Archives for category: effective communication

Because neither has any damns to give…

They call it Cuetlaxochitl.
They used to call it that way for a very long time.
And it was they who had associated it with the Winter solstice. With the Winter solstice, not the ‘Aztec’ solstice…

We, or rather I, don’t know how they used to call the mistletoe. All I know is they used to associate it with their ‘spells’. Performed, again, during the Winter solstice.

At some point, we – or rather after the Christians got in contact them, the mistletoe first and poinsettia later – have associated both with our manner of celebrating the Winter solstice.

In fact, we have appropriated both the celebration itself and the plants associated with it!

I’m not going to discuss whether this was a good or a bad thing.
It had just happened. And we have to live with the consequences of all those things having had happened in the past.

All I’m going to discuss in this post is their association with Christmas.
With what the Christians consider to be ‘Christmas’ and celebrate it as such.

But is there anything to be discussed about the matter?!?

They have associated each of these plants to their celebrations.
We have associated both to one of ours.
What is to be discussed here?!?

Do we feel bad for what we – our ancestors, actually – have done to them?
And want to atone for what had happened? And for the consequences of what had happened? Which consequences continue to unfold to this day…

We want to make amends – and to get rid of our guilt – by giving them back their plants?!?
Really?

How will any of this benefit them?!?
‘Cause this is about them, not us… right?

How about we stop buying the drugs coming from there?
Making it possible for them to shake off the drug lords which make their lives miserable?

How about we stop patronizing them?
How about we start respecting them for being our ‘brethren’? As in equally-fledged human beings?
Instead of we acting as if they were immature children. Liable to feel hurt that we have borrowed their ‘toys’…. For the sole reason that we think that giving them back their ‘sacred’ plants will cleanse our consciences….

The world doesn’t belong to leaders.
The world belongs to Humanity.

Proper = As it should be. As expected. ‘Clean’.
Property=Something which belongs to someone.
A mutually respected arrangement among the members a certain community which establishes boundaries. Which members have the right to go ‘there’ whenever they want while all others have to ask for permission before crossing that ‘boundary’.
A convention among the members of a certain community about what is the proper thing to do in each ‘patrimonial’ situation. A convention about who has the right to do what to the things which happen to co-exist with the members of the above mentioned community.
The above mentioned ‘things’ include the place where the entire community happens to live. ‘Their’ land.

Which brings us to who owns the world.
The leaders? As many of them assume?
Or the humanity, as Dalai Lama has reportedly said?

How about neither?
My point being that we are nothing but guests in this world.
We come empty handed and we leave empty handed.

Yes, we need property while dwelling on this planet.
But only in the sense of who can do what where. And with the limitation that the ‘what’ we do has to be ‘reversible’.
Just as we leave this world with nothing – we leave even our hands here, our presence on the planet has to be ‘discrete’. Has to produce as little disturbance as possible and all that disturbance must disappear in time.

We need to keep the world a proper place.
It’s the only place we have.
No other home for our children.
No other place to spend our last days.
Properly.

You cannot learn
what you think you know.

Epictetus

How many times have you been hit by something you didn’t see coming?

Not very often… for the simple reason that these encounters use to end up badly!
Bent fenders, broken bones…
Hence we pay attention. Or get killed… end of story!

But how many times have you experienced bad consequences, really bad consequences, after misjudging a situation?
After a ‘doesn’t matter’ uttered nonchalantly?

There are no facts, only interpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m afraid the political world wasn’t where this intellectual leprosy had originally came from.
The political world was only the place where this disease had become ‘viral’.
Where this manner of (not) thinking had been weaponized!

Its origin can be traced back to our intellectual arrogance.
To our conviction that ‘I can be right on my own’. Without any ‘input’ from the outside…
Even in spite of whatever information might reach me from ‘outside’, if that information doesn’t fit my already held convictions. My ideology….

In fact, this belief – ‘I’m entitled to my own convictions’ – is exactly what people on both sides of the divide have in common. Intellectually speaking!
A shared disease… a virus infecting indiscriminately…

What are the errors of Marxism?

Marxism is an ideology.
Ideologies don’t have errors, they are thought templates used to evaluate a certain situation and to determine what to do next. Ideologies are tools.
They can be used properly or improperly.
Sometimes, the best use for certain tools is to be left alone. Particularly when you understand they are useless. If you understand they are useless…
Hence it’s not Marxism which is full of errors, it’s the Marxists who are barking up the wrong tree.

If you really need to put your finger on something, if you need to point out a culprit, I give you Marx.
Yes, Karl Marx is your man.
His analysis was brilliant. His diagnostic was spot on.
“Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”
His cure – the mandate he gave to the “bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”, and whom he called “communists” – was abysmal.

Which tells us Marx’s brilliant analysis wasn’t deep enough. He had noticed a series of facts but he had failed to notice the bigger picture. He had failed to see that all authoritarian regimes had failed. Under their own weight. Inevitably. And he had failed to notice that all democratic regimes had survived, and thrived, for as long as they had managed to preserve their democratic nature.

Hence the Marxist cure, communism, was stillborn.
A tool to be left alone.
The attempt to impose yet another authoritarian regime – with no matter how generous intentions – after the overwhelming experience of all other authoritarian regimes failing abysmally, is nothing but the compelling proof of social and historical blindness.

And why start this post by quoting Marx himself?
Because that quote is more than enough. More than enough proof for Marx being a bully.
It’s OK to ‘change the world’ if you own it. If it was yours…
But bearing in mind that there are other people living in the same world… wouldn’t it be nice to ask their opinion about the whole thing? About the changes you want to make? Which changes will dramatically affect the world they live in?!?
They are simpletons? Whose opinions are worthless? Because you said so yourself?

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

As I just said.
Bullly!!!

There is an old ‘rule’ which maintains that even a broken watch may be accurate.
From time to time, if it retains its arms…
Twice daily, to be precise!

Same thing is valid for people.
From time to time, each of us will utter something which actually makes sense!

Sort of, anyway…

The catch being that in order to ‘prove’ the temporary accuracy of the broken watch you need one in good working order. Or, alternatively, you need a good understanding of time.

Same thing with Peterson’s uttering.
On the face of it, the phrase is catchy.
In fact, it’s just as useful as a broken watch.
What solace will be felt by the victim of a tough tyrant when that person realizes that no tyrant, however tough, was ever capable of ‘achieving’ anything without the compliance of the weak? Without the compliance of those who had done, in their weakness, what the tyrant had told them to do…

So yes, broken watches are, sometime, accurate.
And yes, Petersen is right to tell us that both tough and weak people can wreak a lot of havoc.

But neither of these two pieces of trivia will be useful to us until we’ll understand it’s up to us to put them to good use. To understand the temporary nature of the accuracy displayed by the broken watch and the fact that no man, however tough, becomes really dangerous unless condoned, or even helped, by ultimately hapless weaklings.

The things we believe
are
what we have in common
with those who promote them.

Well, nobody ‘blindly’ beliefs anything published in the media!
We use our cognitive biases in order to do that.

The media publishes the things we like to hear.
To sell advertising space, to please their sponsors…
While those who actually do this, the journalists, appease their consciences with ‘we have to give them what they want’. ‘Cause we actually do ‘buy’ their stuff…

And we believe the things we read in the kind of press we ‘buy’ because we no longer bother to keep in check our cognitive biases!

Who has anything to gain? From this vicious circle spinning faster and faster?

Nobody, really!
But we all have something to lose.

Everything, actually!

When was the last time you met a dead person who regretted anything?

What’s wrong with them?
They know plenty and they have everything…
Yet they’re not even content, let alone happy!

The Universe has no other meaning
than that we attach to it.

How do we find that meaning? How do we make sense of things?

“The subjective and the objective,” writes the philosopher, (Schoppenhauer) “constitute no continuum, that which is immediately known is limited by the skin, or rather by the external end of the nerves which lead out from the cerebral system. Within lies a world of which we have no other knowledge than through pictures in our head.” Stephen S. Colvin, 1902

According to Schoppenhauer’s take on the matter, we make sense of the world by carefully (?) ruminating the “pictures in our head”. The information which has already reached our ‘inner forum’.
Which means that we should be very careful when letting something ‘in’!
When reading a text, for example…

‘You should follow science, not scientists. Because scientists can be sold.’

Logically speaking, the phrase makes a lot of sense. Right?

Practically… not so much.

Do we learn everything about medicine before taking the pill prescribed by the doctor? Simply because the doctor might have been sold to the big pharma?
Do we learn everything about microwaves before using a microwave oven? Simply because the physicist who had invented the thing might have been sold to the makers of household appliances?
Do we stop using planes because they are used to spray our skies?

Literary speaking, what do you make of “scientists can be sold to the highest bidder”?!?
Sold by whom? How can anybody sell a scientist?
I might understand the notion of a scientist being bought… of a scientist selling his soul, his scientific soul, to the highest bidder… but selling one… Is there a market for scientists?

only because it happens to resonate with something you are already inclined to believe.

‘Evolution is not about “the survival of the fittest”.
Evolution is about the demise of the unfit!’

What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr

It’s not ‘what doesn’t kill you’ which may make you stronger.
You are! That guy….

But only if you learn enough from the experience!