[Off-Topic] The World Today Is Very Good! Happy 2013!

Update 1/15: Another article just came out, Why 2012 was the best year ever, saying the same thing: we’re much better off today than at any point in the past. Why doesn’t it feel that way? Because lots of alarmists say the opposite. And why do they spread the idea that the world is getting worse? So they can feel like “heroes” for doing “something,” and make you feel worse for not doing as they do. We should always be improving, sure, but without the irrational alarmism and panic.

I decided to kick off 2013 with an article I hope reads as a positive message for the year. The message is simple:

The world today is good, very good, and it's getting better and better.

I get frustrated every time I see theoretically “educated” people who prefer to believe the world is getting worse, that we’re worse off today than yesterday. Today we’re “impersonal,” we don’t play in the street anymore, we lost solidarity, we burn our forests, every corporation is a villain, people suffer more.

Respectfully, I disagree with all those ideas that we’re getting worse. One symbolic reason to write this today is that we made it through 2012, one of the last known “End Times” prophecies, as if it were nothing (which, by the way, it always was).

Anyone who reads the news knows we have increasingly overcrowded metropolises, violence flaring up all the time in various parts of the world, wars in the Middle East, religious intolerance and terrorism, natural disasters that “seem” to be the result of the infamous “Global Warming.”

All of that is true. And none of it is a symptom that the world is getting worse.

The World Is Better

Despite all the cataclysmic prophecies, let me sum it up fast: the world is better today than it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or millennia ago. Fortunately there are people in science, doing serious research and work, who piled up data year after year, and today we can compare it item by item. One of these organizations is Gapminder, which puts all of this data out there so you can see it with your own eyes.

I recommend watching the TED talks by Hans Rosling reading that data. He shows how over recent decades we raised life expectancy for most of the world, improved quality of life, and sharply cut poverty, malnutrition, and inequality. The vast majority of people today live better, with more comfort, and for longer.

Violence is dropping too, as this TED talk by Steven Pinker shows. The book Abundance, by Peter H. Diamandis, gives you even more data on this era of abundance we’re in.

And even the dreaded Global Warming gets constantly questioned. Plenty of scientists aren’t convinced by the data we have. And it hardly matters whether Global Warming is “real”: there are clearly people raking in money and fame off the “fear” of this possible natural phenomenon. Watch the documentary Cool It, where researcher Bjorn Lomborg debunks, one by one, the things you, a reader of this blog, probably never stopped to think about.

Example: if the Kyoto Protocol had succeeded the way the lobbyists wanted, it would have lowered the world’s temperature by all of 0.008 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. And the European Union’s climate policy would drop the temperature by a mere 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit, at the ridiculous cost of USD 250 billion a year for the next century. With half that money you could wipe out poverty, hunger, and disease worldwide.

If everyone in the United States switched to a Prius, it wouldn’t cover even 0.5% of the carbon that technically should be cut by mid-century. And if everyone in the United States used nothing but energy-saving lightbulbs, it wouldn’t cover even 0.2% of the carbon to be cut.

Comedian George Carlin explained this in the clearest way I’ve ever seen:

Getting it?

Who Does This Benefit?

No “small act,” like recycling an aluminum can, makes much difference on its own today (don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt by itself either). What really makes a difference are the steady advances of science. Disciplined experimentation and the buildup of knowledge one day led us to agriculture, keeping famine at bay even with the world’s overpopulation.

That achievement has been sliding back thanks to fads like “organic food”, which ignores years of progress in agronomic technology, the same progress that made sure our generation exists at all.

The reason for this article is to question the obvious: who does all this benefit? The easy answer is the big corporations that know how to cash in on it. But they aren’t the problem. The problem is the people who make it easy for the corporations, turning every discussion into a moral judgment.

Today, if I say I don’t help any “social” cause, I somehow become guilty of someone’s misfortune. A story that bugs me to this day came from a friend I respect a lot. He’s a successful businessman, and he feels a little guilty for having more than others. So when he can, he offers alms and that sort of thing. One day, if I remember right, one of those beggars snubbed the alms, and my friend didn’t know if he was even allowed to feel as frustrated as he was.

That’s my long discussion about the Rights of Man. And to be crystal clear, I’ll spell it out: I have no obligation to help anyone, just as nobody has any obligation to help me.

The key word here is “obligation.” I always have the choice to help or not, but never the obligation. Exercising that choice is an individual call that nobody gets to judge.

The world is simple: everything I produced, by my own effort, is mine and no one else’s. If I want to donate it, that’s my choice. If I want to throw it away, that’s another perfectly valid choice of mine. Nobody has a right to something of mine, and nobody gets to judge what I do with it. The reverse holds too: I’ll never have a right to anything of anyone’s for free, and I should never judge what others do with their own possessions. It’s simple.

Alms and donations are the same thing. I’ll give to whomever I want, when I want, and if I want. And I don’t judge anyone who donates or who doesn’t. Now, it really gets to me when someone has the nerve to think they can judge me for what I do with something entirely mine.

Go back to my story: why does that friend of mine need to feel “guilty” for something he’s not guilty of? Everything he earned came from his own effort and sweat, so it’s his. On top of that, his work made lots of jobs possible, and even let other companies exist, spreading indirect wealth to plenty of people. Why should he feel guilty for not giving away for free something that’s his?

This is the prostitution of the mind that working people suffer daily. The more they work, the harder they push, the more they earn, the more guilt they feel and the more judged they feel. And who are these “others”?

This is the real target of my article. I want to expose the people who benefit from this orgy of fake altruism and ignorance. Charismatic types who talk pretty, with inspiring speeches (especially the ones who invoke justice, inspiration, and motivation), who pile on the hyperbole and present almost no data from a credible source.

They all run the same speeches, the same pompous, contentless routine. They show videos of the world falling apart, apathetic people, little kids, repeating the same old “We must…”, “We need to…”:

"We need to unite," "We need to be more supportive," "We need to care more," "We need to think about our neighbor," "We need to put down the phone and really connect," blah, blah.

BULLSHIT!

Anyone who says a lot of “We need to,” always in the first person plural “we,” clearly wants to be the dictator of a group. Someone who on his own has little to offer, so he rallies more people to borrow the credibility of the masses. And past a certain headcount, whatever he says starts to seem valid.

This is only possible because we let it happen. Because we don’t look at the data, we don’t dig for the facts, we get moved by any slickly edited video with animals, landscapes, and children, especially children in some miserable stretch of the African interior. We applaud every one of these demagogues.

And you know what demagogues like that do once they have masses behind them? They make everyone who is actually working, creating, and producing wealth in the world feel guilty. They point the crowd at these people and pressure them to “share” their property, making them feel lousy if they don’t. And they do it in a “cheerful,” almost festive way: they park the property-owner in the middle of the crowd and say things like “guys, wouldn’t this guy be super cool if he donated what he has to our cause?”, clapping and smiling sarcastically while they shame and corner the producer, leaving no way out.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called fraud. It’s a fraudulent, criminal, and plainly offensive act. Let’s be clear: I won’t put myself through the abuse of criminal acts. And neither should you.

The lesson here is simple. If someone comes to talk to you about another person or group, ask: “who does this benefit?” If someone tells you “such-and-such company must be going bankrupt, since it doesn’t even have money to donate to this very important social cause,” why does the person passing that along care? Who does it benefit? Then flip the question: why would a company not donating necessarily mean it’s in bad financial shape? The most obvious answer, “the company has no interest in donations,” seems “morally too ugly” to consider. And that’s exactly the likeliest one. Except we’ve reached such a degrading point in our morality that this choice is almost treated as a crime.

Don’t Fall for the Talk

So pay attention: the world today is better than yesterday. Don’t doubt it. Donating and taking part in social causes are valid things. But judging others for not taking part is a crime.

Any company, any worker runs one very simple operation: trades. A worker trades the value of what they produced for money. A company trades a product for money. And someone who takes part in social causes trades their own work capacity for another kind of currency: conscience. Every donation is a transaction of your money or possessions for “you feeling good about yourself.” It’s a commercial exchange like any other. After all, have you ever seen anyone donate with the goal of feeling bad about it afterward?

This gets more obvious when you run into the infamous weekend do-gooders. People who want to buy positive karma because they’re frustrated, depressed, unhappy with themselves. So they jump into “save the world” movements, donate money, donate time, donate work. But the moment they get bored, they’re back at the beach, at a barbecue playing soccer, out by the pool. Except now they’re “morally in the black” and put themselves in a spot to judge everyone else with an “I helped and you didn’t.”

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about everyone who’s charitable. Plenty take it dead seriously and, in most cases, stay anonymous, because they’re not in it for attention, they’re in it to help. But the type I’m talking about is in the business of “feeling good,” and that needs an audience, needs telling everyone what good people they are, how everyone should copy them to feel good the same way. Like addicts pushing drugs because the drugs make them feel good.

And they’re worried about the little children? See the trauma they’re putting them through by telling false stories of the end of the world:

The very existence of people like this is one more piece of evidence of how much better our times are. At the start of the 20th century, no one would spare a thought for “social causes” like today: many didn’t even have enough to eat, had no clothes, died from common diseases.

Except this crowd keeps getting more irritating and more tiresome. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m fully in favor of serious social causes, and I can’t stand the weekend do-gooder hipsters. There are serious movements that deserve respect being stained by these groups. Want to really give yourself to a cause? Join organizations like the Red Cross, work on it full-time, and never force anyone, physically or morally, to make the same choice you did.

This goes for social causes and for any kind of “cause.” Be sharp for once: there are plenty of clever people who want you doing the dirty work for them. Be suspicious of anyone who speaks for “us,” for the “good of all,” or any cheap demagoguery of that sort.

The world today is better, check the data, and it keeps getting better. All we have to do is work and produce more and more wealth. Producing is how the world got here, and producing is how it keeps improving. Taking wealth from others, what plenty of people euphemistically call “sharing,” was never the way.