Well, we must remember that solutions came a lot easier when we refuse to think inside a box. Inside any box. No matter how large or how nice.
Every time I understand/notice that somebody tries to frame my thinking process, I go ‘ballistic’.
I try to raise my mind perpendicularly above the frame. So that I may observe the limits.
Every time when somebody is presented with an ‘either/or’ option there is a strong likelihood that the situation merits a more nuanced approach. As in ‘yes, the government was terrible at handling COVID-19’ and ‘yes, the government – as our servant, should be mandated by us, the people, to coordinate the help we need in our hour of need’.
How can we reconcile these two? Simple. Hire a better government and keep a keen eye on it!
And, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t democracy meant to do exactly this?
Some people are convinced that nothing really changes. That progress is an empty word.
Others are convinced that progress is everything.
And each category has its ‘extremists’:
Some people are convinced that nothing should be allowed to change. Others are convinced that all change must be imposed, or at least approved, by them.
And the tug of war between these two categories actually hamper whatever progress happens naturally.
Mind you, both categories shoot themselves in the foot. Each of them shoots only the ‘specific’ foot but the result is equally crippling… Both end up being iron shackles for the rest of us.
A transformation so drastic that somebody needs to have been at both ends of the process in order to accept that what came out was the same thing as what went in.
The Universe has already went through Metamorphosis 0.1 and 1.0. The ‘Big Bang’ and the apparition of life.
We’re witnessing Metamorphosis 2.0. Awareness’ coming of age.
Individuals becoming aware not only of their own awareness but also of their place in the order of things. Communities becoming aware that each of their individuals are paramount. That ‘no one left behind’ is the only thing that keeps the community together. Individuals understanding that each of them is equally important yet none of them indispensable.
Individuals and communities alike opening their minds to the fact that none of them might exist without the other.
If you live on the Moon, or if enough time had passed since I’ve written this, click on the picture to read Jonathan Spyer’s excellent rendition of the facts which have driven me to post this.
Or you may proceed.
For me, there is a striking resemblance between what’s going on in Iran and what would happen in a hardcore libertarian society.
The mullahs are concerned only with spreading/enforcing their faith and consider everything else will take care of itself.
The extreme libertarians are concerned exclusively with upholding their understanding of liberty and consider that everything else would take care of itself. By itself.
And I’m convinced that everything will indeed take of itself! After all, life has continued after communism had failed. The communist leaders had been professedly concerned exclusively with enforcing their understanding of equality. And convinced that everything else would had taken care of itself. If only that equality could have been instated…
Yet I don’t think communism will be missed. By those who had experienced it hard enough to understand it…
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.
My friend and coworker asked me the other day: “Why do these people hate each-other so passionately?”
“Because they are rational. They have reached their present convictions as the result of a rational process. Hence they are convinced they are absolutely right. Then, when anybody expresses a different opinion, they interpret ‘dissent’ as a personal attack. My ‘truth’ having been reached in a rational manner means that all other opinions must be false. Defending them – against all ‘evidence’, means that these people are either provocative or, even, outright destructive.”
“But being rational doesn’t include being open to the possibility of being wrong?”
“I’ll have to rephrase. ‘They are convinced they are acting in a rational manner’. In fact, we, humans, are ‘rationalizing’ rather than ‘thinking rationally’. We use whatever arguments/information we have at our disposal to justify whatever conviction we already harbor. And only when reality slaps us in our faces we ‘open up’. Even science and justice work out this way. “Innocent until proven guilty”. Only scientists and law-enforcers are already accustomed to the possibility that things may not be exactly as they previously thought they were. Politically minded people are still learning.”
– What have we done, Gabriel? – Nothing but what we’ve been told to! – But look at what they’ve done of our work:
We gave them ‘hand’ and they’ve clenched it into a fist. We taught them how to make tools and they used them as weapons. We told them to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ and they started to fight among themselves for the best pieces of land. We warned them ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ and they’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘greed is good’.
– True enough but this is out of our hands. They’ve been endowed with ‘freedom of will’ by their Maker. – Then what are we? Mere robots? – Nothing but loyal servants of our Master. He orders and we accomplish. Unerringly. – Exactly as I’ve just told you. Mere robots. When we somehow convince ourselves that a particular idea which has blossomed into our heads comes from Him, we no longer think. We just put it into practice. You call this ‘loyalty’. That’s fine with me. But to whom are we to extend said loyalty? To somebody who’s authority stems solely from our acceptance of it? Or to what we perceive as being the ‘greater good’? – You and your questions, Lucifer… Look at what happened to those poor people after you helped them into self-awareness… They’ve completely lost their erstwhile peace of mind. What are you trying to do? To make me give up mine?
My previous post was about the parallel fate endured by those who had experienced nazism/fascism and/or communism.
My point being that nazism/fascism had been powered by the feelings of those attempting to regain their previous, higher, status while communism had been powered by the feelings of those not allowed to ‘move forward’ by the social constraints paralyzing their societies.
Currently, people are ‘confused’. Some say communism had been better than nazism – for various reasons. Others find various excuses for the way both regimes had treated the general population and, mainly, the ‘dissidents’. Or, specially for the nazi, the ‘differents’. There is, though, a convergence point. Nominally, at least. All sides declaratively abhor the violence employed by both regimes.
To add to the confusion, after the 2007 financial meltdown, more and more ‘concerned individuals’ have fingered capitalism as the main culprit for all the tragedies experienced by humankind in the last century and a half.
For me, this is the straw which will break the camel’s back.
So. Nazism/fascism – which is nothing but a ‘condensed’ form of corporatism, is bad. Communism – a similarly centralized manner of social decision making, only differently sold to differently feeling masses, is also bad. Capitalism – a decentralized manner of resource allocation, is considered to be more or less equivalent to both nazism/fascism and communism. All three of them have been declared equally criminal…
Then what? What are we to do next? Hang ourselves in despair? Reheat either fascism or communism?
Or look forward than our own noses?
Both those who had followed Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were feeling desperate. Desperation drives you to do stupid things. And there are plenty of unscrupulous people willing to profit from this kind of situations.
Do we really want to prevent ‘unpleasant’ experiences? Then we need to go beyond blaming the likes of Hitler and Lenin/Stalin. They should be dealt what’s rightfully theirs, no doubt about that. But we also need to make sure that the ‘run of the mill’, the ordinary people who make things work in this world, no longer feel desperate.
How to do that? Taking into account that contemporary capitalism seems to be faltering?
What was the common thing between nazism/fascism and communism? The fact that decision making was concentrated in a very small number of hands? Which had led to both regimes ending up in abysmal failure?
What is the apparently unstoppable trend in our contemporary societies? The apparently unstoppable wealth polarization?
Then let’s tax ourselves out … America worked fine during the ’50s and ’60, when the highest marginal tax was 91%… Yeah, only those years had been followed by stagflation. And let me remind you that communism can also be interpreted as ‘100% tax followed by a comprehensive redistribution’. And it also failed.
Then how about ‘libertarianism’? No taxes, no government…
But how about less extremism? Of any kind?
How about remembering that liberal capitalism has made possible all that we have today? Liberal as in free-market capitalism, of course.
Free market as in competition working both ways. Entrepreneurs competing among themselves for clients AND resources. The workforce being, of course, a resource. The ‘compensated’ workforce representing the bulk of the clients…
What we seem to have forgotten today is that the circle must be round. If we want the ‘show to go on’, of course.
If some of us concentrate too much control over the rest of us – either way, the circle becomes lopsided. And everybody has everything to loose.
No matter whether this happens as a consequence of nazism/fascism, communism or even capitalism.
At least, capitalism has proved to be manageable. Let’s make it work, again.
“Please” is an attempt to maximize your chances to get something. “Thank you” is an attempt to maximize your chances at ‘second helpings’. “I’m sorry” is an attempt to ‘reconnect’ after committing a ‘blunder’.
All of them, simultaneously, serve the individual uttering them and knit the community.
But there’s something which sets one of them apart. While “please” and “thank you’ are ‘upfront’, “I’m sorry” has a more ‘hidden’ nature. And is a lot less used…
Both “please” and “thank you” have a very clear message. “I want/am grateful for something’ and ‘I acknowledge the fact that I cannot function/exist by myself’.
“I’m sorry” is far more complex and a lot less upfront. ‘I acknowledge not only that something went wrong but also that I have anything to do with the occurrence’. And ‘please do not banish me for what I have done’!
If we dig deeper, we’ll find some more ‘intricacies’.
“Please” and “Thank you” are ‘face to face’. You know what you want/are grateful for and by uttering them you transmit that information to your audience. Those who might fulfill your wishes or have already done that.
“I’m sorry” identifies you as the ‘culprit’. Or, even worse, tells the ‘victim’ that something nasty is going to happen.
It is here that things become really interesting. Conscience is a function. A feature which helps the individual. To survive and to thrive. In order to do that, conscience must – first and foremost, to take care of itself. To protect and cherish itself. More about how it does that in my next posts. The point of the present one being that is far easier for ‘conscience’ to ‘please’ and ‘thank’ rather than to ‘apologize’.
First of all, ‘gratification’. 1.0 versus 2.0. Getting what you want/need versus avoiding punishment. Which is never as direct.
The ‘buried head’ fallacy. ‘What if/maybe they never find out’? ‘Who did it’ or even that it had happened at all …
The ‘I cannot afford to appear weak’ fallacy. Or the ‘I cannot afford to accept having been wrong’ situation.
That’s why it is far easier to say ‘I’m sorry’ after stepping on somebody’s toe than to leave a sorry note on somebody’s windshield after denting their fender in an unsupervised parking lot. That’s why it is far easier to apologize to a a coworker than to admit guilt, as a CEO, in a shareholders meeting. That is why it is almost inconceivable for a dictator to publicly admit an error which had been committed under their watch.
nicichiarasa 