How to Change the World (Or...How to Occupy Yourself)

Recently by James Altucher: The #1 Most Effective Habit

I cheated. When I was in college I took six courses a semester and then worked another 20-30 hours a week to pay for my bills (on top of the debt I was incurring). Often I had to miss classes because I had a job that I had to go to. One time I showed up for a midterm and the room was empty. Later I found out the midterm was the day before. I had to convince the professor to let me retake the midterm.

A week later he gave me the same midterm he gave everyone else but I had gotten a hold of that midterm and had a week to prepare the answers. Grade. A+. I’ve explained over and over, College is a scam these days trying to relieve you of all of your future income.

My roommate in my second semester was the son of a wealthy doctor. He was also a Marxist. In particular, he liked Trotsky. I didn’t understand any of the differences. Later, I’d run into him and he would be talking about “the worker”. He would be in one of the cafeterias reading, in no rush to get anywhere. I was always in a rush. I had either a class or a job. I wanted to take six courses a semester so I could graduate early and not get into even more debt. I felt like I was a “worker” and would get mad at him for always talking about how “the workers” are exploited. He had an anger that I couldn’t understand.

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Many people are angry. Here are some of the things they are angry at:

  • banks took big bailouts and CEOS got paid big money afterwards. This is horrific. Why did it happen?
  • after the CEOs took home big paychecks, thousands of their own employees lost their homes.
  • 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I couldn’t point those places out on a map if you had a gun to my head. I was always bad at geography. [See, “Name Me a Single War That Was Worth It”]
  • 100s of billions in global corruption funded by the US. Why did Hosni Mubarak’s family amass an estimated $200 billion while he was President of Egypt. How many of those hundreds of billions came directly out of US taxpayer pockets. How many Mubaracks are there all over the world as we continue to fund every corrupt government in the world out of fear and anger towards our perceived enemies.
  • Why are banks more busy foreclosing than lending? (Although, to be fair, I don’t think ANYONE should be buying a home right now. Home ownership is a total scam propagated by the banks for the past sixty years)
  • Why do we have military actions happening in over 120 countries right now even though the last legally declared war was in 1941.

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And on and on. People are angry. I get it. This is anger I understand. And people have a right to protest. But then the anger gets warped even beyond the truth. “The US caused 9/11″. “The Jews control Wall Street” (a common anti-semitic refrain heard among the Occupy Wall Streeters but under-reported in the news).

I get angry also. I want things to be better in the world. I want change. Why do so many African dictatorships horde money we send them while their citizens die of hunger? Why did GM go bankrupt and allow their entire middle management to lose their life savings and pensions? Why has unemployment doubled in the past 3 years.

People say, first, “well you can vote and make change.” Clearly that doesn’t happen. No single vote has ever created change. (See, “Politics is a Scam and Why I Will Never Vote Again”) And who do we vote for? Bush who started all these wars? Or Obama who continued them (he even kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense and now we are in year 10 of Afghanistan). Voting doesn’t work.