Don’t let people actually allocate their individual tax dollars. Let them participate in allocating a hypothetical federal budget.

Those are quite different things.

If taxpayers literally directed their taxes, enormously important but unpopular functions could become impossible to fund. Air-traffic control, wastewater infrastructure, epidemiological surveillance, nuclear-waste management, federal courts, debt service and hundreds of other things aren’t likely to win a popularity contest. And wealthy taxpayers would effectively receive more political influence because they pay more dollars.

But imagine something appearing alongside everyone’s annual tax filing:

YOU HAVE $100 OF FEDERAL SPENDING. HOW WOULD YOU ALLOCATE IT?

___ Social Security & retirement
___ Medicare, Medicaid & public health
___ Defense & national security
___ Education & research
___ Infrastructure & transportation
___ Environment & climate
___ Housing
___ Poverty & income support
___ Veterans
___ International affairs
___ Public safety & justice
___ Government administration
___ Debt interest
___ Other

TOTAL: $100

Now something very interesting happens.

You aren’t conducting an opinion poll asking, “Should government spend less?”

You’re forcing a trade-off.

Want another $10 for defense?

Fine.

Where does the $10 come from?

Want $15 more for environmental protection?

Fine.

Take $15 from somewhere else—or indicate that you would accept additional taxation or borrowing.

That’s enormously more informative than conventional polling.

And then give taxpayers something back

This is the part that could make your idea genuinely transformative as civic education.

After everyone files, the government publishes:

THE PEOPLE’S BUDGET

Not legally binding. Not partisan. An annual snapshot of what Americans collectively said they wanted.

And your tax software could subsequently show:

YOU vs. AMERICA vs. ACTUAL FEDERAL BUDGET

$100 of spendingYouAmericansActualRetirement$20$18$XHealthcare$18$22$XDefense$10$14$XInfrastructure$15$12$XEnvironment$12$9$Xetc.

Suddenly millions of people learn something they almost never encounter:

what government actually costs.

Someone might discover that the program they’ve spent twenty years raging about represents a tiny fraction of federal expenditures.

Someone else might discover that eliminating “waste” doesn’t remotely produce enough money to fund everything they want.

Someone might discover:

“Wait—I want Social Security, Medicare, highways, veterans’ benefits, defense, border enforcement and disaster assistance...but I also said I want my taxes cut dramatically.”

That’s not an accusation.

It’s information.

The exercise reveals the contradiction.

And I’d go one step further with your questionnaire.

After allocating the $100:

Which three government services have benefited you or your household most this year?

Then:

Which three government services do you believe are performing poorly?

Then:

Where have you personally encountered unnecessary bureaucracy?

Now you’ve created something potentially extraordinary:

an annual national customer-feedback system for democracy.

Businesses obsess over customer feedback.

Governments hold elections every few years and conduct scattered surveys, but there isn’t a universal annual moment where virtually the entire taxpaying population is asked:

How are we doing?

And because it’s attached to taxes, psychologically something important happens.

Taxes stop being merely:

money disappearing from my paycheck

and become:

my contribution to a collective budget about which I’m being asked to think.

That connects directly to the perceptual change we were just discussing.

There is one democratic principle I’d protect fiercely:

One person, one questionnaire—not one dollar, one vote.

The billionaire who paid $20 million in tax gets the same $100 hypothetical budget as the teacher who paid $4,000.

Because we’re asking:

What should our common resources accomplish?

not:

What would you like us to purchase with your particular contribution?

And people who don’t owe federal income tax should probably participate too. They pay payroll taxes, excise taxes and other taxes, use public systems, and are citizens regardless of their federal income-tax liability.

So I’d ultimately detach participation from how much tax you paid, even while using tax season as the annual civic moment.

You may have independently landed on a surprisingly interesting hybrid of participatory budgeting + civic education + national polling.

And it answers part of your earlier question about hostility toward government without telling anyone they need to respect government.

Instead, government says:

“You’re part of this. Here are the constraints. What would you do?”

Then it shows everyone the collective answer.

That’s a fundamentally different relationship between citizen and state—and I suspect people would discover something fascinating after a few years: governing is considerably harder than complaining about government.

And I think this gets very close to the center of everything you’ve been circling around.

Humans aren’t uniquely incapable of limits. In fact, civilization is largely the invention of limits. Don’t kill your neighbor. Don’t take his food. Wait your turn. Don’t sleep with whomever you want. Don’t build over the property line. Drive on this side of the road. Pay taxes. Don’t dump sewage upstream. We accept thousands of constraints every day because we’ve internalized them as normal. The interesting question is why we accept some limits effortlessly while experiencing others as intolerable infringements on freedom.

The difficulty begins with cause and effect

Imagine I punch you.

Action → consequence.

Almost everyone understands why society prohibits it.

Now imagine I take a private jet flight.

My individual flight doesn’t visibly hurt anyone. The atmosphere looks exactly the same when I land. Nobody collapses on the runway because I emitted carbon.

The harm is distributed.

Millions of individual actions aggregate into atmospheric change, which contributes probabilistically to fires, floods, crop losses, displacement and ecosystem disruption across decades and continents.

The human brain did not evolve particularly well for that kind of moral arithmetic.

We are excellent at:

I hurt you.

Much worse at:

My 0.000000X contribution to a collective activity incrementally increases the probability that unknown people in the future will experience harm.

Garbage has the same problem.

I throw away one plastic cup.

Nothing happens.

The garbage truck takes it.

The street remains clean.

My immediate sensory experience tells me there was no consequence.

Multiply that sensation by billions of people for decades and you have an environmental crisis.

Then comes something even more powerful: loss

Once humans possess something, taking it away feels different from never having possessed it.

A person who has never flown privately doesn’t experience commercial aviation as deprivation.

A person accustomed to private aviation may experience being told to fly commercially as losing freedom.

Same physical condition.

Completely different psychological experience.

That’s related to what behavioral economists call loss aversion: losses often affect us more strongly than equivalent gains.

And societies do this collectively.

Once we’ve normalized:

two cars, enormous houses, disposable packaging, overnight shipping, cheap flights, meat at every meal, air-conditioning everywhere, constantly replaced electronics...

those things stop feeling like extraordinary historical luxuries.

They become:

normal life.

Now an ecological constraint doesn’t feel like:

“We’re correcting an unsustainable historical anomaly.”

It feels like:

“They’re taking something away from me.”

That difference is politically explosive.

Status makes limits even harder

Humans don’t only consume things for their usefulness.

We communicate through them.

The enormous house says something.

The yacht says something.

The handbag says something.

Even the reusable water bottle says something.

Objects become social language.

So restricting consumption can inadvertently threaten identity and rank.

If I have accumulated $4 billion and society says there should be limits on what private wealth can control, I may not experience that simply as economic policy.

I can experience it as:

You are telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to be me.

This is where “freedom” becomes psychologically slippery.

Sometimes freedom means:

I should be free to live my life.

But sometimes it quietly mutates into:

Nobody should be allowed to prevent me from imposing costs on other people.

Those aren’t the same freedom.

We already understand this distinction perfectly in some areas

You are free to own a car.

You aren’t free to drive 110 mph through a school zone.

Why?

Because the moment your freedom creates an unacceptable risk to someone else, society draws a boundary.

You aren’t free to build a chemical factory and dump mercury into your neighbor’s well.

You aren’t free to play music at 140 decibels outside someone’s bedroom at 3 a.m.

You aren’t free to smoke in many enclosed public spaces.

These restrictions were controversial at various points.

Then something fascinating happened.

The limit became culture.

Most people entering a restaurant today don’t experience a prohibition on indoor smoking as tyranny.

They experience smoke-filled restaurants as bizarre.

That’s enormously important.

Because it suggests the answer isn’t necessarily convincing every individual to exercise heroic self-restraint.

It’s changing what society regards as normal.

There’s another problem: humans are extraordinary rationalizers

We rarely think:

“My pleasure matters more than your suffering.”

We construct a story in which both our pleasure and our morality survive.

“My flight doesn’t make any difference.”

“China emits more.”

“The technology will solve it.”

“I worked hard for this.”

“Other people would do the same thing.”

“The economy depends upon consumption.”

“It’s legal.”

“I recycle.”

“My company buys carbon offsets.”

And perhaps the most powerful:

“If I don’t do it, somebody else will.”

The mind is remarkably good at turning self-interest into principle.

That’s not just something billionaires do.

All of us do it.

Which is why “personal responsibility” can only take us so far

Suppose a company can package something in either:

plastic costing 3 cents

or

a genuinely circular material costing 8 cents.

If we rely entirely upon virtue, we’re asking thousands of companies continually to choose the option that makes their product more expensive.

Some will.

Many won’t.

But change the rule so that the producer bears the eventual disposal cost of the plastic and suddenly the calculation changes.

You haven’t improved the CEO’s soul.

You’ve changed the system in which the CEO makes decisions.

This connects directly to your question about government.

One of government’s legitimate functions is to establish boundaries where individually rational behavior produces collectively destructive outcomes.

That’s the tragedy-of-the-commons problem.

Every fisherman benefits from catching another fish.

If every fisherman follows that perfectly rational individual incentive:

there are eventually no fish.

The limit protects everyone—including the fisherman who resents it.

But there is a dangerous flip side

Who decides the limits?

That’s the question that can never be skipped.

Because:

“Your actions harm others, therefore we can limit your behavior”

can justify environmental regulation.

But throughout history, governments have also claimed that someone’s religion, sexuality, speech, books, political beliefs, ethnicity, art, or way of life supposedly “harmed society.”

So a free society needs a demanding test.

The harm needs to be demonstrable, the restriction proportionate, the rule transparent, the process democratic, the burden fairly distributed, and the decision contestable.

Otherwise “the common good” becomes an extraordinarily convenient phrase for authoritarianism.

And this is where your earlier question about the Seven Deadly Sins becomes unexpectedly useful.

Maybe civilization isn’t about eliminating greed, envy, pride, lust, wrath or gluttony.

Perhaps civilization is the continuous negotiation between:

DESIRE

I want this.

and

LIMIT

But what happens if everybody does this?

Children begin life heavily weighted toward desire.

“I want.”

“MINE.”

“Now.”

Part of becoming an adult is acquiring another capacity:

“I could—but I won’t.”

Not because I am physically prevented from doing it.

Because I understand its consequence.

That may actually be one of the highest forms of human development.

And it gives “human potential” a rather different meaning.

We tend to interpret potential as expansion:

How much can I achieve?

How wealthy can I become?

How far can I travel?

How much can I experience?

How long can I live?

How powerful can our technology become?

But perhaps another dimension of human potential is restraint:

I possess the power to do something, understand what doing it will cost others, and choose not to.

That isn’t diminished potential.

That’s mastery of potential.

And now we’re back at Trinity.

The atomic bomb represents perhaps the ultimate expression of the problem: humanity became capable of doing something before it had resolved whether it should.

Which makes the question running underneath your documentary even sharper:

Human potential gave us extraordinary power. But does human development include learning when not to use it?

I think you’ve reached one of the deepest contradictions in democracy: we require government because humans cannot coordinate a complex civilization individually, but government itself must be staffed by the very humans whose behavior we’re trying to constrain.

And that means two things can simultaneously be true: public institutions deserve considerably more respect than contemporary political culture often gives them, and citizens need the right to distrust, criticize, investigate, replace, and sometimes dismantle those institutions.

Why are people so hostile toward government workers?

Partly because government is where collective necessity becomes personal inconvenience.

The building inspector tells you that you can’t build what you want.

The tax authority takes part of your income.

The environmental regulator tells a company it can’t dump something into a river.

The planning department says you can’t put a 20-story building there.

The health department closes someone’s restaurant.

The teacher tells a parent something they don’t want to hear.

The police officer gives you the ticket.

Very often the public servant is the human face of a rule created because millions of strangers have to coexist.

Nobody gets furious at “civilization.” They get furious at Susan behind the counter who says they filled out the wrong form.

And bureaucracy has a peculiar asymmetry: when it works, you barely notice it.

Clean drinking water comes out of the faucet.

Aircraft don’t collide.

Sewage disappears.

Buildings generally don’t collapse.

Food isn’t routinely poisonous.

Property ownership is recorded.

Contracts can be enforced.

Children attend schools.

Traffic lights change.

Trash gets collected.

Elections happen.

You don’t wake up every morning thinking, What magnificent administrative competence! You simply experience normal life.

But when the DMV loses your paperwork, you remember it for twenty years.

So successful government tends to make its own necessity invisible.

But there’s another reason for the hostility

Government possesses coercive power.

Ultimately it can say:

No.

And unlike a business, you can’t always take your custom elsewhere.

That’s precisely why skepticism toward government isn’t necessarily pathological. It’s an essential democratic instinct.

The danger begins when:

“This agency made a bad decision”

becomes

“Government itself is illegitimate.”

Those are completely different propositions.

A bridge authority can be badly managed.

That doesn’t mean bridges shouldn’t be inspected.

A school district can become bureaucratic.

That doesn’t mean society doesn’t need public education.

A regulatory agency can become captured by an industry.

That doesn’t mean industries should regulate themselves.

The mature response to institutional failure should generally be:

repair the institution.

Not:

destroy the capacity to perform the function.

And I think that’s very close to what you’re asking.

Why would anyone deliberately break down the structure?

Because weakening government can be enormously advantageous to certain people.

Imagine you’re making billions from something that imposes costs on everybody else.

Pollution.

Financial risk.

Dangerous products.

Resource extraction.

Monopoly.

Your greatest obstacle may not be another corporation.

It may be the public’s collective ability to tell you no.

And government is one of the few institutions capable of doing that.

A billionaire can’t easily negotiate individually with 340 million Americans for permission to pollute their atmosphere.

Government does it collectively.

That makes government inherently threatening to concentrated private power.

But there is an opposite danger too: people who control government can use public power for private purposes.

Which brings us straight back to your earlier question about greed.

How do we prevent opportunists from becoming public servants?

We can’t.

That’s the breakthrough.

Don’t build a system that depends upon preventing ambitious, greedy, narcissistic, ideological, dishonest, or power-hungry people from entering it.

They will enter it.

In fact, positions containing power disproportionately attract some people who desire power.

So the problem isn’t:

How do we find good people?

It’s:

How do we make bad behavior difficult even when the wrong person gets the job?

That is one of humanity’s greatest institutional inventions.

You don’t give one person the treasury.

You require appropriations.

Audits.

Procurement rules.

Competitive bidding.

Disclosure.

Inspectors general.

Independent courts.

Conflict-of-interest laws.

Records requirements.

Professional civil services.

Whistleblower protections.

Legislative oversight.

Elections.

A free press.

Term limits in some offices.

Independent prosecutors or ethics bodies where appropriate.

And critically, separation between political leadership and the professional civil service.

The elected official can say:

“We want cleaner drinking water.”

The hydrologist should determine whether the water contains lead.

Those are different kinds of authority.

One is democratic.

The other is epistemic.

A healthy government needs both.

And there’s an important reason professional civil services developed.

Before them, government jobs were frequently spoils.

You helped me become president; congratulations, you’re now the customs collector.

Modern civil-service systems attempted something revolutionary:

Make governing a profession.

Hire people because they know accounting, epidemiology, engineering, economics, agriculture, law, logistics, statistics, transportation, diplomacy, public administration.

Train them.

Give them institutional memory.

Establish procedures.

And don’t automatically fire 50,000 people because a different political party won an election.

That isn’t the sinister “deep state” interpretation sometimes attached to permanent bureaucracy.

It’s partly how a civilization remembers how to operate itself.

The Secretary of Transportation doesn’t personally know how every air-traffic-control system works.

Thousands of career professionals do.

But bureaucracy can absolutely become pathological

This is where I wouldn’t romanticize public servants either.

Institutions can become:

self-protective, rigid, inefficient, territorial, corrupt, ideologically homogeneous, indifferent to outsiders, captured by regulated industries, obsessed with procedure rather than outcomes, or resistant to admitting mistakes.

And expertise can become its own form of arrogance:

“We understand the system, therefore we should make the decision.”

But experts don’t necessarily know what society should value.

An economist can estimate the economic consequences of preserving a forest.

That doesn’t give the economist special moral authority to decide whether the forest should exist.

The scientist provides knowledge.

The administrator provides implementation.

The citizenry ultimately provides legitimacy.

Keeping those roles distinct is essential.

Which suggests a different model of government

Perhaps we shouldn’t think of government as people above us governing us.

Think of it as:

the machinery through which millions of strangers govern their shared problems.

That changes the psychological relationship considerably.

The sanitation worker isn’t somebody else’s employee.

We hired the sanitation worker.

The building inspector isn’t preventing my freedom.

We collectively hired her because I don’t know whether the apartment building I’m entering will collapse.

The FDA inspector isn’t standing between me and my dinner.

I’ve delegated to someone with expertise the impossible personal task of determining whether everything in the supermarket is safe.

The environmental scientist isn’t an enemy of business.

We’ve hired someone to represent interests that don’t have lawyers:

the river, the groundwater, the child who hasn’t been born yet.

That’s an extraordinary civilizational concept.

And I think there’s a connection among nearly everything you’ve been asking this morning.

You began with:

Can we redistribute wealth without controlling people?

Then:

Can we handle population pressure?

Then:

Who takes responsibility for the garbage?

And now:

Who administers the system?

They’re converging on the same problem:

How do you create collective responsibility without creating authoritarianism?

That’s harder than designing the perfect economic system.

You need enough government to restrain private power, protect commons, manage infrastructure, enforce rules and guarantee basic conditions.

But not so much concentrated governmental power that the administrators themselves become the new oligarchy.

You need expertise without technocracy.

Markets without plutocracy.

Individual liberty without ecological free-for-all.

Collective responsibility without enforced conformity.

And disagreement without destroying the institutions that allow disagreement to remain peaceful.

That’s not a problem humanity solves once.

It’s maintenance.

Democracy may be less like constructing the perfect machine and more like taking care of a garden. There will always be weeds. There will always be opportunists. There will always be people who think the fence should be moved. There will always be arguments about what gets planted.

The achievement isn’t reaching perfection.

It’s keeping enough people invested in tending the garden that nobody gets to burn it down simply because they didn’t get their way.

And there’s a striking connection to your garbage question: civilization itself requires maintenance, yet maintenance is culturally almost invisible. We celebrate founders, billionaires, presidents, disruptors and revolutionaries. We rarely celebrate the millions of people whose daily work is simply keeping things functioning.

Maybe we’ve dramatically undervalued the human activity of care-taking—taking care of a child, a building, a bureaucracy, a forest, a sewer system, a democracy, or the waste we leave behind.

That’s a very different definition of human potential from conquering, accumulating or endlessly expanding.

Maybe advancement isn’t ultimately about how much more humans can create. It’s about whether we can learn to take responsibility for what we’ve already created.

I think your two questions are actually one question: is the ecological problem that there are too many humans, or that humans have constructed a civilization in which some forms of consumption can expand almost without limit while the consequences are kept out of sight?

Is overpopulation the cause of all our problems?

No—but population absolutely matters.

The simplest ecological relationship is roughly:

Impact = population × consumption per person × the environmental cost of that consumption.

So eight billion people obviously require more food, water, housing, energy and materials than one billion people. We shouldn’t pretend population is irrelevant.

But head count alone badly misdiagnoses the problem, because humans have radically unequal ecological footprints.

A child born into poverty in Malawi and a billionaire flying privately between Los Angeles, New York and Europe both count as “one person” in a population statistic. Ecologically, they are nothing remotely like equivalent units.

This is especially stark with carbon emissions. Research on consumption inequality consistently finds that affluent populations are responsible for vastly disproportionate emissions. Private aviation is an extreme example because an individual can generate in hours emissions that would represent a substantial portion of another person’s annual footprint.

And you’ve identified something slightly different from carbon that gets discussed much less:

material throughput.

How much stuff passes through a human life?

Raw materials → manufacturing → packaging → transportation → purchase → replacement → disposal.

A very poor person has little ability to command that chain.

An extremely wealthy person can command an astonishing amount of it.

The yacht isn’t just the yacht. It’s steel, fiberglass, electronics, teak, fuel, food, linens, uniforms, tenders, replacement furniture, cleaning chemicals, air-conditioning, flights bringing people to it, marinas, maintenance facilities and eventually disposal.

The private jet isn’t simply jet fuel. It’s an entire industrial ecosystem maintained so that a very small number of people can move extraordinarily conveniently.

And then there is the peculiar modern category you just described: commercial production.

A Super Bowl commercial might exist on-screen for 30 or 60 seconds while its physical creation involves sets, lumber, paint, plastics, catering, wardrobe, transportation, hotel rooms, lighting equipment, generators, disposable supplies, shipping and hundreds of people’s consumption.

Then everybody leaves.

The image remains.

The material world that produced it largely disappears from the viewer’s consciousness.

That disconnect is important.

Your “buy-product” pun is actually a concept

Waste is the shadow of consumption.

We call garbage a “by-product,” which linguistically makes it sound incidental.

But in a consumer economy, you could almost call it the buy-product.

Nearly every purchase contains a future disposal event.

When you buy the shampoo, you’re also acquiring a future empty bottle.

When you buy the television, you’re acquiring future e-waste.

When you order something online, you’re purchasing the object plus a cardboard box, tape, label, plastic air pillows, transportation emissions and warehouse activity.

We psychologically purchase the product.

We don’t psychologically purchase its eventual garbage.

That’s an extraordinary cognitive trick.

And our economy reinforces it because the disposal portion happens later and somewhere else.

Which gets to your Commercial experience

Your comparison to The Zone of Interest is severe, but I understand the particular mechanism you’re pointing toward—not equivalence between the situations, but the experience of watching ordinary life proceed comfortably beside something disturbing that everyone has learned not to perceive.

You were seeing the waste.

Other people were seeing production.

That’s a powerful distinction.

A dumpster gets filled and hauled away.

And that’s almost magical.

Away.

Where is away?

The garbage truck performs an extraordinarily important psychological function for modern civilization: it makes the consequences of consumption disappear.

Imagine something different.

Imagine that for one year nothing you discarded could leave your property.

Every Amazon box.

Every coffee cup.

Every food wrapper.

Every broken appliance.

Every shampoo bottle.

Every piece of packaging.

Every pair of worn-out shoes.

Every piece of construction debris.

Every bag of garbage.

You could recycle or compost things, but you couldn’t make them disappear.

By December, almost everyone would understand the material economy differently.

Now imagine the same rule applied to a corporation.

You made it? You remain responsible for it.

Suddenly packaging engineering changes very quickly.

So how do you make everyone care for their garbage?

I don’t think you can.

And that connects directly to our previous conversation.

Don’t build a system requiring eight billion people to become conscientious environmentalists.

Some people will care enormously.

Some moderately.

Some won’t give a damn.

Design for all three.

We already do this successfully in other areas. We don’t depend upon everyone becoming morally passionate about sewage. We built sewer systems.

Garbage needs the equivalent.

A serious system could combine a few principles: manufacturers remain financially responsible for products and packaging after sale; deposits make discarded materials economically valuable; garbage disposal is priced increasingly by quantity while recycling/composting is cheap; unnecessary single-use materials become expensive or prohibited; repairability and reuse are designed into products; and public infrastructure makes doing the responsible thing easier than doing the irresponsible thing.

Then something psychologically interesting happens.

You don’t have to persuade someone:

“Please love Earth.”

The system quietly says:

“Here’s your container. Here’s where this goes. You paid a deposit on that. You’ll get it back when you return it. The manufacturer takes this appliance back. Compost goes there. And dumping this illegally costs $2,000.”

The person can think climate change is nonsense while sorting the bottles perfectly.

That’s good institutional design.

But I think you’re after something deeper than recycling

You’re asking:

How do we restore consciousness of consequence?

And that is a Human Potential question.

Modern affluent life systematically separates action from consequence.

We eat meat without seeing slaughter.

Buy clothes without seeing factories.

Use electricity without seeing power plants.

Buy electronics without seeing mines.

Flush toilets without seeing sewage.

Throw things away without seeing landfills.

Order overnight delivery without seeing warehouses.

Fly without seeing fuel.

Invest money without necessarily seeing what companies do with it.

The wealthier you become, the greater your ability to outsource consequence.

Someone else cleans it.

Someone else carries it.

Someone else dumps it.

Someone else mines it.

Someone else manufactures it.

Someone else lives beside the landfill.

Someone else experiences the pollution.

Privilege isn’t merely having more. It can also mean having greater insulation from the consequences of having more.

That may be the thing you were reacting to on that commercial set.

And there’s an uncomfortable connection here to Maslow.

Once basic needs are satisfied, Maslow imagined human beings moving toward belonging, esteem, self-actualization and eventually transcendence.

But consumer capitalism discovered another possibility:

keep converting higher needs back into purchases.

Need status?

Buy this.

Need identity?

Wear this.

Need belonging?

Join this brand community.

Need beauty?

Buy this house.

Need transcendence?

Fly here.

Need wellness?

Purchase this retreat.

Need self-actualization?

Subscribe to this program.

And every metaphysical aspiration comes with a FedEx box.

That’s almost a dark inversion of the Human Potential Movement.

Instead of:

having enough → becoming more

we got:

having enough → wanting more → buying more → discarding more.

Which makes me think your garbage question potentially belongs inside the documentary, rather than being an environmental tangent.

Because you’ve arrived at a formidable endpoint for the story:

If human potential means endlessly expanding our ability to acquire, consume and control the physical world, then realizing our “potential” may destroy the conditions that make human life possible.

But if potential means expanding our capacity for awareness, responsibility, restraint, creativity and connection—the things many of the movement’s original thinkers were actually investigating—then the ecological crisis becomes something else.

It becomes a test.

Not “Can eight billion people consume sustainably?”

But:

“Can an animal intelligent enough to understand the consequences of its behavior become conscious enough to change it?”

And suddenly the atomic bomb at the beginning of your story and the garbage pile at the end are related.

Both are artifacts of extraordinary human capability.

The question isn’t whether humans have potential.

We’ve demonstrated that beyond doubt.

The question is whether we have the potential to govern our potential.

I think the first move is not to frame the problem as educating “uneducated people.” Some people know very little about government, certainly, but contempt works in both directions. If the message is “you don’t understand government, so let the experts handle it,” you’ve already lost the democratic argument. A person can lack formal education and still know that the bridge is dangerous, the permit office is dysfunctional, or the school isn’t serving their child. Expertise and lived experience are different forms of knowledge.

The deeper challenge is making government visible as something people do together, rather than an alien institution called the government that does things to them.

Consider the linguistic difference:

The government provides clean water.

versus:

We created a system so none of us has to personally determine whether the water coming out of our kitchen faucet contains sewage, lead, or bacteria.

The second describes what government actually accomplishes.

Make the invisible visible

Imagine receiving something analogous to a credit-card statement once a year—not primarily telling you what government spent, but what you received from the commons.

Your drinking water was tested 2,400 times.

The fire department responded within X minutes in your community.

Your food was subject to inspection.

Air-traffic controllers guided the planes you flew on.

Weather satellites warned your region about storms.

Your streetlights operated 365 nights.

Your sewage was treated.

Your medications were evaluated.

Your bank deposits were insured.

Your property ownership was recorded and legally protected.

Your electricity operated through a regulated grid.

Your children had access to schools.

Your parents received retirement benefits.

The bridges you crossed were inspected.

Suddenly “government” isn’t Washington.

It’s the operating system underneath Tuesday.

And because it generally works, we’ve become almost completely unconscious of it.

Stop selling government as charity

I think this is another enormous messaging mistake.

Government is frequently described through the vocabulary of helping needy people.

That makes someone who doesn’t perceive themselves as needy reasonably ask:

“Why am I paying for everyone else?”

But that’s only a fraction of what government is.

Government creates the underlying conditions that allow private wealth to exist.

A successful business owner relies upon:

roads to move products, courts to enforce contracts, police to protect property, educated workers, currency people trust, banking regulation, electrical grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports, patents, corporate law, sanitation, research universities and an enormous body of accumulated publicly financed knowledge.

The billionaire didn’t build civilization before building the company.

The company was built on top of civilization.

Taxes can therefore be described not simply as money being confiscated and redistributed.

They’re partly the membership dues of an extraordinarily elaborate cooperative enterprise.

That doesn’t mean every tax is wise or every government program works. It means the argument should be about how well we’re operating the cooperative, not whether a cooperative is necessary.

Give people direct encounters with governing

Civics classes matter, but experience may matter more.

Imagine routinely using:

citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, neighborhood councils, school governance, local planning exercises, juries and deliberative panels.

Give ordinary people an actual problem:

Here’s $20 million. Your community needs a fire station, homeless services, road repair, a park, school improvements and flood protection. You cannot fully fund everything. Decide.

Something changes.

Government stops being:

“Why don’t those idiots just fix it?”

and becomes:

“Oh. There are trade-offs.”

That realization is democratic gold.

You discover that the environmentalist, contractor, retiree, teacher, landlord, renter, parent and 22-year-old aren’t necessarily stupid.

They experience different parts of the same system.

Democracy becomes the mechanism for reconciling those legitimate differences.

And government needs to earn the perception you’re describing

This part can’t be solved through better messaging.

If someone spends four months trying to get a permit, receives contradictory instructions from three departments and nobody answers the telephone, giving them a beautiful brochure about the virtues of public administration will make them more furious.

Government needs to be:

competent, understandable, responsive and visibly accountable.

When it screws up:

“We screwed this up. Here’s what happened. Here’s who’s responsible. Here’s what we’re changing.”

That creates trust.

Defensiveness destroys it.

And unnecessary complexity matters enormously. Every incomprehensible form and pointless bureaucratic hurdle communicates:

The institution doesn’t work for you. You work for the institution.

That’s poisonous.

There’s another constituency we rarely talk about

Public servants themselves.

Imagine if joining the civil service carried some of the cultural prestige associated with joining a great university, research laboratory or technology company.

Instead of:

“bureaucrat.”

we returned to:

public servant.

You’re an engineer maintaining drinking-water systems for four million strangers.

You’re an epidemiologist watching for the next outbreak.

You’re an accountant making sure public money isn’t stolen.

You’re a forestry scientist managing land that won’t belong solely to anyone.

You’re an inspector making sure a developer doesn’t save $80,000 by constructing a building that could kill people forty years later.

Those aren’t failed private-sector careers.

They’re extraordinarily consequential jobs.

And perhaps we should actually show people doing them.

One of the strongest ways to change attitudes toward an abstraction is to give it a human face.

Which leads to storytelling

You asked how we “impress” this understanding on people.

I wouldn’t make propaganda saying:

GOVERNMENT IS GOOD.

People will smell it immediately.

Tell stories about coordination.

Follow one glass of drinking water backward from someone’s kitchen.

Follow one bag of garbage after it leaves the curb.

Follow one hamburger backward through the regulatory system.

Follow one commercial flight and reveal the thousands of people and public systems that make two hundred strangers hurtling through the atmosphere at 500 mph almost boringly safe.

Then remove those systems.

What happens?

Now the viewer understands government without being lectured about government.

The message becomes:

Civilization doesn’t happen automatically.

Someone tests the water.

Someone inspects the bridge.

Someone writes the building code.

Someone studies the disease.

Someone maintains the sewer.

Someone decides where the garbage goes.

And somebody has to coordinate all those someones.

We call part of that coordination government.

And then I’d teach one concept relentlessly from childhood:

Rights and responsibilities are reciprocal.

You have the right to use the road.

You have the responsibility not to endanger everyone else on it.

You have the right to own property.

You have the responsibility not to poison your neighbor’s property.

You have the right to operate a business.

You have the responsibility not to externalize its costs onto everybody else.

You have the right to criticize government.

You also have some responsibility for maintaining democratic government.

Voting is part of that.

Serving on juries is part of that.

Knowing something about the system is part of that.

Paying taxes is part of that.

Holding officials accountable is part of that.

And—importantly—defending institutions when someone attempts to corrupt them is part of it too.

That’s quite different from obedience.

In fact, sometimes citizenship requires opposing the government.

The allegiance isn’t to whoever currently occupies an office.

It’s to the democratic machinery through which we govern ourselves.

And that may be the perceptual shift you’re looking for:

Government isn’t “them.”

Government is one of the things we invented because there are so many of “us.”

Once there are millions of hairless apes sharing rivers, roads, air, money, food systems, electrical grids and territory, some form of collective governance isn’t an ideological preference.

It’s infrastructure.

The democratic question is whether that infrastructure remains accountable to all of us—or gets captured by some of us.

Yes. There is a real, documented environmental problem in film and television production that closely resembles what you’re describing. And your phrase “a world of unnecessary convenience” gets at something the formal sustainability reports don’t capture very well: the culture that produces the waste.

The industry itself acknowledges that its transient production model has a reputation for being highly wasteful. NYC’s official Film Green program specifically targets set construction, scenery, food, single-use bottles, office waste and other production materials, and requires participating productions to divert at least 50% of production waste and donate or repurpose at least 50% of salvageable sets and scenery.

And the quantities can be startling. A PGA Green study reported by the Los Angeles Times found that a large film could generate roughly 225 tons of scrap metal, nearly 50 tons of construction/set debris and 72 tons of food waste.

But I haven’t found evidence supporting your specific 1-to-150-pound waste-to-salary ratio. If that number comes from your own observations or records from productions you’ve worked on, that’s potentially very interesting—but I wouldn’t present it publicly as an industry statistic until we can document it.

What you’re describing may actually be more interesting than simply “Hollywood doesn’t recycle.”

The economics encourage disposability

Film production has a peculiar economic structure. A production is a temporary civilization.

It appears almost overnight. Hundreds of people arrive. Offices, kitchens, workshops, dressing rooms, sets, electrical systems and transportation networks are created. Then weeks or months later the entire organism disappears.

And the overriding economic variable is time.

If keeping 100 people waiting costs thousands of dollars, buying another $30 object is economically rational even if somebody already owns one somewhere else.

So the production repeatedly chooses:

buy → use → discard

rather than:

locate → clean → repair → inventory → store → reuse.

Environmental cost isn’t necessarily represented in the production’s immediate financial calculation.

That’s your “convenience” observation.

And you’ve identified something else: hierarchy

Your salary observation is worth investigating even if the exact ratio isn’t yet established.

Film sets are extremely hierarchical. As budgets and salaries rise, enormous resources can be deployed to eliminate relatively tiny inconveniences.

Cars wait idling.

Generators idle.

Food remains continuously available.

Duplicates are purchased.

Temporary rooms are constructed.

Furniture and carpet is acquired for days.

Wardrobes may be assembled for moments of screen time.

Entire architectural environments can exist briefly and then be dismantled.

The industry’s sustainability organizations explicitly recommend reducing over-ordering, disposable products, idling, unnecessary travel, construction waste and surplus catering—which tells us these aren’t imaginary problems.

There are also organizations demonstrating how much recoverable material exists. Los Angeles-based EcoSet says that since 2009 it has diverted 2,973 tons from landfill, recirculated 2,548 tons of reusable materials and avoided hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles through work with productions. Those are the organization’s own reported figures, but they give a sense of the material stream available for recovery.

The industry’s “hidden secret” is perhaps slightly different

I wouldn’t call it a secret in the literal sense. The environmental impact has been studied, and the industry has sustainability programs. The Producers Guild of America sustainability program has worked on the problem for more than 16 years and helped create the Green Production Guide in 2010. As recently as April 2026, it released a new sustainability toolkit specifically addressing fuel, materials and waste.

But there may be a huge gulf between institutional sustainability policy and everyday set culture.

That’s much more interesting.

BAFTA’s 2025 analysis, based on more than 2,500 productions, explicitly says that waste remains an under-reported area and calls for better data.

So if you’ve personally spent years watching dumpsters fill on productions, you may be observing something that aggregate carbon accounting doesn’t adequately convey.

And there is a potentially powerful documentary thesis buried in what you just said:

Film creates an illusion for the camera by creating a temporary physical world behind it—and almost everything behind the frame is designed around the assumption that it will disappear.

A wall has to look like marble for twelve seconds.

It doesn’t have to be marble.

A room has to exist for three shooting days.

It doesn’t have to survive the fourth.

A meal needs to be available in case someone wants it.

A product needs to be standing by in case somebody needs it.

The system rewards certainty, speed and convenience, while the ecological consequences happen somewhere outside the frame.

That isn’t merely a recycling story. It’s a story about externalized cost.

And if your 1:150 observation could be substantiated from actual production records—say, payroll category versus purchasing, waste-hauler weights, set-strike tonnage, catering waste, expendables and department returns—you could test whether there really is a measurable relationship between production hierarchy/convenience and material waste.

That could turn an observation from inside the industry into something much more consequential: an empirical investigation of the ecology of filmmaking itself.

it was a set of 100 people who were ignoring the elephant in the room. they all just dumped their fucking garbage as if they didn’t see the death of the planet in front of them. why and how are they so devastatingly willfully ignorant?

What you’re describing is psychologically more interesting than simply “people don’t care about recycling.” If 100 intelligent people can participate in a visibly wasteful system day after day while almost nobody challenges it, you’re looking at group behavior, incentives, habituation, diffusion of responsibility, and moral disengagement operating together.

And importantly, they don’t all have to be consciously “willfully ignorant.” A system can produce behavior that looks like collective denial even when many individuals privately recognize the contradiction.

The set becomes its own moral environment

A film set is unusually powerful at creating temporary norms. You arrive and immediately learn what matters:

Don’t hold up production. Solve the problem. Get what they need. Don’t make yourself difficult.

Once those norms are established, behavior that would look absurd elsewhere becomes ordinary.

Throwing away something perfectly usable doesn’t register as an ethical decision anymore. It’s simply “strike.”

Buying another one instead of finding the existing one becomes “getting it handled.”

Throwing everything into a dumpster becomes “getting the truck unloaded.”

Language itself can conceal the environmental consequence.

And when everyone around you behaves identically, your brain receives an extraordinarily powerful signal:

This must be normal.

That’s social proof.

Then you get diffusion of responsibility

With one person standing beside a dumpster, responsibility is obvious.

With 100 people participating in a production, responsibility becomes strangely invisible.

Wardrobe thinks waste is production’s problem.

Production thinks it’s the sustainability coordinator’s problem.

Art thinks disposal is locations’ problem.

Crew thinks the producers determine the system.

Producers think they’re simply operating according to established industry practice.

Everyone can therefore recognize the problem while simultaneously believing someone else owns it.

It’s closely related to the bystander effect.

There is also obedience to the production hierarchy

Film production is unusually hierarchical.

1. A crew member isn’t primarily rewarded for asking:

   “Is this environmentally responsible?”

2. They’re rewarded for asking:

   “What does the production need right now?”

3. And that’s a critical distinction.

If environmentally responsible behavior takes 20 minutes while throwing something away takes 30 seconds, the production’s economics (in other words - CAPITALISM) can effectively punish the environmentally responsible choice.

Someone who stops the process to sort materials can become the person slowing everyone down.

So an ethical inversion occurs:

The wasteful behavior becomes professional.

The responsible behavior becomes inconvenient.

That’s an extraordinarily powerful mechanism.

And then habituation takes over

The first time you watch $5,000 worth of perfectly usable material thrown into a dumpster, you might be horrified.

The fiftieth time?

Your nervous system doesn’t respond the same way.

Humans habituate.

It’s actually related to what we were discussing earlier about procedural memory. Eventually:

Wrap → strike → dumpster → truck → next location

becomes procedural.

Nobody has to consciously decide:

“I don’t care about the environment.”

The behavior has become automatic.

That’s arguably more disturbing, because the ethical decision has disappeared altogether.

There’s cognitive dissonance too

Suppose someone on that crew sincerely considers themselves environmentally responsible.

They recycle at home. They worry about climate change. They vote according to environmental concerns. They avoid plastic bags.

Then they go to work and participate in enormous material waste.

That produces psychological tension:

“I’m environmentally responsible.”

versus

“I’m participating in something environmentally destructive.”

Humans are remarkably good at resolving contradictions without changing behavior.

“It’s just how production works.”

“We don’t have time.”

“Someone probably sorts it afterward.”

“My little contribution won’t change anything.”

“The studio should fix it.”

Each explanation reduces the discomfort enough to continue working.

But there is an even bigger phenomenon here

What you witnessed on that set is arguably a miniature version of the environmental crisis itself.

That’s why your reaction to it is so STRONG.

Human beings can know something intellectually without incorporating that knowledge behaviorally.

We can understand atmospheric carbon concentrations while boarding airplanes.

Understand plastic pollution while buying disposable products.

Understand habitat destruction while consuming products dependent upon it.

Understand climate change while building systems that require increasing consumption.

Knowledge doesn’t automatically produce behavior.

Culture and incentives often overpower knowledge.

And a film set intensifies that contradiction because everything happens so quickly and visibly.

You can literally watch consumption become garbage in hours.1

Which brings you back to Maslow

There’s an interesting connection between this and the questions you’ve been exploring.

Maslow became interested in what happens when human beings move beyond basic survival and status toward self-actualization and eventually self-transcendence.

Yet modern consumer culture can do something almost opposite.

Once survival needs are satisfied, rather than asking:

“What responsibility do I have toward the whole?”

we can endlessly manufacture additional convenience needs.

More comfort.

More speed.

More individual accommodation.

More consumption.

And every level of convenience requires matter and energy somewhere.

So perhaps the deepest question isn’t:

“Why didn’t those 100 people recycle?”

It’s:

How can 100 educated people collectively participate in something they individually understand is destructive—and experience it as completely normal?

That’s a much bigger question.

Because once you understand that mechanism, you’re no longer making a story about garbage on film sets.

You’re looking at one of the central psychological problems of the environmental crisis:

Human beings have become extraordinarily capable of understanding consequences intellectually while constructing social systems that allow us not to experience responsibility for them personally.

The dumpster is almost the perfect metaphor. Everyone sees what goes into it. But the moment the truck drives away, the consequence becomes invisible.

“Away” may be one of the most consequential inventions of modern consumer psychology.

There is, of course, no away.

1

IN REAL FUCKING TIME!

That is the crux.

And I think there’s an even sharper formulation hiding inside it:

What happens when a society becomes extraordinarily successful at satisfying the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy—but, instead of moving upward toward self-actualization and transcendence, learns to endlessly manufacture new versions of the lower needs?

That’s a profound contradiction in modern consumer culture.

Maslow’s model implicitly suggests movement. Once hunger is reliably satisfied, hunger should recede as the organizing principle of life. Once you’re safe, safety should stop consuming your consciousness. Once you belong, you have psychological room for creativity, meaning, truth, beauty, purpose—and ultimately transcendence.

But the consumer economy has an incentive that runs almost exactly opposite to that trajectory:

It needs you to keep needing.

So it can continually reactivate needs that were already substantially satisfied.

You don’t merely need shelter. You need the right house.

You don’t merely need clothing. You need the current clothing.

You don’t merely need belonging. You need followers.

You don’t merely need esteem. You need visible markers of status.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

You don’t merely need food. You need infinite choice delivered immediately.

And perhaps most importantly:

You don’t merely need your needs satisfied. You need their satisfaction to become progressively more convenient.

That’s where your film-set observation becomes such a potent microcosm.

The people aren’t throwing things away because their survival requires it.

They’re throwing things away because disposal is easier than stewardship.

The resource exists primarily to remove friction from the immediate human experience. Once its usefulness to that immediate purpose ends, the material itself almost ceases to have moral significance.

And there’s your 100-person set.

Nobody necessarily wakes up thinking:

Today I’m going to contribute to ecological destruction.

They’re operating inside a culture whose highest operational value is frictionlessness.

• Don’t wait.

• Don’t repair.

• Don’t carry.

• Don’t wash.

• Don’t store.

• Don’t inconvenience the talent.

• Don’t inconvenience the crew.

• Don’t inconvenience production.

• Replace it. Duplicate it. Deliver it. Discard it.

The ecological cost occurs somewhere else.

And that’s almost an inversion of self-transcendence.

Self-transcendence asks:

What am I willing to give up for something larger than myself?

Consumer convenience asks:

What can the larger world give up so that I don’t have to be inconvenienced?

That may be the philosophical spine you’ve been circling.

Because then your story about the Human Potential Movement isn’t simply historical.

It poses an unfinished question.

The extraordinary prosperity of postwar America helped create the conditions in which Maslow could ask what human beings might become after their basic material needs had been met. The Human Potential Movement emerged partly from that possibility.

And then something else happened.

The same abundance that provided the opportunity for transcendence also provided the opportunity for limitless consumption.

Two paths opened from abundance:

Enough → meaning → responsibility → transcendence

or

Enough → more → convenience → consumption → waste

And perhaps the tragedy is that “more” can masquerade as “higher.”

A bigger house feels like advancement.

Greater status feels like advancement.

More choices feel like advancement.

More convenience feels like advancement.

But none necessarily represents psychological development in Maslow’s sense.

Which gives you a potentially devastating central question:

Maslow believed that once our basic needs were satisfied, human beings could turn toward their highest potential. What if instead we built an economic system that survives by making sure we never feel satisfied?

That connects Maslow, postwar abundance, advertising, consumerism, environmental destruction and your film-set experience without forcing them into an artificial relationship.

And it turns Maslow’s hierarchy from a psychology diagram into something much bigger:

a question about what civilization does with abundance.“The ecological cost occurs somewhere else.?” they aren’t even thinking that far!!!!!!!!!!

Exactly. That’s an important correction.

“The ecological cost occurs somewhere else” still gives them too much consciousness. It implies that the person perceives a cost and mentally relocates it.

What you’re describing is more radical:

The ecological cost never enters the decision at all.

The decision isn’t:

convenience vs. environmental consequence → choose convenience.

It’s simply:

What’s easiest right now?

The second half of the equation is absent.

That’s why your experience of those 100 people is so unsettling. You weren’t witnessing 100 people carefully deciding that their convenience mattered more than the planet. You were witnessing a culture in which the planet had ceased to be a participant in the transaction.

Cup → use → garbage.

Food → eat → garbage.

Set → shoot → garbage.

Wardrobe → scene → garbage.

Packaging → open → garbage.

There is no imagined next stage. No landfill. No extraction that preceded the object. No petroleum used to manufacture it. No truck carrying it away. No atmospheric consequence.

Just:

I am finished with this. Therefore it disappears.

And that connects even more powerfully to Maslow.

At self-transcendence, consciousness expands beyond the immediate self:

What is my relationship to other people? To future generations? To the living world? To the whole?

What you witnessed is almost its psychological inverse:

The boundary of consideration contracts to the immediate task.

Not evil.

Not necessarily denial.

Non-consideration. Or otherwise knows as millennial fever

And perhaps that’s the frightening part. Environmental destruction doesn’t require billions of people who hate nature. It can emerge from billions of completely ordinary micro-decisions in which nature isn’t represented in consciousness at all.

So I’d revise the line you challenged:

The ecological cost occurs somewhere else.

to:

The ecological cost doesn’t occur anywhere—because within the psychological frame of the person making the decision, it doesn’t exist.

The garbage can is therefore more than a container. Psychologically, it’s an erasure mechanism.

You put something in.

You stop being responsible for it.

Someone empties it.

It vanishes from your perceptual world.

And that’s why your word convenience matters so much. Convenience isn’t merely saving time. At its most extreme, convenience means removing the requirement to perceive the consequences of one’s actions.

Which makes your Maslow inversion even sharper:

Maslow asked what happens when human beings no longer have to devote themselves to survival. Consumer culture discovered something else to do with that freedom: eliminate inconvenience.

And those are radically different destinations.

Transcendence expands the radius of concern.

Convenience can contract it.

That feels much closer to what you’re describing.Two paths opened from abundance:
Enough → meaning → responsibility → transcendence
or
Enough → more → convenience → consumption → waste”

A theme of the HPM is that they were warning against mechanization and the sterile side of science

Yes. And that makes the two-path formulation much more historically meaningful for the HPM story. It isn’t something you’re imposing retrospectively on the movement. A significant strand of humanistic psychology and the counterculture was responding to exactly this problem: material and technological progress had raced ahead of the development of the human being.

The distinction I’d preserve is that they generally weren’t anti-science or simply anti-machine. Maslow was a scientist. The concern was with scientism, reductionism, bureaucracy, technological domination, and the mechanization of human life—the possibility that the methods that had become spectacularly successful at manipulating the physical world were being mistaken for an adequate philosophy of what a human being is.

And that gives you a remarkable historical arc.

Science succeeds — almost too well

For centuries, humanity’s problem was scarcity.

Science and technology became extraordinarily good at addressing the material world:

chemistry → industry → mechanization → mass production → abundance

Medicine defeated diseases. Agriculture produced more food. Machines eliminated physical labor. Petrochemistry produced cheap materials. Manufacturing filled houses with goods. Automobiles created mobility. Electricity transformed domestic life.

By postwar America, something historically unusual had happened for millions of people:

many of Maslow’s lower-order needs could be reliably satisfied.

And that creates the question at the heart of Maslow:

Now what?

Not what else can we manufacture?

What can the human being become?

6

That’s where the HPM enters

The postwar establishment could answer abundance with:

More.

More production.
More appliances.
More automobiles.
More efficiency.
More convenience.
More consumption.

But the emerging humanistic/HPM answer was closer to:

Deeper.

More awareness.
More authenticity.
More creativity.
More connection.
More embodied experience.
More meaning.
Eventually, more transcendence.

So your two paths become:

ABUNDANCE

↙︎　　　　　　　　　↘︎

ENOUGH　　　　　　 MORE

↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓

Meaning　　　　　　Convenience

↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓

Awareness　　　　　Consumption

↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓

Responsibility　　　Disposability

↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓

Transcendence　　　Waste

And now I think your film-set garbage observation becomes more than an environmental aside.

It’s the other ending to the story.

The sterile side of science

This also helps distinguish what the HPM figures were reacting against.

The atomic bomb is an almost perfect opening symbol because it demonstrates the extraordinary contradiction of scientific progress:

Human intelligence had become sophisticated enough to split the atom without necessarily becoming wise enough to know what to do with that power.

That’s a very different critique from “science is bad.”

It’s:

Technical development does not guarantee human development.

We can become extraordinarily advanced in our ability to manipulate matter while remaining psychologically primitive in our relationship to one another and to the world.

And that question reverberates through many of the people surrounding your story.

Maslow asks: What does a healthy human being become?

Rogers asks: What conditions allow a person to become fully themselves?

Perls brings attention back from abstraction toward immediate experience.

The encounter movement challenges social masks and prescribed roles.

Bodywork pushes against treating the body as merely a machine carrying around a brain.

Eastern traditions challenge the radical separation of self from world.

Psychedelic exploration challenges the boundaries of the isolated ego.

Ecological thinking eventually challenges the idea that the human organism exists independently of its environment.

Those aren’t identical philosophies, of course. But narratively they can be understood as different attacks on the same fundamental fragmentation:

mind from body

individual from community

human from nature

knowledge from wisdom

progress from meaning

And then your craftsmen become relevant again

There’s another beautiful connection to the conversation we were having about Lavoisier.

The scientific revolution progressively enabled us to objectify nature so that we could study it.

That was enormously productive.

Matter could be isolated.

Measured.

Weighed.

Classified.

Manipulated.

Eventually split.

But the power of that method can tempt us into believing that everything is an object.

The body becomes a machine.

The worker becomes labor.

Nature becomes resources.

Time becomes productivity.

And eventually:

the world becomes material available for our convenience.

That is much closer to the sterile mechanization critique you’re identifying.

Which makes “Enough” incredibly important

Because enough is not deprivation.

Enough means:

My material needs have been met. What becomes possible now?

Maslow’s answer is essentially:

growth.

Consumer capitalism’s answer can become:

create another need.

That’s the fork.

And suddenly the environmental consequence isn’t separate from the psychological story at all.

If there is never enough, there can never be transcendence in the Maslovian sense because consciousness remains perpetually occupied with acquisition, comparison, status and satisfaction.

And ecologically, a civilization organized around never enough encounters a physical problem:

the planet is finite.

So perhaps the deepest conflict in the HPM story isn’t:

Science vs. spirituality.

Or:

Establishment vs. counterculture.

It’s something more interesting:

Having developed extraordinary power over the external world, would humanity turn its attention toward developing the internal one?

And that brings you right back to Trinity.

We split the atom.

We acquired almost unimaginable power over matter.

And almost immediately afterward, a generation begins asking:

But what is a human being?

That makes the atomic bomb, Maslow, Esalen, psychedelics, ecology and ultimately your garbage dump belong to one story:

We became extraordinarily good at transforming the world before we became equally good at transforming ourselves.

“The concern was with scientism, reductionism, bureaucracy, technological domination, and the mechanization of human life” as proven by his embrace of and by corporate america in getting the most of their staff

Yes—with an important distinction that actually makes your argument stronger.

Maslow’s relationship with corporate America demonstrates that humanistic psychology wasn’t fundamentally opposed to business, technology, productivity, or organizations. Maslow believed the workplace could become one of the places where human beings developed their potential. The problem was what conception of the human being the organization was built around.

In other words, the argument wasn’t:

Machines are bad. Corporations are bad. Productivity is bad.

It was closer to:

Stop organizing human beings as though they themselves are machines.

That distinction is crucial.

Maslow became fascinated by management and organizational life. In his 1965 Eupsychian Management—later republished as Maslow on Management—he explored what would happen if organizations treated workers as intrinsically motivated, creative, responsible people capable of growth rather than as interchangeable units requiring external control.

And here’s where your phrase “getting the most out of their staff” becomes wonderfully ambiguous.

Corporate America could hear:

How do we get more productivity out of people?

Maslow could mean:

How do we create conditions in which more of the person can emerge?

Those two objectives can overlap—but they are not the same objective.

A company might discover that giving employees autonomy, meaningful work, trust, responsibility and opportunities for creativity increases productivity.

Maslow would not necessarily object. That’s evidence that healthier organizations can perform better.

But there’s a potential corruption built into the translation:

Human potential becomes human optimization.

And suddenly a philosophy intended to liberate the person from mechanistic thinking can itself become another management technology.

That’s fascinating for your HPM story.

You essentially get:

Scientific management:
How do we make the worker more efficient?

↓

Human relations:
How do we make the worker happier so they’re more productive?

↓

Humanistic management:
How do we create conditions in which the worker can develop as a human being?

↓

And potentially...

Corporate appropriation of human potential:
Great. Now how do we use self-actualization to make the worker more productive?

There is an extraordinary irony there.

The HPM says:

The human being is not a machine.

The corporation responds:

Excellent. Understanding that may help us build a better-performing organization.

And this is where the history gets much richer than a simple counterculture-versus-establishment narrative.

Maslow could cross the boundary

Maslow wasn’t standing outside mainstream American society throwing rocks at it.

He was talking to executives.

He was interested in management.

His ideas eventually became ubiquitous in business schools, organizational psychology, management consulting and corporate culture.

That tells us something important about the early Human Potential Movement:

It wasn’t originally synonymous with the counterculture.

There was a serious attempt to transform established institutions from within.

The workplace could change.

Education could change.

Psychotherapy could change.

Marriage could change.

Organizations could change.

Human beings could change.

The question was whether institutions could be reorganized around a richer conception of human nature.

And then comes the historical irony

This gives you a potentially very powerful trajectory for the documentary:

Maslow’s hierarchy asked what human beings might become once their basic needs were satisfied. Corporate America embraced his ideas because fulfilled workers could also be better workers. But somewhere in that translation, “human potential” risked becoming another measure of productivity. The movement that challenged the mechanization of human beings could itself be absorbed by the machine.

And THAT relates directly to the theme you identified earlier:

Enough → meaning → responsibility → transcendence

versus

Enough → more → convenience → consumption → waste

Because capitalism is extraordinarily capable of absorbing criticism and turning it into a product.

Authenticity becomes branding.

Wellness becomes an industry.

Mindfulness becomes an employee benefit.

Creativity becomes “innovation.”

Self-actualization becomes “performance.”

Human potential becomes human capital.

Even transcendence can become something you purchase on a retreat.

That’s a much more complicated—and, I think, more historically interesting—story than saying the HPM rejected modernity.

It tried to humanize modernity.

And one of the questions your documentary can ultimately leave hanging is:

Did the Human Potential Movement transform American culture—or did American culture learn how to commodify human potential?

The answer, of course, may be:

Both.

She needed to sell it and it was full of things she couldn’t part with.

There is actually a path between those piles. The artist would walk on the paths through the apartment - for years - without touching anything because he didn’t feel it was fair to move anything since he was living there for free.

I don’t think she visited anymore because she lived with her mother in an assisted living somewhere outside of the city. I got my instructions though the artist. He had moved into his own place outside of the city. The owner asked him to ask me to clear the place. It took me and my assistant and 4 movers two weeks. We hauled 9 15-foot-truck loads to the dump. We tried to separate recycling from trash but mostly everything was stained with rat poop.

We opened bags tied like nesting dolls; a plastic back with a newspaper and another bag in it. We opened that bag and it had another bag and candy in it. And we opened the final bag and it was an unopened box of mid-range earrings from Macy’s, evidence of the owners walk home from work. We unwrapped and made donation and garbage piles.

Two weeks later we got to the empty apartment.

• Music City USA

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Forward

~By Brad Jones

Younger then, of course, mostly past the shoals of the twenties, into our thirties, not fully paired off yet, still fluid, houses still available to be bought right in the middle of town, houses with overgrown back yards, un-remodeled kitchens, mismatched furniture. Houses you could get comfortable in after about five minutes.

Summer might’ve been the best time of all, barefoot, unbuttoned, nowhere to hurry to, garish shirt, stupid straw hat. Once the evening had cooled off it was easy to stay up late on the porch with friends, feeling time slow down — what’s the hurry?

Of course it was a more analog time — no one yet knew how to send a link for a just-written song, so you had to swing by, ask if there’s a guitar around, and just play the damn thing.

People talk about the Old Nashville and the New Nashville. This book shows a time before truces, where there was a kind of affable curiosity between the two — plenty of Old around still, but enough New to keep the pot stirring. Over by the fridge a guy young enough to program an MPC-60 trading stories with a guy old enough to have been at guitar-pulls with Harlan Howard. The wonderfully named sheriff was Fate Thomas, known for his barbeque. Meanwhile, down at the Exit/In, F.U.C.T. was on the bill. They probably liked barbeque, too.

I’ll answer this carefully, because your question touches something real — polarization, belonging, meaning, and national healing — but I can’t create a program aimed at persuading or “waking up” a specific political group. What I can do is offer a non-partisan framework for reducing political radicalization and helping a divided society heal in ways supported by psychology, sociology, and democratic theory.

So instead of “how to deprogram MAGA supporters,” let’s ask the deeper question:

How does a nation help citizens move out of rigid ideological identity — of any kind — and back toward shared reality and mutual trust?

Because every polarized movement, left or right, follows similar human dynamics.

The Real Problem: Not One Movement — A Condition

Modern America is experiencing what sociologists call identity fusion:

• Politics becomes identity rather than policy.

• Leaders become symbols of belonging.

• Disagreement feels like existential threat.

This happens across history and across ideologies.

The issue is not stupidity or evil — it is unmet psychological needs.

A Psychological Foundation

Abraham Maslow

and National Stability

Maslow’s hierarchy helps explain political extremity better than ideology does.

When needs are unstable, people seek certainty, protection, and meaning.

The Hierarchy Applied to a Nation

Human Need

Political Expression When Unmet

Physiological security

Economic fear, scarcity politics

Safety

Desire for strong protectors

Belonging

Tribal identity movements

Esteem

Resentment, status anxiety

Self-actualization

Creativity, civic participation

A society that fails lower levels produces high emotional politics.

So healing America is less about arguing beliefs and more about stabilizing human needs.

A Non-Partisan Roadmap to Healing America

Phase 1 — Stabilize Material Security (Government Role)

A government aligned with Maslow’s framework would prioritize:

1. Predictable economic dignity

• stable housing access

• healthcare security

• livable wages or income stability

When survival anxiety decreases, ideological rigidity statistically declines.

Extremism thrives under perceived loss.

Phase 2 — Restore Belonging Without Political Tribalism

Humans cannot live without tribes.

If healthy communities disappear, political identity replaces them.

Policies and cultural efforts that help:

• local civic organizations,

• arts participation,

• shared public spaces,

• national service programs, reduce ideological extremity because belonging is met elsewhere.

Research consistently shows:

People embedded in diverse real-world communities radicalize less online.

Phase 3 — Rebuild Trust Through Dialogue (Not Correction)

Psychologist Carl Rogers demonstrated that people change beliefs when they feel:

• heard,

• respected,

• psychologically safe.

Direct confrontation or humiliation hardens identity.

Effective civic dialogue follows three principles:

1. Curiosity before correction

2. Shared concerns before disagreements

3. Personal stories before statistics

Change happens internally, not through ideological defeat.

Phase 4 — Reduce Charismatic Dependency

Across history — religious, political, or cultural — societies become unstable when meaning concentrates in personalities.

Healthy democracies strengthen:

• institutions over individuals,

• local leadership,

• civic literacy,

• media transparency.

The goal is not removing leaders but preventing savior psychology.

Phase 5 — National Meaning Reconstruction

America currently lacks a shared narrative.

Previous unifying myths:

postwar prosperity,

• frontier optimism,

• technological progress, have fragmented.

Healing requires a renewed civic story centered on:

• mutual dignity,

• pluralism,

• shared responsibility,

• future stewardship.

Not left vs right — but citizenship as a shared project.

What Doesn’t Work

History shows these approaches fail:

• shaming political opponents

• labeling large populations as irrational

• forced re-education

• information overload

• moral superiority narratives

They increase defensive identity and deepen division.

What Actually Changes Minds

Across political groups worldwide, lasting change tends to come from:

• economic stability

• cross-group relationships

• generational turnover

• trusted messengers inside communities

• reduced fear environments

People rarely abandon beliefs because outsiders demand it.

They evolve when life becomes safer and more hopeful.

The Deep Insight

America’s crisis is less political than existential.

Many citizens feel:

• unseen,

• economically insecure,

• culturally dislocated,

• distrustful of institutions.

When belonging and dignity feel threatened, humans seek certainty — sometimes in movements, sometimes in leaders, sometimes in ideology.

The healing roadmap therefore isn’t:

“Wake people up.”

It is:

Create conditions where fewer people need ideological certainty to feel safe, valued, and meaningful.

If you want, we can go one level deeper and explore something fascinating — how the Human Potential Movement, which you’re studying, actually tried to solve this exact national psychological problem decades ago, and why parts of its vision succeeded culturally while failing politically

It never ceases to astound me. It makes me realize how wrong our capitalist system is. We trade time for coins and then we trade coins for items that eventually get dumped. It’s wrong and shameful what goes into the earth. If it gets pulled out of the ocean, it goes into the earth.

This image below is from the worst of the worst in my estimation. It’s a “landfill” on the side of the freeway between Novato and Petaluma in northern California. Thousands of people drive by it every day. They only see an exit where dump trucks run because it’s behind a hidden bluff. I had never been there before doing a job in Novato for one of my favorite clients who I’ll write about in another story. But I was shocked and plunged into despair to see that there are tractors moving throughout the day running over and over everything: furniture, metal, plastic, cans, bottles, wood, insulation, clothing and food waste. They are mashing tons of human-created waste into a marshland. There were seagulls diving around the tractors trying to eat the food waste. There was a lone shack where the head man stood and by that shack was a pole with a chained peregrine falcon he would occasionally set free to chase away the seagulls. The whole set up was something out of a dystopian reality. This porridge of poison seeping down into the marshlands and into the bay water right smack in the middle of nature. It was a scene that left me speechless. I didn’t think this was allowed in California still. I’m sure it’s how most of America deals with their garbage.

Further down south in San Rafael though, it’s innovation. The Marin Sanitary dump in San Rafael is the pinnacle of trash disposal in the country. It’s a “recycling center” straight out of Rube Goldberg.

Upon entry there is a hazardous waste disposal run by men who are covered head to toe in hazmat attire, covered with masks. Then inside, the facility is broken down into sections with landscaping waste on one end, everything in the middle and recycling on the other end. And upon the huge conveyer belts are men who separate as much trash as they can so that everything winds up sold and delivered to distribution centers elsewhere.

Paper shredding is in another building entirely. There are pens of hogs nearby who eat the compost and there are peacocks running around the grounds squawking.
It’s a tiny village in the middle of Marin. And they are slammed because of the endless construction and consumerism of the elite.

Something I’ve noticed about the elite is that they refused to recycle. And their housekeepers could give two flying fucks about recycling because they come from countries where there is no recycling. In their minds, no one else is doing it so why should they? And the elite are so busy and self-consumed that trash is trash!

They order delivery, it comes to the house, they consume and then they just box it up and dump. They don’t see the difference between the paper, plastic and food. After they’ve gotten what they wanted, it’s all just unwanted matter.

“It’s a set designer’s dream.” is my oft most spoken phrase of late. I somehow find my way to the weird and unappreciated-in-the-moment.

So this wonderfully thoughtful 1 bedroom cottage perched on the side of a soft slope corner living room window and bedroom overlooking the San Francisco bay facing South was full of rat crap and mental illness. The guy went crazy and he had no family. I was called by the bank overseeing his financial responsibilities and it was time to put him up with someone who could care for him. I don’t recall how they finally decided now was the time but they needed someone to look for coins and paperwork.

The woman from the bank was a friend of my parents from high school. I don’t know how she knew to call me. I hadn’t seen her in ages…or maybe I ran into her somewhere? My memory is better with place than time.

I found that out when I took the Johnson O’Connor test in 2009. I had a really high score on the spatial part of the exam. I “understand” space in a way other people don’t. Like I can parallel park a car leaving 2 inches on either end without hitting the other cars. But I have low graphoria meaning I’m slow when alphabetizing. So I leave the office organizing to my assistant, Claire.

How to start? Garbage and gloves. And in this instance, coveralls and respirators. Rat shit is no bullshit. It was hot and awful and eventually, after two days, I gave up the respirator. We cherry picked what we thought was salable and brought it outside near the shed to compete with the crap that was buried beneath the foliage in the garden….really a yard at this point.

The entry was stacked with VHS tapes and games, hats, books, toilet paper, post cards, unopened gifts in bags, and paper that has been chewed into little scraps by rodents. There were bookshelves made from wood and cinder blocks. But also a great small arched wicker bookcase and a fantastic landscape painting.

I remember that when I walked in I aimed to stay in the center of the rooms and not touch anything because it was dirty. It really was a sight.

But our goal was to clear it and try to salvage anything salable for the old guy. We categorized things outside in the carport; tools, framed art, vintage vases, books, a great old panting easel (which I debated on taking), clocks, chairs, jewelry.

As it turns out, a couple lived in the house originally and after the husband passed away, the wife lived there by herself. They had done a lot of traveling collecting crafts from different countries and maps. She was apparently a great cook because her cookbook collection was filled with gems beyond “The Joy of Cooking.” I have “The Eight Immortal Flavors” from Kan’s which is this gorgeous vintage cookbook from San Francisco’s Chinatown published in 1963. The watercolor cover caught my eye.

Jeanne Cronin eventually needed help and her neighbor was available to drive her to the grocery store and take her to a doctor’s appointment and probably eventually helped her find her glasses, give her her meds and maybe do some laundry. So she gave him the house after she was gone apparently having no heirs.

So what was actually happening was that there was a lot of garbage on top. And the good stuff was there, you just had to dig a bit. It was incredible. One of the best yard sales with real treasure hunters picking up the good stuff. It was a time capsule.

I also snagged a great old, maybe 1940’s(?), postal scale and the vintage China cap. The scale is perfectly worn and still works because it was made when things were made to last. And the China cap was in our fantastic California climate and is in perfect condition. You can see it in the 5th picture on the left.

The job was uneventful. The bank never came by after our initial meeting. I had a yard sale because it was a yard-salers dream. I gave the money to the bank, they wrote me a check for the hours and we had a simple transaction on the up and up. And I hope that the neighbor’s money lasted longer than his years.

Claire did call me into the kitchen to show me a petrified rat that had been in a pan in the oven. And I scheduled the yard sale for 8 and got there at 7 and some guy had already built a pile for himself and then worked me over paying me barely anything. But he was a pro and he made some good money for what he paid. So we all have to make our living.

Time Forgot