Most of my life, my cognition has been infected by idealism. It’s a dangerous tendency from which a lot of power hungry dictators have convinced themselves to do pretty atrocious things. When I looked at the world around me, I didn’t see what it was, nor what it could be, but rather what it should be.

The idea of going through four years of college and finding a 9 – 5 job probably selling or advertising products that no one really needed anyway seemed like a laughable waste of a life … especially considering that crazy race I had to win as a wee sperm. Much better, my thinking went, to travel the world, find out what works best, what the secret forumalas (formulae?) are and get the real work going.

It sure didn’t take me long to realize that the world and the people living on it aren’t exactly in tip top shape. These statements I’m about to write have lost their meaning – the realities they represent – because people chant them like bunnies humping, but: the division between extreme wealth and extreme poverty is astonishing. We are doing away with gigantic chunks of pristine nature which will finally be largely documented for everyone by Google Maps. Malnutrition is a constant fact of life in much of Africa (like right now in Niger) which is consistently ignored by a global class that has managed to create a $100 a bottle culture around fermented grape juice.

In other words, based on what I was seeing (50+ countries by 22) and reading, we weren’t exactly on the fast track to my ideals, which of course, should have been everyone’s ideals right?

Now, I was no dummy. I knew then, just as I know now, that market forces alone do not encourage economic equality. In fact, they often are responsible for exaggerating the difference in wealth and lifestyle between the owning class and the working class. (trust me, I’m trying to stay away from socialist buzzwords) What seemed like the obvious answer to me was democratic government regulation so that economic motivations which lead to greater productivity would be balanced by humanistic ideals which lead to greater social harmony.

I saw this balance working well in many Western European countries like the Netherlands, France and Switzerland (someone buy me a ticket to the Scandinavia!!). I read a great book by George Soros explaining the need to maintain the balance without falling too far on either side. And I had witnessed many Neoliberal governments focus on market forces hoping that greater productivity alone would lead to greater prosperity. And everyone knows that wealthy people = happy people right?

But what I still hadn’t seen was a country whose focus, whose priority, was idealistic humanism. Not in making a society properous with material goods and services, but in making individuals and their society better. In 2003, long after the fall of the USSR and Eastern Bloc, the obvious place to go was a Caribbean island called Cuba.

I know the length of this series is really getting out of hand and it’s probably pretty dry for most of you, but anyway, next post I’ll be doing some gentlemanly trash talking on how Peter and his lovely wife Emily’s depiction of Cuba differed from what I experienced. So I highly recommend reading their entire section on their recent trip there. I also highly recommend this man’s impassioned visit to Cuba to get to the bottom of the Socialist hamburger (I ate many of these).

I hope Peter and Emily are doing well … wishing them all the best on their travels.