“Cum vei vedea iubirea celuilalt daca de atata lumina orbita vei fi
Cum vei gasi forta sa crezi intr-un maine nepatat daca in fiecare clipa tu nu
Tu n-ai sa ai pentru ce muri?”
History repeats itself. Really?
The passage of time has divided people in two broad categories. Some, noticing that history seems to be repeating itself, became despondent, at least apparently: “We learn from history that we do not learn from history”, while others, confronted with the same thing, reached a rather different conclusion: “Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.”
In fact the two are not that far apart: It is “us” that don’t learn much from history and, similarly, it is people from amongst ourselves that ‘are doomed to repeat the lessons of history, precisely because they failed to make much sense of them in the first place’…
So, is there anything that can be understood from all this?
First of all that ‘no, history doesn’t repeat itself’. It’s us who play it again and again, until enough of us make enough sense of what has happened to be able to push the whole circus a little further down the road. And sometimes even that is not enough, a whole chapter becomes forgotten and we have to play it one more time….
Secondly we should never forget that more things can be learned during a single lesson. So even if something seems to be safely tucked away during the passage of time we should never forget it had taken place. Who knows when it will yield a fresh meaning? But we cannot extract that meaning unless we remain aware that that thing had happened…
So, going back to where we started, people actually learn from experience, only not always the proper things and certainly not all the useful things at once… and that’s why ‘history repeats itself’: we really need to learn the distinction between the useful, the annoying and the truly dangerous!
Current situation:
A man and a woman have sex.
She gets impregnated.
He accepts, or not, ‘the responsibility’ and, sometimes, helps with raising the child.
Isn’t it high time to change our attitude about all this?
How about:
A man and a woman have sex.
She gets impregnated and decides to keep the baby.
She acknowledges, or not, his contribution and allows him to take part in raising the child.
?
I have great respect for Fareed Zakaria, I’ve been following him for at least twenty years.
That doesn’t mean that we always see things the same way…
He recently published “America’s educational failings” in the Washington Post. To me at least it represents a very balanced analysis of what ‘s currently going on. And yet!
“…if we really want to reduce inequality, we need to reform the system,….
And here is where we start to disagree!
Trying to ‘reduce inequality’ implies a lot of arrogance: it means we know where the inequality level should be and that we are confident enough that our actions would beneficial. (To whom?)
How about setting a more modest goal, long term survival?
In fact some inequality is good, it motivates people. Too much inequality, on the other hand, induces social fragility – the country actually falls apart.
The symptom that things have started to go south is ‘mass dependency’ – too many individuals cannot fend for themselves and depend on others, government or private charity, for daily survival. The tax payers, those who have to foot the bill, start to rebel while the recipients grow despondent. This has happened time and time again, from Ancient Rome to modern days communist states.
So yes, education is the only way out but we have to be very careful what we teach to the young generations.
Telling them to hunt for equality is one thing, encouraging them to better themselves by offering them a level playing field with low (or even 0) entrance fee and a lot of opportunities is quite another.
Every morning I drive my wife to work, smack in the center of Bucharest.
The streets are narrow and full of potholes, for a couple of days the weather was lousy, the radio was belching horrible news about what’s going on in Ukraine yet for sometime now I found a strong reason for being optimist.
I realized driving habits have changed in a very subtle but extremelly significant way. People have understood that mutual respect works a lot better than sheer aggression: they honk a lot less, let others merge into traffic, do not ‘herd’ into bottlenecks as they used to…
In fewer words people have learned that considerate cooperation gets you farther than mindless competition.
Now I’m watching closely for signs of this new attitude being displayed in other circumstances.
PS I
For my American and Western European readers this must sound like hogwash, being used with the courteous driving practiced in their respective countries. They should take into consideration that this development has come about spontaneously, the police or any other agency having (almost) nothing to do with the process. People simply understood, individually, that in this manner all of us will get sooner to our destination.
PS. II
On second thoughts … In fact decent competition, the kind that takes place according to rules, is just another form of cooperation. Even war waged according to the Hague convention can be seen as a form of cooperation…
PS. III
Please notice how everybody takes care of those around them. Do they really care about the ‘other guy’? I honestly don’t know and I openly admit that I don’t really care. But the fact remains that they act as if they do and the consequence is that traffic never gets bogged down.
I started life as any average child, trying to learn as much as I could from those around me.
For practical reasons I studied mechanical engineering – law or philosophy were dead ends in communist Romania.
After the fall of the ancient regime I started investing in the stock market and became interested in technical analysis. This is how I found out about Daniel Kahneman and the notion of ‘behavioral economics’.
Trying to deepen my understanding about how society works I went back to school, sociology this time. Here I found out about Herbert Simon – bounded rationality – and Catalin Zamfir – what constant uncertainty does to human mind and why ideologies are so powerful. (Unfortunatly Zamfir hasn’t published much, if anything, in English so I have to settle for this as a sketchy replacement)
A couple of months ago I rediscovered Zen. It had grabbed my attention some 35 years ago – I had found some books in a public library, a donation from L’Institute Francais. Sometimes in my spare moments I look up ‘zen’ on the internet and this is what I came across a few moments ago:
Maybe I should have sticked with Zen in the first place…
Nu ne mai vaccinam copiii,
In schimb le lasam mostenire o gramada de datorii,
Iar atunci cand vine vorba de cheltuit banul public nu reusim sa ne intelegem la imparteala…
Cat o sa mai tina chestia asta oare?
First of all freedom is a state of mind and only subsequently may become translated (or not) into social reality.
Whenever an oppressor/oppressed relationship exists neither of them is really free, not even the oppressor: he is permanently bound to take care, of sorts, for the oppressed. Otherwise the oppressed would wither away, either literally or by gaining their liberty.
This doesn’t mean Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t right, it still is the duty of whoever feels oppressed to start fighting for liberty, it just puts the onus on both sides of the relationship.
In fact time and time again human history has produced ample proof that as entire societies became freer their individual members fared better and better.
Wealth and technology can only help but cannot replace (perceived) individual liberty.
A rather heated debate is currently going on between ‘specialists’ about how ‘economic fairness’ is influencing growth:
The problem is that most of these ‘specialists’, usually economists or politicians, while sometimes finding interesting facts, rarely stick their heads out of their narrow fields of expertise high enough to notice that too much economic inequality is counterproductive precisely because it creates a relationship of dependency between the haves and the have nots.
Taking care of your dependents uses precious resources that could be better spent concentrating on further development.
This is exactly what Henry Ford had understood and motivated him to double the wages of his employees. This is the sole explanation for why the American economy took off after WWII. More and more individuals were able to stand on their own two feet because the economic climate was good, business thrived AND the wages were decent – without the government or the unions having much to say about this.
Today business people care almost exclusively about the bottom line and the next quarterly report – thus favoring short term results versus sustainable growth, the governments regulate more and more, arrogantly believing that they know better than the (no longer) free market and the union leaders concentrate on gathering more and more clout instead of taking care of the long term interests of their union members.
This byzantine maze does nothing but creates a highly oppressive medium in which everybody is oppressed by everybody else.
And human society, if it is to work properly, needs free cooperation, not generalized oppression.
Do you remember my bewilderment about how come so many people think it’s OK to use, indiscriminately, every opportunity to increase their personal wealth?
nicichiarasa 