Every so often, we find ourselves at moments of sudden clarity. Unfortunately, most of us dismiss them either out of being distracted by things of the moment, or as inconvenient truths we would prefer to ignore. For whatever reason, I find these moments come at almost regular intervals. I believe this is only because I consciously partake in existential pondering sessions, in which I come to seemingly wild conclusions. But, while I use these to question the essential purpose of my own existence, I discover some very interesting contradictions in the things we are taught and urged to believe.

All my life, I’ve owned this intellect, and yet, I had nowhere to apply it to outside of the pages of my own journals and weblogs. I felt that anything I had to say was rarely of any consequence. It took one such moment of clarity well into my adulthood to realize that this was a mindset enforced by a society giving into reductionism and oversimplification.

In my youth, I believed Academics were meant to hone my skills of expression. Yet, I found that my pen only dulled as the expectations of my output became nothing but producing endless drivel full of summary. There was nothing in almost any academic assignment that left me inspired to add my own commentary.

In the process, I also found myself being wrong about a great many things. But, when I could be proven right on something, my shortcomings would be brought up in evidence against me. Any arguments that I correctly made were suddenly found unceremoniously dismissed. So, I felt invalidated by the spurning of those who I thought were elders and paragons I could respect.

At work, I was doomed to an endless cycle of entry level positions. I finally recognized that this was because I was considered too dangerous to the welfare of everyone above me, or so they thought. They saw my coming up as a threat to their own selfish interests, so they did all that they could to make sure the day never came where I would supplant them.

Yet, all I ever intended was to benefit all those around me. That’s how I was raised to believe that organizations work. While in theory that’s true, that every whole can become more than the sum of its parts, in actual practice, those at the top often take the lion’s share of the benefit from most of the pyramid below.

While I’d love to flip the pyramid upside down, I then realized that such a maneuver has been tried on multiple occasions. Sadly, we often find that the cycle of the rich getting richer eventually just happens all over again. I’d like to think that people simply don’t know any better, but it’s more that they simply don’t care. Perhaps the better solution instead is to tip the pyramid over on its side and let the natural forces of gravity decide the fate of the majority.

Before you dismiss all this as abstract philosophical rhetoric and nonsense — which certainly sounds good enough to be fit for print — I do have something meaningful and concrete to say about economics. For example, I’ll freely admit that money itself isn’t the problem; it’s the endless greed of Capitalism, and we need a system more in line with humanist expectations. After all, humankind has seen other popularized economic models, such as Communism, fail spectacularly time and again in just the past century. Still, the issue isn’t so much about “free markets” themselves, as much as it is the unscrupulous actors who motivate and skew them towards their own favor.

Realistically, there is no such thing as a “free market” because the laws of natural economics dictate that there must be an exchange of labor, capital, technology, or assets in every transaction. As it so happens, Nature has its own technology, and the study of that is what we call science. We humans are simply mimicking what we find to be true in Nature. While we may foolishly believe that we are somehow improving upon it, we are in fact simply reflecting the hidden aspects that the Divine Mind intended us to find. At least, that’s what I prefer to believe.

I still believe, despite great volumes of evidence to the contrary, that human beings still have a limitless amount of untapped potential. But we’ll never reach loftier heights if we don’t stop picking on one another and tearing one another down. We expend so much of our energy, itself a valuable and very limited resource, on matters that only serve to degrade our contemporaries. We’re all forced into roles within the telling of an epic of nonsense told by fools who stand to make some sort of profit, real or imagined, from breaking the stories.

You wouldn’t believe the things I used to think about as a child, presupposing many of the concepts that scholars think up as their theses and dissertations, replete with better ways to run things. These days, I tune in to podcasts with hosts interviewing these so-called experts of their various fields and find myself pausing them before they get to the pith of their talk. I make a comment to my wife Emily predicting what they’re going to say, only to then restart the playback and discover that they inevitably parrot my offhand comment.

This isn’t because I am some uniquely gifted genius who simply has come to know what someone will say thanks to some divine intervention. It’s because I’ve thought about these things before on my own. Rarely are we ever alone in considering things. But, in actual realizations, such a small percentage of us ever become inventors who make real our hopes and dreams.

Those who we remember as great inventors and foundations of our society didn’t conceive of their inventions in a vacuum. They simply dared to act, in and of itself, an act of bravery in the face of ignorance. Ironically, what inevitably happens is that when something new and exciting breaks into the world market, you have dozens, if not more, smacking themselves in the head asking themselves, why didn’t I think of that? The irony is that most of them probably did, but never bothered to act.

While I’m not at all skilled with invention in the physical sense, I do know how to craft my words just eloquently enough to relate these discoveries of mine to you in prose. I hope that with my relating my own observations, you will come to respect and share your own in kind.

~ Amelia Desertsong