If you could plant a single thought in the minds of everyone on Earth simultaneously, what thought would you choose to share?

AndreyAsimow@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 143 points –
139

We are in a climate emergency that must be drastically dealt with immediately.

I might even go so far as plant a few policies in their heads. "We are in a climate emergency, and we should address it immediately with policies such as carbon tax-and-dividend, ending subsidies for harmful industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, investing in both established and promising renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal, reducing our dependence on cars with more electrified public transport and denser urban design, and encouraging better urban land use patterns with land value taxes." One sentence = one thought, right?

Knowing humans, if we didn't use this magical power to guide them to good solutions, a good number of us would conclude, "That's it, we need to nuke China and India to save the Earth!"

I'm not sure that just putting the message in their heads would make them actually do it. I feel like the (American) right wing party would just start campaigning with "The commie liberals are using Jewish space lasers to plant their eco hoax in our brains! We must vote the out before they use it to turn your children trans!!!!"

Could you slip in a mention for biosphere collapse too?

I'd go with "Hey, it's God. I actually AM real, but I'm heading out. You guys are on your own from now on, no more afterlife or anything. So be good to each other! Alright, I'm out. (oh, and just some advice? you might want to get ahead of this climate change thing)"

Sounds like a recipe to stir up religious backlash on insert group here for driving god away

Yeah, I was hoping the wording of my message would make people give up religious malarkey, but you're probably right. Even being told "don't use religion to be a jerk" wouldn't stop people from doing it.

tbf, I can't think of a better message myself

"MothBookkeeper is the dictator of the world, and I completely trust his decisions."

Nevermind the logistics of that; power lives where people believe it does.

Then I could make multiple beneficial changes, such as:

  • Heavily taxing the rich
  • Enacting drastic climate policy
  • Banning paper stickers that rip as you try to take them off
  • Sending Mitch McConnell on a rocket into the sun

Considering our names start similar and that you going to do something about stickers that rip off, I give you my support

The Florida and Texas Governors have to fight to the death on a platform suspended by a stationary helicopter a mile over cocaine shark infested waters, and the pilot bailed out 20 minutes ago. Trump is the referee.

Don't be a dick

Problem with that is that many people are being dicks while thinking that they are not being dicks.

Used to have this as the only rule for my Discord server, and it obviously wasn’t clear enough for people to get.

Honk honk it’s the goose

Can you imagine the amazing headlines.

"City Agrees Spirit Spoke To Them; Was A Goose"

I think the only thing that can save humanity from the brink of climate collapse is one rowdy goose

Everyone! I am Son Goku and I need your energy to defeat Majin Buu!

Lol as a kid me and my sister raised our hands to the ceiling to give goku our chi in solidarity, while watching tv.

I'm pretty sure if I hear this in my head, today, as an adult, I'd do it again. No questions asked

“The purpose of your life is to make others happy”

Put that in the head of all the ‘players’.

Instant misery for everybody as nobody would be able to take care of themselves.

How does that follow?

Your purpose is to make others happy == sacrifice your well being

When you only live to make others happy, you disregard your needs by putting others first. That ends affecting your well being. Your whole personality turns into service and you are easily exploited and abused.

"the purpose of your life is to make others happy"

No one said anything about only. My purpose is to build new things. I eat, sleep, and interact with others in an attempt to put myself in my best condition - this is no different.

Ignoring self-maintenance is against any purpose but sacrifice

Ahh, but if I die of starvation, I can't very well make people happy, now can I? Assuming everyone followed the thought's direction, the way to best make people happy is for me to live a healthy and long life, probably. (Of course, it'd be up to each individual to determine how to best make other people happy. Maybe I would decide that my contribution to climate change was causing unhappiness, so I would end my life.)

Give them all a vision of the Earth from space. Look at that, all ya sonsa bitches.

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.

The irresistible urge to consume at least one billionaire. They would think that if they don’t eat a billionaire they would die. Hilarity would ensue.

Doesn't have to be a billionaire. Anyone worth more than 5 millions is ok as well.

That's a bit low. 5 million is low enough that it could still be made through the fruits of their own labour if they're in a high paying industry. Would probably have to be $50M+ before you get exclusively the capitalist class.

Nah, gotta set the bar a bit higher. Maybe net worth of 1b+.

And the thought should be that you feel like you would die if they aren't eaten.

"Eating billionaires is the secret to eternal youth, life, and health."

The Earth is dying and it can live on without us once we are dead.

Do you mean only if we are dead? Or just casual rate of death?

It can and will continue on if we are all dead.

Thank you... I hate all the people who are "we'll permanently destroy the earth and it'll never recover!" crowd. Maybe for us it'll be too inhospitable and we won't survive, but nature is surprisingly resilient. From bacteria that can eat oil and plastic, to entire generations of flora and fauna living in irradiated landscapes, it will adapt and be here long after we're gone.

Yes. Ecosystems as we know them will be decimated, but whatever survives will repopulate. Worse has happened before in Earth's history.

It’s not a thought but I would put empathy

I've been saying for a while that if I could, I'd increase baseline human empathy by 50% or enough to raise its minimum value to current baseline if they have less than 50% of baseline to start with, all up to a maximum of triple baseline levels. Enough to make the world a much better place, but not enough to make millions of people mentally ill or otherwise do more harm than good.

I'd consider anyone suffering negative side effects to be acceptable casualties.

It's a good idea to have government programs to take care of citizens without requiring any strings to get help.

The experience of being the victim of real violence. It's pretty clear most people don't really get it. And it's weirdly common for people to have romantic ideas about fighting, revenge, punishment, war, and even torture. I think it would be eye opening.

And oppression. Real, actual oppression, not whatever middle class white Christian Americans think is oppression.

“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

Reject your humanity become a catgirl nyaaa

"Send Squirrel money." (With details, of course. Can't have them giving money to some random squirrel.)

Can't have them giving money to some random squirrel.

Sorry, too late

The signal your brain gets when you really have to take a shit, right now, or there will be dire consequences.

Start caring about your privacy, governments and corporations are spying on you

Corporations are spying on you and governments are using your tax money to buy the information from them

Stop buying things

Whatcha out! He is behind you.

Billions of people turning back at the same time....

Any argument for your freedom is an argument for everyone's freedom.

Buy a as much of xyz stock as possible. Plant thought "buy xyz stock".

Is "kill yourself immediately" too dark? Probably. But if like three billion people died suddenly and without a massive environmental impact like nukes or some other poisoning of the world, could solve a bunch of problems.

Okay, Thanos. Can't say the logic isn't there though.

As far as I heard, the consensus is that Thanos had a great Idea but bad execution.

Hear me out first.

'Gender critical' theory. Everyone should have this theory, as originally defined, planted in their head. Men would only associate 'masculinity' with their role in providing semen for procreation. Women would only associate 'femininity' with their role in providing eggs for procreation.

There would be no gender-non-conformity because there would be no ideas about gender to conform to. A minority of men would, as an everyday thing, wear dresses. It would be impossible to verify that someone was a woman or not (short of x-raying their uterus).

The important thing, is that if this happened, the people currently claiming that they're 'gender critical' would lose their freaking minds.

You feel that given such an amazing opportunity, that is the single most important issue on the planet?

We're doomed.

You're reframing OP's question. There's no suggestion that I'm the only one with this opportunity - I'm relying on others to plant ideas about the climate or whatever, and focusing on what maybe other people haven't already said (which is a good strategy for posting on Lemmy, incidentally).

But if that's your genuine criticism, that what I posted can't be ranked as the most important thing, well there's plenty of other posts that you should be busy responding to.

Could be material for a novel.

So many relationships would fall apart, so many others would be possible were yesterday they were unthinkable.

So many people would completely lose their identity. And so many others would suddenly feel at peace.

Marketing is completely upended. What even is sexy anymore? To whom and why and how do we even know?

Clothing designers, some will thrive when suddenly it feels as if there are no rules, like you can do anything. Others lose it all together, having no idea what to do.

At the same time, people need to sort people. So I foresee a rise in racism, ageism and other discrimination to maintain largely the same in and out groups. But those first weeks of absolute mayhem that noone understands why it's suddenly mayhem would be beautiful.

This.... sounds very distopian.

Humans on earth would provide their recreational organs to a common cause.

There would be no physical sex (if I am right about what you wrote).

Freaky

Ha, no, I didn't mean it like that. The 'role of providing semen' and the 'role of providing eggs' would be during normal intercourse.

It's wild how threatening people find this idea. I really can't get understand why it is so hard to just imagine seeing each person as an individual. No one is walking around dividing the world a priori into "hockey fans or not" and thinking our society would collapse of if you couldn't do that all of a sudden.

"Aspire to be Jessica Rabbit."

I wanna see what happens.

Like everyone? Males and females as well?

Some would say Love is always the answer for everything. I think that would be a higher state for many. At the very least kindness.

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages."

Read the first sentence and was hoping you just wanted people to fear a vengeful ghost.

Single thoughts are complete within themselves, right?

I'd put my favorite song in everyone's head full blast.