By Bob Butterfield

Dear Decent American Citizen,

If you’ve read any of my articles on thinkbynumbers.org, you know that there are a lot of things going on in this world that don’t make any sense.  For a long time, I kind of thought that I must be crazy and everyone was just too polite to tell me. I was certain that there was something I was missing that could explain why we allocate society’s limited resources in such an idiotic fashion.

For instance, President Obama just announced that he wants to spend $100 million a year studying the brain. This is a wonderful thing.  The brain is the sole source of all joy and suffering in the universe.  However, while President Obama is busy patting himself on the back about this, world governments are spending $1.8 TRILLION each year finding ways to murder us and destroy our property.  I put these numbers in an excel spreadsheet.  I had to make the column representing military spending 17,000 pixels high in order to make the brain research spending even visible (1 pixel high).  It’s fucking ridiculous.

A little less than a year ago, I came up with an easy 3 step plan to start optimally allocating societal resources using a form of crowd-sourced democracy.  To my complete surprise, no one seemed to give a damn about it. Initially, I was completely baffled by this. “What could possibly be more important than this?” I asked myself. I mean, we spend $25.4 billion enabling a large number of grown men to do various things with various types of spheres for no reason. Shouldn’t we be spending even a little tiny fraction of that of a system that will optimally allocate resources in a manner that will minimize suffering throughout the world?  I was so confused.

However, since then, I have had an epiphany which can explain how a world that contains so much unnecessary suffering, will allow its governments to the squander bountiful resources on idiotic pursuits such as the war in Iraq and the War on Drugs.  The reason the world is so screwed up is because open-minded, thoughtful, self-critical people who possess an acute awareness of the importance of reducing suffering typically crippled by the scourge of the mind known as depression.  This leaves the levers of world power to the type A, alpha-male (often psychopathic) personalities that are supremely assertive and confident in their beliefs. Their myopic worldview has no conception of the severity of suffering that is going on all over the world. This is because they are generally psychologically very healthy and have never experienced true suffering themselves.  The result is that they posses a complete lack of empathy. However, they simply know what they want and are willing to do whatever they have to do to get it.

People often assume a causal relationship between power and corruption. However, there is only a correlation.  This correlations exists because the corrupt, psychopathic, type A personalities simply have a distinct advantage when it comes to acquiring power. They are not bound by rules of morality.  They do not suffer from the analysis paralysis malady that most introspective people do.

The reason the open-minded, self-critical, introspective people throughout the world remain in their psychological cages is because the field of modern psychiatry is not taking an aggressive, data-centric approach to curing their illness and maximizing their happiness. As a result the world is filled with the walking dead geniuses that are paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. Since I cured my lifelong depression, I feel like a zombie who just woke up but is still surrounded by a bunch of other zombies that are just stumbling around aimlessly.  I desperately want to wake all of them up so they can be happy and help me to eradicate suffering from the world.  That’s what I am trying to do with Quantimodo.

I feel we’re at an inflection point in history. If Quantimodo can help to wipe out depression, these thoughtful, self-critical, open-minded individuals will gain the confidence and assertiveness that is required to obtain positions of power.  Once we reclaim control from these psychopaths, I believe we’re going to see exponential declines in net world suffering as we begin implementing rational resource allocation policies.

If you would like to help me realize these goals please call +1.618.391.0002.  Thank you!

Love,

Mike

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