American society is fraying on all sides. The problems are everywhere. There is little to nothing that the majority can do to control the wealthiest 1%. They are impervious to even a pandemic, allegedly becoming $637B wealthier. I don’t believe anyone should be surprised by this. Greed in today’s world knows no bounds. The people at the top are in their position because they’ve cultivated a killer instinct to never have enough. The people at the bottom surely have never have enough. And because life is moving faster at higher complexity, this high tech acceleration makes it nearly impossible for the average person to stay afloat. In short, the rat race is getting faster and it’s becoming harder to stay on the treadmill. The stress is rising, wallets are being squeezed; that leads to near term thinking. How do I pay this month’s rent? Can I afford to eat out for dinner?
We are in a cluster fuck vortex. If you’re not ready to roll over and die, you must be asking “what are the real solutions?”
Capitalistic greed has destroyed the quality of American education and consumed America’s time. The root of these issues is money. Education no longer produces critical thinkers nor strong foundations. Most people without STEM backgrounds know the degree only separates them from those without degrees. In other words, the degree is a gating prerequisite to getting an interview for a white collar job. Nothing they learned helps them make better decisions nor generate income.
China Decoded
There are two glaringly obvious reasons China has risen to prominence. The first is America’s greed: we gleefully gave all the production capabilities to China. The rich decimated their own domestic workforce in favor of cheaper Chinese labor. For many years, America did not live in fear of China because we looked down on them: “they are only capable of copying but are unable to make anything creative or original”. Then the tone shifted to “China is stealing our IP” yet the factories never came home… in other words we moaned about their behaviors yet decided to do nothing. Today, China boasts the most opulent engineering marvels on the planet and sans WWIII will be the superpower of this century.
What Americans don’t like to admit is that the Chinese did all the hard work for decades. Americans are notorious for only seeing the present and ignoring the fact that our present is a result of our past. We stopped doing the hard work. We became fat, slow, lazy, entitled. We gave it all away for convenience. And now that we are uncompetitive and our population is ill equipped for the economic battle, we can only moan louder.
The second reason China became a powerhouse is because it believes in hard sciences: science, technology, engineering, medicine. China is rooted in mathematics and logic. America is rooted in fantasy and storytelling. Money is a language rooted in mathematics. Media is the language of storytelling. China is taking over money because its understanding is second nature. America controls the narrative through our ability to weave stories through the media. Given enough time, math prevails over media because math is rooted in truth and logic and eventually the storytelling gets exposed as lies and opinions.
It’s been said that opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. Look at America today: every average Joe has an opinion and digs their heels into their position with or without facts or data. Things in America are not rooted in critical thinking nor logic nor math. Because that takes time to research… it’s hard work. But there is an even scarier reality to the average young American: we are so math deficient that any calculation beyond basic addition and subtraction become nerve wracking. Ask a young person to do division or multiplication without a calculator. Don’t even bother with decimals or percentages.
Media Math
The jobs that pay well are rooted in math and logic. Then there are the plentiful jobs that anyone with an asshole can be: social media influencer, content creators, etc. The problem here is that once again, bad math comes to bite them in the ass. Meaning that because America’s specialty is storytelling, it’s convinced everyone that it’s reasonable to become wealthy by simply posting stories on Instagram. Where the math lets them down is they look at the highest paid person and say, “that doesn’t look hard”. But they don’t realize for every 1 star on social media there are 1 million in the graveyard. That comparison used to be with athletes with the exception that athletes had clear talent. Now the distance between you and the social media star is a few cosmetic surgeries and some good luck. But it’s far from the truth. Most social media influencers are probably sitting at home eating top ramen stressing over their next post, fearful that they are no longer relevant.
Compare that existence to the person who learned math and science. What you learn is a bedrock of knowledge that you can monetize. There may be new techniques or breakthroughs but it never changes the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. There’s a permanence to these high paying skills. But it takes education, time, and discipline. The price must be paid.
