And as horrible as it sounds, this won’t change in the near future, if ever.

Let me tell you a story about a frog and a scorpion.

One day a scorpion and a frog wanted to cross a river. The scorpion asked the frog: “Please take me on your back while you swim across the river”. The frog replied, “I’m afraid you’ll sting me”. The scorpion then said, “If I sting you, then we’ll both drown.” So, the frog let the scorpion climb on his back and started swimming across the river. In the middle, the scorpion stings the frog and they both start to drown. The surprised frog asked “How could you? You are going to drown too.” The scorpion said with his final words “I can’t help it, it’s in my nature”.

It may seem far fetched to compare frogs and scorpions to humans but on a high-level view, humans are very predictable. We all have similar desires, pain points and responses to events. This makes all of us easily manipulatable. Some believe that they can see through the manipulation, the fake news, the propaganda but the truth is that at one level or another, everyone is manipulated.

So why does this happen?

Society thrives when we specialise. One person becoming an expert at a task is much more efficient than 10 people being okaish at it. Similarly, competition and desire for power makes people more productive. This is why communism, a great idea in theory, doesn’t work well with humans. Once we remove personal gain, people either become unproductive, or find ways to cheat and effectively break the system.

What even is society?

If most people are curious about life, about exploration and discovery, society is an 8 billion mixture of curiosity. Society’s aim can then be summarised to please our collective curiosity through advancement. To do that efficiently, it needs to focus on making people specialise in the required fields as quickly as possible.

How does it do it? Through very narrow education system and a carrot on a stick rat race. The education system fills in the demand for specialised labour and the rat race keeps us productive and focused.

Of course, life is much more complex than that which can derail progress, think wars and diseases. But even they can have their function – if there is anything that can drive productivity even more than a rat race, it is wars. Wars unites people within countries, removes safety regulations when developing new technology and removes all distractions.

Instead of taking all of this information pessimistically, especially since most of us know this already deep inside, accepting it can be very freeing. Most people in the world spend their whole lives shouting that life is not fair, that society is punishing them, but the truth is that everybody learns those lessons very quickly. Many just lose the will to escape the grasp of society.

If we all know that society works against our personal interests, why do we allow it to happen? Because it is a balance. Without society, then chaos roams free and we go back to being animalistic barbarians. With society, we have the capability to get what we want, so long as we don’t get locked in the rat race. That means that if you stay within the norms of society, you are just feeding off those that escape.

This phenomena is seen across many different topics. People within society are bombarded with marketing that makes you buy things that you don’t need so that you don’t progress too much financially. If you become financially independent, you stop working and that’s no good for society.

Those that escape the rat race, they buy assets, they become financially independent, they take advantage of legal tax loopholes, they become landlords and they benefit off society.

Before you criticise these people, remember that everyone in their position would do the same. Going back to the early point in my article – all humans are very similar, no matter how different you may feel. It is the possibility of reaching that state of independency that makes the carrot in the stick rat race work.

This is why life will always be unfair. Society only functions when life is unfair. However, life can be fairer. The way to do that is to teach people the skills that make them financially literate and to have the emotional control over impulse buying things that people don’t need. In this way, the competition for financial independence becomes tougher and we can have more people reaping the benefits of society rather than just a tiny fraction.

But do you know why this won’t happen anytime soon?

Human nature. The skills that need to be learned and the actions that a person needs to take to escape the rat race are simple and available for less than $100 in books. But most people know exactly what they need to do and are still unable to do so.

Society doesn’t hide the ‘how to’ escape from it. It just makes it easier for people to stay in. Think Netflix, cheap entertainment and all the other easily accessible goodies that drain our dopamine and serotonin supplies.

Next time you delay acting. Think about that. The more you delay, the more people use you. It really is a use or be used cliché situation. And if you are a genuinely good person, emphatic and capable of improving people’s lives? Then you definitely need to escape the rat race. It is those that do that dictate its direction and we currently have too many that are just plain bonkers, if not outright psychopaths.