This being the most convincing argument that we really need to quit ‘smoking’.
Just think of it. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale…
I know you can do this, breathe, without thinking. You’ve actually done it since your birth. And you’ll continue doing it after you’ll have reached the end of this post. But right now you should be fully aware that your lungs have only one opening.
What has to come out – what doesn’t belong in there, needs to exit from where it came in in the first place. Which is rather hard for anything which isn’t air. That’s why dust, tar, or even microbes, should not go in there at all.
Quit smoking. And quit belching smoke into the atmosphere.
Let’s get to the second part of the post. Presumably, the more interesting one. Click on the image and read the whole thing. Now tell me why would somebody attempt to ‘debunk’ such a lie in the first place? Is smoking something worth arguing for?
Oops… so the whole thing revolves, again, around money… And, if I understand correctly the point proposed by the author quoted above, a certain Fredrik Eich, there isn’t much of a difference between being duped into giving up and starting/continuing to smoke.
No, I don’t like being duped myself. That’s why I’m telling it straight. Lungs have only one opening. Don’t let yourselves be duped into believing that smoking isn’t that bad for you. That some smog is inevitable for a thriving economy. After all, this is how ‘they’ make ‘their’ money.
Now, after proof-reading this, I wonder. What do the dupers breathe? Do they have their, private, atmosphere? Have they duped themselves into believing everything is as pink as a pair of healthy lungs?
We’ve ‘invented’ mutual respect. Based on it, we created the two institutions which allowed us to get where we are now. Democracy and free market capitalism.
I’ll make a short detour for those who are not ‘convinced’.
Democracy, the functional kind, starts from the premise that it is impossible for an individual to know everything. And that together we know much more than each of us. This being the reason for any democratic process starting with an intense discussion. Whoever has something to say, takes the stand and whoever is interested in the well being of the community pays attention. To learn where to cast their votes.
Free market capitalism starts, too, from the premise that it is impossible for an individual to know everything. That nobody, be it an individual or a group of people, might be smart enough to call all the economic shots needed for entire society to ‘feed itself’ on the long run.
These two fundamental institutions operate on the basis of mutual respect between those who live within them. The people exchange ideas and goods on the principle that the transactions are done voluntarily and in good faith. That deception is just an exception.
These two institutions made it possible for us to cooperate into building the present reality. We have developed enough technology that we are able to produce enough food for everybody. We went to the moon We have enough weapons to destroy the entire planet. Each of us can communicate, almost instantly, with almost anyone on the planet.
And? What do we do in these conditions? Although there still are many of us who are starving, we throw away food. For various reasons. Most satellites are used (and) for military purposes. Although we could not have ‘arrived’ if we hadn’t ‘invented’ mutual respect, we currently use information technology mainly to spread fake news and ‘consume’ pornography.
Is this really okay? How much longer is this going to last?
To make ends meet? To make it easier for our needs to be met?
What do we have a banking/financial system for? To mobilize capital for the economy? To make it possible for our needs to be met easier? More efficiently?
Or, to put it the other way around, ‘what profit is?’
The well deserved ‘consequence’ – considered as such by the vast majority of the stakeholders, of a well-done job? Or a self serving benchmark to be reached at all costs? Which costs are to be ‘shouldered’ by anybody else but the profiteer himself… till reality slaps us, all of us, over our faces…
Let’s face it, in the present circumstances the picture above might mean a lot of things.
It can be a prank – somebody might have made the whole thing up just for the fun of it. It can also express the frustration of somebody who isn’t such a good speller. Or of somebody who suffers from dyslexia?
What really interests me is how we, the ‘intellectual’ public, react to things like these. Do we understand the frustration which lies at the bottom of this? Do we even try to?
Or we just dismiss it as being a manifestation of stupid?
No, I don’t consider the economy as being more important than life preservation. Some very sound arguments can be found here.
But I’m absolutely convinced that treating the ‘others’ with disdain is what brought us here in the first place.
You don’t like the manner in which the likes of Trump treat those who don’t agree with them? Then why are you doing the very same thing?
Shanghai is in China. A country so far away that hourly wages are a fraction of those in Europe. Or in the US. That being the reason for so many of our manufactured goods coming from there.
United States confirms its first case in Washington state, a man who traveled to the Wuhan area.
China confirms two additional deaths, a sixty-six-year-old man and a forty-eight-year-old woman
New cases are announced in China, including in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
Chinese state media raises number of confirmed cases to 291 and confirms 15 medical workers in Wuhan have been diagnosed with pneumonia.
Hong Kong confirms its first case, a person in their thirties.
Taiwan confirms its first case, a woman in her fifties.
The above timeline was ‘borrowed’ – through the Internet, of course, yet another example for how close we are of eachother, from https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/updated-timeline-coronavirus on 3/28/2020, 12:30 GMT Which Internet pulls us together by pooling information/data while simultaneously rips us apart by feeding us a constant stream of fake news.
We are so close together that you can send/receive almost everything (from) almost everywhere. We are so close together that everybody who has a smart phone can see their similarly equipped buddies halfway across the world.
We’re so far apart that we still have to make up our collective mind about which comes first. The Economy or the People. We’re so far apart that we haven’t figured out yet that there’s no such thing as a running economy without enough able bodied and mentally sane people. To produce, transport, distribute and buy the things we need. We’re so far apart that we haven’t yet figured out that the present number of people cannot survive – let alone maintain a decent living standard, without a running economy.
Smarter people than me are already prepping for the aftermath. For the opportunities which will have ripened by then.
Which, let’s face it, is a wise thing to do. Most of us would have done it. Prepping for what we fear. And for what we covet.
Also wise would be for us to remember that everything we experience today – the good and the bad of it, together, is the consequence of how we have chosen to use the opportunities opened up by the previous crisis.
I’m sure you’ve already learned everything worth knowing about how to flatten the curve…
My post is about something else. About the need to think with our own heads. Individually. Each on their own.
More damages are caused by the manner in which we have chosen to react than by the pathogen itself.
‘Then what should we do?’
I don’t know. And I just told you to stop taking cues, blindly.
There is something I do know. Nobody can get out of something like this on its own. Alone. And another thing. If we get out of it as a herd, we’ll very soon end up in another trap.
‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t… I really can’t figure out what you want to say….’
OK. We, humans, are social animals. We not only raise our young – all mammals do that, we raise them in a social context. We live in groups and we raise our children to belong there.
Living in a social context has consequences. From being prone to infestation to having adopted specific behaviors. Humberto Maturana is actually convinced that our very conscience – ‘our ability to observe ourselves while observing‘, a paraphrase, is a product of us leading our lives in close community.
One of these specific behaviors is the herd instinct. Whenever in a dire strait, the members of a group pay a lot more attention to the rest of the group than in the ‘peaceful moments’. This has two bright sides and one huge drawback.
All members of a group paying close attention to the others makes it easier for those who need it to get attention. And help. All members of a group paying close attention to the others makes it easier for the group to follow when one of them finds a way out. All members of a group paying too close attention to the others makes it very likely that the entire group will dash out at the first opportunity. Without checking first where they’re going to land. Nor whether there are any other opportunities.
Another specific behavior is ‘opportunism’. Some of us have figured out that by keeping their chill in a crises they are more likely to identify whatever opportunities might exist in that moment. And the deeper the crises, the bigger the opportunities.
Theoretically, these two should work like a charm. The opportunists keep their chill, look around, identify the best way out and the rest of the herd follows them to safety. A win-win situation.
Yeah… but!
Wouldn’t it be a way lot better whether all (or, at least, ‘more’) of us would keep their chill? Wouldn’t we be able to identify even more ways out? It would take a lot more time? We’d need to discuss things over, to negotiate… we’d have to exert a lot of discretion… True enough. Hence we’d need to evaluate two things. First, how urgent the dangerous situation is and, then, whether a better alternative would be worth searching.
And something else. In a ‘follow me blindly’ situation there’s no going back. The consequences for a hasty choice might be tremendous.
We might end up with more people being hurt by our blunder-some reaction than by the cause which had spooked us.
Yet another specific behavior is responsibility. Living in a social context means that, sooner rather than later, individuals are censored for their actions. By the rest of the community or, sometimes, by the stark reality. Unfortunately, sometimes entire communities are censored, by the stark reality, for not behaving responsibly. For not imposing responsibility upon their members.
For not taking enough time before choosing between flight and fight.
Let me put things into perspective. How many of you have chosen to continue smoking despite having been warned? How many of you have emptied the shelves despite being told there’s enough for everybody? Or that there will be soon enough? How many of you do not smoke in the presence of your children? Because you know it will hurt them? How many of you have taken active measures to protect the elderly? For the very same reason…
As for the economy being the main casualty of the present scourge… I’m afraid ‘the economy’, as we know it, has been dying for quite a while now. That’s why it is so susceptible to SARS CoV-2.
The Ancient Greeks had come up with the concept of ‘oeconomia’ as the art of making the ends meet. Adam Smith had described the free market as the place/environment where competing agents made it so that people – solvent demand, could satisfy their needs. Nowadays, too many of us understand/accept ‘economy’ as the art of getting rich. ‘Free’ in ‘free market’ is understood as ‘free’ to do anything you want. Because very few are asked to answer for the long term consequences of their actions.
The economy, as the manner in which we cooperate towards fulfilling our needs, has fallen prey to our gluttony. And to our nearsightedness. Greed is not good. And SARS CoV-2 is only an eye opener, not the cause for the current implosion.
I had already learned that individuals needed to preserve their self esteem. The good opinion they have built about themselves during their entire lives. This being the reason for which most self made people see their own efforts as the main reason for their status. While being adamant that Lady Luck had played no role whatsoever in their advancement…
I had also observed that all imperia had eventually failed. No matter what kind of imperia… Political dictatorships, commercial monopolies, abusive families… For no other reason than dictators’/patriarchs’ tendency to drive away those who don’t kowtow to their opinions. Which attitude effectively empties the structures led by authoritarian figures of any ‘alternative’ expertise. Of any other expertise but that of the leading figure. And since no expertise was ever infinite – not even Napoleon’s, the end of all imperia had been sealed from the moment when a single will had imposed itself over the entire structure.
OK, from the outside everything made sense. The added figures matched the measured total.
But something still bothered me. As a constant rebel, I perfectly understood those who chose to leave instead of bowing to the higher authority.
But why act in a dictatorial manner in the first place? Why drive away all those who might come handy in a dire strait? Why not replace those who choose to leave with equivalent people? Instead of favoring increasingly obedient ones? Specially when speaking about very intelligent people… and very few individuals have ever arrived at the top of any complicated structures only because Lady Luck had a crush on them …
Yesterday, when discussing the subject with my father – we each support different political parties and Romania had just elected it’s president, he told me: “You had been lucky enough to never have had to make a compromise. That’s why you can afford to think like this!” We were using Romanian. I used ‘can afford’ to convey what he said to me because I’m not aware of a closer English equivalent. Maybe I could have used ‘allow yourself to think like this’… Anyway, that was the moment when it struck me.
That past ‘compromises’ tend to compromise our ability to see the forest for the trees. That whenever somebody aired an opinion which even slightly contested any of the compromises we ever had to make in our pasts we perceived it as an aggression. As if our self esteem was under assault. No matter that the ‘assailant’ had no way of knowing that we had to compromise our own beliefs at one point. The simple fact that we remember that moment is enough. We’ve found ways to soothe our souls. We’ve already have invented excuses. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to function… But we’ve never been able to really come to terms with ourselves. We’ve never forgiven our own weaknesses. Never assumed them in earnest.
And this is how past ‘mistakes’ continue to haunt us. Preventing us from accepting advice. Because ‘deep down’ we feel the urge to continue the path we have already chosen’. That being the easier way to preserve our psychological well being. Our mental consistency…
For a (free) market to function, at all, it needs active economic agents. Which economic agents need, in their turn, certain amounts of concentrated resources at their disposal. A certain amount of ‘capital’. Regardless of who owns it. Or disposes of it.
In this sense, no matter where each of them finds itself on the individual to socialist spectrum, all societies are ‘capitalist’.
On the other hand, individual capitalists – economic agents, do not need a free market to thrive. The do indeed need a market to sell their products/services, only that market does not have to be free. On the contrary, even.
OK, no monopolistic market has survived for long. And all monopolies have eventually failed. Even those who had grown ‘too big to fail’!
But go and tell this to any of those who happen to be at the helm of a monopoly… be it of economic or political nature …
While ‘fitting’ discount priced toilet paper into my new second hand car, something struck me.
In many ways, we are a first generation.
And by ‘we’ I understand what Americans call ‘the baby-boomers’.
We are the first generation to use toilet paper ‘en masse’. Have you noticed the hole in the Farmer’s Almanac?
We are the first generation to witness new cars becoming less reliable than the older ones. Not to mention less ‘honest’… remember the scandal regarding the Diesel engines emissions…
We are the first generation who has not witnessed a large scale war. As a consequence, very few of us had to flee conflict. My paternal grand parents had to leave their country behind after WWI while my mother was trice displaced during WWII. During my ‘tenure’, I’ve only read about those who had to flee the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Or Syria… We’ve met refugees, indeed, only all of them had come from other continents. While our parents/grandparents had to flee themselves. Had relatives and/or friends who had to run for their lives.
We are the first generation whose children expect to have a harsher life than ours.
Would this be enough explanation for the demographic decline we witness in Europe? And in other civilized places? Japan, South Korea…
As in ‘the reason for which less and less of our children have children of their own’?
OK, and where’s the link between my discount priced toilet paper and the demographic decline?
The fact that we don’t want to get our hands dirty is absolutely normal!
Who, in their right minds, would want such a thing?
There is a second fact though. Which cripples us. We haven’t yet learned that, from time to time, people do have to get their hands dirty in order to survive.
And people actually died because of this.
Boeing was so eager to cut costs – and corners, that didn’t even consider doing the ‘right thing’. ‘Getting their hands dirty’ and treating the 737 Max 8 as the new type of aircraft it really was. Before two of them having crashed due to pilots haven’t been properly trained for the new flying conditions. Boeing should have designed the plane starting from a clean sheet and the FAA should have certified it as such.
