A whole new world

When you experience a mind shift in perceptions,you see things differently from those with a herd mentality.Those with a herd mentality have been brow beaten by the conventional societal forces to accept the status quo,not to pose a challenge to
it.It starts from the familial conditioning of behaviour to the mass indoctrination by orthodox religion and public education on what constitute a good or a bad person.When we buy into that narrative,it becomes a form of social conditioning that sinks into our subconscious on what constitute success.Do well in your studies to make your parents and nation proud,The more money you make,the more successful you are,those who bum around chasing personal dreams are losers,a good person obeys the law and not challenge nor question it,you are a grown up because you have a cushy job,so marriage and the obligatory 2.0 kids and a landed property is the mark of your achievement.Branded luxury items show the world you have a certain status and class in life.
                My self searching leads me to one conclusion.You can be broken if you keep on chasing the status quo and comparing yourself to societal norms.The yardstick of success has to be changed to Are you happy? Do you have self fulfillment? What have you done to improve the society around you?
             Mass indoctrination through public education sells you the stories of your past ancestors.So historians like Howard Zinn are anarchists in that they challenge the official myths that Christopher Columbus enlightened the savages with civilized behaviour and he sought to free the savages from ignorance and a primitive life but the savages were not as destructive as the invaders who stole their native lands.
 So if we look at Dr Farish Nor's book 'What your history teacher didn't tell you."it paints a different version to the official history of our nation.When I introduced it for Eu Jun to read,he got all fired up and read about the French revolution online and wrote a piece advocating republicanism and challenged the narratives his history teacher taught.Teaching should be the lighting of a candle to dispel darkness not a forcefeeding of information to cram the brain with facts and more facts without thinking critically about it.
               Browsing through Noam Chomsky's book,Optimism over Despair,he puts his  critical analysis of current affairs in a logical,convincing angle.Loss of jobs in the US should not be blamed on immigrants coming to snatch away the jobs of the locals but as the practice of capitalism that seeks to maximise profit by lowering cost of production or evading corporate taxes which saw many factories move offshore to countries with lower cost of production,to be nearer to target export markets or being given generous tax shelters.When the state opts to increase corporate taxes to finance healthcare or public housing,these big multinationals are globalised entity and so they relocate to places that offer them tax breaks and so on.If the city of San Francisco increases the tax rate on tech companies like Square,the CEO would relocate to another city that offers more attractive tax rebates.It's human nature that they seek the best deal possible by shopping around different places to seek maximum return on investment.They also seek to maximise returns for investors and shareholders.
         In asking Noam Chomsky this question,it's interesting that he sees that civilization cannot survive "really existing capitalism".What did the interviewer define as "really existing capitalism",since the late 1970s,most advanced economies have returned to predatory capitalism.As a result income and wealth inequality have reached spectacular heights,poverty is becoming entrenced,unemployment is skyrocketing and standards of living are declining.Moreover really existing capitalism is causing mass environmental destruction which along with population explosion is leading us to an unmitigated global disaster.Really existing capitalist democracy is radically incompatible with democracy.Really existing capitalism is a human creation and can be changed or replaced.

           Chomsky reminded the interviewer of a quote from the Analects defining the exemplary person as "the one who keeps trying ,though he knows there is no hope."
Was the current situation as dire as that?
     Chomsky said "We cannot know for sure.What we do know,however,is that if we succumb to despair,we will help ensure that the worst will happen.And if we grasp the hopes that exist and work to make the best use of them,there might be a better world.Not much of a choice."
          The butterfly effect is such that the idea of interdependence is vital to the survival of everyone as an insignificant event in one remote part of the globe could have catastrophic effect in a faraway corner of the globe.Could fracking cause unstable seismic activity in the core of the earth and trigger a tsunami or earthquake in another faraway part of the globe?Who knows? so we cannot operate in isolation and global institutions like the UN are needed to coordinate multilateral cooperative efforts to study global phenomenon like the rise of sea levels or melting of ice caps.
           Multilateral effort would be needed to prevent collapse of nation states,the rise in international refugees or another nuclear war for as Chomsky predicted there are two grim shadows that loom over everything that we consider: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war.
                   I wouldn't need to peer into a crystal ball to imagine a future in which the dehumanizing effect of technology cause human society as we know it to undergo radical transformation.People would be increasingly alienated as they cut themselves off from contact with society as they don't need real time and face to face interaction to function.We could shop online,interact and socialise online,work online,have love relationships online and even have sex with non human robots.
            What does it mean to be a human in this world would be the next big question if our jobs become redundant,relationships are with artificially intelligent non humans and the question of marriage,family,birth and death take on an altogether different level of understanding.Artificial intelligence makes better predictor of causes of diseases,make more strategic moves and even paint art better than the human counterpart.Where does that place humans in the world today?
That world is already at our doorstep so we better figure it out fast.