When you look at the sustainability issue, it seems hopeless. And the first culprit always seems to be that we took too long to realize we were causing damage. But environmentalists have existed for as long as I can remember. There have always been people aware of the damage we are causing to our environment. Originally it was the Native Americans as the Europeans took over the land. But the ones that understand the damage we are doing are not the ones making the decisions of whether to do it or not. It's become more complicated now as our world is rooted in capitalism but even before this it's easy to see why things went to shit. It's much harder to preserve something than to utilize it. If there are two people and a tree, protecting the tree is a 24 hour a day job while cutting it down is a job that can be done in a matter of minutes. So, we have always been aware of the damage the manipulators have been doing, it's simply a futile fight to oppose it.

Lierre Keith thinks that our planet could only sustain a human population of 300 million. This led me down an interesting path of thought. Pretty much everyone has an opinion of the Holocaust and its concepts. A very grand majority of people think that it is based in evil. But there is no such thing as evil, simply what is, was and will be and its accompanying explanation (if there is one). Calling something evil is just writing it off as something you don't understand, it's giving up on understanding it because anyone who uses the term evil doesn't identify with it (unless under some bizarre delusion, which isn't impossible...)

And I'm not going to try to pretend that I could possibly figure out why what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s did, but I think it's a much more beneficial thought experiment to propose justifications than to simply be disgusted with it. One of the logical fallacies we tend to have is that if someone does something we see as wrong, we will write off all of their thoughts and conclusions as wrong. And we always come up with cheap excuses to explain why the Holocaust targeted Jews. What if Hitler originally conceived his ideas in the name of sustainability? And as time went on the focus became not sustainability, but rather how to follow through with his goals. The Holocaust really is an interesting thing because it explores a small part of human nature that we are rarely ever granted access to. Most people have a very misguided view of the world and they choose to think of the Holocaust as an exception. That it happened once and all we have to do is kill everyone that enabled it and it won't happen again. It's like getting mold on your fruit and throwing away the fruit and assuming you'll never get mold again. Obviously we all know better than that, but that's the logic. Just like when people are sent to jail. Just take the bad people out of society and that's how you get rid of the "bad."

The problem is that a bad apple isn't simply a bad apple. A bad apple is either an apple that didn't receive adequate energy supply from the tree or due to some factor or another it attracted unpreferred bacteria or any other number of factors that made an apple "unfit" for its "function". A bad apple is not simply a bad apple, but a result of its environment. And I probably don't have to say it, but there really is no such thing as a bad apple. An apple may be unfit for being eaten by a human, but that doesn't make it bad, it just makes it a bad apple for human consumption. It will be consumed by other organisms and will also serve its purpose to the tree (for example if the tree is unable to give that apple much energy, but limiting its energy for that apple it is conserving energy for other, presumably more important, functions).

I suppose I'll admit it is possible that the Holocaust was drawn up in rage, but such a conclusion is very unlikely. Such overwhelming rage is most certainly not healthy and at least up until his time, unhealthy people were not made figures of political authority. Health is a very important thing to humans and prior to the infection of capitalism, our main measure of health was our most accurate one, our eyes. But now we have measures for human fitness. Rather than physical competitions (not only are we hardly physical, but fighting isn't even "allowed" by our society) we have a competition for who can acquire the most money. Admittedly the focus is not entirely on money, but it is certainly the primary focus. And it's not entirely misguided, either. Your ability to support a family is heavily influenced by your financial status. And definitely moreso than your physical fitness or physical and mental health.

(I could go on but I think that proves my point)

I'd like to mention that I am not trying to teach anything. I'm not even trying to inform what I'm writing about. What I'm trying to do is to get people to think. I listen to people talk about stimulating things and the things I draw from it are not what they tell me but what I think about as I listen to them talk. It may coincide with what they are saying, but it may not as well.

Knowing facts is not very useful. Understanding facts is extremely useful. A lot of times knowing something while not understanding it is more harmful than anything. And of course I say knowing something disregarding whether it is true or not because if you do not understand what you know, then there is really no reason to think it's actually correct. To clarify, lots of people "know" lots of things and a lot of time people "know" things that are not true. And if you do not understand something, you may as well not know it given how often we are wrong about things we think we know.

So what I like to do is to present all possibilities to myself and over time I will promote and demote hypotheses based things I know. Human logic has its limitations. Suppose a person is eating their typical diet and for some reason they quit eating peanuts and over a month they lose 5 pounds. That doesn't say much. Were they exercising? What did they eat in place of peanuts (if anything)? Did everything stay the same (sleep, medicine, work, stress, sex)? Well, if we go back to the original fact and don't ask the questions we can come to 100 different conclusions and a lot of them can/will contradict each other. It could be something as simple as assuming that the person lost 5 pounds because cutting peanuts out of their diet was healthy or thinking that the weight was lost because it was unhealthy. Because weight loss can occur due to "healthy" decisions as well as "unhealthy" decisions. This is why you can't learn things from other people. Or you can learn things from other people and then wonder why you have no control over the state of your body/health. What's beneficial is to remember that someone lost 5 lbs while cutting out peanuts but to also take everything you learn with a grain of salt unless it came from the effects of your own body because you end up knowing about 1% or less of all the important factors from that testimonial. Then when it comes to you... well it's still not even close to 100% of inputs but you have a lot more to infer from and you also have a gauge of how unusual certain behaviors are and whether they have had similar effects in the past. Ultimately we are our only teacher and the only function others can effectively do is to help make links in our logic by thought experiments. The more amount of what we know that is learned from others, the more likely we don't know much at all.

I used to work with a girl named Sarah Dean. She had worked at the front desk for about a year and a half by the time I left Providence but even up until my last day she still asked questions. That's because the part of your brain that tries to understand things didn't work in Sarah's brain (that's an exaggeration, of course, but she really didn't analyze things on a conceptual basis most of the time). Sarah had been working in medical records for a while when I started at Providence and started at the front desk after I had been working there for about 3 months. But somehow I asked much fewer questions than Sarah. Because my outlook of my job was understanding that I was the link between a requestor of medical records and a receiver of medical records. First you have to know what situations you will not fulfill the request in. And rather than know who does not have access to records, try to understand why someone would not have access to another's records. That's the key difference between me and Sarah. And that's the key difference between knowing something and understanding something. Knowing something really only helps when that one particular situation comes up but if you understand something it will almost indefinitely have much more application than that one situation.