WE ARE WINNING! 

National Public Radio (NPR) made another unsupported, dramatic claim last night that "bullying has increased to epidemic levels in our children's schools!" While appreciating the seriousness of bullying, I was also reminded that, factually, violence, abuse, hate crimes, racism, bigotry, and bullying have decreased significantly the last thirty years, have been radically reduced in the last one hundred years, and are almost statistically non-existent compared to two hundred years ago. Things are shockingly, almost miraculously, better! But, human nature does not allow us to see this. 
We believe the past was better than it was, and we always believe the future is in jeopardy. We believe in scarcity instead of abundance. JAM Views, as is its mission, today attempts to forcibly change the lens on your camera using logic and knowledge. First, I must ask you to turn off the television. 
I have borrowed many statistics for this argument from four fantastic books which I recommend you enjoy: "It's Better Than It Looks" by Gregg Easterbrook, "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress" by Steven Pinker, "Abundance" by Peter Diamandes and Steven Kotler, and "The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis which studies the work of Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. 
Recently in our politics, Hillary and Bernie told us that the U.S. has been "destroyed" by the wealthy and "poisoned" by greedy corporations, and before taking office President Trump yelled that our economy "is always bad, down, down, down." Every self-help book in the world starts off chapter one telling us never to watch local news in order to stop corrupting our brains with daily doses of violence, drugs, murder, lying, cheating, stealing, and Lotto. 
The truth is that 137,000 people were lifted out of poverty today, and have been everyday for the last 25 years. The world is 100 times wealthier than 200 years ago, and the wealth is by far more evenly distributed. In the last 100 years, Americans became 96% less likely to die in a car crash, 92% less likely to perish in a fire, and 95% less likely to die on the job. Today's poor have electricity, air-conditioning, and color television, all unavailable to the Vanderbilts 150 years ago. 200 years ago, 1% of people lived in democracies, and now nearly 70% of the people on Earth participate in a form of democracy. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has fallen 85% since its peak. 
In the 1960s the educated predicted that billions would die of starvation, but instead in 2015 the United Nations reported that global malnutrition had declined to its lowest level in history, with the real problem now being global obesity. In the 1970s the educated told us we would run out of oil and gas by 2000, but instead the supplies are overflowing despite the incredible proliferation of people, vehicles, aircraft, and construction. Unstoppable outbreaks of super-viruses and mutations were said to soon menace a growing world, but instead nearly all disease rates are in decline, including most cancers. Smog in major cities is in free fall with sulphur dioxide (acid rain) down by 81% in the U.S. since 1990, and the forests in Appalachia "are in the best condition they have been in since the eighteenth century." Belief in equality for ethnic minorities and gay people has statistically gone through the roof, while homicide rates have dropped through the floor. Can this all be true? Wow, it sure doesn't FEEL like it!
Not only are the politicians, media, and Loser Bob at the office forcing us to believe everything is a disaster, but our own human software and hardware causes us to focus on the bad instead of the good. In the "Undoing Project," Amos and Daniel help us with this psychology. "People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too. The rational behavior of the few would not be offset by the irrational behavior of the many." "A false view of what has happened in the past makes it harder to see what might occur in the future." "The mind arranges historical facts in ways that make past events feel a lot less uncertain, and a lot more predictable, than they actually were." "Once we have adopted a particular hypothesis (worldview) or interpretation, we grossly exaggerate the likelihood of that hypothesis, and find it very difficult to see things any other way." 
A few more from Amos and Daniel to drive home our understanding. "It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination." "When people become attached to a theory, they fit the evidence to the theory rather than the theory to evidence. They cease to see what's right under their nose." 
Siddha Yoga gurus teach us that our external perceptions and experiences are simply our own internal projections onto the screens of the world. We must understand that recency bias, hindsight bias, vividness bias, confirmation bias, and all those other biases give us a very distorted view of reality, or better stated, give us our own reality. 
Our reality, even when we may be battling terrible challenges, is that abundance always wins out over scarcity. It is not a zero sum game. If we give others a slice of our pie, we are not left with less. The pie is infinite. Technology, productivity, and the onward march of mankind will replace our slice quicker than we may consume it. Democracies and capitalism will always develop technologies which shift our paradigm in ways previously unimaginable (Israel exports fresh drinking water from their tiny desert country). We do not yet know even a fraction of the knowledge we will soon know. It is illogical and irresponsible to be pessimistic and fearful. We know that it is intelligent and educated to be wildly optimistic. For some reason, others interpret unfounded pessimism as critical thinking. This is incorrect. We all need to make wildly optimistic cool, because history and the facts are on our side! 

"Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and bad things happen, you live it twice." - Michael Lewis 

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