Without any warning a question comes to my mind: Who is in charge of thinking? I mean, whose job it is to think about us? about our society, the human race?
Ehhhh? I don’t know, I guess us? I mean we all as citizens?
But that is not happening. We don’t have power, we don’t know the solutions, we don’t even have time, we are too busy working. We barely have time for anything else apart from working. We need money to survive. The tyranny of work.
So it must be politics. They should solve all the problems that societies have. That’s what we pay them for, isn’t it?
Again no. That is not happening. Politics are not free to think. They are too busy trying to get elected. Their main concern is not to think and solve our problems but to get elected. If they don’t get elected they won’t be able to do anything, and if they get elected, they won’t do much either because they had to compromise much in order to get elected in the first place. The tyranny of the votes.
Well, it must be big companies and enterprises. They do a lot of research and they develop products. They decide what are the best products. That is true, partially true. They develop the best products, but not the best products for us or for our society. They develop the best products for sales, the products that sell the most. So it’s us who decide what do we buy. The tyranny of the consumer, sales and profits.
What else do we have? Let me think.
I got it. Academia. Yes. They do a lot of research and they publish lots of papers every year. Again this is partially true. They are not totally independent when choosing what to research. They need money for the research and that funding comes many times at the cost of their freedom. The tyranny of the money.
NGOs. Yes, non-governmental organizations. I think this is a good example of someone working for the good of other people. It totally is as long as their freedom is not compromised by how they get funded and also their scope of action is usually quite narrow, usually related to health or hunger in the third world.
OK. Let’s stop for a second. Who used to think in ancient societies?
Philosophers.
OK, then, we have philosophers nowadays too. They should be the ones doing the thinking.
I’m afraid that’s not the case. Current philosophers are humans and that means that they need to eat. Every day. This means that they need to have a job so they can have money so they can eat. The tyranny of money again.
Wow! this is getting tougher than I expected. Let’s see, what is it required in order for someone to be able to think? I mean to spend time thinking how to solve our world’s problems.
The first thing you need is time. Free time to think.
You also need freedom. Freedom to decide what to do and how.
Third, you need money. Money to carry out the plans.
Who has all these three things nowadays? time, freedom and money?
Rich people. I mean, very wealthy people. Lot’s of money assures personality needs are covered, mainly Certainty and Significance, which avoids greediness. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates come to my mind. Two of the biggest philanthropists to date.
We are getting closer but still there is one thing I don’t see clearly. I may have lots of money but that doesn’t mean I’m good at thinking. I may be very good at thinking about the businesses that made me a lot of money but not necessarily about other problems. I guess that’s what Warren Buffett thought when he gave billions of Dollars to Bill Gates, to the Gates Foundation.
That foundation hires many other people hopefully very smart people that are good at thinking how to solve human problems. So they get paid to solve peoples problems. That’s not a bad job. I like that.
This foundation thing sounds very nice to me. Just not sure if we have enough rich philanthropists available to fund enough foundations to solve all the big problems our society has.
Something else comes to my mind from a completely different realm, open source code. Lot’s of programmers working hard to develop code that they donate to society. Everyone can use it and take advantage of it. I like this initiative too. They are not rich people and they donate the thing that is most valuable to them, their time. What do they get in exchange for their time and effort? recognition, Significance as we mentioned earlier.
We may have found something important here. The currency these people get paid is not money but recognition. Can we use this model for something different than writing computer code? No doubt about it. Open source hardware for instance.
Last thing before ending this post I would like to thank all the philanthropists and to all the thousands of contributors to open projects.
Let’s all contribute to the progress of our society. It feels good, and we will get paid in “recognition coins”.