Category: Values

Are we losing the ability to think for ourselves?

We are living through and experiencing very challenging times. Not because of events and factors which are outside of human control. But because of the way that we currently think.

Much of the problem isn’t even conscious and reflects the reality that a significant proportion of us are not self-aware. Even though many of us would nonetheless insist that we are.

It is a certain truth that we have to know ourselves if we really want to know and understand how life works for others.

There is certainly a good argument to be made that for everyday people whose lives don’t appear to have any impact upon others, that understanding either themselves or others doesn’t matter.

However, this exclusion or any hint of it certainly shouldn’t apply to anyone whose actions can or do have an impact upon any other person’s lives.

Education has failed us. Because we have become culturally obsessed with the idea that academic qualifications are themselves the educational benchmark for life.

We have progressively left swathes of younger generations behind. As it has become fashionable to believe anyone without a degree lacks intelligence and the grounding in life necessary to achieve beyond ‘technical’ roles in the workplace.

Regrettably, a narrative is also being carefully constructed about the arrival and rollout of the latest generations of AI. And anyone looking closely at the direction of travel and what change of the kind that those who will financially benefit from the ownership and control of AI systems in the world that they have crafted intend, may soon find themselves with a very difficult question in mind. Namely, ‘Was the ‘dumbing down’ of the population that many of us already recognise, always part of some strategy or plan?’

It is perfectly reasonable to question any suggestion that there are those amongst us who wish to remove the ability for the masses to think for themselves and to prevent everyone from operating and managing their lives independently.

But don’t you find it odd that in an age where so little can be trusted within the flow of information that heads to us from the moment we wake up, that no establishment voice has championed the idea that teaching critical thinking as an essential part of our educational processes would be a very good thing?

There is a tragedy unfolding around us, either by specific design or just as a consequence of the way that The System we have is steadily destroying humanity itself: Few of us are awake to what is happening. Even though just as many believe that they are.

Of those who understand or question what is becoming obvious in so may ways, there are virtually none who will speak out or stand against the way that The System operates. Because they believe that the benefits that they are gaining by ‘going with it’ far outweigh the perceived disadvantages  of rejecting all the things that are hurting us and the people around us. Many of which, are carefully hidden by narratives that even the most aware cannot always see.

Skills for Life are far more important for each and every person than any academic specialism will ever be for only the few who can genuinely achieve academic sense in its truest form. And there will be many more who achieve that success and other successes too, if we ensure that every young person is equipped as best they can be to read, question and understand the world which comes into their view.

Just like AI, the tools, actions, rules and infrastructure of tomorrow will be good or bad for us depending upon who and what is in control

Perhaps the greatest disadvantage from the absence of critical thinking as we try to absorb the constant flow of information from the world, is the assumption that words, ideas, actions, rules and tools of any and all kinds that we associate with anyone or anything that we do not like are automatically worthless. And that as damaged goods, they cannot be used for any purpose that we might consider to be correct.

This is an enigma that has significant cost for everyone. Not least of all as politicians and those with their hands on the levers of power have been consumed by this dangerous lack of objectivity too.

In a period of human history where lies, myths and narratives rule our lives, and the absence of original thinking is being excused by the manipulative story that in the near future, ‘thinking’ is something that only the new generations of AI will do, the information overload from digital devices certainly compounds the terror of anyone who tries to wrestle with solutions for the future in the same breath. Often finding themselves concluding that what we are experiencing today, is the only way.

That not-so-obvious feeling of isolated helplessness is real to many. It is no small part of the reason that ‘populism’ has been gaining momentum in the ways that it has.

People feel alone and under threat, without doing a thing wrong. Worst of all, People genuinely believe that those who should be looking after them are actually acting against them.

Yet these imposters seem to stubbornly able to remain in control.

When terms such as Great Reset, Net Zero, Sustainable Development Goals and the many straplines and sub-versions of these same narratives (like Local Traffic Neighbourhoods or ‘LTNs’) come flying out from International Organisations, Government, Councils, the Public Sector, NGOs and even Big business, it is as such unsurprising that very few People outside of them could believe that there is anything good for anyone other than the elites and beneficiaries contained within.

The problem the fear of normal People is creating, is we cannot see that many of the things that in the hands of greedy, selfish or bad people, that will certainly be used to hurt and control us, could also be highly beneficial and promote freedom and much better lives for everyone, IF they are driven and motivated by good leaders instead.

Sustainability today is all about societal control to benefit the few. In Our Local Future, Sustainable Living is a tool of liberation and freedom for ALL

Appreciating the difference in outcomes from using the same tools, actions, rules and infrastructure differently, isn’t the easiest idea for many to get their head around.

Many genuinely overlook the reality that the different uses of different things are hiding in plain sight. Depending upon what our experience or interpretation of them has or will be.

For example, a knife can be a tool for food preparation in the hands of a chef. Just as a knife can be a weapon in the hands of a violent criminal.

A rule can be used to stop one group of people from expressing their feelings, thoughts and fears about a certain issue. Whilst that very same rule can be reinterpreted to allow another group to express whatever they want to, whilst encouraging them to criticise the group that the rule has been used to ‘close down’ and control’.

Likewise, AI could be one of the greatest tools ever created to improve and benefit life for all of mankind. Or it will be used to destroy employment opportunities, devalue human life, and as a tool of fear and control – as will be the outcome from what businesses and government are doing and saying right now.

Reinterpretation of what is important. Rediscovering Values and Changing the way that We Think

Yes, it is exceptionally difficult to see that so much good can be hidden behind so much that we now know to be bad.

But darkness is always extinguished by light. And this is perhaps the simplest way to begin thinking about using much of what we have available to us today, for the better of everyone, by using it in Our Local Future in a very different way.

We don’t need to travel across the world, to have our own car, to have the latest fashion or gadget, to have a big public following, or to have anything that makes us believe we are better than others in some way, to have great lives and great experiences that are available to All.

Happiness is a gift that comes from within. It is an experience that can never be bought.

Sadly, the Old World of today is completely obsessed with making profit. Whilst nobody with responsibility has stopped to calculate the real cost.

Click HERE to visit Our Local Future

Prosperity in today’s world only lasts until the very moment that it doesn’t. And by then, it’s too late

Very few realise it. Even fewer are prepared to talk about it. But the financial and monetary system that we currently have can only exist as it does, making some extremely rich, at the cost of many becoming increasingly poor or poorer.

Because of the way the FIAT monetary system is constructed, it is necessarily skewed to benefit those who control and play the system.

FIAT can only continue to function as long as the rules that hurt everybody who is outside of the game continue to be punished more and more.

Because FIAT and all the systems that are built around it have disparity at their very core.

The System literally survives and can only survive on the basis of the Wealth Inequality that today grows exponentially between rich and poor.

Clever as FIAT is for those who control it, the system was always destined to fail. It was never a question of if, only the question of when.

The only question that troubles today’s world elites is ‘What comes next?’

With AI set to put millions of people out of work for no better reason than more profit being made for those who own and control the systems and the industries behind it, the masses have yet to awaken to the reality that using technology and Artificial Intelligence in this way is not progress. Neither is it necessary.

The AI-takeover that is today being delivered through narratives, even before it has fully arrived, is a change that can only lead to challenges across society that those who are set to benefit believe that they will be insulated from and that they will have no responsibility to bear.

If you consider yourself to be living in the real world today, can you really picture the situation where there is perhaps just a handful of people on the planet, and that they can continue to enjoy the kind of luxury and wealth in material form that they have today and that they aspire to maintain, without the millions and perhaps billions of other people on the planet who made that whole scenario viable?

Despite even this rather uncomfortable truth, the most challenging reality that we face, as we try to open the doors to change and imagine a world that puts people at the heart of everything as it should, is that the world of today embraces an unwritten cultural acceptance that For some to be rich, many more must to be poor.

So successful has the process that brought us here been that those at the top of this twisted tree of upwardly flowing benefit, have turned their back on everyone at the bottom that this corrupt system has left behind.

They now imagine that a new world can be engineered and deliberately be brought into being where those with wealth and power have no responsibility for the poor.

This is where we are today.

Regrettably, those who are doing so well out of the increasing misery of so many others today really do believe that the future need only be good and that freedom in its real sense need only exist for the few.

It is why so much of the technology that we now have available under such direction is such a massive threat to humanity. Rather being the tool for The Common Good to support us all in our search for better lives which it would be. IF the fervent greed and obsession with profit at all costs that now drives all tech development including AI we’re to be left behind.

We recognise that people, community and the environment must be at the centre of everything.

That money must be returned to being used only for the purpose of being an exchange mechanism and tool for life that it was always supposed to be.

A future that works for us all doesn’t allow a cultural system to exist where we believe that even human existence itself can only be calculated in monetary forms.

Money cannot and will not be the only way that we can trade.

The real value that underpins economics and economies at all levels in the future will be based upon the people and the contributions they make within it.

We foresee a Local Market Exchange coming to be which flourishes around the local economy and where goods, services and labour itself can be traded and bartered directly for others goods, services and labour, as well as locally derived and managed cash based and blockchain supported currencies can also be used.

Money, nor currency of any kind will be speculated or gambled as today. As this is where the majority of social problems effecting so many across the world have most often found their true origin and cause.

Above everything, we recognise it as essential that the lowest paid can sustain themselves fully and independently on a weekly wage.

To achieve and maintain a society where everyone has the ability to self-sustain, it is also necessary that the entire system of business, finance and governance must prioritise this and only this, instead of profit for the few as has up until know been the only acknowledged way.

We have called it The Basic Living Standard.

Today, Money is a rigged game with a real-life cheat code that is  part of the Moneyocracy that we are all currently enslaved to. And if we all want to experience a much better kind of life, there is much that we need to consider and a great amount that is hurting us all, that we must leave behind.

If you feel ready to visualise what a better world would look like, and reflect on what that means for us all, please follow the link to explore Our Local Future, which you will find immediately below.

Click HERE to go to the Site Map for Our Local Future

The UKs Public Smoking Cloud: The desperate need to feed confirmation biases and the unacknowledged reality that few non-smokers enjoy being forced to passively smoke

Since the UK General Election in early July, there has been a marked change in the way people are using social media and the messages they are sharing.

Don’t get me wrong. The questions over social media and the damage that its misuse and mismanagement has and continues to do is long held and there is much to be resolved.

It just seems to be the case that many if not all of what seemed to be ‘credible’ speakers across the political spectrum, have now got completely wrapped up in their own rhetoric and become sucked down by one or other of the many rabbit holes that seem to be giving so many some weird form of sanctuary whilst the world seems to be suffering from a madness storm.

The point is illustrated uncomfortably by the massive onslaught that is now underway in the UK against the proposals by the quickly aging Labour Government to impose smoking bans in pub gardens and many other public areas.

Following hot on the heels of the age-based smoking ban that the disastrous Sunak Conservative Government didn’t bring into being before their wipeout in July, the hypocrisy coming from the political right is as troubling as the countless ‘voices for reason’, who are now obsessively attempting to use everything the establishment does as evidence that confirms that George Orwell’s 1984 is as good as done and dusted, and is already taking over every part of life in just about every possible form.

If we look hard enough for evidence of anything, the chances are that we will find it. Not because it’s necessarily there. But because that’s the way that human nature works if you give it a green light to do so.

There is much to be concerned about by the way the establishment, the elites and the governing classes behave and how they approach the responsibilities that they no longer seem to accept they have to all others. However, the behaviour that they exhibit comes from much the same place and is founded upon their own biases, ignorance and an intoxication with power that few would be able to avoid. If they too were to suddenly find themselves in the same place.

Banning smoking in public places is not an attack on freedom. That is unless we are happy to agree that public policy should be based on the damaging belief that governance is about pandering to the minority, rather than doing what’s best for all. Or what the more sensible amongst us might recognise as being ‘The Common Good’.

The most recent figures from The Office of National Statistics tell us that 12.9% of the UK Population are smokers, which is roughly about 1 in 8 of us.

So why should those of us who do not smoke have no option but to inhale tobacco fumes, vape clouds or any kind of smoke that someone who smokes or vapes anything has chosen to discharge in any public place?

Whilst it is unquestionably a personal freedom of choice and should certainly remain so that anyone can smoke or vape if they so choose, it is also incumbent upon them not to do so in any way that compromises the freedom of others to make the alternative choice.

Like many, I enjoy a drink at a pub. And in the summer months like nothing more than to sit outside and enjoy the British Summer as I do so. If and when it decides to turn up.

However, what I don’t enjoy – also like so many others, is having that experience spoiled by anyone smoking or vaping, who clearly believes that simply being outside is the only thing they need to consider where the impact of their actions is concerned.

Dreadful as the Labour Government might be in so many respects, this is one rule that will probably have a lot more support than many would believe. Rather perversely, because once again, it’s the silent majority that are otherwise being forced to suffer because a noisy minority have no awareness of the impact of choices which are regrettably, all about them.

Food is as important as the air we breathe and water we drink. So why can’t we talk openly about the real threat to Food Supplies?

Regrettably, I long since realised that whilst many of us talk about change, kick and scream about the need for change, and talk about how we’re going to get those in power to facilitate change, very few of us are actually prepared to do what it would take to embrace and create the kind of change that all of us actually need.

This leaves writers, bloggers, commentators and thinkers either massively frustrated and in some cases falling into the trap of sensationalising their messages to get attention. Or like me, just accepting that people aren’t yet ready to accept that an unsustainable situation can no longer be sustained.

My back catalogue therefore quietly grows. The upside is I can at least say that through the 29 Books and the material now published and available to read on the Internet, I’m pretty sure I’ve covered all the bases when it comes to shining light on everything that’s wrong; what needs to change; what is preventing change; what will create change and of course what change might actually look like. Which is where I have just left the desktop, now.

I’ve been busy over recent weeks writing Our Local Future. Published both as a free-to-read website and as a book for Kindle which is now available to buy.

The reason change isn’t happening, isn’t because we don’t have the ideas, energy, guts, commitment and values present across our society to bring about significant change.

It’s because we are too busy arguing over the first step; who’s right; who’s wrong and who should be in charge.

Because of this, I felt it was time to leap into the future and commit to writing what the world would need to look like, feel like, and how it would need to function, IF we were to open ourselves to a way of living that genuinely works for the greater good and is beneficial to us all.

But doing so means dealing with some very uncomfortable truths, and those aren’t east to convey without being open about where things really are today.

Our Local Future is in the abstract. Because there’s so much about the world we live in today that we must leave much of it behind, including things that we thing are good but are actually hurting us. Rather than simply expecting that we can keep all the things we like and just leave the crap that it causes behind.

We leave the crap in our wake each and every day. And it’s the problems that wider society and the environment we live in now face that are manifesting as a result.

What we fail to see is that taking everything for granted and as entitled as we have increasingly become, means that the Basic Essentials of life are now at significant risk.

The issue of Food Security and the growing risk that the U.K. population could go hungry or experience serious Food Shortages are what concern me as a former politician and community leader myself.

So much so that I attended and completed a postgraduate course in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at a well-known UK university earlier this year.

Acknowledging the role of so many stakeholders in the Food Security problem remains important. But it’s not enough, as almost without exception, everyone on the problem end of everything still believes that the usual suspects will have a lucid moment of realisation, then change their approach.

The truth is simpler, and I believe it correct to be open about the reality that the empty shelves we experienced during the covid lockdowns could very quickly become normal in times ahead. Especially so when it comes to our level of access to Basic and Essential types of Food.

Never mind the heavily processed and unhealthy stuff that many of us mistake as being just that.

In publishing www.ourlocalfuture.com, I have lent heavily on the opportunity to use an AI Image Generator, and after publishing nearly 100 created images to accompany every published page, I was alarmed to discover that no matter how I instructed the software to create an image, there was no way that the programme would produce anything to illustrate what empty supermarket shelves would look like.

The words and title used were clearly also ringing algorithmic alarm bells somewhere in the Clous, as Facebook then also rejected the post after I had adopted a different approach to the imagery. Within seconds of publication telling me that I had committed a community violation and that the post had immediately been deleted.

We can only speculate upon why there is a refusal to allow open and honest discussion about the genuine risk to U.K. Food Security and how it is increasingly likely to affect the UK Population.

The harsh reality we face is that the Food Supply and Food Production is quickly becoming a key method of societal control.

Increasingly so, as British Agriculture – the industry that provides it – seems to be in what can only be described as a form of terminal decline that looks remarkably deliberate. Even to the untrained eye.

Many who still trust The System may well ask the question, ‘How could it possibly the case that someone wants to control access to what we eat, when food is as important as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink?’

To visit Our Local Future click HERE: