Who Are Our Leaders

 We are affected by two types of people. Creative people and competitive people. It's more of a sliding scale between these types of people. The creative people who affect our lives make stuff, invent stuff and discover stuff. Their world is limitless. They are driven by curiosity. The competitive people are combative. In their world resources are limited. The cup isn't half full, it's half empty. If their thinking is "there is only so much to go around" then they want to be first in line. And they are. To do well in life you need to be one of them or create something they want. 

Our lives are greatly affected by the most successful of each of these types of people. Our standard of living mostly comes from creative people. Look around you. What do you see? Did any of it exist 200 years ago? Not much. Why is it there now? Because it is essential to the functionality and comfort of our present existence. Who made it happen? Creative people. Competitive people brought it to market, but creative people made it. 

Competitive people affect our lives too. We pick them as our leaders. There can be only one leader, so I guess these competitive people are right about something. They are combative by nature and they seek the high, the recognition, that winning can give them. But if these types of people that we pick as our leaders think of the world as being resource-scarce then where is the creativity? It's not with our political leaders, it's not with most of our CEOs. 

I can accept that competitive people decide how many resources can go to creative people to make the world even better. Or maybe not. For instance, who decided not to put billions of research dollars into battery technology until just recently? Wind turbines have been around forever. Solar panels have been a thing for decades. All we got was, solar panels are useless when the sun doesn't shine. A movie was even made called "Who Killed the Electric Car". I can tell you who killed it... competitive people. 

We now have as the leader of a major nuclear power a competitive person. He is constantly threatening nuclear war. He looks into the history books and reads about Peter the Great and that German woman who ruled Russia. I forget her name. But she was very horny. He wants to be like them. They are his role models. He thinks he is clever and knows about history and this qualifies him to lead his country. He actually said once that if there is no Russia then he doesn't care if there is no planet. 

If he really wants to know about history, then why does he base his worldview on a tiny speck of history. Stop looking in those dusty old books for just one night. Look up into the night sky. What do you see? Stars. Look further. What else do you see? More stars and lots of black in between. If you could look through the Hubble telescope you could see much much further. In fact, you could see back to the beginning of time. That's about 13.8 billion years. Now we are talking history. 

So Mr Putin comes back inside out of the night sky. He walks over to the mirror and looks at himself in this full-length mirror. What does he see? He sees a man who loves his country. He sees a man who will fight for his country. He sees his country being bullied just like he was when he was a little kid. He'll use the same tenacity he had as a kid for his country now. What a wonderfully competitive man. He'll get us all killed. 

Look in the mirror again. Properly this time... What do you see? You see 13.8 billion years of history looking back at you in the mirror. It's taken that long to make you out of stardust. We have been looking for other intelligent life forms for decades and we have found nothing. We are either the only intelligent life form in the universe or we are so rare we can't find each other. And you think you know history! You wouldn't know history if it was staring you in the face. 

I've named my goldfish after you. He doesn't look up either.