of the 7 billion people on earth, I'm sure, no more than 1 million are doing something that is worthy use of human abilities.

tragically, art, music, literature etc , the 'useless' pursuits, are the ones worthy.

the rest are just running around doing not much more than barely staying alive & reproducing,  and working hard to keep the rest from doing no more than barely staying alive & reproducing. aimed at 9 % of the world's population ( the 1% has a separate eco-system that doesn't figure in mass-production)

we have the power of industrial production of goods . yet, quite a lot of it is squandered on producing gadgets to replace perfectly good ones that are obsoleted by design,

we have the power of industrial production of food . yet, quite a lot of it ends up as  junk food steering us towards diabetes or heart disease.

our era is defined by the principal-agent problem in politics. defined by how the populace is held in scarcity patterns by the integrators and the representers.

someone convinced us to mistrust our instinct for what makes us happy and satisfied. religion ? advertising ? More than coffee, this gets us up and running every morning ,searching for a quiet that we and peace that destroy with each spreadsheet we crunch each line of code we write, accelerating the economic machine and its ravenous appetite for chewing up delicate green of the earth and leaving polluted wastelands  behind.

man is well on his way to becoming an ant, earth a termite hill

the economy is the biggest matrix of them all, with no need for all the digital machinery . ironically it doesn't need to feed machines on the electricity provided

homo economicus is no more than the veal calf  or the foie-gras duck or goose forcibly made immovable and force fed and fattened. 

progress in the 'industrial' age depended on natural resources looted from the 'third world' . Europe modernised and the rest of the world became 'colonies' , its residents less than individuals.

today, the economic machine is a golem who needs work and will not sit idle. no corner of the world will be left alone, but won-over, domesticated &  harvested until it becomes a wasteland and its residents either slaves or terrorists.

kaczynski probably saw this all the way through early on

terence mckenna probably had a solution to one aspect of the problem

asimov got something when hari seldon made psycho-history.

sowell said it when he said it's about tradeoffs to handle scarcity.

the human has multiple identities - the tribe member, the team member, the family man, the individual ...

and also one per group he is member of . each one dominates at different times. On top of that we have the triune brain and the decision making.

*sigh