This is just how the system works. It's not a conspiracy. It's a perfect example of how a a bad system forces a bunch of rational actors to do absolutely batshit crazy things... Any real fix stands to hurt so many players that it's pretty unlikely we'll see change from a political standpoint. I'm kind of hoping the whole thing just collapses under it's own weight and something better can arise from the ashes.

That's a popular hope, but I'm not sure it has ever happened. Instead, bad systems keep going until they are outcompeted. The best historical comparison I can think of is the medieval church. For hundreds of years everyone knew it was completely corrupt, but it held a monopoly on salvation, so it didn't change until protestantism also offered salvation. So we need competing systems that offer medical care much cheaper... or in some cases they could just release us from the belief that medical care is necessary.

Alright then, if you can't pursue happiness, how can you make yourself a fertile place for happiness to grow of its own? Happiness being the most subjective of states, I can only speak for myself. I have found four qualities that I believe naturally enrich the ecology of joy. When I'm capable of sustaining them, they sustain me and continue to do so even in these strange days. They are: a sense of mission, the casual service of others, the solace of little delights, and finally, love for its own sake.

He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorists are socially isolated.

Another footnote on language: have you noticed that "inner city" has nothing to do with how close a neighborhood is to the center of a metropolitan area, and instead refers to wherever the black people live? Anyway, I want to expand on my final sentence from Monday.

Imagine a prosperous nation in which most people can have an adequate life inside the system. Then you've got people like me who don't like how the system structures our lives, but are able to generate our own structure. Then you've got people who are so damaged that they will fail under both external and internal regulation. They can't hold a job, they can't find friends, so they turn to crime or drugs, or suicide, or rarely a mass-killing. By the way, I think a lot of people get into illegal drugs as a way to make friends.

So in a successful society, the greatest risks are taken by the least competent people. But then suppose there's an economic collapse caused by an impossible attempt to have permanent exponential growth on a finite planet. Now you've got millions of highly competent people who can no longer have an adequate life inside the system, and they are driven to take bigger risks. What exactly? I don't know, because someone as creative as me and more motivated will come up with ideas I can't imagine. The point is, as a society fails, the people living on the margins become, on the average, smarter and more capable.

Consider Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor and favorite of Aphrodite. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes him carving a perfect woman out of ivory. Her name is Galatea and she's so lifelike that Pygmalion immediately falls in love with her. He prays to Aphrodite to make the statue come to life. The love goddess already knows a thing or two about beautiful, non-biological maidens: her husband Hephaestus has constructed several good-looking fembots to lend a hand in his Olympian workshop. She grants Pygmalion's wish; Pygmalion kisses his perfect creation, and Galatea becomes a real woman. They live happily ever after.

"Life is composed of primarily mundane moments," she says. "If we don't learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along."

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

Graeber goes on to suggest some future reforms, for which the mechanisms have yet to be worked out: canceling debts, producing less stuff, and redefining labor in terms of helping other people instead of growing the economy.

And two more political links. In How Noam Chomsky is discussed, Glenn Greenwald argues that "the more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more personalized, style-focused and substance-free the attacks become."

And from 2009, The other side of Rick Steves, in which the travel guru cautiously talks politics.

What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.