I am anonymous.

I'm you. The person next to you. Someone who you work for or someone who works for you. Someone you love or hate. Or just someone you've bumped into on your way here. My opinions are my own and probably they are yours or the person's next to you. But they are not the opinions of a single person, they are created by interacting with everyone everywhere so they come from all of us. They are society's opinions.

I'm a scientist, cheerleader, farmer, homemaker, child, doctor, mailperson, socialite, movie star, clerk, president, homeless.

I am intense emotion tempered by immense control. I am a reasonable human being.

and I want to talk with you about:

Where are we going?

What trends in society underlie the more obvious swings of change? Start with the basic needs of the components of society, human beings. We all need food, shelter and sex to some varying degree. These components are necessary to survive and propagate the species, which is just what we have evolved to do so well. To those ends we have modified our environment so that we can build shelter in just about any location on earth and in space. As soon as we put enough effort into traveling to the stars we will begin colonizing the rest of the universe. We can grow or make the foods we need for nourishment in just about any conditions, even without soil. We even harvest from the sea and someday we will cultivate those two thirds of the earth as well. Of course we have made varying forms of sexual satisfaction available. It doesn't need to be for reproduction and your partner might even be a voice from the other side of the earth. With these needs met we have changed drastically from the hunter/gatherer who struggled every day for those three basic needs. And without the struggle for the basics we have invented many others.

Questioning

Someone said that the unexamined life is not worth living and that the unlived life is not worth examining. Once you've stopped questioning don't you just become a puppet for the opinions of others? Don't you spout what you are told, believing it all to be true because someone said it was? Is everything you've ever been told, read or watched on TV the truth or just someone else's opion of what the truth is? They may even have had motives for telling, writing or showing you something completely false. We all desire to fit in and belong but should you believe everything?

Hate and fear

"Hate is a wasted emotion." a friend of mine once said. Look at what causes hate and understand it. Look deep enough and you will find fear behind hate. You've heard we fear what we don't understand. We sure do hate what we fear. Racism in particular makes no sense since the brain that makes each of us different is also what makes us the same. It is so amazing that we have all evolved to be so similar and yet some people will still focus on the most minor differences like skin color, the shape of an eye, gender or sexual preference and attempt to say that these differences make a person better or worse than any other person. This rings so hollow it would be funny if it were not so terribly sad. These judgements are based on differences that don't matter. What matters are the connections formed by the synapses in our heads. What this means is who we are is not a factor of what we look like or where we come from, but what we think and do. Are we so afraid of the world that we feel we must hate so much?

Sex

Why are we so prudish in society? What is so wrong with sex that we have to hide our own sexuality and fear that of others? Isn't the human body simply what we are all born with? Don't we all have some need for sex? Ask yourself what sex has meant to you. It is an integral part of being human along with the needs for food and shelter. And yet we have allowed society to use this basic need as a tool to judge us, make us doubt our feelings and to manipulate us. Should we let a few people in society judge our emotions to be bad and then tell us how we can or can't behave in the privacy of our own bedrooms?

Education

Now that society can meet the basic needs of food, shelter and sex with very little effort why bother to become educated? You can get by with minimal effort just by showing up to work and accomplishing the minimum necessary not to be fired. For this minimal effort you can be paid enough to purchase food, shelter, sex and other forms of recreation. With cheap forms of entertainment like alcohol or television you can fill the rest of your waking hours with mind numbing entertainment. The days and nights that follow are much the same. But human beings are never completely satisfied. We crave more. We must be mentally stimulated or we stagnate. We create hobbies, join social organizations, excel at our work or go to school to expand our minds. It is the continued learning that opens the most doors for us. By learning we improve all our other activities. Even after we have matured learning lets us continue to grow even after our bodies have stopped. When do you say "that's it I've learned it all" ?

Superstition and religion

As society evolves we cycle between mass superstition and reason. As we understand more about our universe, superstition seems more and more unreasonable. As our understanding explains fire to be a simple chemical reaction it is no longer a gift from the heavens. When we understand why the wind howls it feels silly to say it is the scream of a Banshee. Now that a single God or deity is popular we laugh at the ancients who had tens of gods like the Greeks or Romans. When we have a personal god we say that anyone with a different god must be wrong.

But someone who believes the essence of life is contained in a quartz crystal that they bought in a shop down the street relies on the same reasoning that a million Christians do. And those reasons are just as valid. Since some people do not have superstitions what do they believe in? Maybe they believe in themselves or the ones they love. Maybe they believe in what they can see, touch or understand. Maybe they just question why they should believe in anything? Perhaps we no longer need irrational beliefs in anything to explain the wonders of the universe.

Religion has less and less value every day. We don't need religion to explain the daily mysteries of life because they can be explained by real understanding. Religion began as an attempt at explaining what we didn't understand and what it ended up doing was making life simpler for us by giving control of our choices in life to some imagined power or deity. However since these deities must coincidentally always communicate to the masses through a chosen few, believers have relinquished control of themselves to other human beings who for whatever motives want to control the masses. In the worst case this leads to war or religious persecution and in the best case millions of people expend large portions of their lives' efforts performing acts on a stage for an empty audience. Should we allow anyone, deity or salesperson of religion, to write out the play of our lives?

Equality

I realize that most advanced societies have already recognized that all people are created equal but there are a few throwbacks even within those societies. It is interesting to note that someone who says that they would never treat a racial minority different can still treat a woman as other than completely equal. From some very intelligent people you still hear comments similar to "I envy him for his smarts, his money, and his beautiful wife." or "He loves coming here because I treat him just like everyone else." Certainly no one is perfect but the people who set examples for others must be even more careful than those who follow. Why treat anyone as inferior simply because they can be placed into a category of broad generalizations? Don't we all fit into someone's generalizations, a scientist, cheerleader, farmer, homemaker, child, doctor, mailperson, socialite, movie star, clerk, president, homeless, a man, a woman ?

Priorities

What would you say if I told you that a nation exists with enough resources, numbers, and leadership to travel through space, save the rainforests and cure the ill, and yet it chooses to focus a majority of its efforts and resources on building weapons? It even does so when it has the destructive capability to destroy the Earth several times over. And its leaders are driven by selfishness rather than selflessness. What would you say if I told you that there were more than one of these nations? And the worst part is that the people who live in these nations not only continue to turn a blind eye to the actions of their leaders and their country, in many cases they rationalize and condone these actions. When given a choice to replace the leaders who make and carry out these policies the people buy into the same propaganda spouted by the same leaders with the same agendas. We have truly become a race of consumers. And we will buy even the most useless junk or abhorrent policies if they are advertised to us attractively. Are the planet and all the people on it disposable?

The Knights of Reason

Reason is my sword
Thought my shield
Knowledge my armor
I shall call no-one lord
for I am my own lord and master

I will struggle to banish the darkness alone
but I will stand with all the knights of the past, present and future

Curie
Einstein
Ghandi
King
Turing
Paine
.
.
.

User Anonymous January 1 1997

I want to thank Fred for hosting my observations.
Please send e-mail to me at fredlock@west.net with the words "user anonymous" in the subject line and it will be forwarded to me.