Do not worship brands. Especially fashion or electronic brands. Even if your favorite sportsperson or movie star pretends to like them. Wherever there is a brand with enough persuasive power to charge more for their goods than they're worth, there are thousands of people somewhere in Asia being exploited, ground into the ground, and arse-fucked from here to breakfast.
Do not worship the authority of the police. They exist to protect the politically connected elite classes from everyone else. They are the violent wing of the regime under which you are suffering.
Do not read horoscopes, even if you already know they are bollocks. Do not deliberately expose yourself to nonsense.
Do not believe in the fantasy of dinosaurs. Think about the types of dinosaurs you know and realize how neatly they conform to well-trodden character archetypes in storytelling traditions. The idea that millions of years ago, giant reptiles of different shapes and sizes roamed the earth and one day all decided to go to Saudi Arabia to gaggle together - bizarrely coinciding with the same day a huge asteroid hit the earth so powerfully that it whipped up so much dust that the sun's rays were blocked out so severely that Earth fell into an ice age and everything on it - except crocodiles - froze to death, and that no cosmic event of a remotely similar severity has occurred either before or since then, is pure fantasy. But you should still buy your kids little plastic replica dinosaurs, because fantasy is good for the imagination and imagination is good for our brains.
Do not worship your religious leaders if they preach messages of hate, exclusion and intolerance. Learn to identify those people and ignore them. Fear God. Just make it your God, not someone else's.
Do not read newspapers or watch the news on TV and think you are being told the news. Newspapers and TV news broadcasts work for advertisers. Their job is to sell audiences to them. Read this again. The newspaper's client is the advertiser. You, the reader, are the product the newspaper manufactures.
Do not take your career seriously. Nobody else does. Careers are conceptions of the industrial age designed to motivate people to get out of bed and do better than their peers. If you need to feel like you have a career to feel important, seek counseling. You have a self-confidence problem.
You are not in the 1% and you never will be. Unless your parents are. In which case you are in the 1% and always will be.
Do not confuse corporatism and crony capitalism with capitalism. The free market economy exists in an idealized form only. The economies we live in are corporatist economies, designed to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many. The 2008 financial market collapse was a failure of corporatism, not capitalism. Only a handful of real free markets exist. The stock market is one of them and because we humans are so prone to corruption and cheating they are the most heavily regulated markets there are. Regulation does not mean communism.
In the absence of social mobility, socioeconomic inequality is morally objectionable, aesthetically displeasing, of no economic virtue, and little more than an institutionalised caste system. Inequality is necessary but insufficient to provide economic motivation in society. It must be matched with mobility. Severe levels of socioeconomic inequality - in the absence or presence of mobility - are economically unsustainable and socially and politically destabilizing.
Do not confuse elections and ballot boxes with democracy. There are plenty of states that have been pretending to be democracies for decades without any evidence of actual democratic forces being at play.
Do not allow yourself to be advertised at. Understand that you are being advertised at a lot.
Do not allow labels to confuse you. Do not think that something is what it is called just because it is called that. Free Trade Agreements are agreements for anything but free trade. But they're still called Free Trade Agreements, because that's what the spin doctors decided to call them. There is no such thing as a partial birth abortion. They are called that because that's what the spin doctors decided to call them. Telephone companies in Australia are allowed to call a minimum spend a 'cap', which would suggest the opposite of what it actually is if normal English-language usage is any guide. Do not allow labels to confuse you.
Do not argue with ignorant people, bigots, rednecks, or people who say they vote republican because they 'don't like big government'. It will only frustrate you.
Understand that the vast majority of people throughout history and contemporaneously have no experience of good government. Good government is the exception, not the norm. The same is true of democracy. Democracy is not normal. It never has been and it never will be.
Do not kill endangered species. Do not buy or sell products derived of endangered species. Not for fun, not for food nor clothing, not for profit, not for status. If you do, you are either an extremely poor person struggling to feed a family or a cunt. Do not be cruel to any animal. Cruelty to animals is a sign of a mental illness. If you find yourself being cruel to an animal, you are sick and need to consult a doctor.
Do not bully. Bullying betrays feelings of inferiority. Do not tolerate bullying around you.
Do not do anything because its cool according to anyone else. Do it because its cool according to you.
Find yourself impressed and inspired by those who seek to give at their own expense and by those who give and ask nothing in return, not by those who take.
Do not wish your parents were billionaires. Life is not fun for billionaires.
Do not eat packaged food thinking you are eating food. Food comes from a farm. Plastic comes from a factory. If it comes from a factory, its not food.
Use correct grammar when you post a status update on facebook. A sentence needs a subject. If you don't know what that means, stop posting status updates on facebook. If you value your privacy, don't use facebook.
Do not think you are important or indispensable. You are neither. You are an organism that will eventually cease living. You are significant in a handful of peoples' lives.
Do not be afraid of burning bridges by standing up for yourself. Stand up for yourself and for those you love.
Do not fear cease and desist letters. Nobody is going to sue you unless you made yourself stinking rich doing whatever it is you are being asked to cease and desist doing.
Do not knowingly ingest anything that will make you hallucinate more than once. Snort cocaine, but not too often. Do not take crystal meth. That stuff will fuck you up.
Do not expose yourself to television series that manufacture insincere situations wherein people are placed in positions out of which adversarialism or competitiveness are the only roads to success. They bring out the worst in people and it is not healthy to watch the worst being brought out in people.
Understand that art communicates to people at the emotional level. Not the intellectual level. Not the sexual level. Not the physical level. The emotional level. If you find yourself watching, reading, looking at, or listening to something that doesn't do that, its not art. Art communicates to people through their guts, not their brains.
Have pets. Learning how to care for and communicate with a different species is good for the human soul.
Do everything you can to use deodorant that does not have aluminum in it. I'll give you a hint; it will be a women's scented one and it will be roll-on.
Trade unions are created and paid to promote the interests of their members. Just like lobbyists, just like employer associations, just like agents, just like sports clubs, just like public relations companies, just like political parties. Striking is one of the tools in a trade union's kit box. It is a legitimate, courageous and important tactic and one which has brought enormous benefits to modern humankind. Any government that makes any trade union activity illegal - particularly the right to strike - and that uses violence to prevent it is taking society backwards.
A person who ties themselves to a tree to protect it is not a loose canon. You'll miss them when you can no longer breathe. Buy furniture made from reused and recycled wood.
Speech that purports to limit the rights of other groups in society should not be protected under freedom of speech laws.
Every day, do one thing that makes you feel awkward, one thing that teaches you something you previously didn't know, one thing for pleasure, one thing for the future, and one thing for the past.
Only wear pants that make you feel happy.
Don't believe the hype. Its only hype.
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