Tag: Essays

Why are so many Americans overweight?

A frequent comment from my European and Asian friends is surprise at how many overweight people they see in the USA, and how overweight those people are.

If you search on YouTube, you’ll find a bunch of videos explaining “the one reason” why Americans are so overweight (and why there’s such an epidemic of diabetes in the country). However, none of these videos are right, because there’s really about four reasons, two of which are more important.

  1. Extensive poisoning of the food supply
  2. Frequent eating
  3. Portion sizes
  4. Less walking

Extensive Poisoning of the Food Supply

You can find about a hundred thousand videos on YouTube with titles like “This difference between European food and American food with shock you!” One will talk about differences in farming. Another will talk about high fructose corn syrup. Others will talk about sugar, what people eat at meals, how people prepare food, etc. The problem is basically all of these things. For some reason (that I do not fully understand) the USA has extensively poisoned its food supply from production, to processing, and even to packaging. It’s provided pots and pans that will poison you if you cook in them. It’s made it super convenient and very cheap to eat foods that will slowly kill you over time, or at the least, mess up your hormones and lots of other systems in your body. It provides no education to its children about how or what to eat, and leaves that all up to junk food advertisements, apparently.

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Smart People

Very smart people often express frustration to me about interacting with less intelligent people, and vice versa. Even though they are very smart, one thing they have never figured out is how to communicate successfully with people who are less smart. I think I’ve isolated one of the reasons for this.

One of the primary aspects of intelligence is recognizing specifically what you don’t know about something. For example, somebody says, “John wants to shoot your sister.” A pretty stupid person just takes that at face value, questions nothing. A somewhat smart person might think, “Huh? Why?” A smarter person might think, “Why are you telling me this? What’s your motive? Is this true? Shoot how? Are we talking about the same John? When does he want to do it? Is this urgent? Did something happen? It seems like there’s some story behind this.” And so forth. Many people will actually have all of those questions basically at once, instantaneously. It will be “obvious” to the smart person that they don’t know these things. The less intelligent person will be vaguely aware that they are missing data. The stupid person will have absolutely no idea that they are missing anything.

So when a very smart person and a less intelligent person talk to each other, the smart person often totally overlooks this. They simply get frustrated with the less-intelligent person. They are confused. “Surely this person knows they don’t know, so why are they behaving this way? They must be trying to do the wrong thing, or something?” And the less intelligent person is totally baffled. “Why is this smart person being such a jerk to me? I’ve told them the truth and they can’t seem to see it.”

So what you get is smart people just being critical about “stupid people,” without any effective solution or ability to communicate, and less intelligent people being frustrated about geeks or “the intellectuals” or nerds or whatever—feeling like they are being talked down to, disrespected, and generally invalidated.

The Most Powerful Weapon

The most powerful weapon in the world is PR. It is not the atomic bomb, guns, tanks, planes, chemical, or biological weapons. All of these things can be overcome or stopped by PR, and far more people can be hurt or helped by PR.

What is PR? Well, more or less, it’s the handling of human emotions, usually on a broad scale. It turns out that most people are driven by how they feel about something as opposed to what they think about it. As such, you can get people to feel certain emotions and thus get them to take specific actions or believe specific things. Because emotion is the senior quality for most people, even more so than reason.

Even if people think they are being logical, they often miss the emotional component behind their reasoning. But you can see it—people will talk about how they feel about a piece of data or express their conviction (itself an emotional state) that something is the case in some very emotional way. I’m not saying everybody is irrational all the time. I’m just saying that people are more driven by emotion, more easily, than they are driven by data. Data is helpful, but mostly if it drives them emotionally in some way. I’m not saying that this is how I think things should be, I’m saying that this is most commonly how the civilization works, and if you ignore it, it’s hard to get very far in affecting society on a broad scale.

At some point, somebody realized this and started to develop some of the only truly workable social technology that man has—the technology of Public Relations. I would love to tell you that the initial users of this technology intended to help man, but as far as I can see, that was not the case. Since its inception (which I suppose in the West one could trace to Charlemagne in about 800 AD or so, but that’s debatable) it has been used by people in power (or those who wish to be in power) to consolidate their power, eliminate their enemies, and manipulate the populace into doing their will.

Although in modern times this technology has been extended to be very helpful to business and individuals, as far as I can see, its most common use is still the same—to manipulate populaces to satisfy some agenda, often an agenda that is actually harmful to that populace but which they will buy with full love and hunger, because they have been so convinced that it is true, right, and good.

Today the technology of PR has become very sophisticated. It recognizes that you won’t get to everybody with the same message. That different types of people need to have different messages.

Let’s say that your goal was to get everybody to stop buying bananas. There are a lot of things you have to look at here. What’s the emotion you want to cause people to have? What’s the emotion that stops things? Well, hate or anger. Fear, if you want to stop the listener themselves, but hate or anger if you want to get people to stop the banana companies. So, you have to figure out how to get people to feel hate or anger about bananas, or the companies that make them, or the people that eat them, etc.

So first, one thing you have to look at it—who do people listen to? Or perhaps more accurately, who is most capable of driving people’s emotions? For some people, this is the “mainstream media,” like NBC, CNN, Fox News, etc. So you have to craft a message that (a) the readers of those channels will agree with and that (b) gets them to hate bananas.

However, many clever people who work in PR have realized that there is, today, widespread distrust of the “mainstream media.” So what do you do? You create numerous small websites and spread the data through social media. You use a _different_ message, but still one that will get people to hate bananas in the end. This works because the data doesn’t come from “the mainstream media,” but instead it comes from your “friends,” or from “independent sources.” If you do this well enough, you’ll even convince people to start spreading your message themselves, which is great, because word of mouth is still one of the most effective advertising methods around. Maybe you can even convince some famous people, and then they will spread your message too—for free! It helps if you use your “independent media” to amplify some of these famous people’s statements too—it’s a great cycle for you, the PR agent.

One of the best parts of this strategy is that, for the most part, it is not strictly necessary that the data you are spreading is _true_. Now, don’t get me wrong—lying in broad PR is absolutely going to backfire against you eventually. But it does still work (in terms of having the effect you want on the society) if you do it fast enough and broadly enough, because remember, it’s not about what’s true—it’s about what makes people feel the way you want them to feel, a feeling that they agree with and that fits into their framework of ideas.

There really are people in the world who would do literally anything to get what they want. Not everybody thinks about the fate of humanity, many people think just about their own desires or about their own family. And some of these people have the power, money, and connections to do almost anything to get what they want. It turns out that the most effective way to accomplish that, in the modern world, is very often via PR. It’s a subtle weapon that will let somebody do almost anything if they can use it with enough skill and force (force meaning, usually, money).

The force that is today attacking most people, most nations, most companies, is PR. It is using (or trying to use) you to do its work, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media platforms like Facebook.

There are some things you can do to avoid this:

1. Understand that you live in a world where, unfortunately, PR is being used as a weapon all the time, and you are the target.

2. Always ask for the whole data. Don’t accept one picture, one snippet of a video, one sentence that somebody said. Ask for the source material and read the whole thing. Ask for specifics—don’t accept data that says “they” or “people.” Don’t accept data that doesn’t have a location or time. Don’t accept data that says “a group” but doesn’t say how many or who are in it.

3. Don’t participate in spreading messages that will produce hatred, anger, or fear. These are almost always the tools of PR agents being used to manipulate you into being their free advertiser. Instead, it’s usually possible to do #2 above and then, if there is something bad happening, share something uplifting or empowering that tells people about true solutions that have been actually proven to solve the problem that’s being talked about.

It’s often hard to learn the exact truth of something, but it is possible to recognize when the data you are being given is just weaponized PR, and simply ignore it. Like, you don’t have to solve every mystery, you don’t have to have an opinion about every cause, you don’t have to take a side in every debate. You aren’t morally broken if you choose simply to not be involved. If the data is being thrown at you just to get you to feel some emotion and thus take action on the speaker’s behalf, but you can’t actually get the full data or be confident that any of it is provable, then it’s fine to just skip it. We don’t have to be the victims of this. We just decide to be, sometimes.

If Everybody Would Just Do What I Say…

One of the greatest errors that a government or politician makes is believing that they can plan a civilization.

Perhaps we’ve all had the thought, “If I were in charge of this mess, surely I could fix it,” about one thing or another. But for some of us, I think we’ve conceived this as, “If everybody would just do what I say, then everything would work out.” Sadly, this is a fatally flawed idea, and I believe it is one that many politicians actually possess. The problem is that the people we are moving around are not inanimate objects, but rather beings of free will. If you remove that free will from them, nothing good happens. It doesn’t improve them as people. It’s sometimes necessary in brief emergency circumstances, like when somebody is on a drug-fueled rampage to kill your family. In that case, sure, take somebody’s free will away. But this whole civilization is not in that circumstance, and never has been. When you take away the free will and self-determinism of a sane individual, you degrade them. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes, but that doesn’t balance out the harm you can do to a person by severely restricting their self-determinism. Yes, there are circumstances in which it’s necessary, but in no way does that make for a sensible argument for why you (or any politician) should be in a position to plan the activities and pattern of an entire civilization.

You may think that I’m just talking about fascism, but I’m not. There is a gradient between total freedom and total control, and on both sides the civilization goes awry. Sadly, in current condition of Mankind, if you were to let everybody do anything they want all the time, many bad things would happen. Also, in order to have a civilization, there does have to be some structure in which people can make decisions and play the game of life. But many (perhaps most) governments of Earth today have taken this much too far. In an attempt to solve the evils they have seen when some people are given too much freedom, they have set up systems that punish or restrict the freedoms of every person.

One of the greatest errors made here is generalization. Some wealthy people are evil, so we want to punish all wealthy people. Some employers are unjust to their employees, so we punish all employers. Some websites have made mistakes about censorship, so we punish all websites. This has happened for so long that we believe this is the way that it must be. That, oh sorry, there’s evil in the world so we have to restrict the freedoms of everybody. But I will put forth a wild opinion–that the restrictions that are put in place almost always lead themselves to more evil in the world than they were designed to prevent.

The only thing that I believe a government can successfully do is provide freedom and safety for its citizens, plus some sort of structure in which they can operate. This may sound like some sort of wild anarchism or libertarianism or whatever you want to say as an -ism. And there are plenty of arguments against it, most of which start with pointing out what happens when you allow people to have freedom. Many of these arguments start with the story of some individual or group that was oppressive when provided that freedom. Often, we have been taught about these individuals or groups as though they were the whole civilization, but usually if you look deeply into it, it was not everybody who was doing the bad behavior, but rather a minority of people involved.

But I’m not forwarding any -ism. I’m saying that this is the only safe thing a government can do. At some point, you have to accept that you’re governing a flawed populace. You’re not going to “fix” people by passing laws. That’s for their religions, therapists, and friends to do. But you could provide a civilization in which their friends, therapists, and religions can operate safely, and in which everybody would be able to do the positive things that they want to do.

Crazy Year

Oh, okay. It’s Crazy Year in the US, again. Happens every four years. Probably something to do with the extra day, or something. 😉

Some thoughts for Crazy Year:

1. It doesn’t make sense to make abstract arguments about people you have no personal experience with, as a vast generality to justify systems you’re proposing imposing on a whole country.

2. There are a lot of things that sound true, but aren’t actually facts.

3. Even if something is true, that doesn’t mean it’s important.

4. There are people with billions or trillions of dollars on the line in political decisions in the USA. If you think they won’t try everything in their power to deceive or manipulate you in order to be voted into power (or have their shills voted into power), then you’re naive.

5. When people ask, “But how/why is [some political thing] different in the US?” the first thing you think of should be point #4 above.

6. There are more than two sides to almost everything. In some cases, there are infinite “sides” to an argument. When somebody forces you to pick between two sides, it’s because they want to force you into picking one of those two choices and not any of the other choices. It is a method of manipulating you.

7. When somebody uses their power and platform to demean or attack somebody else, and the person being attacked isn’t an actual criminal, that’s an act of hatred. It’s just a mechanism of manipulating you. They are using it because it showed up in marketing surveys as a successful marketing method for the demographic they were trying to reach. But if you’re a person who values peace and opposes hatred, it would be hypocritical to support politicians who vigorously attack their fellow human beings.