When something bad happens, it hurts. Already at an early age, the damage gets highlighted as pain. Consciousness receives a signal that it needs to do something. A demand to stop the bleeding.
Say by stumbling, the skin gets torn. It leaves the inner tissue exposed. That risks harm, infection and can get worse. While the foot of the stumbling individual may not make much sense to blame, the person themselves is often faulted for how they move. The decision-making that made them move limbs, feet and shift balance, led to stumbling.
That said, there’s always more to it; the decision-making wasn’t sufficient. It wasn’t clear enough. Perhaps the attention was occupied, something in the surroundings diverting awareness when it was needed. It may be that something was stressful earlier in the day, or that they went hungry and didn’t have the energy to be careful.
Add to that societal defaults of the diet lives are fed, never mind the strain that accompanies. There may be an over-stuffing of knowledge, with too little digestion of what is learned, damaging the inner. There could be malicious explanations, or patterns of denial, blocking neural pathways from connecting as they would.
Even fear can add strain, as a life finds itself dependent on extreme exploitation for cheap infrastructure, access to goods and security. How are you able to read this?
There’s no end to the list of things part of creating a circumstance, in which decision-making is insufficient.
And all of that is compounded by harder-to-fathom things, such the way demand finds pathway through fate. A person crossing the road just at that time .. or by the way it shifts the focus of a random passerby. It may not be the most eco-friendly trajectories of fate, if it consumes a life stumbling and getting a wound. A life struck, perhaps as they were spoken a veiled, vile word to, leaving them fatigued and slightly dazed, more prone to error.
This is a point at which honesty begins to hurt. Some truths are difficult, not in their complexity, but because admitting them would rearrange responsibility. Not because one must accuse harshly, but because some parts were convenient to skip and ignore. Whether in the form of stumbling, or a wrong done, an occurrence of harm is a product of many parts that come together.
It is like small streams running into bigger streams, feeding rivers that become tributaries to events and unfoldings of fate. Down the line, harm is produced. I detailed these mechanics of demand and supply at depth in the eBook I wrote.
Applying the Awareness to Unlock Latent Resources
If this is accepted in small events, it becomes harder to deny in large ones. Often neglected, this simple bit of awareness can be applied at massive scale. It unveils opportunities to access latent resources at a low cost.
Please note that the point here is not to excuse, shift blame unto the wronged or the like. It is to explore beyond the permitted narrative.
As an example, looking back in history, China repeatedly conquered surrounding lands. More than once did a vast empire grow. Of course, as with any territorial expansion, there are those that struggle. Conquest, dominance, maintaining control and obstructing rebellions tend to lead to a lot of wrongs done, lives misused, hearts torn apart, and loved ones lost. In short, it builds up a store of demand for wrongs to be undone, and a need to negate the escalating losses that, like an infinite chain reaction, begin at ground zero.
At the time the Second World War was developing, large parts of Asia had been taken under rule by other countries. China was pinned, Hong Kong turned into the territory of far-away power. There was a demand, a need, to negate the colonialism grasping for cheaper procurement of goods, faster production and access to methods of reward such as luxuries. Japan, still independent, positioned as a counter-active force. In doing so, acting as a kind of umbrella-pathway for the demand of multiple lands in Asia.
The importance likely combined with the exploitation of living beings at a global scale taking a turn for the worse. This would increase the likelihood of indifference towards those considered as having no significance. Especially when lives are deprived of dignity. Transgressive exploitation — in brothels, medical experimentation, coerced labor or fear-based control — follows a similar pattern: the life is treated as usable material.
One possible reading is that latent demand, built and pent up over long periods, shaped the demand-pathway in the unseen. Without excusing the atrocities the Chinese underwent during WWII, it may have been produced in part as an eruption of previously mischanneled demand, even suppressed desire for vengeance. Many wrongs small as conquest tends to entail, demanding resolution, if denied like nuclear-waste decaying only over a long time. The same need, holding a key to reducing a lot of ongoing expenses, compounded with every passing year. Of course, hese are, however, only a few of the tributaries that culminated in the malice.
Similarly, while there’s no lack of negative feelings around events in Europe at the time, what if these were misdirected? There’s no denying that the evils inflicted upon Jewish individuals were cruel, inhumane and plain wrong. The way they were targeted was very obviously a part of the downfall of the Nazi-regime. Think of the social map; who would’ve been next? The friction did not form only with the targeted population, whose kin and peers naturally began counteracting the threat. Conflict escalated to those fearing being next. The indifference towards lives, the methods employed, would predictably spark fear and a desire to eliminate the threat. Inhumane wrongs that produced immense loss of support.
Think about it: why would the rising regime running at that scale, pursue target outcomes that predictably multiplied resistance against it? The individual in charge neither lacked intelligence nor stood to gain at the loss. An answer surfaces when looking at the streams that fed into the fate. The tributaries that drove the unfoldings of events, towards the fall of the power.
Without any necessarily planning or scheming the downfall, a fulfillment-pathway began shaping as they were weakened. Think of a shopping trip to the mall, do you consider how the food is procured? The events acted a seemingly cheap link in a chain of events, within a few years leading to a victor on the battlefield. There was demand, supply and a seemingly low-cost route.
At random I found a copy of the book written by the individual who ran the campaigns. In school I was only told of the evils, and never read the material. Curiously I peeked at the first few pages. Initially it highlighted how “the Jewish press” had continuously been cruel to the individual who started the endeavor, seemingly before things escalated. The pages were full of emotional material; childhood-experiences, upbringing, family-intricacies, school-experiences etc.. Access to that kind of information makes inspiring feelings, thoughts and motivations easy.
There is one pathway by which demand could move without requiring intentional human effort. While white-hat hacking is a thing, there are plenty who use human-hacking techniques to extract outcomes in less than friendly ways. Sales the least of it. Think of stories of indoctrination, narratives shaped by labels and standardized procedural compliance. It would be fairly easy to seed, spur and inspire anger, hatred, fear, desire for vengeance. That kind of thing happens at cultural levels, without necessarily requiring individual awareness.
Hand an AI a bit of personal information. Ask for a well-timed message with destructive effect; email, letter, phone-call, text-message - it’ll demonstrate the point easily, and there’s nothing magical about it. While AI is still a novelty, the skill to manipulate feelings, seed collective ideas and the like existed for long. Since before the Chinese commonwealth and lands saw the first empires dawn.
What that means is that not only is guilt maliciously assigned solely to the endeavor. Culprits, beneficiaries, consumers and passive participants may walk free, sometimes even deriving gains from the events. Imagine the sheer loss of potential resources, all those veiled wrongs and blame-shifting led to.
The numbing, fixing and induced denial as well as twisted awareness, would lead to a lot of therapy-costs. Assigning the blame entirely to the endeavor, simultaneously blinds to the variety of tributaries that led to events. When awareness, knowledge and experiences are blocked from access, it adds resistance to neural pathways connecting. Blocks travel across inner bridges, and subsequently decays decision-making. Imagine all the small hurts that piled up over the years.
Every denied tributary has a cost. Someone still pays it. Not only is it a lot of money potentially freed up, taxation that wouldn’t be needed to cover the gap - it’s a lot of damages to health. The tip of the iceberg is the hundreds of millions of lives whose decisions are degraded every single day. The scale is vast.
Try to envision the number of times, churches, sanghas or the like were not attended. Over time, that’s a lot of blocked transmission of wisdom, leaving lives unable to approach daily challenges with skill. It’s a lot of addiction more likely to develop. Every kind deed by those that went before, lost a bit of positive impact as the surplus to carry these forward faded.
That means the dynamic extends to drain the value-creation of ancestors, of the kind that are loving, caring actions. It diminishes trust in these ways, demotivating compassion, kindness and care. The point is not to name every cause. The point is to stop pretending there was only one.
Envision the sheer potential resources that would be unlocked; man-hours, quality of work-hours, improved spenditure patterns, health and longevity let alone all the freed up energy. Who needs more windmills or gas-pumps?
The work starts without ideology and removes the polluting cloud of denial. One occurrence, one denied tributary, one refusal to pretend the wound came from nowhere. That’s a low-cost way to reduce ongoing loss, and to stop feeding the barbaric false narratives.