Can One Change The World When Elections And Protests Fail? / Sasha Davis

“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness we have to go beyond the resources it provides.” – David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at NYU

We are human. At least that’s what I’ve always been told. You might have been told the same thing. Humans talk about themselves a lot. Humans find people endlessly intriguing. All stories are about people, even the stories about animals. Even science fiction stories, in which not a single human might appear, are all about people. One might understandably conclude by this that humanity is a consummately narcissistic species.

At any time in history, and even before history, there have been humans who have considered it their destiny to dominate the other animals, the plants, non-binary organisms such as fungi and slime molds, and the Earth itself. Even as astronomy has inflated our observable sphere from geocentric to heliocentric to galactic and beyond, and our commonly understood objective reality has broadened by billions of light years, there remain swaths of the population whose deeply- held conceit that humans are the center of importance in the cosmos has only hardened. Maybe they fear reality’s unfathomable expanse. Perhaps their desire to shrink it to the size of the Earthbound human sphere is driven by insecurity rather than the ever-fashionable narcissism.

Then again, doesn’t narcissism comprise a varied palette of emotions, poised like sentinels to guard the ego? And isn’t protecting the ego from the full force of comprehending the vast meaninglessness of existence the imperative that has always driven human behavior? All humans tell themselves, “Humans are more than insignificant dust in an apple-skin-thick biosphere shrink-wrapped over a lonely planet without a purpose, flecks of grit in a cosmically inutile tissue of chemical and mechanical activity surrounding a soft-boiled ball of minerals and metal! We matter, if not to ourselves or each other than at least to some supernatural character we made up for the purpose.”

Isn’t that the true subtext of every proverb, aphorism, bromide, pedagogy, philosophy, theology, and great work of literature? I’d say it is. I’d be interested in a remotely persuasive rebuttal to such an analysis. But don’t rush it. Take some time and really torture yourself over... read more

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst you can drink!

I assume we’re all familiar with the concept of fake shortages. They are always paired with arbitrary price hikes. In a capitalist wonderland such as ours, there’s very little constraining the capitalist from charging whatever he, she, it, or they want.

“Whatever the market will bear.” That is, the highest price one can charge and still move product: that is the only price limit. That is the limit on the capitalist’s avarice. And if the poor people in the market can’t bear it, too bad for them. That’s why Martin Shkreli decided he could raise the price of an AIDS-related pneumonia drug about 650%. He figured insurance companies can’t deny their policy holders the drug. If you need a medicine, you need it. The sufferers who have bad insurance policies or otherwise can’t afford it, well, they’ll find the money or lose a lung. And what skin is it off Skhreli’s entitled behind if a few luckless losers die? He wanted that delicious money. Savory money, hot off the grill, dripping with loser blood.

Shkreli’s special expertise, besides driving stock prices down by pounding them with a barrage of negative rumors in order to collect on short sales, was buying the rights to sell certain drugs whose patents had lapsed, for which there was not yet a generic version being sold, and jack up the price astronomically. He had various methods to choke a competing drug’s distribution, quash generic alternatives, obtain regulations targeted to make his inflated option the only option.

Imagine if your job was to get up every morning and find a way to drive up health care costs for your own benefit, without a thought to whose lives would be destroyed. There’s nothing illegal about it. It’s a perfectly valid career choice under our system. Shkreli’s in jail now, but not for pharmaceutical extortion. See, he also enjoyed committing securities fraud. But don’t worry, he’s expected to be released this coming November, even though he was caught with a contraband cell phone with which he was still running his company from prison. You’re not supposed to do that, but we won’t increase your sentence, just take your phone away and make you promise

never to do it again. No punishment. Same as if you’re caught running your business from the Oval... read more