Archives for category: collective identity

“I have my values and I stand by them!”

September 13, 2016 //

That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

What would we be without ‘our values’?
How could we judge things/people and evaluate situations without being guided by them?

But what if the ‘objects of our judgement’ do not belong to the same value system as we do?

What then?

I’m writing this immediately after reading a FB post. A female teacher, who ‘tries to be vegan’, has rather abruptly informed one of her female students “I don’t eat animals”, right after she had finished boasting about hunting a deer with her father. The student’s face ‘fell of’ and the teacher was wondering whether the Principal will chastise her.

So.
Is ‘not eating animals’ a value?
What is a value, after all? And do we go on affirming our values on every occasion?

By Google-ing ‘value’ one gets “principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement of what is important in life.”they internalize their parents’ rules and values””
It seems that a value is something extremely personal, ‘one’s judgement of what is important in life’, but also something that is learned from somebody else, “they internalize their parents’ rules and values”…

In this situation it would it be safe to say that a value is something which is simultaneously considered important by both a group and the individual members of that group?

Doesn’t make much sense? Except from an ‘arithmetical’ point of view?

Well… Let me give you an example.
Europe used to be a Christian continent.
Not anymore. A considerable number of Europeans no longer belong to any church and a lot of them do not consider anymore that God is their Maker.
But, on the whole, most Europeans still consider Christianity to be a ‘value’. Because they understand the role played by Christianity in the development of humankind, because there still are a lot of people who share this faith… the really important thing here being that very few Europeans would purposefully deface a Christian symbol, even when/if nobody would ever find out who did it. And this is valid even for the majority of the hard-core atheists.
At the same time, very few Europeans would – even among the believers – dream of imposing their creed, by force, on other people.

So what is the real value here? ‘Faith in God’ or ‘Live and let live’?

Actually I’m convinced that there is a direct connection between these two.

The Old Testament teaches us that ‘God made Man in his own image.’
It is very simple to make another step forward and understand that those who had written this believed that all men (or at least all those who shared their values) were equals among them (simply because they had been cast in the same ‘mould’) and, at the same time, that each of them shared at least a spark of divinity (the mould having a divine origin).
Europeans shared this value for two millennia.
No wonder that at some point it had morphed into what we now call ‘the human rights’ – a very similar concept/value, which produces the same social consequences: ‘Live and let live’.

Then how come some of the Christians felt very comfortable when using the sword as an argument to convert ‘the pagans’ to the only ‘true religion’?

Well… an alternative definition for ‘value’ could be ‘a certain conviction, reached out rather as a consequence of a specific set of circumstances than as a rationally deliberated conclusion, and shared by the members of the group living under those circumstances’.
According to this hypothetical definition the functional role of a value would be to ‘make it easier’ for each of those people. The ‘shared’ value would constitute a communication medium among the members of the community and a standard/guide for each of the individuals.

The problem with all this, as proven all along the human history, being that from time to time people act as if ‘values’ are ‘castles to be defended’. Or even ‘banners which have to be implanted on conquered soil’. Remember the Christians who used the sword to baptize pagans? Or the pyre to cleanse the souls of the sinful witches and those of the wicked heretics?

What happened in those moments with ‘Live and let live’? What drove those people to forget that ‘the others’ were also made ‘in His image’?

Or, in our days, how come there are so many people who consider that it’s OK to practically insult others while professing their own ‘values’. Which are not so widely shared as they would like them to be.

The strangest thing of all being that this very insistence, which sometimes becomes bullying, constitutes one of the reasons for which some of those values have such a hard time being accepted by ‘the others’.

Tags values

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, Rule of Law

The phones of our wrath

September 8, 2016 //

Quite a lot of things are currently going on on our Earth.
Many of them have a planetary importance and some of them make it into the news bulletins.
The manner in which they are selected by the editors speaks volumes about our, collective, mind set.

So let’s see what BBC, one of the most important news outlets, deemed as being important enough to make the cut this early morning – September 8, 2016.

US elections, Technology, A peek into how the Chinese Government manages its country, A little ‘human touch’ – an Australian family caving in to mental illness, A short but heated discussion about ‘ugly buildings’…

An so on…

The Middle East Crises is buried somewhere in “More World News” but still only two clicks away from the main page while if you want to find out more about the “Worst SE Asia Haze for 20 Years” you have to specifically search for it despite BBC itself wondering, only three short days ago: “Could air pollution cause brain damage?”

OK, but what about those ‘damned phones’?

So don’t you find it rather strange that ‘Apple’s new IPhone ditches headphone socket‘ makes it to the ‘first page’?

Tags Apple, Headphone socket, IPhone, Panama Papers, Polution Brain Damage, Syrian Crises, Worst SE Asia Haze

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, yes but

Maslow, an Actualization…

August 24, 2016 //

Abraham Maslow, the initiator of ‘humanistic psychology’, has been described as being “concerned with questions such as, “Why don’t more people self-actualize if their basic needs are met?” and basically why don’t people try to reach their full potential.”

“To over simplify the matter somewhat it is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half. Perhaps this health psychology will give us more possibility for controlling and improving our lives and for making ourselves better people. Perhaps this will be more fruitful than asking “how to get unsick”. (A. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being,)

In a sense Maslow follows in the footsteps of J.J. Rousseau.

“Although, in this state [civil society], he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man” (J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract)

In more than one sense.

Both consider that society presents its members with almost endless opportunities for self em-betterment, both wonder how come so few make good use of those opportunities and both have been accused of things they have never done.

Rousseau has been falsely accused of being the father of the ‘Noble Sauvage’ – and the quote above proves his complete innocence, ‘stupid and unimaginative animals’ can be mistaken for ‘noble savages’ only by those ‘abused’ by their ‘new condition’ – while Maslow’s detractors – who have failed to scientifically validate all aspects of ‘the hierarchy of needs’ – are questioning the scientific nature of Maslow’s ideas instead of reconsidering their own positions. (The truth being that Maslow had stated upfront that “I yield to the temptation to present it (his notion of a ‘Psychology of Health’, which includes the concept of ‘self-actualization’) publicly even before it is checked and confirmed, and before it can be called reliable scientific knowledge“)

Unfortunately it is rather obvious that while Maslow has successfully detailed what it takes for an individual to ‘ripen’ into the situation of being able to ‘reconsider its own self’, he failed to reach as far as Rousseau was able to. While the latter deplored the fact that ‘the abuses of his new condition often degrade him below that which he left’ the first blindly entertained the notion that self-actualization is necessarily a positive process.

I’ll use only two examples to illustrate my theory, even if by doing so I’m presenting myself as a target for the ‘science-nazi’.
First take a glance at those who founded/were involved in running LTCM. All of them had very respectable careers behind them at that moment. Why did they feel the need to get involved in such a risky business? For those of you unfamiliar with the financial world LTCM was a hedge fund which had to be bailed out in 1998 after losing $4.6 billion, a huge amount of money for those times.
Then tell me what drove Bernard Madoff, an already very successful ‘operator’ in the financial market to transform the wealth management branch of his company into a huge Ponzi scheme that eventually lost some $18 billion of actual money ($65 billion if the fabricated gains are added to the total)? Not to mention the fact that he involved his family into the daily operation of his company, leading to his brother being sentenced to 10 years in prison and one of his sons committing suicide… – the other one died of lymphoma a few years after Madoff had been incarcerated.

Could it be that this ‘self-actualization’ business depends on two things, the character of the individual involved and the kind of interaction that exists between him and the community of which he is a member? Meaning that if the ties are weak the character of the individual becomes the dominant factor?

And since nobody’s perfect…

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” (Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear)

But also

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

I’ll end up saying that it’s not the governments that have a ‘recurring problem’ but the peoples themselves. By definition governments come and go, it’s the peoples that stay behind and must suffer the consequences of ‘self-actualizations’ went wrong.

Tags Bernie Madoff, J.J. Rousseau, LTCM, Maslow, Maslow's Pyramid, Noble Savage, Ponzi scheme, Psychology of Health, self actualization, Social contract, the Hierarchy of Needs

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, politics, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

Police state

August 22, 2016 //

Recent riots in the US and the need to respond in force to the ever growing number of terrorist acts happening in the Western Europe has prompted some to worry about the specter of a potential ‘police state’ that might be lurking somewhere in the future.

Those who have first-handedly witnessed what it means to live in a real police state have a dissenting view on this subject:

“I live in a bona fide, real world, living, breathing police state: the People’s Republic of China. I live, in short, in the real thing, not in the cartoonish caricature of a police state that people have in mind when they hear the term. . . . The role of the police in a police state isn’t to control citizens’ lives. That’s a myth that’s almost laughable. . . . The role of the police in a police state is to protect the power structure from change. That is it in its entirety. Anything which doesn’t endanger the powers that be is unimportant to the police. Anything which does endanger the powers that be is brutally suppressed. . . . I have more direct, personal freedoms here in China than I ever had in Canada. So do most Chinese people. The only freedom they (we) lack is the freedom to criticize the government in public. . . . A competent, stable, secure police state doesn’t need brutality to keep itself in power. It’s insecure states (of any kind!) that find the need to brutalize their citizens to ensure compliance.” Michael Richter courageously posting on his FB wall.

Having myself lived for 30 years in a real police state – one that was insecure enough to terrorize its citizens – I can vouch for what Michael Richter tells us.

On the other hand police, in every society, acts like an ‘immune system’. Its job is to maintain the status quo. Basically it tries to maintain the entire ‘organism’ in ‘working order’. And here come the differences.
If that society is a normal one the police tries to maintain an ‘unbiased’ order.
If the society itself is biased the police will favor one side of the society.
Those who are favored by the police will consider this to be ‘normal’. Those who feel the brunt of the police action will reach the conclusion that they live in a ‘police state’.

Evolutionary theory teaches us that living things are able to maintain, for quite long time, a certain level of in-balance. For instance, warm blooded animals are, for most of their lives, either hotter or colder than their environment. And yet they manage to survive.

If the balance is not tilted too much, in either direction.

Same thing with the ‘police state’.

Basically all societies are biased. And all police forces in the world have to guard an in-balance or other.

As I mentioned before, as long as that in-balance is manageable – and the population at large is OK with it – the police can do its job without stepping over too many toes.

But if the in-balance that the police has to maintain becomes unmanageable, more and more people will consider they live in a police state and, at a certain point, something will break. The people’s acceptance of the police, the police-men’s willingness to impose that in-balance over their fellow citizens or even both at the same time.

This is so obvious that even the Ancient Romans issued a stern warning on the subject.

In reality ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum’ doesn’t mean “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” but ‘Let justice be just, otherwise the heaven will fall upon your (collective) head’.

Tags Fiat justitia ruat caelum, Police state

Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

Who’s in control?

August 5, 2016 //

While discussing with a FB friend the last video posted by Price Ea – you can watch it by clicking on the picture above – something hit me.

We were exchanging ideas about how much control each of us has over his own life when I realized that our very insistence on using precisely this term is what causes a lot of trouble.

The notion of control divides the world in two.
The controller and the controlled.

And since we are social animals, things become very quickly very complicated.

Being ‘animals’ means we that we have ‘animalic’ needs. Air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter from the elements… The first floors of Maslow’s pyramid, as you surely remember.
Being ‘social animals’ means that we not only depend on having access to enough physical space and resources but also on the cooperation of the people who happen to be in our vicinity.

The control hypothesis ‘leads’ us into a competition for both space and authority above those around us.
Our world becomes divided into what ever space we already control and the rest. Meaning the (yet) uncontrolled areas from where it is very possible that a challenger might spring up anytime so that the controller must somehow extent his control over those areas as well, as soon as possible.
Our neighbors become divided into our ‘slaves’ and our direct competitors. Who have to be, sooner or later, subdued into slaves – lest they do the same thing unto us.

In conclusion, the ‘control hypothesis’ sees the world as a constantly busy battlefield where each of the dwellers is in constant conflict with everybody else.

Luckily, even the most perfunctory glance down the history teaches us that human success is more about cooperation than about conflict.

Only the conspiracy theorists believe that most wars are started by business people trying to sell their wares to the warring parties. The reasonable business people know that while a certain amount of tension is good for their business – tension sells guns, among other things – an actual war exhausts both parties and destroys solvent demand.
While it is possible that some callous business people or political actors might try to foment war, for various reasons, that doesn’t mean they are behaving reasonably.

Which brings us to the alternate hypothesis.

How about we replace the concept of ‘control’ with the idea of ‘autonomy’?

How about we give up the ‘tiresome’ notion of control and replace it with the peaceful concept of cooperation?

Since we have already figured out that we depend on both those around us and on whatever resources we can identify, how about we enroll the cooperation of as many of the like minded that surround us as possible and search together for those resources?
Instead of each of us simultaneously trying to run faster than everybody else and to hold back as many as possible – the true meaning of generalized conflict?

Which brings me to the notion of ‘autonomy’.
Being autonomous means being engaged in a special kind of relationship. It means being part of a flexible structure. One that is strong enough to resist but flexible enough to allow a variable amount of leeway for each of its components.
The very concept of autonomy recognizes the mutual dependency that exists between the autonomous members of the said structure and also the fact that the very strength of the structure comes from each of the members being able to solve problems on his own.

Autonomously, that is.
Drawing resources from the structure, sometimes enrolling the negotiated cooperation of some other members but, on the whole, most of the problems get to be resolved ‘under the radar’. To the great benefit of the entire structure.
The vast majority of the structure not even noticing the huge numbers of situations that get solved this way.

Compare this situation to the one described in the first scenario, the one where everybody fights, openly or covertly, with every body else and tell me what you prefer.

“Control” or “Autonomy”?

An all out incessant war for ultimate control or a continuous process of negotiation?

Tags autonomy, control, Maslow's Pyramid, monopoly, Price Ea, Row the boat

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mindset, Money as goal, Mutual Respect

The Past. Resource, ballast or both at the same time?

August 2, 2016 //

Funny, isn’t it?

Or yet another reminder that constantly cracking jokes about everything and everybody is not exactly the best thing to do… Let’s compare the relative importance of the British Empire during Shaw’s coming of age – the period when he developed his habit of cracking jokes about everything, no matter how serious the subject, with the fact that Scotland is seriously planning a second independence referendum.

Or let me remind you of another Brit who enjoys cracking annoying jokes:

Not funny anymore?

OK, let me try another tack.

What if

Could it be that the problem resides with us?

That this is basically a matter of what we do with whatever (history) has been passed to us by our forefathers? That what has been passed to us does have its own importance but that we can’t do very much about it?
History can only be rewritten but never changed…
We, on the other hand, can and should learn to deal with the dynamics of this world.

How come ‘those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it’?

Could it be that some of the ‘students of history’ are doing something wrong?
Misunderstand the very lessons they try to impose on the others?

Cracking annoying jokes about the matters at hand instead of honestly helping others to reach intellectual autonomy and then respectfully allowing them to develop their own interpretations of things?

Tags Collapsing empires, Goerge Bernard Show, history, Mistakes, Nigel Farage

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, democracy, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

The Lesser Evil

August 1, 2016 //

I hear a lot of people discussing about the need to choose ‘the lesser evil’.

Otherwise the ‘greater evil will prevail’ they warn us.

I’m afraid that those who fall into this trap actually validate the idea that ‘evil is acceptable’.

Every time this subject comes up I keep remembering the joke about an older man asking a young lady:

‘Would you sleep with me if I gave you a million bucks?’.

‘Well, I’m not that kind of girl… but you know, that’s an awful lot of money… I could help my old parents… I could go back to school… OK…”

‘But what if I gave you $100?’

‘I told you I’m not a hooker!’

‘That’s already been settled. All that’s left for us to do now is to negotiate the price.’

Same thing with ‘choosing the lesser evil’. Once you’ve accepted that evil is inevitable … you’re sure to get some. And keep getting it until you quit playing their game.

That doesn’t mean we schould quit voting all together. It would send the wrong message. Even if you don’t go to the voting booth because you are disgusted by the available options the ‘analysts’ interpret your stance as ‘they’re so despondent that they don’t care anymore about their own fate. They they don’t have enough energy left in them to protest so no need to change anything. Or, maybe, things might be allowed to become even a little worse. For them, of course.’

What we need to do is vote what we really like, even if that candidate doesn’t stand the slightest chance. This way the intention of the voter is absolutely clear – ‘I want exactly this’.
If there is no acceptable option, we can always check the ‘non of the above’ box – if available – or take the necessary steps to annul your vote – the specifics depend on local rules and regulations. Again, this sends a rather clear message. ‘I refuse to play into your hands and accept that evil is inevitable’.

Tags the lesser evil

Categories Bancuri, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, The world as described in jokes, Trust

Future

July 29, 2016 //

I’ve spent the first 30 years of my life under communist rule.

One of their many ‘mantras’ was: ‘Children are the future of mankind’.

Communist rule had brought about so much happiness in Romania that people had stopped making children.
Concerned about the future the communists had decreed that from then on abortion was to be considered a crime – after it was freely available until that time, October 1, 1966.
As a consequence more than 10 000 women died after botched abortion attempts – all other methods for birth control had been banned also.
Add to those deaths the individuals, mostly youngsters, killed while attempting to flee communism by sneaking across the borders.

But there was one good thing that communist rule had brought to the people. Not that much because the communists really cared about the fate of the individuals but because they needed skilled laborers in order to put their plans into practice.

Schooling was free.
You could learn as much as you wanted without having to pay a dime.
One had to pass some exams, positions were limited for higher education, but if you were smart enough and diligent enough you could go really high. Specially in the area that is currently known as ‘STEM’. ‘Humanities’ were somewhat off limits, because one could get ‘funny’ ideas when delving too deep in that area but STEM was OK.

Fast forward to our days.

Half of my University mates – I have a MSc in Mechanical Engineering – have emigrated right after Ceausescu was toppled while political power in Romania has fallen under the constant grip of a small coterie which doesn’t really care about what’s going on and/or has not enough intellectual flexibility to understand that we are currently running towards a dead end.

In the end the ‘good’ thing has proved to be a poisoned apple. By tuning the schooling system towards their own goals the communists had created many generations of superb engineers – who were welcomed by the ‘greedy capitalists’ – but also had completely discouraged independent thinking – the kind needed to breed honest politicians and effective public figures, if you can accept those concepts as anything more than empty words.

Gazing over the borders I became even more despondent.

Forget, for a minute, about child pornography, sweat-shops and so on. These are absolutely horrible but we might console ourselves with the thought that those who are involved in them are either mentally disturbed or blinded by greed.

But something like this?

Supposedly a feminist writer is followed by either like-minded people or opponents of her ideas only both categories belong to the wider category of ‘intellectuals’ – people concerned with ideas, human rights, philosophical thinking, etc., etc….
In this context to threat a mother that you are planning to rape her child is way above anything that was imaginable until this moment.
It’s as if being able of sophisticated thinking is no longer one of the venues towards becoming a better person – by simply being able to understand how much pain is produced by evil or careless behaviour.

Then I came across the meme at the top of my post.

I must confess that I don’t like her. For various reasons that do not fit here. Enough to say that while watching the DNC 2016 I had the distinct impression of being transported back in time to one of the congresses organized by the Romanian Communist Party.
Because of my dislike of her I had the tendency to believe that she had actually wrote that.

So I did that.

“While it’s true that Hillary Clinton published a book in 1996 called It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, it does not include the above-displayed quote, and Clinton (a parent herself) has not said at any point that she believes that children should be raised by the state with parents taking a secondary role.

OK, some of you will tell me that Snopes is leaning towards the left and that you cannot always trust its findings.

I can agree with that. Sometimes you should not believe your own eyes, let alone what you read over the Internet.

But my argument still stands.
What has happened to us?
Why are we so willing to involve even our children in our political lies? It doesn’t matter here who lied – Snopes or those who ‘cooked’ this meme…

What are politics for if not for securing a future for our children?

What kind of future can be build on lies?
On this kind of lies and on this kind of threats…

When are we going to understand that the state which side-lines the parents is a fascist one – fascism and communism are close authoritarian cousins, that no one can survive for long outside a community and that the community, as a whole and each of its members, fare better if all its members have a real chance to develop their potential?

Education and health care should not be treated as ‘individual rights’.
It is obvious to the naked eye that societies who take good care of their members while simultaneously respect their freedom fare better than those who let their members fend for themselves without helping them train for today’s job market and without extending them any safety net.
We keep saying that we need better skilled individuals and do nothing about it. We keep saying that in a free market there are risks that have to be taken yet we step back when a risk taker who happened to have failed, honestly, asks for our help.

OK, I understand. The communists dissuaded their children from studying ‘humanities’. Simply because they might have started to ask the very same questions that I’m asking today.

But what happened to the rest of the world?

Who is thinking about the future, beyond planning for future cash-flows (extremely unreliable in the first place), anyway?

Tags education, future, health-care, politics

Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, Mindset, Mutual Respect, politica, Psychology, Social justice

The ever changing ‘onion’ world.

July 25, 2016 //

The scientists act on the assumption that their efforts to un-peel the ‘onion’ will eventually bear fruit and that ‘the truth’ will eventually be found crouching behind the proverbial ‘last skin’.

The artists keep torturing their souls hoping that theirs will be the one blessed with enough sensitivity to feel the ‘ultimate’ experience and with enough talent to be able to communicate it to the rest of us.

The mystics keep entertaining the proverbially faithful ‘grain of hope’ that their soul will be blessed by their Maker with some ‘insider’ knowledge and with enough stamina to make the revelation known to the rest of the flock.

Meanwhile the rest of us, the ‘regulars’, keep altering the ‘onion’ – otherwise known as ‘The Reality’, sometimes beyond recognition.

Let me elaborate.

As of now it seems that there are a hard core reality – the one feverishly pursued by all those mentioned at the start of my post, a multitude of partial images of what that reality looks to each of us – the ones made up by each of us when trying to make sense of our perceptions about the (hard core) reality, usually without being aware that what we look at is a window dressing composed of the numerous patches pinned by by each of us on the original while acting according to what each if us perceived to be (the image of) the ‘reality’.

And it’s exactly this overgrowth that constantly changes the object of perception at which each each of us stares continuously and tries not only to understand it but alto to adapt to it. Constantly forgetting that our efforts not only adapt us to the (perceived) reality but also alter the reality itself, not only the image we perceive of it.

But hold on. I haven’t mentioned the really interesting part yet.
All of the above constitute the ‘innocent’ side of the whole thing. The natural process that would take place if all of us would act ‘up-front’.

In reality some of us have ‘ulterior’ motives.
Some of us consider that their understanding of the world is not only better than that of everybody else but also that they are entitled to act based on that understanding. Without asking permission from and sometimes even against the wishes of those who will bear the brunt of the consequences brought forth by those actions.

That’s why the ‘patches’ pinned by these callous people fit a lot less to the real reality than those attached by the honest ones among us.

And that’s the catch.
The ‘distance’ between the reality of a fact and our perception/action about it produces a certain ‘energy’. If the distance is small the energy corresponding to it is manageable. People can adjust to it and absorb its consequences.
But sometimes the distance is larger than what can be comfortably absorbed and this leads to the formation of social scars. And if successive ‘distanced’ patches are applied without enough healing time in between, then, eventually, wide ‘gaps’ will have to be dealt with.

And since ‘wide’ produces a lot of ‘energy’ and ‘a lot of energy’ leads to massive upheavals…

Tags Berger Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, freedom, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

Ou sont les philosophes d’antan?

July 23, 2016 //

This ‘lack’ of philosophers can be explained in two ways.

Nobody = among those with enough ‘brain power’ – cares enough any longer about finding the raison d’etre for which we toil on this Earth.

Not enough of the regular people find this subject interesting enough to keep alight the flame of the discussion.

The consequence being that freak ‘intellectual monsters’ have occupied the front stage and drive the ‘unsettled’ among us to utter insanity.

My take on the matter being that we live in a different world that we used to.
One where both the explanations mentioned above hold almost equal sway.

Thinkers do not touch the subject with the same vigor as a couple of centuries ago because knowledge has become vast enough so that very few people dare to look from one (putative) end to the other.
Commoners do not care much about the subject because they have become rather complacent. Day to day life no longer poses the same challenges as it used to, to the tune that most people, including the not so well of, do not feel such an ‘urgency’ about tomorrow as the one felt by our forefathers.

What we have is a total lack of workable ‘world visions’.

Usually in time of crises new ideas were presented to the public, some of them took roots, and the (local) world enjoyed a fresh start.

For instance when the Athenian democracy reached its crises point Plato came up with a whole concept that influenced the thinking of Europe for the next two and a half millennia.
I’m not going to discuss here the ups and downs of his teachings but the very fact that enough people followed them, and that his ideas survived for so long, means that there was something there. In the ‘cooperation’ between the philosopher and his followers.

The last inflection point happened sometimes in the XIX-ht and XX-ht centuries. Darwin, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx (the philosopher and the sociologist, not the political activist), Adam Smith, Durkheim, Max Weber, Einstein, Popper, Kuhn, Maturana…

Now?
Zilch!

Not that people do not think anymore.

Take Nicholas Nassim Taleb for instance. Or Jared Diamonds, Robert Prechter and Neagu Djuvara – to name but four of who shine on my radar!
Yes, each of them had their relative moment of glory but not any near of what each of them really deserved!
Maybe because none of them had actually engaged in an all out effort to redefine human understanding?

Have we become lazy?
This lazy?!?

Tags lone wolf terrorism, Maturana, Plato, Taleb

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, The kind of world we live in, Trust

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