less than discreet legal challenges to force us to live according to profit makers’ wishes. Also as predicted in the original book.
The information on the European Union, provided for the referendum, indicates that the US encirclement policy against Putin is indeed at the heart of these not-particularly-nice trade deals we are being told we have to negotiate.  (ditto) We are all supposed to form a giant trading circle around Russia.  This is unhelpful, childish and stupid, and frankly I have more respect for Russia as a result.
The Asean nations may be quite happy to go along with this, but the Asean nations have a host of different costs and benefits to Europe.  I always previously thought of Europe as being the responsible continental bloc, with less pressure in terms of suffering populations and being more fussy about food in particular, I imagined that the EU would save the world from the mortgage on life that GM has been turned into by American corporatism. As the German chemical companies are also rather keen on modifying genes to accommodate chemical profit-making, this is not going to be the case.

I am sorry Wolfe.  I am sorry that I am not also 22, blonde, wearing a bikini or whatever your limited criteria is for speaking to people without messing about like a squirming five year old for several years.  I am sorry that I am not a confident person.  I am sorry that I thought that you would understand anything that I had to say.

 

It is a shame that I was going through so much at the time that I did not just dismiss him as an idiot instead of putting myself through all this in order to come back to the point where I appreciate my own mind. I could have lived without the food related self torture too.  That side of things isn’t his fault, if I hadn’t bothered actually speaking to him at all, I could have avoided any of it. Discovering that he is even more insecure than I am in some respects, clouded my vision even further.

 

For the benefit of the rather stupid science ‘experts’ I frequently come across online – here is a short, concise description of what GMO actually does.

Patenting a seed, and then suing landowners if that seed is blown onto their land is a bit like granting the company doing it ‘God-like’ powers for the purposes of profit.  It would have been very easy for a supposedly ‘God-fearing’ nation like America to simply spot the ethical problem with this and make an ethical decision that life is not patentable.  They did not.
As with the Green revolution, where the USA sent chemical-treated seeds in an effort to feed the starving, instead of paying a blind bit of attention to local foodstuffs and issues with land, profit is at the heart of American altruism.  All that happened was that small landowners were put out of business in favour of larger landowners who could afford equipment and chemical supplies to support the growing of unsuitable and unsustainable crops which did not provide year round food availability.  This led in one notable case to a poorer village having to feed the next village, the next village having been stupid enough to agree to accept American donations.  GM simply took the Green Revolution a step further.  According to America, the entire world should pay them for growing food.  This is what TTIP will lead to. It is a social and capitalist revolution, not one of altruism or concern for others.
Nature is extremely good at coping with interference.  The only thing GM actually does in terms of reducing pesticide or herbicide use, is ensure that ecosystems develop systems for defence against man-made chemicals. This means that the aforementioned chemical company gets to invent another chemical, and stays in business indefinitely, passing the costs of development on to the idiots that agreed to this moronic system in the first place.  It is only a matter of time before, like the movie, the Americans produce a crop which can be watered only with Coca Cola.
GM may have saved the papaya, but it kills thousands of suicidal Indian farmers every year.  Yes, of course these people matter.
TTIP, TTP etc means that the very very large chemical companies will have the right to challenge any government objecting to feeding the population with GM food.  They have already sneaked in a few without telling us, and now they will insist on the same non-labelling policy in Europe that they have inflicted on the American population.  This will ultimately lead to a global disaster of mammoth proportions, with the double whammy of chemical resistance and no labelling.  Who cares, right?
In addition, TISA can still allow American health companies to lobby for the right to invade our health services.  You can look forward to lots of not very tempting bad food advertisements, in tandem with solutions for health problems you need never have had.  That is how America works, and they would like us to share their bad management for fun and profit.

Do you want to exist in corporate slavery, to please a few lobbyists and politicians too stupid and irresponsible to see the consequences of their actions?

 

Do you want to live in a world where you are effectively forced to spend a large part of your life ill, in order to pay someone to make sure you do not become even more ill?

 

Do you want a world of opportunity, or do you prefer to live in a world where you have to toe the corporate line, whether that is about what you eat or what you do for a living?

 

Do you want to put up a barrier to your own entry to a market, whether that be by being a small landowner, growing whatever you want rather than being told, as many Americans are, that you cannot grow food on your own land because it doesn’t fit in with the fascist regime? Or by starting a business in an impossibly regulated market?

 

Do you want private prisons and capital labour?

 

Do you want armed police turning up if you milk your own cow? (yes, this has already happened in the US of A.)

 

Do you want an inferior, uncritical corporate education to enable you too to cheer people like Trump?

 

Do you want to be denounced by a faceless PR company or even your own doctor if you speak out against any of this?

 

If this is what you want, keep going as you are, because that is the future we are looking at.  Sit and play some more Candy Crush Saga, and see if that helps.  Make sure that you rid yourself of conscience, self directed thought or any feeling that you can do anything about it.  Look forward to corporate militia, because once the stupid politicians and corrupt individuals willing to agree to this retire to their tax haven, this is what you are left with.

 

 

 

Right, Mr Superhero, read it and weep.  Move your ass, if you know how

Continue Reading

The Future of Capitalism

The Future of Capitalism

Listening to the delectable Yanis Varoufakis this evening, (he moves beautifully) it struck me what a marvellous idealist he is.  His ideas about society and capitalism are charming, but they will not work, sadly.  The future for the Eurozone and for the USA is extremely bleak for the general population, and there is very little chance of turning back.

 

Why?  Yanis’ take on the relationship between capital and state is based on the idea that:

businesses appropriate research from society, which is governable
society has responsibility for the people in it

What we have seen from our government in the UK, is that a large proportion of society feels no responsibility for the people in it, and that governments cannot be trusted to function effectively or responsibly when there is a possibility of personal profit.  As a thinking and feeling individual, Yanis is adorable, but as a realist, he falls down on a number of counts.

 

TTIP will give business the right to challenge governments on issues of regulation.  In the UK and the rest of Europe, regulation is currently dictated from Brussels, by faceless people who debate in private and are seemingly unchallengeable by the well paid MEPs who sit in the European Parliament. What we have found out about TTIP has been either leaked, or interpreted by people who have limited time to look at the documents, and who are prevented from making notes, taking the time they need to study it, or fully evaluating the information they are provided with.  This will not do, for a number of reasons which the public appear to be choosing not to understand.

 

Yanis’ view of society as being something which falls within governable boundaries has disintegrated thanks to the internet.  Intellectual property now has to be seen as individual in nature, rather than as something produced by a collective will.  This makes it far easier to exploit, and far more difficult to regulate.  In addition, enforcing taxation on business effectively has become impossible, in the event that we do not have tax haven income, we will simply be undercut by systems in place in countries such as Switzerland, the villages of Zug and Pfaffikon being cases in point.

 

We are all about to be crushed under a capitalist jackboot which is not going to be under anyone’s control, and if there is a suspicion that it is, the person concerned will simply be presented with a self interest situation that they cannot, and probably will not, resist.  Responsible idealists such as Yanis and I are a dying, almost dead breed.

 

Add to this the massive proportion of the UK and USA population who appear to believe that nothing unfortunate will ever happen to them, and that as long as they support the mighty they will be protected, which is not only untrue but a vicious state of existence, and you have a storm which ends in disaster.

 

As Yanis says, the future mechanisation of deskilled work means that the very people baying for the blood of the less fortunate will very soon be suffering alongside them.  As Yanis says, it only takes a small development for AI to pass the Turing test, meaning that human labour will cease to be relevant at all in a massive proportion of cases.

 

The only good thing about this is that the businesses still need someone to sell to.  If we cannot tax businesses effectively, and businesses require nothing but customers, what are we left with but resource hogging consumers with no income?  Then nation states truly do become irrelevant, since inevitably anyone functioning internationally will simply choose to base themselves wherever corporation tax is lowest.

 

The good news here is that individuals can only consume so much.  As I have said in previous posts, you have to trickle up, otherwise you cease to function at all.  There is no point in continuously benefitting the haves at the expense of the have-nots, because the haves have limited wants.  Otherwise you end up with very dirty luxury, since nobody can afford to do the cleaning.

 

So, what is the answer?  My proposal, in my extensive paper for Wolfe, was that the answer is to create maximum income limitations, return to anti trust legislation, and break up large companies.  Genetic modification for example, should not be in the hands of chemical companies, and companies such as Walmart should be restricted to one line of retail trade.  This keeps companies as competitive instead of domineering forces, and it creates new opportunities for the general population. We certainly do not want TTIP or TISA, which are inherently corrupt deals designed to confuse those being courted to sign them.  We allowed them to get too big, and now we have a major and urgent problem with companies bigger than nation states.

 

If we cannot persuade the public to vote with their wallets, we have to persuade governments to join together to prevent the unlimited growth of individual businesses.  Capitalism is lovely, but it is no respecter of human suffering.  Since there is no way of making a global decision to do this, we also have to take into account that a less altruistic country is always going to allow the existing giants to function without restriction, and we have to be prepared to punish them accordingly.  Otherwise the future involves destruction beyond our current imagination, as we return to a dark age of clearing the starving bodies from the street, whilst others hide in their rooms, eking a living from underselling their ideas to unfettered corporate monsters.

Continue Reading

The British Class System is unemployed

As someeone who studied eleven centuries of international economic history in the course of my reading, I am a bit of a fan of feudalism.  Feudalism is under-rated.  On a good day, feudalism works a lot better than capitalism.

Contentious, qui moi?

It may surprise you to learn that after the Black Death, when many villages and feudal settlements were empty as a result of the deaths of the occupants, the contents of the cottages revealed, in many places, a far higher standard of living than expected.

Ask an unemployed urban dweller now whether they would feel hard done by with their own rabbit warren, space for a cow and some hens, hand me down crystal, clothing and metalware from the ‘big house’, a four day working week for the local lord, followed by a day for the church to cover education and medical treatment for the family, their wives doing cottage-based piece work for the travelling merchants, and they will admit that our marvellous capitalist system is not treating them particularly well compared with medieval peasants.  Capitalism and socialism are mutually dependent.  If you believe otherwise, you are being conned.

The difference with feudalism and the reason that it could not be sustained, was that it was based on the availability of land, which is why the British strove so hard to acquire quite so much of it.  The British class system, complete with privilege, horse skills, hunting etc was set up for exploration, not industrialisation.  Given a chunk of uncharted territory, your average toff was able to feed his workers, organise them to build shelter, reroute rivers and eventually plan out a wider agricultural and transport strategy thanks to their having been given land to manage over several generations, something I touched on in Best Scandal Ever.

Now, of course, there are far too many people for us to benefit from a feudal system with a local landowner to blame if things go wrong.  In the event that the reformation had not happened as a result of urbanisation, the catholic peasantry would have been starved and tithed out of this formerly comfortable life. The British class system, which worked so well for the Georgian and Victorian explorers and their military-imperialist tendencies, has now been reduced to a small number of corrupt individuals who, rather than believing in duty, the preservation of land, and the glory of the nation, now believe in reducing those who do not benefit from capitalism to criminal behaviour in order to survive.  Instead of national pride, we have a system which supports contempt for the poor and disabled, offering benefits to cronies in the fields of banking, weapons manufacture, construction and of course, the politicians who ensure that their instructions are carried out.

What happened then, to the idea of ‘things being better when gentlemen were in charge,’ a cry uttered by my neighbour within my lifetime.  When the gentlemen were in charge of my city, they dutifully gifted their estates on death to become parks.  Can anyone imagine George Osborne gifting his wealth to anyone? I have met some of the older members of David Cameron’s family, and whilst they would not gift their wealth, they certainly donated quite a proportion of their property for the benefit of the military during World War 2 and had a sense of humility whilst doing it.  I cannot imagine the same can be said for the Head Prefect, who spends his time whining to his local council whilst recommending that the rest of us get fracked.

So why retain faith in the Great British machine, when the Great British machine no longer works?  Clearly the answer is to remove cronies, whether they be Tories, sustaining each other’s family businesses by promoting war, forgiving banker’s errors, indulging in not-so-secret talks with corporate lobbyists before promoting policies that serve only themselves?  In the meantime, they feign caring by retaining some of the worst Labour policies.  Labour, as a party, is all but dead, they wait to be told what to think.  Consensus, as I have always said, is not a healthy or progressive state of affairs for any party, nor is attempting to centralise a country that cannot, and should not, be centralised, particularly not for the benefit of London, at the expense of the entire UK.

Honesty, in addition to duty, have gone out of fashion, unfortunately at a time when we are more aware than ever before exactly how many lies, and how many mistakes, we are at the mercy of.  Is it not time that we took some initiative to get our country back on track?  We used to be great, not a puppet sideshow, whispering in the ear of the USA to scrape a few arms sales to line the pockets of a few more fat cats, smoking in the private member’s club right next to your politicians.

Continue Reading

Trickle down lies

My apologies to my fellow economists and economic historians, you may wish to go and do something else just now as today’s post is about the fallacy of trickle-down.

 

Our current economy still works on the age old principle that the sacred pyramid is still worthy of worship.  It is far better for you to be halfway up, or better still, at the top of this sacred pyramid.

 

The idea that in 2016, we still worship pyramids, is rather hilarious, but nobody who is busy making as much money as they can wants to hear that their efforts may not be entirely effective, or that they are making themselves unworthy through sheer ignorance or self-deception.

 

To clarify further, since I know many readers of my blog are currently people who have no time to actually think for themselves as they are busy filling their pockets from their very fortunate gainful employment and presumably, like my own siblings, ignoring their responsibility for looking after people other than themselves.

 

Here are some basic economic facts for our conservative chums:

Dead people cannot spend money
Poor people retain less money in the form of savings
Poor people spend a greater proportion of their income, with the benefit of the multiplier effect, this makes them far more active and useful economic agents than rich people.
The multiplier effect is the principle that moving money is more productive than static money – ergo people who have to spend it have a more beneficial effect on the economy than people who do not.
Centralising economic activity in one region does not benefit other regions, meaning that the creation of infrastructure becomes difficult, expensive and impractical, at the expense of areas which could easily benefit from increased mean income, property prices and in which poor people benefit in terms of standard of living by having richer people to protest about their ‘inhuman’ garbage collection etc.
Housing benefit exists to benefit property owners, not tenants. The only reason housing benefit has not been attacked under the Conservative government is because they own a lot of rental property. It is a construct designed to benefit people with money and property, not protect the rights of the people doing the renting.
Dropping public money in the forms of bombs is not cost effective, unless you are doing it to secure contracts from an ally country, or ensure a living for a friend in the defence business.
Likewise, outsourcing jobs which require no experience or education is a bad idea if you want people to claim fewer benefits. It reduces the base on your pyramid.
Attempting to replace the base of your pyramid with immigrants causes further damage to the foundations, as communities blame new arrivals for issues of poorly maintained property and services, and new cultural influences, such as mosques and outdoor fruit and vegetable suppliers, increase negative attitudes and crime amongst the inhabitants of the base of the pyramid.
Deciding that you are a knowledge economy and then providing no tangible evidence of this, leads to a lot of underemployed and unemployed graduates, who then spot that your system does not work. Indicating that these people are to have their lives effectively destroyed and feel shame over it will not help you long term.
Putting an ever increasing proportion of the population into permanent debt, means that the base of the pyramid is now extremely shaky, and if it falls down, everybody suffers and you are at risk of actual revolution.
Not everybody is a selfish economic agent, capable only of patting themselves on the back for acquiring money.  The opportunity cost of self righteous obsession with money, is compassionate and conscious care for others, and consideration of far more important issues.
Failure to address people’s more altruistic feelings leads to unstable politics
Opportunity cost – the opportunity cost of working in a biscuit factory on minimum wage when you have other irons in the fire, is that you may never get to develop your potentially lucrative creative career in app design, or whatever else floats your particular boat.  Sometimes giving people the opportunity to develop their ideas is the more lucrative option.
When the economy recedes, an intelligent Tory provides money for small to medium sized business, as this feeds the base of the pyramid, in the form of a disproportionate number of jobs provided, and encourages self motivation amongst the damned and condemned poor that you hate so much.

Trickle-down is a myth, a rumour spread by the same delusional people that think it is ok for them to have more than twice the average income in interest on their parents ‘trickle-down’ wealth, whilst other people rely on charity.  The idea was that if one economic class is given money, they would use it to make more, accidentally benefitting the bottom of the pyramid by virtue of the spending involved and potential jobs created.

 

I have known for some time, that the notion of scarcity in economics is belied by countries with high savings rates.  People do not have unlimited wants.  People do not have unlimited motivation.  What our current government believes, is that if you continue to feed your economic plants from above in the form of tax breaks, that the plant gets bigger.

 

No, if you fail to feed the plant from the roots, it will collapse.  Trickle-up economics is the only way to go.

Continue Reading

All that Eco fair trade bullshit

As those curious enough to bother investigating will know, I am;

pro natural health (on a civil liberty basis)

pro ethical business (even pretending is a step forward)

pro social capital (on an neo-socialist basis)

pro nationalism (on an anti USA dominated globalism basis)

pro diversity (on the basis of leaving people alone unless they attempt to interfere with your life)

pro action on climate change (this ought to be obvious unless you are demented)

 Unlike most people, my confinement at home due to my caring responsibilities means that I have some limited time to actually find out before making decisions on such things.  My vision for the future is of individuals investing in developing nations from their own pockets.  Setting up a rural business in Africa obviously requires significantly scaled down investment on setting up a business in central London, which is apparently how our delusional spoilt brat government in the UK thinks.

A chance conversation with a nice chap from Yorkshire on Twitter today alerted me to the fact that most people do not realise why they are under threat of being fracked.  It is part of the war effort and strategy for the period after conflict, when Saudi, the USA, and to a more limited extent European countries including the UK will divide the spoils in terms of contracts issued to rebuild countries such as Syria and Lybia.  To achieve this, puppet regimes will be put in place in much the same way as they have been put in place in the Ukraine, Iraq and Lybia.

Oil prices are artificially low at the moment.  There is no actual glut. Sensible countries should be withholding their reserves for the future, but the few individuals that benefit from defence spending, loans taken out by people maintaining appearances, inflicting poverty (which affects the rest of us by causing a proportion of the population to take up a life of crime eventually) on the lowest income brackets and new immigrants alike, are making sure that no reserves are held.  This is to ensure that the nation funds the biggest economic heist in history.  As I have explained in several previous posts, your only chance is to redirect your money.

I have already suggested that you move your money to ethical banks, who do not invest in fossil fuels, defence producers, GMO and chemicals.  I have suggested that you avoid chain supermarkets.  I have suggested that you feed the smaller companies to encourage competition in the fields of media, finance, food, chemicals and health.

Today’s conversation indicated that most people do not have sufficient knowledge or interest to investigate reducing their reliance on fossil fuels.  As this is rather central to our current political situation, I shall now endeavour to explain the very real conspiracy you enable when you vote either Tory or (new)Labour, both end up with the same global result, in slightly different ways.

When I was still interviewing, it became apparent over several years that gas prices continuously went up.  When I investigated why, it was said that Russia was the main supplier to Europe, with some supplies coming from the Middle East.

We all know how hysterical the USA are about Russia.  They seem very fond of Saudi, however.  My Hindu friends hypothesize that Saudi has bought some favours, meaning that we are taught endless tolerance even as people fall victim to attacks which probably would not happen if we were not incessantly helping the USA with their encirclement policy against Putin.  Now we are also being asked to tolerate armed American guards in our airports.

Fracking is supposed to be accepted without question.  If pushed, they will probably tell you that it is part of the war effort, since Canadian and American fracking is lowering the price of gas. In the UK, the Tories are keen to exploit our rather fragile country in order to produce even more.  This is not to benefit the consumer at all, since once America installs a puppet state in the countries we are currently destroying, the preferred fossil fuel suppliers will move into those countries, making fracking the UK a luxury that will no longer be necessary.  Granting permission to do it, however, means that the same people who benefit from war, benefit from fracking your country when the war is over during the rebuilding process.  Therefore relying on gas, is effectively supporting endless austerity and perpetual war.

For this reason, five years ago I installed an air to water heat pump and system in the family pile.  This has saved us 66 percent on our huge fuel bills, and means that a 14 room house costs slightly less to heat with our constant hot water than my friends 2 bedroom flat costs to heat with gas. The system paid for itself two years ago in terms of outlay, and we are not supporting the corrupt and outdated fossil fuel business.  I am not quite brave enough to switch to an electric car yet, but I will be doing this also, when I am satisfied that I will still be able to drive all over Scotland without mishap.

Not for the first time, this story has been divided into parts, to make sure you are confused, and to make sure that you can only be bothered about one bit at a time.  ‘Anti frackers, anti science’, in much the same way as they have waged war on the alternative health ‘problem’.  This is in anticipation of TTIP TIPP and TISA.  Europe and the Asean countries are expected to play along with American corporate dominance, bought with borrowed American cash. (from China, who are laughing their heads off)

Likewise, it is relatively simple in America to present the argument as ‘Anti-war, anti-Jesus.’  We in Europe are not so simple, so instead we get some nice frictional immigration to foster a shift to the political right.  Your nervousness about immigration is likely to confuse you into supporting the welfare budget being spent on bombs from the Cameron friends and family.  The media has helped by doing a marvellous job on persuading you that poor people really do deserve to starve, so it is fine that thousands of disabled people die because of the policies of the poorly educated Ian Duncan Smith.  Add to this, the cheeky Jocks wanting to take your fossil fuel supply away, and we have a perfect storm of confusion.

The consequences of you falling for this, staying in a state of ignorance, believing that as long as you are in the home counties or London, paying your way in your relatively safe job, getting the rest of the UK to fund as many bridges and roads as Boris could wish for, is that your country is being set up to be sold to the USA hook, line and sinker, with the proceeds going to a very few already rich people.

Voting labour in its former form, simply meant the proceeds would go to alternative already rich people.  Under Corbyn, there is some hope that the structure of corruption changes somewhat, but not completely.  As I have said before, socialism and capitalism are mutually dependent.  Endless liberalism is not desirable either, since it simply leads to people being confused into agreeing to a different package of corruption.

So, in addition to my entreaties to move your money, to stop supporting large lobbyists, to encourage competition from smaller and more honest players, I now ask you to consider investigating ecological, therefore moneysaving ways of reducing your personal reliance on fossil fuels.  You support war and corruption to a degree beyond that of even the most hardened junkie.  There are many reasonably priced alternatives – solar, wind, groundsource heat pumps, air to water heat pumps.  The government would have you believe that this does not matter, despite European emissions targets.  Remember the day Gordon Brown signed us up to them, simultaneously ordering two more coal fired power stations?  That is the level of stupidity and corruption we the public are up against.

You need to change your habits now.  Repeat after me,

We are not American, and we will not be conned any more.

Continue Reading

Problems with Motivational Speaking

So, now that I have given you a rough guide to why Wolfe is not such a bad guy after all, (see previous posts) I would now like to go into the problems of the methodology of American motivational speaking.

Strong elements from the past also render it extremely weak for the following broad reasons:

Plain English – motivational speaking is popular because of the homely tenor of delivery – speakers such as Earl Shoaff were poorly educated guys who took to network marketing to earn some extra buttons in the early part of their life.  Jim Rohn himself was basically a sales trainer for Herbalife in the latter part of his career.  I cannot imagine the level of worship that he enjoyed being replicated in Europe, for a number of very good cultural reasons. Whilst I have no problem with imaginative and non-patronising explanations for things – I once used doughnuts to explain the main theories in social philosophy, for example, sticking with a formula which worked sixty years ago is extremely limiting.  I watched Wolfe in the early part of his career becoming extremely frustrated with the apathy he was confronted with as he tried to grow various early versions of his model. (kudos to Wolfe for leaving this material online for me to gawk at)  Since then, he has found other ways around the problem. Suffice to say, the world has changed considerably since the Dale Carnegie/Earl Shoaff golden era of smartly dressed and respectful audiences writing down every word their chosen guru says. Today’s audience is more focused on education and a level of information provision that Shoaff and Rohn simply did not have to worry about. So, the answer here is to develop a more advanced methodology which includes a little tragedy with the optimism and present a more balanced and believable picture than in the past.

The rich are too rich – One of the more interesting features of Rohn, in this case, is that he does not bother to present himself as a particularly nice person, the grin that does not reach his cold dead eyes is particularly marked.  His assertion that we should wish to leave the 90/95/97 percent behind simply does not suit modern thinking – economically speaking, people are now well aware that having a tiny percentage of extremely rich people at the expense of everyone else is not a feature of a healthy society. So, rather than a ‘forget the negatives and affirm yourself to wealth’ approach, today’s speakers would be well advised to shoot for an informative way to implore the audience to collectively raise their personal bar of achievement.  I had a look at The Secret a few years back, and it was so despicable in its approach that I was unable to continue with it.  Reality check – people are starving to death and we all hate banks – social capital is the future, not leaving people behind to die whilst we roll about in our money. Interestingly, economic anthropology shows that we are thinking more consciously about others in the west as our countries are richer – third world experiments show a far more dog-eat-dog mentality.  So, unless you plan to market to a developing nation – try to show some sign of ethical values.

Plagiarism – keeping a journal of things to make you richer is a very bad idea unless you plan to reference everything extremely carefully.  It is considered to be acceptable in oratory, because obviously it is impossible to reference every line you say in the course of delivering information.  It is, however, relatively simple to paraphrase, and equally easy to mention the source of your great ideas. Rohn’s premise of journal keeping, and using anecdotal material to get your point across is just not going to cut it for the future. Instead, it is again quite easy to pepper your material with useful or otherwise stimulating information and heartfelt goodwill to your fellow humans.

The pyramid must die – This is a personal observation – it is time to kill the pyramid – the one percent sit at the top of it.  There are other formulations, from the time of the Medici, which I am able to go into, but will save this for a different post or possibly book. If you are employing or being told to employ your affirmations or motivational techniques as part of a sales scheme in which you are on the lower ranks of yet another layered network, just get out of it and find some ideas of your own.  You are not onto a winner in the vast majority of cases.

Stop hitching your wagon to other people – I have witnessed life coaches and motivational speakers alike who speak in almost religious terms about their inspiration.  I think I have demonstrated from my non-relationship with Wolfe that it is entirely unnecessary to worship your inspiration.  It is entirely possible to see people for what they are, admire them for the good bits, and kick them in the ass for the bad.  It is called, amusingly, being objective.  Objective objectification, in my case, presumably, given my ongoing project. I do this mainly because I want him to get what he wants from his life, but this does not mean that I have any responsibility for his success or failure, that is entirely up to him.  My direction is parallel, rather being on the same wagon trail. The point is that there is no answer – you should be shooting for your own path, not dragging your heels on someone else’s. Which brings me on to my final point for this evening –

Original Material – despite the many problems I would love to get my teeth into, (alas I am not a 22 year old beach bunny) Wolfe’s use of whimsy kept me listening to him for several weeks before I realised why it sounded so familiar, and yet so odd.  His timing is impeccable, just when you are thinking you have heard enough about premium spirulina, along comes some random wildness that shocks you back into your chair.  Whilst this is to be applauded, it is important to self-generate something that is completely your own.  You need to wallow happily in your own filth, to a certain extent, to be producing something that you are so comfortable with that you own your topic, whether you are writing, or speaking.  Being confident is not about following a model, it is about making use of a model for your own purposes.  It is imperative that any keen audience get some sense of acceptance. Bringing a sense of dignity to your audience whilst raising their consciousness may seem like a return to an evangelical approach, but it is perfectly possible to instill pride, and make use of it, in an audience which has been lulled into defeat by an increasingly oppressive meritocratic approach.  This does not mean that you start every speech with tales of poverty and anecdotes of failure, as used by Zig Ziglar, but it does mean that you remove the barriers from an increasingly cynical and browbeaten public.

Continue Reading

Economic Raw Food for the Brain

About a fortnight ago, a tearful young lady had put a message up on facebook complaining that she was tired of being disposable, that nobody had any feelings anymore and she did not feel that she could live like that.

I very quickly replied that her generation had been brought up for a transient existence because transience is good for the economy, and that if she expected to change anything, she was just going to have to rebel.  She did not reply. A good example of this symptom of the Western economic disease is one of IKEA’s campaigns, which entreated the viewer to get divorced and buy some furniture. This is a fairly advanced gag for the European market, but an important one.

I am sure this phenomenon, of personal disposability and the need to continuously upgrade yourself, started during my generation or even earlier in the USA, but in the UK even people two years younger than me show a marked difference to people of my own age. The sublimation of cultural influence is so finely tuned now, that even 20 odd months make a difference. Where I got much the same post war creative children’s programming as my older peers, I noted as far back as the 1980s that colours in newer TV shows were more akin to sales signs and children were being discouraged from actually making anything in favour of showing off another purchase. I was met with dismay in the 1990s when I made a serious complaint to the BBC about it.

It is very sad, and very bad for fulfilling personal development that we are now training people to despise menial jobs and assume that the answer to all ills is to purchase happiness.  It is equally sad to destroy the sense of commitment that, despite sacrificing a sense of day to day contentment, provided people with the stability required to move beyond Candy Crush Saga, to discuss more important things and perhaps volunteer to do something about them instead of assuming powerlessness.  Being serious is now considered to be something undesirable and unattractive. People like this poor girl feel that their emotions are somehow unacceptable, and that feeling anything renders them worthless.  Compare this with even fifty years ago, and you will see exactly how much you have been manipulated.

Post 90s babies may not even have access to people who remember when it was OK to have feelings and make lousy Valentine’s cards (or whatever else) for each other as it now seems to be desirable to throw the elderly into a care home.  Boys are now deprived of the company of their fathers, fixing broken items or inventing new ones, because the traditional skill level has been depleted for the benefit of the Political Economic Paradise we are so fortunate to live in. Now they are supposed to jump into the second car and buy something new to keep somebody somewhere (else) in work. All so that your government can show you another couple of percent growth and keep you voting for them.  You can also count yourself responsible for perpetual war and student loans, since these are also part of the economic machine that is running out of steam.

I, perversely, count myself lucky to be in a position to show you exactly how much you have been conned. Time is money – no, money is time, and time is worth a lot more than cash to you if you know how to use it effectively and have sufficient motivation to do something with it.  Nobody is powerless, and nobody is worth more than you just because they are good at extracting cash from their employer or anybody else they do business with. Don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, stop comparing yourself to them and stop worrying about what people might say if you actually care about something.  You may well surprise yourself.

Continue Reading