Why the average person has given up on trying to make a difference

Years ago, when the AIDS scare was just beginning, and people had no idea what this disease really was, I was studying genetics in college. At the same time, I was double majoring in archaeology, because I was fascinated with both subjects. Realizing the implications of this disease, I formulated a theory of how to trace back the virus to Patient Zero, the first case of someone with the disease, and then eradicate the disease by following its original mutations. I turned in the theory to my professor at the time, not knowing she was actually one of the main people instrumental in forming one of the first AIDS Conferences for the city. A few days later, she asked me if I would speak to a number of doctors who were interested in my particular theory. So, I went to this little informal gathering before the conference, and I was asked a bunch of medical questions, involving T-cell counts, and other such medical inquiries that were relevant to the AIDS crisis at that time. I answered all of the questions to the best of my ability, and they all seemed impressed with the direction I was taking with this conversation. Then, one of them asked me where I received my medical degree. I was dumbfounded, because I figured my professor would have at least informed them of my actual status, that I was really only an undergraduate, studying genetics and cell biology. When I informed them of this, they immediately wanted no more to do with me, thanked me, and that was the end of that. The AIDS crisis bloomed and exploded after that. Twenty years later, I read in a journal that someone was actually thinking of attempting to eradicate the HIV/AIDS virus by a method very similar to the one I presented; the only caveat was that so much time had passed, the investigator did not think it would be possible to trace the disease to Patient Zero.

Why am I bringing this up thirty years later? Well, because it keeps happening to me, and it is really depressing me. During the Reagan Administration, I had a plan for fixing the problems with our intelligence gathering assets, which I projected would cause serious problems for dealing with harder to pinpoint subjects, like the growing phenomenon of terrorism, which was limited at that time to splinter groups in Western Europe and student radicals in former authoritarian nations. I received a glossy photograph of Reagan as a response, thanking me for supporting his administration. That was pretty much it.

Years later, I had an idea to fix the economy of Michigan, using an advanced method of game theory that I was manipulating using a pretty simplistic interpretation of computer modeling. I received a message back from the state’s national senator, thanking me for supporting her stance on fossil fuels. I’ll be honest; to this day, I still don’t know what her stance is on fossil fuels, so I’m not sure how I was supporting her.

Unfortunately, this has been a pattern in how representatives of our government tend to respond to the common constituent. It’s like invoking Rousseau, when he argued that democracy only works during the election, but rarely after the ballots have already been counted. The politicians only seem to need you when they need votes; after that, the constituent is a roadblock and irrelevant.

Recently, I completed a theory for sustainable world peace, which a colleague and I have titled “Friendship Over Time”, or the FOT Theory. It involves several disciplines, some advanced game theoretic mathematics, and a result that can easily be obtained without having to be an analytical genius to handle the implementation. In other words, carrying out the peaceful project is easy; I did the math so the implementation could be easy.

My colleague and I, both communication scholars from the same institution, sent this theory to the Obama people during the 2008 campaign, explaining this is change that could make a serious difference. No response. None. Not even a glossy photo or a thank you for supporting his fossil fuel policy.

We presented the theory at a national communication conference, and people showed sincere interest. It was different from anything they’d seen before, and it actually causes people to think. Unfortunately, we don’t think that much anymore. We keep trying to do things the old way, hoping that unlike the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a better result), we might be successful if we keep doing the same international moves we’ve always done. Yet, we don’t get better results. We end up with more enemies and more people who we have to categorize as people who hate us for whatever reasons we can think of to fill in the blanks. Rather than moving towards peaceful co-existence, we move towards sustainable lack of hostilities that can change at a moment’s notice.

This is why the average person gets really frustrated with politics and trying to make a difference. I have been trying to make a difference for most of my adult life, and I’ve discovered that I might have been better off just trying to make a profit off of gullible people and exploiting those who didn’t know better. Because that’s what so many other people do, and they’re seen as successful, and even worse, they become powerful enough that those are the people to whom the rest of the country listens. It’s almost as if the one who screams the loudest, but has the least to say, is the one who gets the most attention. And we reward that.

Personally, I’m about to give up. I don’t see that anyone really cares for solutions to the bigger problems in the world. Instead, I see a lot of people who are more interested in pretending to focus on those problems without actually doing anything about solving them. We’ve become very good at rewarding reactive politics and shunning preventative actions.
With that being the case, is it all that surprising that people have given up on trying to make a difference?

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