Archives for category: collective identity
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A democratic conundrum.

August 16, 2015 //
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                                                                                                                                                             Rebecca Cook/Reuters

Donald Trump is making big headlines in his bid to conquer the White House.
Covering this subject the Atlantic published a very pertinent question posed by Conor Friedersdorf to Trump’s supporters:
“You’re right to mistrust conventional politicians. But why do you think he’ll treat you any better?”

This is one side of the entire development.
If we dig a little deeper we have to observe that the person who actually occupies the Oval Office – or any other public office, in no matter which democratic country, is important indeed but even more so is the fact that that person has to be voted by a majority in order to accede to that office.

In other words, America has a little over 300 million inhabitants. There must be better contenders out there.
Better than either Trump or Clinton!
What’s keeping the ordinary Americans from recognizing and bringing some of THEM to the fore of the American politics?

PS. Click on this link and read the comments, besides the article. As always, they are are at least as revealing as the article itself, if not more so.

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Categories collective identity, democracy, Frames of mind, politics, Psychology

Theology of rape?!?

August 13, 2015 //
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ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool. Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMAAUG. 13, 2015

This is not as much about a particular religion as it is about the dominant religion of a certain place loosing its ability to fulfill its mission.
By ‘religion’ I understand the set of ties that transforms a certain population into a community, the rest is ritual.
When those ties no longer do what they are meant to do – make the individual feel that he belongs and therefore impart a certain sense of safety – many members of that erstwhile community start to loose their marbles.
Some kill themselves, pretending to be martyrs who die for a sacred cause, some others rape the innocents that happen to cross their paths.
The fact that some ‘religious leaders’ use the teachings of a particular religion to encourage these abominations only proves that the so called leaders are nothing but fraudsters that feed on other peoples’ misery.
More than a hundred years ago Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, had wrote ‘Le Suicide’ and fully explained all this. Maybe what we need is to re-read it. All you have to do is follow the link.
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Categories Choices we make, collective identity, Frames of mind, Social justice

Gang Rape

July 29, 2015 //
2

dolce-gabbana-gang-bang

Some 30 years ago I stumbled upon a book by Desmond Morris.

The Naked Ape.

I read it overnight because next day it had to be returned to its owner. Books published in their original languages were hard to come by in communist Romania…
Little did I know at that time that my interests will slowly shift from Mechanical Engineering to Sociology and then on to decision making… Anyway…
In that book Morris tries to convince us that women have so many periods because in this way they are a lot readier to receive their mates, thus ensuring a tighter bond inside the couple. In turn this is beneficial in an evolutionary sense because a tightly knit couple is better suited for raising the kind of slow growing children that is characteristic for the human species.
In short Morris proposes that monogamy was a step forward in human evolution.
I tend to agree with him and I even have a further argument. Imagine what would happen if a small number of alpha males would ‘corral’ – one way or another – most of the available nubile women, as it’s the case with the chimps or the gorillas. Do you think the rest of the males would be able to cooperate in any way towards the survival of the community they belong to or they’d be constantly obsessing about how to get laid?

Which brings me to my subject.

Emile Durkheim used suicide as a pretext to introduce us to his theory about social solidarity and the social function played by what we consider to be a crime.
Durkheim’s research had led him to see suicide as an individual decision but one which is heavily influenced by the cultural medium to which the decision maker belongs. More over, the same line of thinking produced his conclusion that a society must keep a fine balance between ‘solidarity/intolerance’ and ‘laisez-faire’. One that is too intolerant drastically reduces its own ability to adapt to changes that occur in its ‘environment’ while those that do not care about the fate of their members will eventually auto-dissolve.

What if incidence of rape was to be studied in the same light?

Bill Cosby – a man who, let’s face it, could have had legions of willing women – is accused  to have drugged and raped some 40 women in more than 30 years before anything came to public notice.
Jimmy Savile, a British “larger-than-life character”, used “his celebrity status and fund-raising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades” and to unabashedly rape them.
Rape not only occurs randomly in war time but has also been used as a weapon:
“Sexual violence is also used to destabilize communities and sow terror”.
Meanwhile France – Durkheim’s own Motherland – has become the stage for some 7000 ‘tournantes’ every year. The English term for ‘tournant’ being gang rape.

As Durkheim said more than a hundred years ago suicide is indeed an individual act/decision but it’s incidence is heavily influenced by what happens around that person.
Same thing is valid for rape. A rape appears at the intersection between the history/experience/upbringing of the rapist, the social/cultural milieu in which he lives and his ‘on the spot’ decision.

Sex sells.
“It’s been said that as human beings, we have a lizard or reptilian brain that responds to certain primal urges. Food is one. Sex and reproduction is definitely another. This underlying, pre-programmed disposition to respond to sexual imagery is so strong, it has been used for over 100 years in advertising. And the industry, while abusing it more and more, would be foolish to ignore the draw of sexual and erotic messaging.”

How far are we willing to go in order to make a sale? As far as Dolce and Gabbana went when they published the picture above?

Morris said that our first step towards humanity was to change our very physiology in order to promote (at least an apparent) monogamy. It seems that we are now altering our culture in order to sell more…

Gang Rape taken to the next level… Manipulation went wild…

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Categories Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, evolution, Frames of mind, Money as goal

What’s going on here?

July 19, 2015 //
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“Muslim Marine Murderer’s father sexually assaulted wife and beat son”

A Facebook friend of mine shared this Daily Mail article with the following comment:
“Sad… well educated, accomplished, but lost spiritually… perfect for being radicalized…”

I was haunted by this ever since Mohamed Atta and his gang of terrorists forced us to consider it.

What made them snap?

It couldn’t be their religion.
First of all mainstream Islam, like all other bona fide religions, does not condone senseless murder.
Secondly only a very small minority of the Islamic immigrants become ‘radicalized’.
Thirdly, some of them even turn on their own people.

What if they use religion, Islam in this case, as a pretext for destruction rather than a way to connect with the others? As religion was meant to – reliegare, in Latin, means ‘connecting to’.
What if for them religion is more about ritual than about true spirituality?

I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that what these guys are doing can be interpreted as a form of ‘assisted suicide’. They are pissed off by what has happened to/around them, they blame it on the ‘society’ and they just want out. So they commit suicide and exact vengeance at the same time.

Maybe we need to pay closer attention to what the classics have taught us.

Emile Durkheim, Suicide.:

“Suicide is used by Durkheim as a means of demonstrating the key impact of social factors on our personal lives and even our most intimate motives. The book succeeds brilliantly, both as a technical study of suicide and as a fundamental contribution to this broader issue. Students of sociology will continue to be required to study this book, which will remain on the sociological agenda for many years yet to come.” Anthony Giddens.
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Categories collective identity, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect, religion

Marx, the ‘schizophrenic’ dialectician.

May 17, 2014 //
0

I’ve made an assertion on FB, forgetting to use scarecrows, and I’ve been asked to elaborate:

“Marx was a schizophrenic? You need to provide me with some good evidence before I can countenance that assertion. Similarly with the accusation of intellectual arrogance; Marx was a dialectician–which I understand to mean that conversation was more productive than solitary rumination.”

First about Marx being a dialectician. He was one alright. Only there is a small problem with dialectics. In order to work they need at least two equivalent proponents, one on each side. You cannot have proper dialectics by talking to yourself, eventually you’ll take sides and the whole exercise loses its scope.

At this point I’ll make a short break and let you in on one of my moments of shame.
As a high school student (Romania under communist rule) I had to participate in a compulsory class about ‘dialectical and historical materialism’ – the ‘scientific formula’ used by communists to describe their creed in those times. At one point the teacher asked me “What are the reasons for ‘dialectical’ materialism being ‘better’ than all other forms of materialism?”. “‘Dialectical materialism’ constantly checks its concepts against the reality and adjust them as the reality changes. By doing this its practitioners constantly deepen human knowledge and build an ever improving understanding of the world.” The teacher congratulated me for this answer and I felt very proud at that moment.
But only momentarily. Very soon I started to understand that the theory was fine indeed but that it couldn’t be put into practice.

Precisely because of how Marx had envisioned the communist society:

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”

In fewer words he had stated that the communists were the sole guardians of truth and that that truth was unquestionable. Hence everybody else was wrong and the communists had an obligation to bring everybody back to the ‘straight and narrow’!

And where are the symptoms of his alleged ‘schizophrenia’?
Read the manifesto. It is comprised of a ‘theoretical’ introduction, in which Marx exposes his view on what had happened until the dawn of mankind till his days, and a ‘to do’ part which contains Marx’s recomandations about what people should have done from there on. I find it extremely baffling that a person who gathered such a complex understanding about a certain situation could come up with such completely erroneous ideas about how to proceed from there on.
Quite a lot of people entertain the notion that Marx was right only Lenin got it wrong and hence the failure of Russian/European communism.
No! Marx was right only when he described and explained what had happened. What he had said about the ‘conquest of political power by the proletariat’ was plain wrong. There is no such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘right’ dictatorship, no matter how dialectical it pretends to be.

You see, bona fide dialectics is about people freely, but considerately, contradicting each-other. In no way about ‘sheeple’ submissively caving in to peer pressure or crushing authority.

And here we have ‘it’: under communist rule, in order to save both their mortal beings and their inner souls quite a lot of people apparently toed the line but nevertheless kept a mental reserve about what was going on around them. Not clinical/proper schizophrenia indeed but how else would you call it?

PS. I still have to explain where my shame came from. When I eventually did understand the unbridgeable contradiction between my fine theoretical demonstration about the relative superiority of ‘dialectical materialism’ above over all other forms of materialism and the day to day tragic consequences of that specific brand of materialism being put into practice I remembered how proud I was about the praise I received on that day.
Remembering that moment is a fail proof method to prune down my pride!

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Categories collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, politics, Psychology, skin in the game

God. Is it real?

November 11, 2013 //
1

Some of you will say that yes, it is real because ‘look around you, He made all this’ while others will wonder ‘what happened, I knew you were a cool-headed guy?’.

Well, first of all, I didn’t ask ‘Who created the world?’!
Just to set things straight, I don’t need a god to be at ease with how we came into existence.
On the other hand, I don’t know everything so I cannot rule out the possibility that somewhere, somehow, somebody started the whole process that had set the things in motion nor can I be absolutely certain that there is no ‘higher force/authority’ that operates the ‘control room’.  I do not see a plausible role for such a ‘higher instance’ but I cannot rule out its very existence.
(The main reason for why I don’t think it exists is that the moment I accept its existence a question pops up: “how did this ‘higher instance’ came into existence, what made it possible?” and this would bring me back to square one. But I repeat myself, I cannot rule out such a possibility, especially so if I consider the ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum: ‘What if the creator god and its very creation evolved simultaneously and symbiotically?’)

Enough with this metaphysical speculation and back to our more mundane question: ‘is God, as we know it, real or not?’

We kid ourselves for being rational beings. What would a rational person do when confronted with a problem? Try to ‘measure’ itself out of the whole situation, right? What else being rational means if not trying to discover the relations between things?
This way it would be relatively simple to determine if a particular thing exists or not: ‘Does it have any consequences?’.
If the answer is ‘yes’, then it is certain that that particular thing exists. If ‘not’ then we cannot give a definitive answer. (Please don’t fall for ‘if it doesn’t have any consequence it doesn’t exist’. This is a trap. Us not being aware of something doesn’t mean that that something doesn’t exist. ‘The absence of proof is not proof of absence!’)

So does God have any consequences?

‘This guy is nuts! First he tells us that he doesn’t believe God created us all and now he asks if God has any consequences. His discourse doesn’t have the least shred of consistency!’

Well… not so fast!

Why did the Ancient Egyptians build the pyramids?
Because the were convinced that that was the only way of preserving their pharaohs for the afterlife?
Why did the Ancient Greeks build and used their magnificent temples? Because they believed that was the proper thing to do?

Now can you tell me if AmonRa and Zeus existed or not? Only in the Ancient Egyptians’ and Ancient Greeks’ imaginations, respectively? Are you sure? The Pyramids and the Parthenon seem pretty real to me, even if I haven’t seen any of them ‘face to face’! So AmonRa and Zeus were, and in fact still are, real. At least in the sense that they both had, and still have, palpable consequences.

Same thing with ‘God’! Any of them. Monotheistic, polytheistic … it doesn’t matter. If somebody believes in any of them strongly enough to act upon that belief then each of those Gods suddenly springs into life. And sometimes there is belief even in absence of a God. What God do Buddhists believe in? Yet they are at least as steadfast in their beliefs as the rest of the religious people.

It seems that ‘belief’ is the actual connection between ‘God’ and reality. Human belief that is.

So please take care what you believe in and how you transpose your beliefs into the real world. The one in which we are going to spend the rest of our natural lives and the only one our children are going to inherit.

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Categories collective identity, Culture, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children
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