Jill Domschot

My husband just texted me that I should watch the latest Scott Adams Periscope because he discusses future memory in it. If you go to Adams’ Twitter page, you will easily find the video near the top (obviously, this is time-sensitive to this day, 3-16-2020), and then you will find the future memory bit starting about 47 minutes in. Here’s a link for those who are search-impaired: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1239552289037156352.

I’m a little stunned by the video. Well, not exactly stunned. I already knew that Adams believes in the power of positive thinking, that if you speak something to the universe long enough, it has a greater chance of coming to be. This is esoteric thinking, and he has no problem with it. He discusses it in his book on success. Thus, I’m not so much stunned as intrigued by this segment on future memory. Adams is an odd mix of high intelligence, atheism (at least in the past; in this video he mentions God as a concept that might be true), and curiosity. He isn’t a scientist, but if he were, I imagine he would stick to a basis of what is known to be true but would veer from it where his mind and ideas led him. He would not make his ideas public until he had cause to do so. That is my assessment, anyway.

Regarding the esoteric concept of future memory, he brings it up hesitantly at the end of the hour long video. To be fair, I can only take his word for it that he does indeed possess the ability to have visions of the future. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt for a couple of reasons: anybody who puts themselves out there as a kind of “prophet” will only be successful temporarily if his statements don’t turn out to be true; I have experienced future memories myself. As for the first reason, many false “prophets” have not let the temporariness of their fame stop them from dishing out their visions, but Adams is the type of person who looks at the long view. He’s not a rash person, in other words, who is willing to go down in a bath of poisoned Kool Aid with his followers. The second is my personal weakness. If I’m willing to believe in esoteric ideas — that they are in fact real in my life — I’m more willing to believe them in another person if that person is reputable. By the way, I’ve put prophet in quotes above because prophecy isn’t simply knowing the future. It’s essentially speaking God’s word, which might include future edicts. I don’t think that future memories are necessarily something that come from God. Rather, they seem to be part of the reality of a universe we don’t fully understand.

I believe in future memories as a concept because, as I said, I’ve experienced them. I might have written blog posts on this in the past. I have more than ten years worth of blog posts; I can never remember what I’ve written and what I have not. Scott Adams calls his future memories “visions.” I don’t know that I’d call mine visions as much as I’d call them obsessions. I get obsessed with an extraneous detail that seems irrelevant. One example I like to give is the Ford Fiesta. I became obsessed with the idea of having a Ford Fiesta when all I had was a gas-guzzling SUV. I guess you could say I had a vision of a blue Ford Fiesta, but that is a sorry sort of vision. One would hope a vision would be more exciting than an economy car. I didn’t tell anyone I was obsessed with Ford Fiestas. I might have told my husband I wished I had an economy car like a Fiesta so that I could drive to the big city and visit museums and health food stores. I was stagnating in our small town, and I was ready to move on and see the world. The car was a symbol of mobility to me and that is all. But I didn’t tell anyone else. In other words, I didn’t plant the idea of it in anyone’s head. Later, when my husband was given an unexpected job opportunity in Roswell, he asked his brother to find him an economy car that would help him commute to Roswell until we were able to move. His brother picked a blue Ford Fiesta. The car is extraneous because my future memory was really about moving. I could sense a move, and the car represented that. Also, the car was a piece of crap. It caught on fire last summer and the engine burned up. It had problems. P.s. don’t buy a 2013 Ford Fiesta.

Other visions I’ve had have been similar: obsessions with certain types of houses or of meeting people I hadn’t yet met. Some of these obsessions set me up for disappointment because in some cases, I thought that God was directing me. Those have been few and far between — generally the visions of meeting people before I had actual conversations with them. Looking back, I no longer believe God directed me to those people. Not that I don’t believe God orders my steps. It’s as the Bible says, “[His] word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” I believe he will also direct us to people for specific purposes of spreading the gospel. In those cases of future memory, I saw events that were going to happen, but those events weren’t necessarily earth-shattering and didn’t involve spreading the gospel. They were just weird pre-cognitive glimpses of the future that I couldn’t put into context until later. I gave the example of the Ford Fiesta, but there was also the vision of a mid-century brick home, of tearing up carpet and finding original asbestos tile flooring that had to be cleaned up as a secondary layer. Actually, that was a dream rather than an awake vision. At the time, I thought my subconscious was telling me I had many layers to tear up inside my mind before I could reach a clean, bare state. When we eventually were in the market to purchase a home, we looked for houses with the flooring already done, but we didn’t find one (oil industry has narrowed the housing market). We instead found a house that looked like my dream, which had the original asbestos tile under the carpeting. To be honest, I wouldn’t have wanted to guess this context because I didn’t want a huge fixer-upper project.

If you’ve read my book The Minäverse, you know I dealt with this concept of future memory in my main character, Oso. The original (working) title of the book was Future Instinct. While I don’t think it’s a great book — the plot barely hangs together and it could use another editing pass — it will always have my heart in it: redemption, humor, and future memory. My next book is much better as far as plotting and (hopefully) reaching an audience, albeit it isn’t humorous. And there are prophecies rather than future memories and characters I don’t love nearly as much as Oso and Gillilander. Ah, well. That’s the way it is.

I don’t know what you make of future memory. I have no expectation that you consider me anything but crazy at this point. I’m guessing, though, that most people have these little glimpses into the future without knowing the context or seeing any importance to them. Most people might not even remember or acknowledge these little glimpses. I happen to be an obsessive person, and hence my remembering them. Scott Adams might be, too. Focused is the complimentary term for it. Go listen to the end of his video if you don’t think we’re crazy. You might find his story fascinating.

For being such a skinny person all my life, I’m like a slow-moving giant. It’s a good thing not everybody is like me. The world needs people who can respond in an instant to crises. Crises might require slow and measured thought at some point, but not when it is time to act.

New Mexico has shut down all its public schools for several weeks. They did this almost immediately after three people in the state tested positive for the Coronavirus. Knowing New Mexico, they were not testing at all for Coronavirus before these travelers from abroad came staggering back across our border with respiratory illnesses. That’s the way New Mexico operates. New Mexico is perhaps the biggest slow-moving giant (there’s a reason I fit in here), until you poke her.

And then we’re still a slow-moving giant. I doubt anyone is actively testing for further cases of Coronavirus. It is partly the nature of New Mexicans to be lax about such things, but we also simply don’t have the medical personnel to cope with a fast-acting disease. So those in charge did what made sense to them: they shut down public gatherings, with an exemption for schools, and then quickly turned around and shut down schools. It makes sense. Schools are disease incubators. It makes perfect sense, except when you consider that New Mexicans are one paycheck away from not being able to pay their bills and thus won’t stop going to work unless they’re forced to stay home. The kids will be babysat by their grandparents, the parents will bring their diseases home to the kids, and then everybody will get sick anyway.

I’ve never been inclined towards panic or doomsdayism. My sense of fear doesn’t operate as it should. Yet, I’m not a fool and can look at the picture of what is happening around the world. Coronavirus infects people quickly, and while I don’t think I should dress up in a black cape and beaked nose and run a wheelbarrow up the street shouting Bring out your dead!, it does appear to have a higher death rate than the average flu virus. It is smart to try to keep it in check and be prepared for quarantines.

If I do have a panic button, it will occur out of annoyance when I go to the store and find empty shelves. Stocking up is a good thing, but I know how this works already. A handful of people will clear the shelves of everything because, hey, if you’re going to be prepared, you might as well make sure you have five year’s worth of water, toilet paper, etc. — and everybody else be damned. One middle-school student told me her dad had done just that, cleared everything off the shelves of Wal Mart. Carts full of stuff. Because he can. New Mexicans are like that, too. That’s the funny thing. They operate paycheck to paycheck and still manage to single-handedly scrape store shelves clean.

I’d better stop. I’m finding I like these writing warmups on my blog, but this particular one is making me cynical and grumpy, and I haven’t even begun to imagine what it’s going to be like for the next few weeks, as I will no longer have a few morning hours to work in the quiet by myself. I do not want the flavor of cynicism in my book. As of now, my two main female characters are in the kaleidoscope viewing room and have just realized the viewers are actually portals to…! And the male hero is about to slay…! That would be giving things away. Have a great Friday.

This subject happened by accident. I was listening to Tucker Carlson on YouTube (someday I’ll tell you why I like Mr. Carlson), and that brought up a video made by a man called Ray Comfort, which was ostensibly about Rhett and Link falling away from Christianity. For the record, I don’t know who Rhett and Link are. Comedians, apparently. Comedians who used to proclaim Christianity and now no longer do. I used the term ostensibly because the video isn’t specifically about Rhett and Link. Ray Comfort (I’m not familiar with this person either) is applying universality of the human condition to the falling away of Christians from the faith. But he’s made his point to me long before the video has ended for a reason he might not have intended.

The video is a series of interviews Ray Comfort has with young university students on the subject of evolution vs Christianity. He is in the Christianity camp. Ray Comfort is clearly more intelligent than the average person. He has all the answers, knows the answers, can talk circles around young people with average or maybe slightly above-average intelligence. And he does all this calmly and politely, without raising his voice one time. To give it a sense of fairness, I guess, he also interviews three evolutionary professors, who also can’t compete with him, at least in the clips he shows of them. Journalists who conduct interviews are almost never honest in their video cuts, though Ray Comfort might be. I’d like to think a Christian would be inclined toward honesty.

Ray Comfort reminds me of the average professor of evolutionary biology when they are in control of the conversation. They are older and, by the law of averages, more intelligent than most of their students. They talk circles around their students; they have all the facts and know everything, and the faith-based students find themselves in a position where they can’t argue against their teachers. Oh, there might be one or two who try, but it doesn’t go well for them when it comes to grading time. Professors do surprise me at times with their egalitarianism and generosity, but I have mostly seen that in the humanities. Those in the sciences are a special variety.

What are the results of Ray Comfort’s interviews with the young people? After his logical case and intelligent words, one responds positively; there are a few agnostics, and then there are the ones who just say no to Christianity. The same phenomenon occurs in a university classroom, where the professor is trying to convince his students that evolution is a fact and that God isn’t. Some believe the professor; others remain agnostic, while others adamantly continue in their faith.

This is because belief doesn’t happen in the mind. It happens in the spirit. Our spirits will either believe in God or they won’t, and our minds simply devise intelligent arguments (well, some of our minds do) for what our souls have chosen. Like the Bob Dylan song from the iconic Slow Train album, we all have to serve somebody. It may be the devil; it may be the Lord, but we’re going to have to choose. It doesn’t matter how intelligent we are. It doesn’t matter what our politics are. We will end up serving a master. If we believe we can circumvent this by serving ourselves, we have believed a lie.

Ray Comfort shows a few clips of either Rhett or Link claiming that he simply believed what people told him growing up, and now he has started seeking out knowledge and has begun to question Christianity due to this knowledge. I don’t know where this man will end up, but it isn’t book knowledge that has altered his perspective. To be honest, I don’t know he got to the age he did without seeking out knowledge. But not everybody is motivated toward the same things — he obviously went the route of being on stage telling jokes instead of reading books. Still, it isn’t book knowledge that has caused the questioning of his faith. It’s a wrestling in his spirit for who will be in control of his life. I hope he eventually chooses God.

I’m not devaluing what Ray Comfort was trying to do in his video. While he does talk circles around the youths, he also brings everything back to the gospel and our human need for a savior. As I wrote this post, the video was still playing, and I was taken aback by the power of the gospel as Comfort gave it to the people he was speaking to. The young woman he spoke to looked very conflicted, her face a slew of emotions, and a peculiar shade of red by the end. So while I saw Comfort use his intelligence and knowledge to intimidate his audience, I also witnessed what the power of the gospel can do to a person’s soul. Who knows what direction the agnostics will go now that they’ve been confronted with God’s word? Who knows whom they will end up serving? My mind is skeptical, but my soul rejoices at the possibility they might choose God.

Yes, now that I’ve broken my silence, I’m writing a slew of posts. I have thoughts. I write mental essays. Generally, they sit in my head. They are probably best left that way. On the other hand, it’s hard to jump into my book, especially right now as I’m approaching the end. On a completely unrelated note, do you know how hard it is sometimes to get your characters from point A to point B? They need to go to a specific viewing room of kaleidoscopes, but they are in a palace besieged by soldiers. How will they make it to the kaleidoscopic vision of earth? I do not know because they’ve stopped on the clockwise spiral staircase. On a more related note, I’ve tried to incorporate all manner of conspiracy theories in this book from aliens to immunizations.

At night, when I finally collapse (and while my characters are still stuck on the staircase), I’ve been reading a book called And There Was Light: autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, blind hero of the French Resistance. This is one of those autobiographies that excites me and makes me want to import salient quotes into numerous blog posts, the problem being that most of the book is quotable. It’s really quite astonishing and inspiring. I haven’t liked an auto/biography this much since I read Andrew Carnegie’s several years ago. I’m sure you will find at least three old blog posts on Carnegie. He was an early inspiration for my character of Oso, though Oso took a darker turn because he’s a gen Xer and not of an earlier optimistic American generation — however, the Carnegie book being an autobiography, I’m sure he didn’t tell us anything he didn’t want us to know. The difference is Oso doesn’t care if the world knows about his bad morals and vicious drive to be in charge.

Back to Lusseyran — I want to give him a fair blog post and not this conspiratorial one. And so this is just an intro to the man. He was blind; he had an inner sight that guided him. That sight was in part due to his faith in Christ. When he became a French resistance fighter — when, in fact, he started a French resistance organization — he was inspired by his sense of justice and morality being assaulted by the Nazis. He was anti-communist and pro-democracy. I’ve had my negative thoughts on democracy, though they’re never as dark and hateful as the thoughts I have towards communism. And when it comes to the French resistance, I honor those who were not communists because so many of them were.

In passing, Lusseyran mentions that Albert Camus was also part of a French resistance organization. This made Lusseyran a little uncomfortable for the obvious reason that he knew many of the people working underground were in fact communists. Camus, however, was at best a reluctant communist. He was rather more libertarian and leaned in the direction of anarcho-syndicalism. He saw that the communists were working toward changes in society and conceded to work with them. Later, he was more adamantly opposed to the communist party.

On one of my many sleepless nights, I looked up Camus to get a better sense of who he was. That’s when things got interesting. I noticed Camus had died in a car accident at the age of 46. Wait…hadn’t Lusseyran also died in a car accident at the age of 46? Were they eventually friends, and had they been in the same car accident? No, Camus was eleven years older than Lusseyran. By the way, that’s an interesting fact: Lusseyran and his buddy resistance fighters were teenagers. They were so young they couldn’t be put to work in the German labor camps. That is really an aside, but it shows the drive these men had at a young age. Camus, on the other hand, was a full-fledged adult when he became a resistance fighter.

What a weird coincidence, I thought. Here were two men who had been French resistance fighters, both of whom had been vocally anti-communist who had died in car accidents at the age of 46. Some suspected Camus had been taken out by the KGB. Nobody seemed to suspect anything of Lusseyran’s death by car accident.

I did what most insomniacs do: I took it to the internet. Surely, somebody else had noted the strange coincidence of their deaths and lives. Nope. I couldn’t find anyone who had tried to develop a conspiracy off of this. But I did end up on a website giving a list of notable people who had died at the age of 46. I assume the site came up because Camus was on it. Lusseyran, not being as famous, was not on it. You know who was, though? That’s right; you guessed it. The biggest conspiracist’s dream, John F. Kennedy. In between the deaths of Camus and Lusseyran, was the assassination of our beloved president at the age of 46. Is there something significant to this age? Was all this part of the Cold War? What had really happened?

I got up and paced the house. What is an insomniac to do when she is completely mad from lack of sleep and too much alcohol that hasn’t really done the trick to put her to sleep? She is left to pace and run her fingers through her hair, to stare at the moon out the kitchen window, to shift into 3rd-person perspective and remember that she herself is 46. And what now? Has she finally cracked a code and now she must die because of her current age?

I (re-entering my blogpost) should have cracked the code several months from now when I turn 47. But it’s all right. I’m sure the Cold War is over now, and I was never a resistance fighter. Rather, my life is taken up by arguing with young communists on Facebook who think they’re democratic socialists like the French have become these days. Oh, boy. What a life this has become! The internet just doesn’t have the intrigue of underground newspapers circulated by teenage boys who are fighting for truth and justice and Christianity. I need to up my game if I’m going to survive in my soul past the age of 50. Let alone 46.

Pride isn’t silly in the sense that it can be very destructive and cause people to commit heinous acts of evil. It is only silly in the sense that it is masking a very silly thing: the human ego. And often, it does give rise to silly results rather than ones that are truly evil.

Case in point: I didn’t write a new blog post until Sunday, at which point I was seething over the time change. I still am, having not slept for several nights. But that’s irrelevant to the subject of pride. The reason I didn’t write a post was due to the internet on my laptop not working. I really don’t like writing and editing complete posts on my phone. I use my phone for continuing posts or other writing I’ve already started if I’m stuck waiting at the hair salon or wherever mothers end up waiting. I much prefer my usual keyboard. Thus, without access to internet on my usual writing machine, I didn’t write a new post.

And, yes, it does come down to pride. I’m used to being able to fix my own problems. I don’t like relying on other people, or necessarily waiting for them. But for some unknown reason, I couldn’t fix the problem of my internet browsers blocking the internet. None of the usual fixes worked. Why was this happening? Everything looked normal with my firewalls and security. When it comes to computers and internet, there are much more difficult problems to fix. E.g., when I recently broke my website after letting it sit for several months without doing administrative work on it and then quite suddenly updated everything, I had to go to my host site and fix the code that was causing the problem. Being that I’m a figure-it-out-as-I-go type of person with no actual skills, this took a bit of doing. I mean, yeah, it’s just a simple command here or there, but I had to figure out which ones.

My husband is better with computers than I am, but I don’t like asking for help. It’s that stupid pride thing. You could plumb the depths of my psychology if you’d like — find that little black place inside that believes it’s my lot to go it alone in this world. I mean, you could if you wanted to. I wouldn’t suggest it, though. I don’t like being analyzed any more than the next person, and I’m pretty boring when it comes right down to it. No great mysteries here. Finally, though, I had to admit to getting annoyed with my internet problem. Why couldn’t I get it to work? I don’t use it much on my laptop. There’s very little chance I picked up a virus. Nothing about it made sense.

So I finally let my pride go and asked my husband for help. It turns out that he didn’t need to grab my computer and work on it. He already knew what had happened. When he’d set up a new router, he’d blocked an unknown device because it didn’t sound like it belonged to any of us. He’d unintentionally blocked my computer from the internet.

He said, “I figured if I accidentally blocked somebody’s device from the internet, they’d come tell me about it immediately.” Leave it to you, he went on (I’m paraphrasing here), to let it go for weeks without asking why your internet wasn’t working.

Pride. It’s a stupid thing. Because, yes, it had been weeks since he’d done that. And meanwhile I had managed to publish two posts on my laptop and use internet on my phone or Kindle. I can’t explain why I was able to post the two previous ones. The blocking system had taken a bit longer in the earlier days, and I had managed to post before the message popped up telling me I couldn’t. At the end, it was happening with immediacy. Although the subject of this article is stupid pride, it does reveal something about our supposed security systems that sometimes take a while to do their job. Imagine — if somebody with a foreign device was trying to hack into your internet, could they slip in and do what they wanted in the interim before the system worked? I don’t really know. That seems to be the case. But as I said, I’m not much of an expert at anything. A jack-of-all-trades — or jill-of-all-trades — and a master at nothing.

However, that isn’t always a bad thing. As the full idiom goes, “Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one.” It’s sometimes a good thing to be self-reliant and able to fix what is happening at the present moment rather than an expert so narrow you can’t operate outside your field of expertise. This is often a phenomenon found in the cubicle environment of workplaces, and if you want help beyond the one trained-for expertise of that cubicle, you will get passed to another department. This also happens in academia, where a genius at examining and interpreting microbiology, for example, can’t figure out the most basic logic of philosophy or religion or, astonishingly, another scientific field. May I never be that myopic.

But as I already stated, may I forgo pride, as well. As soon as humans venture off their given reservations, or out of the garden, if you want to get metaphysical, they begin to think they don’t need anybody else, certainly not a spouse, and least of all God. They have all the answers, and if they don’t, they’re certainly not going to own up to it. They’re rather going to figure out how to find the answers even if it means going without the internet for a time.

This is going to be a short post in which I complain obsessively about daylight savings time. I’ve long thought that politicians should be slapped more regularly with Swiftian flappers until they give up absurdities, such as the belief that we can move the sun or add or take away sunlight hours from the day. It’s a long-lasting example of the way in which governments will treat their citizens like monkeys trained to do ridiculous and unhealthful things. On the outside, it might seem like a minor nuisance — an arbitrary thing we do twice a year because it’s our shared religious tradition of sun or clock worship. Nowadays, the powers that be reach their hands down to change the clocks for us. That makes it official! Evidence for the hand of God!

Like many states, New Mexico has tossed around getting rid of the stupidity and becoming daylight savings atheists. Except that’s a lie. Rather, the people who wrote the bill were such religious zealots they wanted to remain perpetually in the time of late-day sun worship. It’s no surprise the governor tabled it. At the time, I was irritated with Ms. Martinez because going with permanent daylight savings would at least mean we wouldn’t have to do the trained monkey thing twice a year, even if it would conversely mean giving in to a religious idiocy. But ultimately, she was right to table it.

Yes, I’m probably exagerating. Yes, daylight savings probably bothers my health more than the average idiot monkey, being the insomniac that I am. If I’ve managed to establish a four-hour sleep span during standard time, daylight savings means kissing that nicety goodbye. That is most likely the case for any insomniac; changing the clocks is very, very bad for establishing a regulated circadian rhythm.

On the other hand, I’ve never died due to daylight savings, and it kills people every year. Heart attacks, strokes, an increase in traffic accidents — and all for in the worship of a false deity. I know I’m being a little snarky regarding the religious worship aspect, but seeing as how there’s no rational reason to change our clocks and pretend we’re adding sunlight to our days, I have to place it on the level of superstition. I don’t know what else to call superstition but an adherence to a pagan worship.

The funny thing is I read about a new (to me) medical fallout in an article this year: in-vitro fertilization is not as successful during the month of March post changing clocks. This got me interested in what it does to our general fertility rates. The CDC keeps a record of the months with the highest birthrates — the two biggest months are August and September, but the biggest window for births is between the months of July and October. It’s no surprise to me that if you count back nine months, the window of conception that correlates is what the government has left us of standard time, November through February. You could make a case that people don’t have anything better to do in dark cold winter months than go to bed early, which could be responsible for the increase in births nine months later. But you could also see how daylight savings time is unnatural to the human instinct and condition. You mess with our circadian rhythms and suddenly we don’t even engage as frequently in normal biological behavior. We make hay while the sun shines, but not that kind of hay. We make other hay. Or we sit inside and watch Netflix because we can and we don’t care that the sun is shining later than it ought to be. It’s surprising we manage to bring forth offspring at any time of year, to be honest.

What we don’t need, regardless of whether we sit inside and watch Netflix instead of truly honoring our sun god with outdoor sungazing, is the government continuing to treat us like idiot trained monkeys. All it would take to change things is massive noncompliance. Just don’t do it. Don’t change your clocks. Ignore the governors and congress and presidents and don’t do it. It’s that simple. Nothing cataclysmic will happen. Okay, maybe some cataclysms will occur, if machines are set to automatically change to daylight savings and workers don’t show up to do their part until the standard work time hour has actually come around. But what are a few cataclysms compared to gaining back our dignity from a government who thinks they are capable of moving the sun? A government who thinks they are deities? A government filled with idiots who needed to be slapped in a Swiftian sense a hundred years ago?

…still looks like my usual observation of culture. I’ve been very curious as to what it’s like to live in Bernie Sanders’ lauded Scandinavia dream. And while I’m tempted to write my observations for each country and what I have read about them, from personal accounts of defectors to those who love their countries dearly, I’d like to rather cut to the chase.

The United States already has a system like the the lauded Scandinavian countries. We (as is in the US along with these countries) all have social safety nets propped up by the bulwark of capitalism. Those Bernie supporters who hate capitalism won’t appreciate this, but it’s true. However, obviously, the Nordic countries have gone a lot farther down the road of erecting safety nets; by comparison, US citizens end up as the riskier sort of circus performers for many aspects of their lives.

That’s terrible, isn’t it? That depends on who you talk to. The problem with comparing us to them is that we are a giant country that could be broken up into several smaller countries, and we are made up of just about every culture in the world. By comparison, Nordic countries are mostly still mono cultures, despite the recent influx of immigration. Mono cultures tend to have shared values. One value of these cold northern countries that makes their system work is conformity. When I was reading about Finland, I was mildly appalled at the descriptions. According to some Finlandians’ own stories, they are a people who look down on entrepreneurs who try to get ahead. Their tax rate is so high for the wealthy that most people end up at the same level. Thus, ambition doesn’t mean much. Why work hard and be inventive when there’s no incentive to do so? Finland is a particularly extreme case, where the people do not even value happiness as a culture, but aspects of this same conformity will be found in all countries with successful (this is subjective; many do not deem their systems successful) social safety nets.

These countries have much smaller populations than we have. It’s a lot easier to bend a small conformist population to to a collective authoritarian will. The United States is, as I already stated, filled with a very diverse population. Going down the road to a complete social welfare system has been rocky at best for us. Our system is surprisingly filled with ironies. E.g., we tend to tax our corporations and the very wealthy more than Nordic countries on average, if you combine state and federal taxes. They hit the slightly above middle incomes harder, while levying very high sales taxes. Americans have fought the system we have; Trump lowering the federal corporate tax rate was welcomed by many and decried by those who saw it as their conformist system declining. Well, to be honest, they won’t admit that we already have the same system Bernie waxes poetic over. All they can see is the corporate graft. But so can everybody else. True American capitalists don’t want to be under a corporatocracy anymore than those calling themselves Bernie-style democratic socialists.

Americans aren’t going to completely conform, except by force. That’s the sad part. And if we do end up buckling, it will be a complete nightmare due to the size of our population, and the distance between the coasts. Already, our bureaucracy botches almost everything. Why do the Bernie-ites think it will get better as it gets bigger? It makes no sense to me. Look at what happened with national ID cards once they came in and imagine that on a grander revolving scale. It’s downright frightening in nature.

But…but…all civilized countries do great with their safety nets. Sure, they do. With small populations, conformity, and a lot of dirty little secrets that aren’t that secret. Dissecting those would take a whole new post. Maybe three posts. But what I mean is little secrets like Sweden’s university students carrying the biggest load is student debt in the world…even though their tuition is free.

If you want some good facts and particulars, you can read this post from the tax foundation. This shows you how each country supports its system (it does not include Finland, which does have a slightly different culture, albeit they are so close to Sweden that Swedish is one of their official languages. That’s why I included it.)