@rawrgrr When I was your age, I started fighting pretty much exactly the same battles. I was anti-war (Vietnam), worried about what would happen when oil ran out (pro solar energy), concerned about nuclear waste and contamination of humanity (anti-nuke), concerned about over-population and the misuse of human resources, concerned about poverty and the difference between the richest and the poorest, pro environment (we were worried about a river near Cleveland that had just caught fire). I could go on and on—racism, sexism, homophobia, legalization of marijuana… it exhausts me just thinking about it.
I could go through another litany of the things I did to try to address these problems, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that it didn’t make much if any difference at all. My work got buried under the mountain of confused work that six billion other humans were doing. But I tried, and I’m still trying—even if I have been beaten down and cynicized in between.
What I want you to look at is human relationships. You are getting confused by looking at money. Money is not the point. It’s nothing without an agreement between people as to what it means. Money is more like a word—a symbol. It means nothing unless we collectively decide to give it a certain meaning.
The real problem arises from another trait that is the result of evolutionary pressures: status. You may have heard of supply and demand—it’s what determines prices in free markets, and value in totalitarian markets. No one can escape it. And really, take people’s advice and learn about economics—it will really help you. I was very skeptical of economics for the first thirty years of my life, but gradually I began to understand how well it helped explain human behavior. Sociology helps a lot, too. Many disciplines are important to know about.
So what is that trait? I think of it as status. Every human seeks the highest status they can achieve. The higher your status, the more people like you and want to be near you and want to connect with you. Most importantly, the more chances you have to reproduce, creating more people who are similar to yourself, while the people without status have children who also have very little status.
This is what we are truly fighting. It’s human nature. It is what got us to where we are.
Money is one way of symbolizing status, but it’s not the only way. One thing that gives us status is our relationships and the esteem in which other people hold us. You don’t need money to be held in high esteem. Esteem doesn’t translate well into money. Money can help you get esteem as well as love and friendship, but there is a lot more to it that money can’t get you.
People like to quantify things because it makes it easier to understand what is going on. They tend to discount things that can’t be quantified very well. It’s as if love or esteem for others doesn’t count.
Thus people focus on money and things and wealth and how we measure wealth. These are just human things. Money is the agreement we reach to assign value to everything we make, do, or own. It helps us organize our economy and our work.
Underneath that is what people are looking for. We struggle and climb and try to be better than others so we can get what we want. Status gives us access to what we want. For some that might be power, for others a chance to talk to people and on and on. The focus though, is on individuals. And that is what makes it hard for people to focus on the big picture.
I, myself, want status because I need love. I need love more than anything and I need more than most people normally have. I need it because I never had it growing up. And like poor people who become gazillionaires because they never had anything as a child, I need to be a gazillionaire in love because I’ll never feel safe. I’ll feel like I’m always a paper wall’s thickness away from losing love, losing hope, and losing life. If there were a love bank, I would have put away more love than most people would see in ten lifetimes. And it’s still not enough to fill the hole inside me.
So I write. I try to talk to people. I try to get appreciation for what I think. I try to help people. I try to be the best person I can be so as many women will like me as possibly can. That’s the kind of status I want, and it’s a kind that money isn’t good at measuring.
Change is slow because people always take the easiest path. Right now, oil is so much cheaper than solar power, and it is plentiful enough that people don’t have to really ration it, so people use it profligately. The oil companies do not have a conspiracy to fight electric cars. Hell, they own solar power companies. They know oil will run out. They want to be able to make money some other way when that happens.
Global warming is a very tricky issues. Almost everyone now agrees it exists, although there is much debate about how much of a contribution humanity makes. More importantly, there is disagreement that we can predict the consequences of global warming, and some think it might have a more beneficial effect while others think it will be a disaster.
There are so many issues, and you’ll see them all discussed here on fluther. You will also find many people like yourself who are passionate about these issues on fluther. When I was fifteen, I was pretty sure I knew so much more than my elders. It frustrated me no end that they wouldn’t change the way they acted. The older I got, the less I felt I knew. The more I saw that I didn’t understand. The less certain I became that my knee-jerk reactions were right. I found myself coming to see that those who had been my opposition while I was young actually had ideas that helped me achieve the goals I have.
Part of my problem when young was that I didn’t know how to present myself. I only knew how to shout. I didn’t know how to listen, and I didn’t know how to use respect in order to persuade people. But then, it’s always been hard for me to deal with social issues. I could never read people very well.
So, besides economics, the other thing that is most important, I think, for dealing with these problems, is people skills. It helps to know how to listen. It helps to be able to read people and to be able to guess where they come from just by the way they present themselves. All that takes experience. But these are the things that will help you work to bring about the changes you are interested in. With any luck, you’ll have a great deal more success than I had.
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