Culturally, we cannot conceive of a well-adjusted man forgoing an income opportunity that requires no more burden on his life than his private pursuits. The common example are men spending time on role-playing video games. At least from my own experience, playing such games is just as difficult as many jobs. Our culture has a strong bias that it is irrational to turn down the income opportunity for the same level of effort.
Under this concept of Aten, there can be a more coherent understanding of the recent discussion about man’s value. By default, every man’s value is zero. To have value, a man has to do something with the timestamp he is given. In particular, he has to spend that timestamp on actions that builds and grows his relationships along a scale that has a high-value end. Such effort is optional in Aten’s mind. The motivation for man is that if he plays his provision of timestamps well, he will reap rewards for himself as well as those in his network.
It is important to define value as a scale that has at one end the term “high value”. if there is a scale for value, then that scale must have a zero. If we allow the fact that there are a select group who can attain high-value status, then we must accept that others are in the low value end. I assert there must even be an absolute zero. There is the possibility of a zero value man. I’ll further assert that they are abundant.
The high value man is a very publicly visible man, in particular to that portion of the public that consists of similarly high value individuals. He has to like, or at least tolerate, being in their presence. Similarly, his romantic partner needs to tolerate being his partner.
The more sustainable model is that of the distant past civilizations of dramatic inequality in terms of male access to procreation. Those civilizations benefited from maximizing the fertility of their women with the fewest men, while encouraging the excess men to redirect their attentions and aspirations to take advantage of being free from attending to the needs of the females and their offspring.
Given what we now know about this virus, our ancestral trust in God would have served us must better than our actual course of action that instead trusted humans acting beyond the boundary they should not have crossed.
We are learning that we can not live on this earth on our own. We all depend on external life support systems of government directions and universal obedience. Initially by following social-distancing and isolation directives, and ultimately be getting annual immunization shots.
The ultimate fallout will be political upheavals resulting from the fact that the lessons of this experiment are impossible to unlearn. People will see the contradictions between what they were told to believe before, and how things actually work out. There will be two sides: those who want to retain their prior authority by going backwards, and those who no longer believe that option makes any sense.
I see a very grim future for current governments that are already trapped by their decisions with the only option to ratchet up the restrictions and government dependencies. It is possible that a brighter future could emerge under an algorithmic driven government with the properties described above of punctuated liberty with extensive data use.
As during the Prohibition where people moved their social gathering from public bars and saloons to their private residences, I think the same thing will happen now. Social gathering in comparable numbers will resume but they will be in private “speak easy” locations with restricted entry to those who have the right test results instead of knowing the right password.
