Yesterday
I had to drive to Mid Rivers mall and while driving along I-70, traffic
momentarily slowed by about 20 mph before an overpass. A lone man was sitting
under an umbrella and had hung a large sign stating “IMPEACH OBAMA”. The
motorcyclist in front of me, dressed in leather with a red bandana, raised an
arm in the air and made a fist. What compels people to think that removing a
single president from office will make things better?
If
Obama is impeached, we will still live in a world where most of the money is
concentrated in a small group of people and most people will work their lives
away and get little in return. We will still live in a world where paying for
college results in credentials that can suffice to impress employers enough to
impart some of their money. We will still live in a world with artificial
political borders that require one to have a passport and be treated worse than
a rapist, murderer, arsonist, robber and sodomite when attempting to cross
those borders. We will still live in a world where people believe in religion,
astrology, ghosts, conspiracy theories and deny that humans evolved from
simpler organisms, and that human made industrial processes and technology can
cause global warming.
I
was born into an already established world. Things weren’t right when I was
born, before I was born, and since I was born. During my existence and 200
years prior, we have had presidents and along with them, problems. Even before
presidents there were problems. I don’t know what people are thinking when they
think eliminating a person will solve problems with people. The only way that a
person can live without problems is to live in a society without any other
people, which will turn sour once other people are desired and not found.
Politicians
are people that crave power. They want your vote so they can stay in power,
since the worst that can happen to a politician is losing power (it’s like
someone else losing a job). I suspect that most people don’t understand the
truth about politicians, which is that they do not hold office to make YOU
happy, but to make THEM happy. Politicians seek to satisfy themselves, which
makes them pretty much like everyone else. For example, you don’t get a job to
make your employer happy. Think of yourself as the employer and the politician
as your employee; I find this particular example elucidating. If I carry this
example further, imagine firing an employee that does not produce desirable
results, which would be equivalent to removing a politician from office. When
the employee is gone are all problems solved? No. New problems replace the old
ones. The new problems are typically in the form of new people.
The
problem with people is that they try to domesticate each other. We’re all basically
solipsistic hedonists that avoid genuinely disturbing situations and events. We
have invented terms like “altruism”, “empathy” and “social”, which are, to wit:
the self-satisfying pleasure of helping others, the self-satisfying pleasure of
attempting to understand another mind, and the self-satisfying pleasure of
interacting with another mind. With each person striving to achieve a state of
unending pleasure and with pleasure not being the same for everyone, how can
anyone ever be happy?
While
I have been writing this essay, a quote from Robert Heinlein came to mind. I
consider it to be the most truthful thing ever stated by any human being:
“When a place gets crowded enough to require
ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best
thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”
Unfortunately,
we don’t have space travel yet, not in the sense that will liberate people from
the madness of religion and political borders. My ultimate idea of happiness is
having my own FTL-drive spaceship and returning to Earth perhaps once or twice,
just to see how the madness is moving along. The spaceship would serve as a
home in any environment, so I could live anywhere. It’d be fun to meet other
people that left the Earth and talk about the things we’d seen. We’d never form
large enough groups to require identification and once someone showed signs of
wanting power, we’d jump in our spaceships and go elsewhere. Politicians would
go insane without people to control, so they’d all have to stay on the Earth.
Once everyone left the Earth, the politicians would be the sole survivors and
finally kill each other, rather than using other people for that task.
