Who am I?

I'm the guy who takes things too far, the right things. As a kid, I took the wrong things too far, but I learned my lessons. My dad told me there were three types of people in the world - people who learn from reading about it, people who learn from hearing about it, and people, like me, who actually had to piss on the electric fence.

My mom, on the other hand, told me that everyone's virtues are their faults. I've got a ganglion of misfiring neurons somewhere in my frontal lobe that compels me to do crazy things, but sometimes the world needs crazy. Sometimes the world needs people to take things too far, the right things.

Things like temperance. In America, we like to debate whether someone loves "justice" or "liberty" more, but neither of those political virtues is needed as desperately as temperance. We need to take temperance to a new extreme. We're a greedy mob of 7+ billion people living beyond our means, exhausting the planet's resources just so we can have houses that are too big and drive cars fat enough to fit our gluttonous fat asses on a drive to the store where we can buy a bunch of stuff we don't need. We tell people this is the "American Dream" and talk about how we're the leaders of the free world. Developing countries look up to us and say "damn... I want to be like (those materialistic bastards)".

And when they start to try to live beyond their means like us, the whole world goes to shit. The world goes to shit when there's a really, unbelievably simple solution: don't have so many babies and don't buy shit you don't need; define a better notion of "the good life" than this silly, materialistic "American Dream", one that values moderation, benevolence, and all the other virtues we seem to have forgotten about. I don't want the world to go to shit. I'm another eHuman with a dream of giving my kids a better world than we inherited, and I believe it's possible. It will require confronting some uncomfortable truths about our eHuman Nature - that we consume goods whose impacts we've never seen and that oppression, competition and human evolution will always be with us, with it problems of sexual selection, preserving "liberty" in a Just society, and more.

My name is "Alexander", which translates to "Defender of Mankind". This is hilarious when you learn about how infuriated I get when I think about mankind. But then you realize that my fury comes from a desire to see mankind do better, and you start to understand... I'm like Homer Simpson who strangles Bart for going down the wrong road. Some people might say that's taking things too far, but if they realize the intensity of love and hope that must be present for one to feel such pain and despair, they'll find it hard to hate the guy who took it too far.

I don't have the answers. I don't like strangling mankind, but I can't do nothing as mankind lets everything go to shit. This blog is an effort to voice my thoughts on we can do better. Why we should live in moderation, how we can live in a democracy with fundamentally different worldviews and notions of "the good life", what is nature - that place in which Homo sapiens arose, which puts our entire species' history in context - and why I love it... how we can balance human life with a love and gratitude for the world that gives us life, how we can engineer a socioeconomic and socioecological system that can put the world on sustainable footing, and how we can balance comedy with sincerity in this otherwise poo-pooey discussion about our fragile world being driven madly by an erratic yet fragile species of primate.

These are the kinds of thoughts I tell myself when I'm standing in front of the mirror, because they all require I ask myself whether or not I'm practicing what I preach. In all my rants about how the world should be and how we should be, there will be ample opportunities to call me out on being a raging hypocrite, and I'll thank you for that. I try not to be a hypocrite, and I always appreciate it when somebody challenges me with charges of hypocrisy - it's a great opportunity for self-improvement because clearly something is wrong with either what I've said, what I've done, or what I've left unsaid (usually, FYI, I leave unsaid my compassion and forgiveness for other people's deviations from the high road of virtue, as well as my intolerance for my own deviations). Such is the risk of rants - the risk of taking it too far.

But I'm okay risking a little piss on the electric fence, because in today's world, we need people to take things too far, the right things.