what is fair?

If everyone had the same opportunities and abilities, that would be fair. I don’t think that either ideal Capitalism or ideal Communism are the perfect fair world. I think that a fair world is one in which everyone is born with enough to be happy, and can get to a higher place without exploiting anyone along the way, but not too high. I think that a fair world would be one without inheritance, one where everyone starts in the same place and is given the same level of options.
In a fair world, no one could tell anything about you from looking at you except for what you had decided to make of yourself. In a fair world, everyone would be self-made. We would make everything ourselves or voluntarily for each other. There would be no need for charity, but we would give each other things out of natural generosity, not an attempt to be quote-unquote “virtuous”.
We would all naturally look basically the same, but we could alter our appearances however we wanted, and people would consider other people’s physical appearance the way they consider art in a museum; carefully, knowing that everything they see had been arranged to invoke thoughts and emotions in the viewer.
When I say that we would look the same, I do not mean that we would have the same features or skin or anything like that. People would look just as varied as they do now. But the difference would be that the body and face would be seen as a blank slate, not a collection of classifying traits that came with social baggage. I mean this in terms of gender as well as race.
People would travel all the time. We would not have this notion of “work” as a pointless task whose only purpose is to get money from an employer. Instead, our lives would function as a sort of tangible version of the Hindu and Buddhist idea of Karma, as I understand it. We would do something that helped another person, or moved foreword our human culture in some way, and, sooner or later, we would get something in return. No one would have one set employment. We would drift, volunteering to help whoever was nearby with whatever they were doing. For example, no one would stay on a farm for an entire lifetime. When you saw a farm, if you had nothing else to do, you would go and work there for a few hours, or maybe a few days, just to help. Maybe you would take some food with you.
Volunteerism and giving would be the rule. You help and work not because you are expecting to be compensated, but because you know the vibrations will come back to you sooner or later.
Our society would be much less clannish. We would be less attached to our families. Relationships needn’t go in stages; when you meet someone, you can talk to them just like you would talk to someone you had known your whole life. The main problem, I think, with our attitude towards others now is that we have a kind of “everyone is out to get me, better huddle close with the ones I’m not afraid of” attitude.
I said before that we would travel. This is true. We would be acquainted with many different cultures, not just our own. Cultures needn’t all be the same, but they needn’t be so segregated, either. If there were an element of some culture that we liked, we could adopt it. This would be the main advantage of a greater mixing of peoples.
The other reason that I say we would be less familial is that in a society where one associates with one’s parents, one is born with privilege, power, and an idea of where one is among the social hierarchy. In a world with no social hierarchy, one sees no reason to stay with one’s “own people”. If everyone is equal (different, but equal), then there is no reason not to be friends with everyone. People would not be afraid of each other as they are now.
The two main reasons that people are afraid of each other are this: we are afraid of what is different, and we rightfully know that there are dangerous people out there. Neither of these problems would exist.
People would not be afraid of differences for the reasons I have explained above; mixing of cultures, travel, an understanding that humans are different but equal, equality at birth, a looser familial structure, etc.
Also, there would be no need to be afraid of each other. Everyone in this world is born, like I said in the beginning, with equal opportunities and abilities. If we have equal opportunities and abilities, right off the bat there would be fewer people who hurt others and commit crimes, because they don’t need to. The other thing is that everyone would be intensely aware of that sort of manifest Karma that I mentioned above. We wouldn’t hurt each other because we would know that it was pointless; the bad vibrations would just bounce right back.

i have decided that the way to tell if someone has lost all of their childish funness is if they no longer are able to speak in gibberish. or if they are, but it's the common type of gibberish that is basically words, like "shabadabadadoodoodeeedeelalalfoofaa." it really bugs me when people call that gibberish, because it isn't.

when i was really little, i used to bang on the keyboard like sdklfsdfisdfksdfsdf49ewicnm,vnsa and print out whole pages of it and my dad read it to me. that was fun.

please read

this

parsley teardrops

what is it about human beings that looks at a pile of snow or sand or dirt or rocks or legos and decides to build something? we have this endless creative obsession--which is not to say that all of us are artistic, only that we want to create. we are endlessly prolific and we are never satisfied. and, to top this, everything we create creates problems that require us to create more stuff. in the myth of prometheus, epimethius gives all of the physical strengths to the rest of the animal kingdom. prometheus looks in the jar of good traits, and there is nothing left. so, prometheus gives the homosapiens this...thing. it's difficult to describe. i suppose it could be called curiosity. not pandora-type curiosity, but philosopher-type curiosity. have you ever seen the sculptures of early man at the natural history museum? we are so naked, so soft and vulnerable. we have no armor. we just have pointy sticks. but even in this, we are ahead.
there is another element as well, and this is the selfish one. human beings are selfish. there is no way to get around this. we may be idealists, but even the most hardcore communist is a little bit greedy. humans are naturally capitalists. we want to build stuff, get stuff, take stuff, get ahead, win, be the the alpha male, etc. this is why communism never works on a grand scale. people may agree with it theoretically, but instinctively they want to win.
this is why patriarchy won. from my small amount of knowledge of these things, matriarchy is a family-style society; everyone works for the greater good of the people. patriarchy is the opposite; if you can enslave people to build a really big house for you after you're dead, go ahead. good for you.
this is why i think that we still have problems. while our curious side is intrigued by the puzzle of human suffering and our matriarchal side wants to help, we don't want to give things up. we think that the idea of living significantly less luxurious lives for the good of abstract ideas or people we don't know is stupid. and i am not condemning us for that, i am simply stating that this attitude causes problems.

or perhaps this is just how we feel in america.

i haven't written a post this long in a while.

i was researching freeganism recently, because i find it interesting. so, i read the "why freegan?" page. and it said this:

Working Sucks - Where does the money you spend come from? You or your folks working long hours at a dehumanizing job, most likely. You don’t have to compromise yourself and your humanity to the evil demon of wage-slavery! Working sucks and if a little scavenging can keep you from needing a job than go jump in a dumpster! Even if you do need to work to pay your bills, think about how much less you would have to work if you didn’t have to buy food.

true, this does look a little too fanatical to take seriously. but i take everything seriously, so here is what i thought:
in a world where no one worked and everyone scavenged, pretty soon everything would run out. then, people would need to grow and make their own things, which is work in itself. this is originally what work was. however, as humanity got more and more complicated, all kinds of services began to be needed. thus, gradually, "work" became separate from taking care of oneself. actually, for most of history, people had to do both. no, let me rephrase that: men had to do one thing, women had to do the other. men would grow/buy food, make money, etc. women would cook the food, make the clothes, etc. however, quite recently, women (at least in some parts of the world) rejected this role and began to work as well. so now (in developed countries), everyone works. the cooking and clothes-making, and even some of the cleaning and childcare, is done by someone else as their work. everyone does one thing and one thing only. what if everyone, instead of "working" in the way that men used to, would "work" in the way women used to? actually, thinking about it, this is not possible. basic things like crops, cotton, etc. have to come from people working.
but what about recycling? what if we actually don't need that stuff, because we have so much junk lying around already that we could just use that? that still leaves food, though. although it is possible to do as the freegans do and eat recycled food, it wouldn't last for very long. thus, we would need farmers.
but, is it human to become more and more extravagant? to, gradually, think that we require all of these services and luxuries and advances? and i suppose, on a certain level, we do. we are weak. we cannot live just for ourselves--we must huddle together and move forwardforwardforward------->.
so this is my answer to the above paragraph by the freegans: work is human. the only negative work is that which undermines or does not progress society.