Main5

Preface

All references made on this wiki come from scientific journals based upon access to data that would not have been possible without the incredible work performed by Aaron Schwartz and Alexandra Elbakyan in the creation of Sci-hub, a decentralised shadow library of restricted access scientific research papers. BurnZero is maintained by an anonymous group of moderators one of which is Voytek Bereza. We offer a bounty for any errors, to claim, post on our anonymous subreddit .

Part 1: Introduction

We are running out of time to hide from the ecological crisis. Whilst we have been working on solutions to deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change, these are only remedies to symptoms, not the underlying cause. There are a bunch of common logical fallacies which obscure the imminence of the threat. Many of those who can see past this, have been pacified, a few have broken through, raised representatives to power to address the issue, only to find them captured by bad science and big finance.

In desperation, activist have taken to our seas and streets, Tomorrow Movement, XR, Sea Shepherd. Whilst normal folk funnel funds to the wages of charities such as Greenpeace and WWF. All fight for the same cause however, through inefficiencies and tribalism we remain divided, lacking vital economies of scale. Solidarity is desperately needed, but this requires trust in a cohesive vision. This evolving wiki, BurnZero, is dedicated to the exploration and subsequent funding of new open-source ideas.

Part 2: Popular Delusions

The human mind evolved for another less complex time. It seems before we can effectively address this crisis, first we must look at our own failings and dissolve ancient perceptual frameworks and enable new modes of thought. As we do, we find popular delusions including logical fallacies, thought paradoxes and cognitive biases have been distorting our view of a common, shared reality. We find our personal paradigm is not the only paradigm. However, due to the limited timeline and the degrading neuroplasticity of those in power, traditional learning is too slow for the task ahead. We need to induce pivotal mental states with proper guidance to change our minds before an ecological collapse will.

Part 3: Learning from our mistakes

Our societal-level social experiments have failed to provide us with long-term, sustainable solutions. Communism in the 1900s showed us our selfish genes and neoliberalism has now brought us to the brink of environmental collapse. Instead of framing these failed systems as two ends of a spectrum we need to agree they have both failed us.

To get out of this mess, we need to better understand what makes us. Our genes, which for millions of years have been attuned to scarcity are now facing abundance making obesity a greater threat than starvation. In the blink of an eye, what was once good for us has become bad for us; and our minds and collective culture are simply not prepared. As a result, inequality has become so rife, that 0.7% have more money than 47% of the world's population combined. If there is any truth in the relativity of ethics, billionaires need urgent mental health treatment.

Part 4: The Bad Machine

Corporate irresponsibility has been known since their inception. When the corporate structure was first invented, the powers that be codified their founding statements so they could only form for short periods of time, after which they would have to be dissolved. The reason for this limitation of life was that the granting authority feared that as the corporate structure limits liability a Pandora's box might be unleashed in perpetuity with no one to blame. This failsafe persisted for some time however as corporates became increasingly powerful they effectively lobbied for the removal of dissolution controls and became perpetual profit-generating machines. Today the vast majority of global negative externalities originate from just 90 corporate entities around the world.

Figure 1. The profit motive, working its way down the chain via fiduciary duty.

But why does this happen? In short, the pursuit of profit regardless of negative externalities. This pursuit is codified in their founding incorporation statements (ICs) which exhibits as behaviour in its leadership via "shareholder primacy". This profit seeking behaviour then propagates through the organisation to staff behaviour via "fiduciary duty" (See Figure 1) ensuring all parts of the system work in the pursuit of financial gain of shareholders. This binding principle gives corporates the traits of an inhuman, unfeeling, machine.

This structure protects itself from outside influence as its hierarchical structure acts as a funnel selectively promoting the worst human traits. Research has found people with narcissistic traits tend to get promoted 39% faster in their progression to CEO and that there are at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population. This should be extremely worrying as psychopaths constitute only 1% of the adult population but 20% of (North American) prison populations. However, unlike psychopaths, a corporation is merely a machine and founding heuristics can be readily modified.