I met yesterday morning with a good friend who dreams of an excellent future for Mauritius. He asked me how we unify people behind ideas when so many ideas are floating around, and false flags are planted to misdirect and divide people.

My response was, ” teach people history!” because everything happening now has happened in slightly different variations.

Intelligent individuals are often better able to recognize patterns. And the best way to do it is to use the information, contrast it with existing mental representation and catch the irregularities or regularities in the news that comes to you.

The better the mental representation, the better and faster you can spot patterns, make decisions, and predict the future.

Let’s look at history:

In the late 1700s, China was the world’s largest economy and strongly demanded British goods, mainly tea.

However, the Chinese government restricted trade by allowing only a limited amount of foreign goods into the country and only accepting payment in silver.

This created a trade imbalance in which Britain bought more Chinese goods than it was selling, resulting in a deficit.

To address this, the British East India Company began to smuggle opium into China, which was illegal under Chinese law.

The opium trade had a devastating impact on China, as it led to widespread addiction and social problems.

Eventually, this led to wars, the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Second Opium War (1856-1860).

The war resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858, which forced China to open more ports to foreign trade, allow foreign missionaries to operate in China, and legalize the importation of opium.

Now let’s look at the science:

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is naturally produced in the brain and plays a crucial role in the reward and pleasure centers of the brain.

Cocaine acts by inhibiting the reuptake of dopamine. Both cocaine and dopamine can increase dopamine activity in the brain and create feelings of pleasure and reward. This is what makes cocaine and dopamine addictive.

When dopamine is released in response to pleasurable experiences, it creates a sense of reward and pleasure. This can be addictive because the brain learns to associate the release of dopamine with certain behaviors, activities, or substances.

Social media can impact dopamine in several ways. Personalized content, short videos, entertainment value, and social connections are the key factors in play—likes, comments, and shares – (dopamine-releasing feedback loops). Fear of missing out (FOMO) on “important” updates or events – keep users coming back to check the status and posts of others.

Add notifications and social comparisons, and then you have a potent mix.

Opium smuggling drastically decreased the productivity of people in china. However, social media is essentially a deflationary activity – it does not produce any economic value proportional to the time spent on it.

These are just tools that can use to increase profits, motivate people to do the right things, or launch an attack by reducing the productivity of people.

Another way to reduce the productivity of an entire nation? Propose lower work days and package it as something extraordinary to have. For example, how to destroy the social fabric – control the theme of porn sites.

Who is the bad actor or who is the good actor – it all depends on the vantage point and time frame you are looking through. You must draw your own conclusions.

Here is mine:

Finally, it all boils down to human nature and our limited intelligence that cannot see beyond national boundaries and make attempts to undermine each other like one ant colony attacking another with different weapons over time – weapons evolve – our brains do not (yet) – we are perhaps not much more intelligent than an ant from a super-intelligent Alien of AI’s perspective.