Open Letter Stewart Brand

Hello Mr Brand, So I can from my home sit and listen to some of the greatest minds and thinkers of our time, their thoughts and ideas. Steward brand has inspired a generation so they say, but in all honesty he doesn’t impress me too much…… nobody does, I annoy my partner incessantly with we are all overrated, or 99.99% of us are, I don’t even impress myself very much. There is an exception and that exception is James Lovelock, thinker, scientist and writer. Well I open a letter with, that doesn’t impress me much. It is unlikely to garner his attention but he has the ear of important individuals so I should try. We should in fact all not be very impressed with ourselves, all our heroes were flawed, or most of them, we all have done things we should not be proud of and fundamentally in the modern world the majority of us are committing a sin against our planet. So our heroes, Mr Brand, Mr Jobs, they in all likelihood have lived very polluting lives, well they are in America aren’t they? 99.99% of all Americans over pollute the planet, even if they don’t we also turn a blind eye to much of the agony on our planet. In fact to have a happy life necessitates a certain amount of selfishness, as there is so much pain and suffering on this ball of life that if we don’t avert our eyes occasionally, any right feeling and thinking person would feel extreme depression, angst and guilt. So by the luck of nature they have lived relatively happy lives, but by the nature of where they were born a certain part of their lives does not impress me much. In fact I am the same, without the great ideas, the money and probably the charisma. So I think we need a new belief system and part of that belief system should begin with humility, we are all not very impressive, and that to change this world, perhaps to save this world we all need to make sacrifices. I don’t know if it is possible, the tribal creature, our inability to preserve the commons, the guilt I feel when I eat fish knowing how it is over exploited and polluted, damaging perhaps to myself and the planet. We need to also work together, the solutions to our planet's problems are quite basic, we need to eat more vegetarian food, we need to have fewer children, we need to deal with perhaps a stable or even moderately shrinking economy, we need to be happy with our lot in life, and the rich need to devote most of their savings and income to persevering humanity, the planet and others… yet… this all repeatedly falls apart as somebody, a tribe, an individual will not protect the commons… so there is another scenario we are all fuck*d so hitch up, to that 12 miles a gallon car, eat all the fish, pollute, pollute, consume away as we are all screwed and the largest, strongest tribe will survive when chaos hits…. Yet some part of me, the spiritual side, the hopeful side hopes that perhaps humanity can come together as a group and as a species and do the right thing, we make sacrifices, we must all sacrifice as the planet requires it, how do we teach that, how do we imbue it, how do we ensure nobody exploits excessively the sacrifices of others, that nobody freeloads. Communism was wrong it should not be equality of reward, it should be equality of sacrifice, we should all give for the greater good. Yours hopefully, Ordinary Joe Wish.