Teach About is a nonprofit, nonpartisan and nonideological organization, established in California in 1999, whose website address (URL) is www.teachabout.org
What is Teach About?
The primary objective of Teach About is to educate people, especially youths, about the costs, in particular the economic costs, of violence, prejudice and corruption.
Teach About’s task is to articulate the pernicious effects of violence, prejudice and corruption, and to help people recognize the critical need to make serious efforts to extricate themselves from those evil acts.
No nation and no individual are exempted from these crimes. They are inherent and organically embedded in man. They are rampant in every country, backward and poor as well as advanced and rich. They infuse every race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.
Only ongoing education about the adversity of violence, prejudice and corruption will help teach people the necessity to abstain from them. Extricating from those evil acts will help improve people’s economic affluence and lead to enlightened civilization.
Teach About will start teaching in classrooms in 2010. In the meantime, this subject will be disseminated through its daily online newspaper, Daily Sheen, which has three web addresses (URLs): www.dailysheen.org, www.dailysheen.com, www.dailysheen.net.
What is Immanent Wickedness?
Violence, prejudice and corruption, the three most injurious human weaknesses, a trinity of human curses, are jointly labeled “immanent wickedness”. The world would have been categorically and exceedingly more civilized and affluent had there been concerted efforts to reduce the pervasiveness of immanent wickedness embedded in human beings.
Among the adverse consequences of immanent wickedness, the impact to an individual’s economic affluence is the most devastating. Its impact on a nation includes negative economic growth, economic prosperity, and economic development.
Our estimate highlights that in the absence of violence, prejudice, and corruption, the 2002 per capita income of the United States would have been more than double what it actually was. Had America been extricated from the trinity of curses, its per capita income would have been more than $100,000 in 2007.
Immanent wickedness, mankind’s worst enemy, is invariably detrimental to the nation’s economic growth because violence causes destruction, prejudice creates waste and corruption imposes the misuse of economic resources. It has an adverse economic impact on all people: victims, perpetrators, onlookers and outsiders. When a society loses, its individuals always lose because the society’s loss must inevitably be borne by its members. To help people become better civilized and more affluent, individuals and societies must recognize the relentless grip immanent wickedness has on humanity.
What is Economic Development?
With no exception, everyone in a society wants an increased standard of living and growing social betterment. A country must achieve ongoing economic development to offer its people such universally desired opportunity. Economic development results from concurrent economic growth and social progress.
Economic growth brings about increases in per capita income through growing economic activities, with reduction in unemployment and increase in investment.
Social progress includes advancement in every aspect of a society except economic growth. It covers culture, politics, government, justice, education, environment, healthcare, and organization. Some critical requirements for social progress include representative government, individual freedom, equal opportunity, free market, uncorrupt government, universal voting rights, adequate regulations, cultural choice, an unbiased legal system, quality education, universal healthcare, and effective poverty assistance.
Does Immanent Wickedness Heighten Poverty?
Economic growth is essential for poverty reduction. Economic development is critical. Full employment, together with social assistance and universal healthcare, would help remove poverty. Since such a civilized policy blend is regarded in America as disgraced liberalism, a reduction in poverty relies most on a reduction of unemployment.
Since destruction from violence, waste from prejudice and misuse from corruption necessarily curtails economic development, and since poverty and economic development are directly related, any increase in immanent wickedness aggravates poverty.
More unemployment invariably causes more poverty. More poverty brings about more discontent. More discontent sires more immanent wickedness. Discontent directly spawns, deepens and spreads violence. It heightens prejudice, which exacerbates violence. Poverty spreads corruption among the low income groups.
What is Enlightened Affluence?
An individual’s enlightened affluence is determined by an optimal blend of their economic affluence and civic culture. Economic affluence is a function of money income and the inflation rate. Civic Culture is determined by social awareness, social responsibility, empathy, tolerance, altruism and environmental consciousness. Dedication to help the helpless, commitment to the democratic process, readiness to obey the laws, willingness to pay taxes, adherence to social and economic justice, and dedication to the principle that all human beings are equal help raises one’s civic culture.
Is Violence a Genetic Disposition?
Humans are animals and thus violence is part of humanity’s biological nature. Being part of human essence, violence is innate, organic and inherent. Every individual is born with an immanent disposition for violence. No child is endowed with an absolute insulation from a proclivity for violence. Since the inclination for violence is in humanity’s essence, it is a dominant trait. Inclination for nonviolence, however, is only a cultivated outlook. It is one’s upbringing, association and awareness that improve their nonviolent disposition. The environment and culture within which an individual is evolved, either adds to or subtracts from his innate proclivity to violence, making him either more prone or less prone to violence. Systematic teaching is required to help children grow up with the recognition that the costs of perpetrating violence will prevent them from achieving the level of enlightened affluence their ability would permit.
How Does Violence Destroy Wealth?
Violence leads to the reduction of wealth, as well as a corresponding decrease in the environment, capital and labor. The disruption, or outright destruction, of means of production, curtails economic growth and reduces economic prosperity. Violence erases both prosperity achieved and prosperity achievable. Destroyed wealth is destroyed forever. A murdered doctor no longer is available to treat patients. A burnt down house is no longer available to live in. Resources needed to rebuild assets that are wrecked by violence could have been used to build totally new assets to produce additional economic growth. What is destroyed is irretrievable.
How is Violence Categorized?
Violence may be grouped as macro-violence and micro-violence. Macro-violence includes war, conflict and despotism. War covers battle between sovereign nations. Conflict includes group violence motivated by social, political, economic, racial, ethnic and cultural discords. Despotism covers a political system in which individual liberty and rights are subjugated. Micro-violence is violence committed by individuals or groups like a gang or an underworld mob. It is motivated by an individual’s vested interest like financial gains, enmity, bigotry, grudge, sexism, power, racism, ego, ignorance and arrogance. Acts like murder, drug trafficking, burglary, robbery, theft, smuggling, assault, domestic violence, rape, and hate crime are acts of micro-violence.
How Does Violence Ruins Perpetrators?
Micro-violence maims and kills victims. Ironically, it ruins the perpetrators as well. As they are ruined, their families are devastated. Violence deprives perpetrators of their prospects to achieve civic culture and economic affluence. They get convicted, losing economic opportunities, political rights, and social standing. They get incarcerated, surrendering their freedom, ambition, potential, dignity, and worth. They get deprived of opportunities for employment and education, utilizing their skills and talents, and even be a part of their families. When they grow old, probably they become homeless and poor. They invariably remain social pariahs. Never are perpetrators winners. Neither victims nor perpetrators gain from violence. Both simply lose.
How Does Violence Smudge Patriotism?
Since violence wrecks economic assets, a nation gets progressively impoverished by the increased destruction of its assets. Whether it is macro-violence or micro-violence, every violent act wrecks a part of the nation’s assets, and to that extent its strength is reduced. Since a patriot’s duty is to help a nation become increasingly stronger, a perpetrator of violence is unarguably unpatriotic. Obligated to protect the country, a patriot must both refrain from committing violence and persuade others from initiating violence. Violence and patriotism are inversely related.
What prompts prejudice?
History explains prejudice is a universal phenomenon and a part of human temperament. It is a part of human event, our nature, our reality and our culture. Inserted into one’s upbringing by family, society and institutions, prejudice is sent down from generation to generation through history, tradition, culture, customs, civilization, practice and belief. No people are beyond prejudice because it is emotionally and environmentally embedded in human consciousness. It is an evolved and established part of every society’s practice, tradition and belief, enveloping everyone, affluent and indigent, civilized and barbarous. No one is a saint and everyone is a sinner. Although prejudice is an environmental phenomenon, it looks more like biological, as if it were meshed into one’s marrow.
Prejudice stems from actual and perceived differences that distinguish a person or a group from another person or another group. Perceptions, emotions, passions, sentiments, attitudes, mindsets and notions breed prejudice. Fear, ignorance, mistrust and suspicion give rise to prejudice. Differences in race, caste, ethnicity, religion, denomination, color, culture, nationality, region, gender, sexual orientation, politics and economics cause prejudice. Belief, tradition, experience and practice source prejudice. Even one’s appearance fertilizes prejudice.
Prejudice nurtures and crystallizes in some people a notion of superiority and in some other people a notion of inferiority. Such notions create prejudice. They can be factual or fancied, emotional or inferential, perceived or projected. Old notions are continued and new notions are cultivated. Some are as old as humanity. Some are as new as e-mail. The notion of superiority is responsible for most cases of prejudice and is used to discriminate and exclude victims. The most critical and tangible motivation for prejudice is the desire to maintain economic power.
How Does Prejudice Waste Resources?
Prejudice’s motivation is to deny equal opportunity to victims. It wastes economic resources to the extent it prevents victims from freely making maximum use of their resources to maximize their productivity. Waste is spawned by the lack of use of victims’ resources. Waste occurs when less efficient labor is utilized in lieu of more efficient labor. Nation’s economic growth is deprived by both the waste of resources and the lack of competition. Prejudice prevents a nation from maximizing productivity when the entire available resources are underutilized.
How Does Extrication From Prejudice Benefit?
Slavery, the caste system and apartheid are legally abolished. The Holocaust is now history. Nonetheless, ethnic cleansing regularly occurs. Social, political, economic, racial, ethnic, regional, caste and cultural prejudices invariably imperil every society. As it become less stringent, more victims start benefiting. A person’s liberation from prejudice brings in direct economic benefits. The resulting increase in economic growth provides indirect economic benefits to liberated perpetrators. Abolition of prejudice will offer tangible economic benefits to victims, perpetrators, others and the country.
How Prejudice Stains Patriotism?
A patriot must cherish his country’s progress. A country’s defense is its patriots’ duty. Its level of economic prosperity determines its defense capability. Patriotism demands everyone’s diligent effort to maximize the country’s prosperity, which is impossible to achieve unless its entire labor force finds productive employment, helping to reach full employment. Since prejudice curtails economic prosperity and consequently defense capability, a rational patriot must extricate himself from prejudice. Prejudice and patriotism are inversely related. A more prejudice person becomes less patriotic. A more patriotic becomes less prejudiced.
Is Corruption Inherent to Man?
Its pervasive nature illustrates how intimately corruption is connected to mankind. Corruption impacts on every aspect of humanity: Economics, politics, justice, environment, national security and social cohesion. At no period in human evolution, has mankind extricated itself from the perniciousness of corruption. It is strongly linked to man’s genetic structure and deeply rooted to his psyche. Every nation, community and individual is tainted by corruption. It is part of every culture, advanced and backward, primitive and modern, wealthy and poor. It causes an ongoing dust off between an individual’s ambition and a society’s interests.
Since it unavoidably causes a subtraction from ongoing progress and prosperity, the perniciousness of corruption can be more devastating than violence when it undermines the very fabric of a nation by sabotaging its constitution and jeopardizing its national security. Uninterrupted edification about its profound consequences and strong societal disapproval and social sanctions are necessary to get the proclivity for corruption tone down. The threat of serious legal consequences and especially prolonged incarceration is an important deterrent to corruption, especially for people of power and influence.
What Motivates Corruption?
Corruption is an extension of self-interest that is indispensible for survival. It ensues when the extension stretches beyond self-interest. Motivation for corruption is to gratify selfishness, greed and narcissism. Corruption grows to subdue logic and morals when selfishness is stretched to greed. When greed aggrandizes into narcissism, corruption transforms temperament into an opaque vanquisher of man’s empathy. Greed and narcissism are dark and dangerous human traits that lead to unrestrained obsession, culminating into inevitable ruin. As a person starts climbing from selfishness to greed and then to narcissism, temptation for and aggression toward corruption heightens. Everyone is a little corrupt as everyone is embedded with a varying degree of selfishness, greed and narcissism, whose sole medium of manifestation is corruption.
Is Corruption Widespread?
Corruption may be divided into monetary corruption, corruption of power, and ideological corruption. Monetary corruption concerns political, bureaucratic or business officials helping undeserving individuals or businesses gain unearned advantages in return for monetary gains like bribes or favors. The corruption of power is the abuse of power in order to gain increased or extended power and influence. Pakistan’s Pervez Musharaff’s 2007 coup is an example of the corruption of power. Ideological corruption concerns abuse of power for ideological reasons. The decision of five conservative Supreme Court justices to select George Bush by usurping voters’ power is an example of ideological corruption. Since quantifying the economic effects of the corruption of power and ideological corruption is difficult, our sole focus will be monetary corruption.
Corruption is more widespread in poor and despotic countries than in democratic and affluent ones. Exceptions to these generalizations are familiar. Corruption is common in indigent and democratic India and not uncommon in affluent and democratic America. In despotic China and Saudi Arabia it is rampant. Everyone in the Zimbabwean government is corrupt. Except Shimon Perez, practically every politician in Israel seems corrupt. Boorishly rich Russia and pathetically poor Bangladesh are corrupt.
How Does Corruption Undermine Competition?
Corruption seriously undercuts economic growth, undermining competition and afflicting efficiency. Its adverse consequences on efficiency and the resulting waste are caused by five ways. First, since one performs no productive task, payments and favors given to a corrupt individual generates zero productivity. Second, since a business was chosen to perform a task or receive a subsidy not on competitive merit but based on a corruptive influence, such choice aborts free market’s thrust to maximize efficiency. Third, since the decision on a task’s remuneration is not taken on the basis of competitive bidding, corrupters are paid higher than market price. Fourth, since the decision on a subsidy or tax credit is not made on cost-benefit calculus, corrupters are given undeserving benefits. Five, when public resources belonging to governments, businesses and organizations are diverted to personal use, economic efficiency is reduced as resource allocation is not determined by its productivity.
Corruption necessarily wastes scarce resources. Waste’s underlying cause is distortion to competition. Corruption was responsible for waste to occur when:
A corrupt official was given a payment without any reciprocal productive services;
A least efficient business incapable of maximizing productivity received a contract;
An inefficient business unequipped to maximize productivity received a subsidy;
A business received in excess of competitive price;
A business received a subsidy not on the basis of a cost-benefit determination;
A business received a tax credit not on the basis of a cost-benefit calculus; and
Public resources are diverted from public purpose to an official’s private use.
How Does Corruption Upend The Free Market?
Corruption fundamentally upends the basic rules of the free market, hijacking the tenets of competition and nonintervention. In a free market, the means of production must freely travel to the most efficient firm, ensuring productivity maximization. Corruption aborts this process by imprudently anchoring opportunities at businesses devoid of the ability to achieve productivity maximization and cost minimization. Corruption stymies the free market as it circumvents open bidding. With the exception of the corrupt and the corrupter, such a permutation makes everyone a loser. America’s economic growth could be increased at least two percent a year by eliminating subsidies and tax credits as well as government contracts without open bidding.
How Does Corruption Diminish Welfare?
Corruption imposes a serious welfare problem. The beneficiaries of most corruption are relatively rich individuals and businesses whose marginal utility of money is much lower than that of non-rich people. Money’s marginal utility at big businesses is exceedingly lower than public purposes like repairing a tunnel or providing lunch to school children. Convicted former Congressman Duke Cunningham and allegedly corrupt Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s marginal utility for money is exceedingly lower than a retired soldier either in America or Israel. The marginal utility of money for Exxon Mobil is much lower than that of improving the safety of a bridge.
What is desistance strategy?
The cessation and reduction of corruption, prejudice and violence help improve a nation’s economic prosperity. They increase the economic affluence of individuals including victims and perpetrators. Economic reality advocates “desistance strategy”, framing the economic need to refrain from initiating immanent wickedness. Desistance strategy is directly linked to economic necessity and the standard of living. Its categorical connection to economic necessity furnishes a compelling relevance, increasing its practical appeal. Being people’s main and perennial concern, economic necessity is the most universally felt human motivation, and the most compelling factor that determines human behavior. A rational person is an economic person.
Once the facts about the costs of immanent wickedness on an individual’s economic wellbeing are articulated, once the adverse impact of the cursed trinity on wealth accumulation and economic development are explained, and once the power of immanent wickedness to proliferate and prolong poverty is highlighted, people will have a vested interest in practicing the desistance strategy to promote their self-interests.
Is Desistance Strategy Realistic?
Desistance strategy advocates refraining from initiating immanent wickedness. It recognizes a victim’s right to choose his response to an act of immanent wickedness. Yet desistance strategy beseeches a victim to exercise moderation, prudence and insight. If there is a response, it should be measured. Proportionality is critical for a response to stand the test of justified self-defense. Desistance strategy, however, does not advocate a response. A non-response is economically desirable, as it would reduce the impact to an individual’s affluence and a nation’s economic development.
Desistance strategy is easy to practice because it recognizes one’s instinctual response to protect oneself and one’s legal right to defend oneself. It is, thus, realistic. It is inferred from the blend of humanity’s biological, cultural, social and economic imperatives. Such association will help everyone develop an incentive to refrain from immanent wickedness. Desistance strategy has unique merits and great potential. If everyone avoids initiating immanent wickedness, there would not be any corruption, prejudice or violence. Where would immanent wickedness come from if no one initiates it?
Is Learning The Economics of Immanent Wickedness Critical?
A nation must teach its people, especially its youth, the critical economic necessity to refrain from immanent wickedness. It is a nation’s indispensable priority to educate about the economics of immanent wickedness and the benefits of desistance strategy. Knowledge helps mold rational behavior. Education makes people environmentally enlightened and people aware of the harm of smoking, alcohol, drugs, racism, unprotected sex and sexism. Continuous education is critical to help evolve and modify human behavior.
Learning the economics of immanent wickedness and the benefits of desistance strategy must be a part of the social study program in schools and colleges. Corporations should teach them to their executives and employees. Adult classes would be beneficial. The concepts should be repeatedly discussed on television and the Internet. People must be made aware that what desistance strategy asks of people is to become logical to protect their own economic interests by refraining from initiating immanent wickedness.
Why Must The Youth Be Given Priority?
It is easy for youths to learn new ideas and form new habits. Every youth must have the opportunity to learn how an individual’s own actions could ruin his own economic affluence and civic culture. How perpetrators of immanent wickedness invariably suffer serious economic misfortunes; as well as how ruining a person’s economic opportunities directly impedes the nation’s economic development. They should be taught the irrefutable causation: immanent wickedness ruins wealth, which reduces economic growth, which leads to more poverty, and reduces social progress.
Does Teach About Have a Vision?
Teach About’s vision is to teach everyone in America and abroad the Economics of Immanent Wickedness and the Benefits of the Desistance Strategy. It would be an awakening experience when people in America recognize that their per capita income and the country’s GDP would have been more than double what it was if Americans refrained from committing corruption, prejudice and violence.
Teach About is committed to make the Economics of Immanent Wickedness and the Benefits of the Desistance Strategy a part of the social study programs in all schools, colleges and universities. Detailed development of both subjects is ready, including their curriculum development. Teach About also has initiated a dialogue with the country’s major school boards and ascertained their interest in the subjects. The next critical priority is to work on getting the nation’s school boards and universities to agree on making the two subjects a part of their social study curriculum. Teach About’s thought is that the subjects should be taught to high schools seniors and university freshmen.
Another critical priority is to build an infrastructure to teach adults the Economics of Immanent Wickedness and the Benefits of the Desistance Strategy. This can be done the hard way and the easy way. The hard way is by recruiting and training college graduates with social consciousness, preferably in economics. Those dedicated graduates will be teaching adults both subjects in the evenings at schools and other nongovernmental centers. They may have to travel among such centers in a county.
The easy way for Teach About is to get the AmeriCorps, a national organization with an ideal group of volunteers, involved. Teach About will provide those young and dedicated volunteers necessary training to teach the Economics of Immanent Wickedness and the Benefits of the Desistance Strategy. A certain number of ‘adult centers’ would be assigned to each AmeriCorps volunteer. Each volunteer must make repeated visits to the same institution until it becomes certain that each adult participant is thoroughly equipped to etch the new ideas in their consciousness.
Organizing such training in other countries, rich and poor, would be immeasurably useful to their economic development. Had India, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Congo, Israel, Iran, Cuba, China, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Russia and the rest of the world understood the adverse economic impacts of immanent wickedness, they could have done better than what they did to save lives, reduce poverty and improve their economic development. The Peace Corps is an effective medium through which people abroad could be taught the desistance strategy and the economics of immanent wickedness
What Role Does Daily Sheen Play?
Teach About has its own online newspaper, the Daily Sheen. It has three website addresses (URLs): www.dailysheen.org, www.dailysheen.com, and www.dailysheen.net.
The Daily Sheen is dedicated to telling the truth of reality. Like any other newspaper, the Daily Sheen will provide news: national and international, political and economic, social and environmental. Sourcing from all major wire services, the Daily Sheen will publish more international news geared toward helping people learn what is happening around the world so that they will have a meaningful global awareness.
The Daily Sheen will not be splashing gossip about celebrities. We consider every person as equally worthy and famous as everyone else. The Daily Sheen will avoid talking about abusers of people’s human rights or civil rights. We will not publish news on the opulence, lives, or death of oppressive dictators and those who allow human torture.
The Daily Sheen will be dedicated to discussing the efforts and achievements of individuals and institutions who champion people’s human rights, civil rights, and economic rights.
The Daily Sheenplans to regularly publish editorials, essays and commentaries articulating our unconventional but logical and coherent views as well as realistic solutions to problems. Distinguishing itself from other online news sources, the Daily Sheen’s opinions will invariably tell the truth of reality, devoid of any partisan or ideological slants. It offers an opportunity for readers to write blogs, viewpoints and comments.
Sunil AB. Kayal
August 15, 2008