I've been putting of actually writing for a while now. I guess it's fear - irrational fear, but fear nonetheless. The things I want to write about are important to me, so I fear they will be meaningless to you. Still, I suppose that's better than not sharing them at all.

I recently finished reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It's the type of stuff I would consider common knowledge because I tend to familiarize myself with that sort of contextual understanding of my relative place in the universe on a regular basis. And yet the content isn't at all likely to be common knowledge, even though it probably should be. One idea that I really appreciate learning from the book is that of imagined realities, or intersubjective truths as I prefer to think of them. In law they are called legal fictions. And we swim in them. Money, religion, political ideologies are all among the myriad intersubjective truths that permiate modern society. The crime though is that we often go too long without acknowledging the nonsensical elements of these social forces. The other thing that troubles me about intersubjective truths is where they come from. They have emerged over the course of millennia because they facilited organizing humans into larger and larger groups. They then often persist afterwards because the structure of the resulting group - and the way that group interacts with the world - prevents a regression to older patterns of human organization. You should read the book if you'd like to learn more about it.

This brings me to the idea(s) that I find important: Why aren't we designing these intersubjective realities for the benefit of all humankind? And, as technology evoloves, as the book concludes, what do we want to be as a species? What do we want to think? And what do we want to want? I wrote about this publicly in a breif Medium post a few years ago. Apparently, I also wrote a much longer post that I didn't publish at the time. Rereading it now, I find that I still agree with all of the content therein, but that I'm more focused on the desired ideas that would guide a designed society than I am focused on the technological implementation of those ideas. Still, it's likely worth discussing both. So, I published that old Medium draft.

What imagined realities should guide our species forward? Which existing imagined realities are the most important to weaken, undermine or destroy? In a recent Facebook post, I answered the second question with "Nationalism," and I'll go further by claiming that we ought to be fostering a new intersubjective reality of "Internationalism" - akin to humanism - so perhaps we should call it "International Humanism" or "Universal Humanism." Beyond that, it seems like a good idea to create a new belief in "Structured Inequality." By this I mean that we want to have some amount of wealth and power stratification, but that we want the distribution curves thereof to be mandated by the government, rather than organically derived by society as they are today. The imagined part is that this is a "good" thing, but I'd settle for saying it's worth a trial run. How should we measure success?