Archives for category: cooperation

Loyalty

March 17, 2018 //

As most other words, loyalty describes a ‘multidimensional interval’ rather than the ‘precise something’ most of us usually expect.

What kind of loyalty?
Loyal to whom/what?
How far would it go?
How is it affected by the passage of time?/How does it change the passage of time?

I’ve been mulling over this subject for more than 10 years now…

For me, this is closely related to the famous “Prisoner’s dilemma”.
You now, where two guys break the law together, get caught, are indicted for two felonies and the prosecution has solid evidence only for the lesser charge. The two guys are held in separate cells, with no way to communicate, and are pressed hard to confess of the higher charge and/or to betray the other guy. During the interrogation each of them learns that:
– If both betray, each of them gets 2 years in prison.
– If one betrays and the other stays mum, the snitch walks and the ‘mute’ gets 3 years.
– If both shut up, each of them gets a year for the lesser charge.

Interesting enough for somebody who was never in such a situation. And it gets even more interesting if you start reading what the ‘pundits’ have to say about the whole thing.

The ‘cold rationalists’ maintain that it’s only logic for both of them to betray, simply because this is the only sure way to avoid the longer sentence. You never know what the other guy might do in a pinch, right?
The more down to earth, specially those with a more ‘intricate’ knowledge of the ‘underworld’, will loose no time to point out that something like that won’t happen if the the pair belongs to the mob…
Those with economically biased minds will be quick to point out that both of them should shut up simply because this way the team would ‘minimize the aggregate cost’.
Last but not least, sociologists will consider that it’s a good thing, for the society at large, that the criminals tend to be more disloyal than the law abiding citizens – otherwise crime would be even harder to fight than it is now.

Confused?

Then let be present the situation from the ‘loyalist’ point of view.

The ‘what’ of the matter has to do with the proportion between ‘blind’ and ‘willingly/knowingly assumed’. A mobster will be loyal because he has no other alternative – he’d walk into a self-sprung trap if he’d snitch on his partner while a true friend/brother would be loyal for completely different reasons.

Loyal to a person? To a ‘moral value’? To a ‘time honored tradition’? To a ‘local custom’?
If both guys were loyal to each other…
If both were loyal to ‘do no harm unto others’ they wouldn’t have got here in the first place…

As far as ‘distances’ are involved… In the standard example, as ‘formalized’ by Albert W. Tucker, there’s a relatively small difference between what both of them ‘get’ if both of them snitch and what the ‘mute’ would get if the other one would choose ‘the easy way out’. It’s only fair to presume that the pressure for both of them to betray the other would be far bigger if the ‘betrayed mute’ would be ‘rewarded’ with ten years instead of three while ‘mutual betrayal’ would remain at two each.

Time… isn’t this the most interesting dimension? Where you can only look, but never actually go, back and where haze always increases with distance …
Time, where the ‘good’ kind of loyalty helps those who ‘practice’ it and where bad loyalty constitutes an extremely heavy dead-weight …

How to tell ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in this case?

Consider the long term fate of the provinces/countries controlled by organized crime or by any-other form of dictatorship. No capo/dictator/authoritarian figure would ever be able to impose his will over the rest of the population, absent the loyalty of his supporters…

OK, loyalties are what defines us. What keeps us in one piece. What keeps all of us together.
In fact, the few of us who have no loyalties are nothing but sociopaths.

“Joseph Newman argues that the sociopath has an attention bottleneck that allows him to focus only on one activity or train of thought, to the exclusion of others. Researchers, including Howard Kamler, say that the sociopath lacks not “moral” identity but self-identity altogether.”

Hence, it’s up to the rest of us to spot them and to protect ourselves against them.

How?!?

By not extending misplaced loyalty towards them, of course!

“Sociopaths are people who have little to no conscience. They will lie, cheat, steal and manipulate others for their own benefit. They know exactly what they are doing, they just don’t care because they don’t think that way. If you are naive enough, they will brainwash you into doing exactly what they say and what they want which is the only time a sociopath is truly happy.“

‘They know exactly what they are doing’…

What’s keeping us from doing the same thing? From keeping at least an eye open for those who demand undeserved loyalty? Under which ever disguise and under which ever pretense?

Tags Loyalty, mob, mobster, prisoner's dilema, snitch, sociopath

Categories authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, freedom, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Misunderstandings.

March 15, 2018 //

“Survival of the fittest“.

Evolution is not about survival of the fittest but about the demise of those unable to adapt. Even if the difference seems trivial this approach has vast consequences. As Ernst Mayr explains it What evolution is, (Basic Books, New York, 2002) one can never know what “best” may mean, in any situation. First of all because (Werner Heisenberg, Herbert Simon, Dan Ariely) you can never have a complete picture of anything and secondly because in the real world ‘situations’ are changing constantly – Panta Rhei.
So the only relevant test is survival, being able to cope with whatever comes along and not the brilliance with which one might be able to solve a very particular problem, at a particular moment in time.

“Division of labor”

After understanding ‘survival’, it’s a lot easier to figure why social strategy functions better than sheer individualism: by creating the right environment for its members to become specialists a complex team will cope better when confronted with different complex situations than a mob composed of identically qualified members.
With the caveat that this arrangement works only as long as every member of the team realizes that it’s better for him to belong than to get out and only as long as all the members of the said team act consistently as if ‘one for all and all for one’. Otherwise put, complex teams where each has it’s own more or less indispensable role work properly only as long as most of the members continue to be ‘socially intelligent‘.

For those who feel there is an apparent contradiction here please note there are two levels of analysis/interaction.
Individually, each of us has to take care of him/herself (and his/hers immediate family).
Socially, each of us has the duty to evaluate the other members of the group and to exchange information with them about the well being of the whole group.

This can be taken even further. Whenever a subgroup becomes too ‘specialized’ – as is in ‘becoming so preoccupied with it’s own well being as to stop caring about the rest’, its own survival is in danger. Time and time again, history shows us that those who become estranged from the rest of the society end up badly. Creating problems for the entire society, true, but ultimately their behavior amounts to a form of suicide. Callous royals end up on the chopping block, seemingly indestructible dictators end up at the hands of angry mobs… Erstwhile top of the feeding chain (too big to fail?!?) companies end up broke or bailed out by the government…

“Politics versus Economics”

I’m constantly amazed by the fact that politics and economy have grown so apart from each other and each of them so disconnected from reality.
Politics has become a constant struggle for administrative power while economy has ‘metastasized’ into a battle field where the foot soldiers struggle to survive while the big brass gorge themselves with ‘money’.

Nowadays, too many politicians have forgotten that their job is to figure out, in close cooperation with the rest of the society, how to solve the various problems which challenge us on a daily basis. Too many of them do nothing but fight among themselves, each of them attempting to impose their particular vision on all of us.
In the same time, the economic mechanism is no longer geared towards ‘making the ends meet’ – the original meaning of the Greek word oikonomia.
Our not so distanced ancestors have invented a self governing mechanism which very efficiently allocated the available resources to those who were able to put them to good use. Adam Smith described this mechanism as ‘the free market’.
Presently, we’ve corrupted this previously self leveling mechanism into a collective MMA arena where the heavier knock the wind out of the weaker in the name of ‘king profit’.

All this because we mistakenly believe free market capitalism to be an ideology when it is nothing but a mechanism for allocating resources.
The best to date, admittedly, but only as long as we’re wise enough to preserve the freedom of the market.
And as soon as we’ve mistakenly ‘anointed’ profit as the most important goal of any economic venture… the market had ceased to be free! You see, profit is the best measure for efficiency – which, in its turn, is the best indicator for economic survivability, yet efficiency itself is pointless if the needs of the market are not met. Smith’s famous characters – the baker, the brewer and the butcher, went to the market to meet the needs of their customers. They became comfortably well off because they were successful in meeting those needs in an efficient manner, not because they were successful in cornering the market… as some of the present day tycoons are teaching us…

Why do I maintain that a ‘profit obsessed’ market is no longer free?
Well, simply because the participants to such a market are just as free as those addicted to heroin. Both kind of addicts think of nothing but the object of their addiction and are oblivious to everything else. As in blind to everything else!
And I’m sure you all agree with me that being blind is detrimental to being able to stay alive. Specially so for those unaware of their blindness!
Or unaware of their addiction…

Tags Competition is for losers, Division of Labour, Free market capitalism, profit obsessed market is not free, survival of the fittest

Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Economy, effective communication, Frames of mind, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children

Is there any meaning in any of “this”?

March 14, 2018 //

Let’s face it, all of us have asked ourselves, ‘why do we have to go through all this’?

Why are we thrown into this world, without any of us ever been asked about it, only to end up dead?

Well, I haven’t got an answer to this particular question. Sorry for getting your hopes too high.

But, thanks to a friend of mine, I’ve just found the answer to the next best one.

‘Now, if we’re already here, is there anything that we can do about it?’

The gamut of a potential answer to this question runs from ‘end it this very minute’ to ‘let’s do our best, which ever that might be’.

‘End it this very minute’ has the obvious plus of avoiding any additional suffering to that already experienced – and we pretty much know what we can expect as we’ll be getting older, and the equally obvious minus that no one knows what tomorrow will bring.

Literally.

Who amongst us knew, thirty five years ago, that communism will fall? With a bang!
Who amongst us knew, thirty years ago, that the internet will allow us to exchange ideas so fast, across so much of the world?
Who amongst us knew, five minutes ‘before’, who was the soul-mate each of us have been so happy to share everything with since ‘that happy moment’?

OK, let’s do our best then.
But what is this ‘best’?
How can we define it?!?

To each, their own…

It was exactly here that my friend’s input was invaluable.

“Curiosity is an important source of wisdom, but nowhere near as important as pain.”

The very moment that I was reading this, my fingers started to itch:

“I’m afraid both are ‘equally’ important.
The way I see it, curiosity and pain are, intellectually speaking, very similar to man and woman. You cannot have wisdom without a ‘healthy’ dose of both curiosity and pain, just as you cannot possibly conceive a child without enough of both man and woman.
Furthermore, the kind of wisdom/child you end up with depends heavily on how well both factors manage to cooperate in their ‘discourse’. Not to mention how important is the ‘environment’ where wisdom is ‘attempted’ and ‘child’ is raised.
In this sense, curiosity and pain are just as equal as man and woman are equal.
Or should I say ‘so complementary that neither of them can fulfill their meaning if the other is absent’?”

At first glimpse, this whole thing seems extremely reductionist.
What about those who cannot/want not to have children? Am I implying they’re wasting their lives?
And what about the few who cannot even comprehend the concept of wisdom? Are they to be ‘set aside’?!?

Take a deep breath!

What I’ve just understood is simple.
Basically, these are the only two things over which we have the slightest degree of control.
To give birth – to the next generation of humans, and to learn. To add something to the accrued understanding which is known as ‘culture’.

‘End it, this very minute!’ versus ‘Do our best!’

In order to add something to the future of mankind, not all of us actually need to ‘give birth’. Not all of us actually need to become the next Steven Hawking – I have chosen him as an example because he had just passed away this morning.

But how better this world will become as more and more of us will learn to balance ‘curiosity’ and ‘pain’?
As more and more of us will learn to encourage ‘curiosity’ – their own as well as that of others?
As more and more of us will train themselves to apply only the least amount of ‘curative pain’ whenever they are in control?
As more and more of us will understand that in so many instances both curiosity and pain are more a matter of chance than of ‘due diligence’, and, as a consequence of their newly found understanding, will be more willing to extend a helping hand to both curious and painful?

Flash back from earlier this morning.
Another friend of mine had mentioned a Russian proverb – his translation, I don’t speak the language.

“Do not try “raising/shaping” your kids.

Whatever you do, they’ll still grow to resemble you.

Educate/shape yourself.”

There’s nothing else left to be done but to shape ourselves.
This way we’ll contribute both to the future of mankind and to our own.
It’s a lot nicer, and safer too, to live among people who entertain an atmosphere of mutual respect amongst all of them than to attempt to survive in a ‘top dog takes all’ ‘urban jungle’.

Tags curiosity, do your best, Pain, shape yourself

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Culture, effective communication, evolution, gender roles, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children

1918-2018, The Most Progressive Century, ever. Part III

March 9, 2018 //

Part II ended on the Western side of the Mediterranean sea, right before WWII.
Which, by the way, was a consequence of the WWI victors making a terrible mistake.

For the III-rd part we have to cross to the Eastern side of the aforementioned sea and to fast forward to the aftermath of WWIII. The Cold One, if you haven’t figured that out by yourselves.

I’m going to make a small detour now and bring back a subject that I’ve already mentioned.
The changing nature of war itself.
Up to the start of WWI we had war as a conflict between ethnic/imperial chieftains while from then on really important wars had been started by ethnic/imperial chieftains and won by the attacked democracies. The key word here being ‘won’.
Which is not exactly true.
Those wars had not as much been won by the victors as lost by the aggressors. All that the democracies had to do was to (actively) resist long enough for the aggressors to rot from within and crumble under their own weight.
Actually all three WWs had been lost from the first moment. Simply because the aggressors had been inflexible ‘imperiums’ – social systems where the decision making mechanisms were controlled from the top in a more or less absolute manner.

Let’s go back to Syria.
What we had here was a population who had lost patience with being mistreated by a dictator and which, somewhat encouraged by what was going on globally, had tried to ‘buck the rider’. To carve a better future for themselves.

Just as in Spain, almost a hundred years ago, things had become way more complicated than they should have been.
Opportunists of all persuasions and from almost all over the world have jumped in to the occasion. And all those who could have dragged their asses instead of doing something useful for the longer term did exactly that. Dragged their asses and done nothing.

The parallel is staggering. Unfortunately things are becoming far worse and far more complicated.

In Spain, the world had perceived the whole movement as being predominantly of a communist nature. Which, eventually, made it so. Perception wise, in this case.
In Syria, the world perceived the whole movement as being predominantly of an islamist nature. Which, eventually, made it so. Simply because only the islamists of the world became involved, while all the rest did next to nothing. On the really ‘progressive’ side, that is.

In Spain, the only ‘outside’ power which had intervened decisively was the loser of the previous WW. More precisely, the decisive intervention was carried on by the dictatorship established over the population which had felt mistreated after WWI.
In Syria, the ‘outside’ power which intervenes decisively, helping the ‘regressives’, is the loser of the previous WW. More precisely, the most effective outside intervention is carried on by the authoritarian regime established over the population which had felt mistreated after the Cold War. In Syria’s case we also have a second intervention on the side of the ‘regressives’, carried on by yet another authoritarian regime established over yet another population which feels mistreated by some of the most powerful governments on this Planet.

Then we have the popular sentiment in the rest of the World.
In Spain, people from some 50 nations had volunteered to fight on the Republican side. Very few of them entertained any communist convictions and most of them had a place of their own where to return after the war was over. And when they did return, they were welcome to do so.
Syria has also seen her ‘fair share’ of volunteers. But there’s a marked difference here. While those who went to fight on the Republican side in Spain were animated by some romantic ideals, most of the aliens who came to fight in Syria were driven by a sort of desperate ennui and an acutely perceived lack of any perspective in their countries of origin.
While those who went to Spain did it to help the Spaniards fulfill their dream, those who went to Syria were hoping to carve a piece of land where to build theirs.
While those who went to Spain were welcomed back by their families and neighbors, those coming back from Syria are shunned by their relatives and investigated by the authorities of the states they are returning to.

And the most complicated aspect of the whole thing is ‘separatism’.

To be continued.

Tags Cold War, Foreign intervention, Lack of perspective, Spanish Civil War, Syrian Crises, World War

Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, human rights, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we are building for our children

1918-2018, The Most Progressive Century, ever. Part I

March 6, 2018 //

We are constantly being told that we’re living in the best possible world.

I agree with that.
Of course it’s the best possible one… specially since there’s no other!

On this side of the Styx, anyway…

Let’s get real now.

This is the Century when we’ve managed to open up all corners of our round Planet. We’ve ‘conquered’ the most remote and inhospitable places – both poles, all mountain tops and most of the ocean floor, including that beneath the Arctic Ice Sheet, and, way more important, made most of the Earth solid surface accessible for almost everybody. By car, by train, by plane, by bike, by ferry …
We’ve managed to populate all the ‘cubicles’ designed by Mendeleev and we found uses for most of them.
We’ve managed to identify a vast array of natural resources. We’ve developed matching technologies to exploit each of them, to transform and combine them into what we thought it would fit our fancies and to distribute the results to whomever wished to receive them.
We’ve continued to develop already invented means of communication and we transformed them into something totally different. Practically, we’ve restored the world to it’s ‘Golden Age’. We now live in the Global Village.

Which is not that much different from the old one…

“Now, with the world watching Aleppo burn, Daraya fall, and Idlib and other Syrian cities suffer so brutally, Pope Francis’s description of Syria as “abandoned and beloved” rings chillingly accurate. After Bosnia, I was sure the international community would never again stand by and watch in silence as hundreds of thousands of people were bombed relentlessly, starved, beaten, traumatized, and denied the most basic human rights, including education and medical facilities. During the height of the worst years in Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1994, you could chart the ebb and flow of the city’s hope, like the steady flow of the Mijacka River, whose shelled bridges we had to run across to avoid getting hit by snipers. Food supplies ran out; soldiers were getting slaughtered on the fronts; the hospitals’ generators went down.“

Janine Di Giovanni, From Sarajevo to Aleppo, Lessons on Surviving a Siege,
The Atlantic, October 12, 2016

What happened with “only a fool learns from his own mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others“?

OK, back to square one…

1918 had seen the end of the First World War.
Which was the first ‘mixed’ war and the one which should have been the last…

‘The last’ part is obvious, let me elaborate on ‘the first mixed’ one.

Basically, people are both lazy and easily frightened. Their natural tendency is to ‘give in’, a.k.a. ‘trade in’ rather than ‘fight for it’ ‘to the ultimate consequence’.
Which actually makes a lot of sense. Just imagine what would have happened if we were just a tad more combative than we used to…

Need a clue? Click on the picture below.

Welcome back.

The proposition “Laziness and congeniality is our default mode (mood?)” is valid but from a ‘statistical point of view’.
On a ‘case by case approach’, the manner in which each of us reacts in specific circumstances depends both on those circumstances and on our own interpretation of what’s going on. In fact, it’s our individual consciousness which makes things even more complicated than the situation described in the video above.

During most of our history, human social arrangements have closely resembled those of the chimpanzees. Alpha males have somehow managed to climb to the top of the food chain while the ‘laziness’ of the rest kicked in and allowed the alpha males to do more or less what they pleased.
Which had included a lot of unwarranted aggression.

Up to WWI, most wars had been started by aggressive rulers who had somehow convinced their followers to attack one or more of the neighbors. Which neighbors were also organized more or less like a chimpanzee troupe – ‘lazy and congenial people’ ruled by which ever alpha male was aggressive/cunning enough to remain in power.
These social arrangements had a very interesting consequence.
All conflict was between rulers and all wars were ‘turf wars’.
The belligerents were not attempting to out-kill each-other but to establish hierarchies. More prosaically, war was nothing but ‘protection racket’. The loser had to pay a certain amount of money to the winner – ‘war reparations’, surrender a piece of the ‘turf’ or both at the same time.

In time – due to particular circumstances, some of what are currently known as ‘nations’ have learned that ‘chimpanzee social order’ leads to unnecessary suffering and have (re)invented an alternative. A.k.a. democracy.

WW1 was the first major war which pitted authoritarian regimes against democratic ones.
Yes, humankind had already witnessed some wars which had been started by more or less democratically run countries – the British Empire had attacked the Boer Republics in South Africa, for example, only this is but a blog post, not a 500 page dissertation…
Unfortunately, the democracies which had won the WWI had behaved totally inappropriately… with dire consequences. For them, as well as for the rest of the world.

The Treaty of Versailles imposed a huge amount of war reparations upon the main loser. Germany.
Two consequences have arisen from here.

The obvious one was WWII. And almost nobody disputes this.
The less obvious one was that those war reparations had transformed war itself.

A democratically run coalition imposing war reparations upon a defeated and leaderless/dispirited population had transformed war from a dispute between rulers into a dispute between nations.

This was the ‘accelerant’ used by Hitler to start the second funeral pyre which had engulfed Europe…

Democratically run nations behaving inconsiderately towards other nations also established an immensely dangerous precedent.

The first example of which had occurred less than 20 years later in Spain.

Tags Chimpanzee bonobo, Global Village, Spanish Civil War, Syrian Civil War, Treaty of Versailles, War, War reparations

Categories authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperare, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, Mindset, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Reality check.

March 5, 2018 //

What we call reality exists.
Regardless of us being able to faithfully express whatever we know about it.
Regardless of how much of what we know we are willing to share with others.
Regardless of some of us using their knowledge to impose themselves upon the less knowledgeable.

The irrefutable proof about reality being a fact is not that we have chosen to call it so. Or even to call it at all.

The irrefutable proof that reality is factual is, duh, another fact.
That nobody, no matter how knowledgeable, powerful or both at the same time, has ever been able to impose their will upon the said reality for any significant length of time.

No dictator has ever been able to consistently subdue a people. To kill it, yes. To consistently subdue it, NO. Lately, most of them have also lost an erstwhile relatively common ability… that of bequeathing their power to their intended successor.
No scientist has ever been able to pretend they really knew what they were talking about. No genuine scientist, that is… That they have a clue… yes. Of course!
A fair understanding of what’s going on… that is increasingly plausible.

That at least one of the above possesses the ultimate knowledge/power about even the minutest portion of reality…

Tags failure, Political power, Reality check, Science, unknown

Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, Frames of mind, freedom, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children

Go figure

March 3, 2018 //

According to Protagoras, we are here for but one reason. To determine whether anything which happens around us makes any sense.
Mind you, we are not supposed to knit fancy stories and to skillfully include in them everything we perceive! A.k.a ‘narratives’.
Just ‘measure’ things and call them out for what we think they are.

I’m going to enumerate a series of facts and let you figure them out.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

So, if people are less likely to be killed, in any manner, why a shrinking number of them buy an increasing number of guns?

Then why are people so focused on ‘assault rifles’? Only because they tend to be used in mass murders? Is this a good enough reason to try to remove them from the eco-system?
And why is there so little fuss about the huge number of suicides?
Bzw, can ‘mass murders’ be considered a form of suicide? After all, very few of the perpetrators ever managed to leave the scene… And even fewer have never been identified.

According to the ATF, people in the USA buy an ever increasing number of guns each year yet since 2012 (Sandy Hook) Cerberus Capital Management has not been able to find a buyer for Remington Outdoor – the weapons manufacturer who produces, among other ‘things’, “the most popular version of the “modern sporting rifle” sold in the US.”
People in the US are interested to invest in weapons per se but not in weapons manufacturers?

Considering that, according to Bloomberg, Cerberus Capital had eventually handed over Remington Outdoor to “Wall Street Creditors”…

“Blackstone Group, which offers asset management services, has been reducing its weapons exposure for years. This weekend, it verified that no gun investments remained in its portfolios, according to the Wall Street Journal. The investment giant BlackRock Inc. said it, too, was exploring ways to cull gun companies from the portfolios of clients who no longer wish to invest in them.“

Tags AR-15, Gun control, man as the measure for all things, Parkland Florida, Protagoras, Remington Outdoors, smart investing

Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, man induced fragility, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency

Age as a mental illness.

February 24, 2018 //

Some of us loose our patience when in close contact with age related ‘peculiar behaviors’.

There are a few ‘real’ facts about this phenomenon and I’m going to list them before letting you in on what I feel about this whole thing.

We live way longer than our parents and grand parents. Statistically, of course.
Which means that everybody gets a fair chance at reaching well into their 80-ies, something which was ‘available’ only to those smart enough to navigate around the perils of life, rich enough to hover over them or both at the same time.
Most of the run-of-the-mill-s and the outright dumb-asses used to die long before that.

Brain is both an organ and a muscle. Like any other organ, it deteriorates with age. Like any other muscle, if trained properly, it keeps for longer.

People are lazy. Most of them don’t like to compete on their own. And, even more importantly, most of them stop training after reaching the top. Even a relative one.

Simplistically, one could say age is an opportunity each of us has to demonstrate their true nature.
Both the quality of our ‘natural endowment’ and how well each of us has treated/trained theirs.

A more comprehensive approach suggests that age might be something a little more complicated than that.

The present is a combination between whatever resources were at the disposal of our ancestors and the accumulated ‘consequences’ of our ancestors living in those conditions. Basically, a combination between nature and human decision making.

We live today in the world we inherited from our parents and our children will live in the world we’ll bequest upon them.

Yep, only living longer also means having to retire at some point.
It means having to give up calling the shots.

And this is the real litmus test.
How one behaves after they realize they can no longer call the shots but are not yet ready to die and how one behaves after being called to call the shots yet still having to care for the former ‘bosses’.

This is when people have to face the consequences of how they trained their brains during their life times.
This is the moment when people meet the real results of how they had interacted. Among themselves and with their children.
This is the moment when people meet the consequences of their former choices.

And, also, this is the moment when the children have the opportunity to prove themselves.

In a nutshell, one may say that humankind is like wine.
Both depend very much on terroir, are the results of collective efforts and age demonstrates their true nature.

Or, one could say that age is more of a social disease than a mental illness.

Tags Age mental illness, social construction of reality, social disease, wine humankind age

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Three strikes.

February 19, 2018 //

Remember Midas, the character who, after being granted a wish by a grateful Dionysus, “asked that everything he touched would turn into gold“?
And who was happy as a pig in mud after his wish was fulfilled … only to find out that he was going to die of hunger since everything he touched did turn into gold? Including his beloved daughter who had enthusiastically embraced her father upon his return from the fateful meeting with Dionysus?

“Under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the “Three Strikes” statute provides for mandatory life imprisonment if a convicted felon: (1) has been convicted in federal court of a “serious violent felony”; and (2) has two or more previous convictions in federal or state courts, at least one of which is a “serious violent felony” (the other offense may be a serious drug offense). The sentencing enhancements in this law can have a significant impact on a criminal defendant.“

Now wait a minute! What has this got to do with anything?

Well, more than two and a half millennia after Midas had driven himself into a tight corner we continue to ignore his lesson. As a species…

And the key words here are ‘continue to’.

The axe.

Very soon after our flint knapping ancestors discovered that a shaped stone is very useful at chopping wood they tied it to a shaft and started bashing the heads of their neighbors with it.

‘Corrupting’ tools into offensive weapons, strike one.

Articulated language.

Soon after learning to fight our fellow humans, we started to speak to each-other.
It might have started while hunters tried to coordinate their efforts or when strangers tried to barter things… Does it really matter?
For me, it’s enough that very soon after we learned to speak we were masters in the art of lying.

Corrupting words into lies, strike two

Money.

At some point in our more recent history, we discovered that it was easier for each of us to learn a particular skill and to exchange goods among rather than each of us providing for all his (family’s) needs. Eventually we invented money and replaced barter with proper trading.
Soon after, some of us forgot that money was meant to facilitate trade and started to hoard it.

Elevating money to stardom against all historical advice, strike three.

Are you wondering whether I’ve lost it entirely?
Neah… just came home from the movies…

Since the movie ended on the bright(-ish) side, I’m going to remind you that Midas also found a way out of his predicament.
The ‘golden’ King begged Dionysus to lift the cursed blessing bestowed upon his head, was instructed to wash his hands and everything else he wanted turned back to its original state in the Pactolus River – in present day Turkey, and presto, everything was fine again.

There’s only one small problem left.
Where are we going to wash our hands…. or should we cleanse our minds first?

Hopefully, before experiencing the hunger pangs which had driven Midas to wisdom…

Tags All the money in the world, Midas, Three strikes you're out

Categories Bounded rationality, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Freedom, and G-d.

February 11, 2018 //

The early believers were convinced that God’s ‘real’ name could not be uttered by their ‘mortal’ lips.

Their logic was simple. Using a single word to ‘differentiate’ something from everything else is somewhat arrogant. It implies that the ‘god-father’ knows all that there is to be known about that something – or at least enough to give credence to that naming.

As faith became stronger, so did the self confidence of those involved in the process.
When writing about their beliefs, some of them circumvented the initial shyness by using multiple names to describe the object of their adoration – hoping that in this manner they’ll get close enough to the real thing.
“To begin with, God is referred to by a number of names in the Bible—not just a single name. By some counts there are more than 20 different names for God mentioned in the Bible. And each of these names has great significance. Each one tells us something important about God—His character and how He relates to us.”
Others still stick to the ‘no name’ policy, refer to their God using a title, Allah – the ‘One and Only Who Deserves to Be Worshiped’ – instead of a ‘proper’ (?!?) name, and use a number of attributes to describe him. Such a large number of attributes as to make it evidently clear that stringing attributes is in no way enough to ‘exhaust’ the inner nature of any god. Of anything, really.
“”If We had sent down this Quran upon a mountain, you would have seen it humble itself and shatter out of fear of God. Such are the parables which We put forward to mankind that they may reflect. He is Allah, there is no deity but He. He is the Knower of the unseen and the seen. He is ar-Rahman (Most Compassionate), ar-Raheem (Most Merciful). He is Allah besides Whom there is no deity. He is al-Malik (Sovereign), al-Quddus (Most Pure), as-Salaam (Giver of peace), al-Mumin (Giver of security), al-Muhaiman (Vigilant), al-Aziz (Migthy), al-Jabbar (Overpowering), al-Mutakabbir (Glorious). He is pure from whatever they ascribe to Him. He is Allah, al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Bari (Perfect Maker), al-Musawwir (Fashioner); to Him belong the most beautiful names. Whatever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him. He is al-Aziz (Mighty), al-Hakeem (Wise).” (Quran 59:21-24)”

After writing for long enough about their beliefs, the worshipers had become emboldened enough to transform their convictions into precepts. To be not only followed by the believers themselves but also imposed upon others.

And this is how various groups of people have traveled from “The Truth Shall Make You Free” to defining heresy as being the most heinous crime… so heinous that the congregations felt the need to punish it in the most eloquent manner.
“Does it seem logical that heretics were burned alive, with their mental faculties intact, to give them one last chance to repent before being sent into the “eternal fire”? Could it be that burning an individual at the stake was seen as a merciful death, as a means of giving that person one last chance to save his or her soul before final damnation??? I have read that “burning at the stake was believed by some medieval authorities and scholars to liberate the sinner from his or her formerly damned state and offer some hope of salvation to the now ‘cleansed’ soul”.“

After some of us have somehow survived that era, a few parts of the world have become ‘the lands of the free’.
The countries where a majority of the inhabitants believe that “your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”

It’s here that things get really interesting.

The quote defining freedom as stemming from the relation between your fist and my nose logically leads us to observe that those who define liberty in this manner are a bunch of tired, and maybe wised up, fist-fighters.
Who have finally reached the understanding that it’s better to negotiate it rather than fight over it.

‘Negotiate? What is here to be negotiated?’
‘The distance between our noses? How close am I allowed to bring mine to yours before you becoming allowed to defend your intimacy?
After all, if my nose is so far away that you’ll never be able to touch it, this particular definition of liberty ceases to make any sense while if you’re never allowed to punch mine then I’ll be able to use it to crowd you out of your own life.
And vice-versa.
Capisci?’

Which points out the cruel reality that we cannot negotiate everything.

To start any negotiation we must first have something in common.
A common language would be fine indeed but I have something else in mind.
Both sides involved in any negotiation need to share the same attitude.

This is the hardest thing to convey.
To convince the other side that you’re going to keep your end of the bargain.
Only after both sides have reached this ‘belief’, they will feel free enough to discuss the real issues.
This is where ‘religion’ comes in handy. It teaches us that all people are to be treated equally – all of them have been molded in a single cast, and that they share a spark from the same divine fire.
“God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them“.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!

Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians, 1:6-10)

Which brings us back to the original question.

Is any liberty possible, outside the one we continuously build ourselves, through constant negotiation?
Is any bona-fide negotiation possible without a healthy dose of mutual respect among all those involved in it?
Why do we, grown-ups, still need our father to constantly remind us to stop bickering?