As usual, Chomsky is only half-right.
Opportunities shouldn’t be provided. Period!
In fact, nobody should be able to control/provide sizable amounts of opportunity!
On the other hand, making it so that only a small number of people enjoy all the opportunities in the world is, indeed, criminal.
Unsustainable for the longer time frame, actually!
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate
their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
I have spent the first 30 years of my life under communist rule.
Under a communist yoke, actually.
I have witnessed Trump being elected President of the United States.
Thrown out by popular vote.
Then I watched Mike Pence being spirited away by the Secret Service. Some of those convinced by Trump’s Big Lie were chasing the Vice President inside the Capitol in an attempt to…
The US Supreme Court reversed Roe vs Wade.
Prigozhin, also known as Putin’s chef – and lately the mastermind behind PMC Wagner – had become so pissed that organized a field trip. Then turned his troops around and went to Belarus.
What’s going on here?!?
The world has become a battle-field.
A political battle-field where ‘right’ and ‘left’ fight for control.
Both sides oblivious to the fact that politics is, or more exactly ‘should be’, about solving people’s problems.
Given my experience – half a life spent under communist yoke – people expect me to root for the right side of the political spectrum. Which I do.
But I’m also fully aware that the left would have had no chance, absolutely no chance at all, if those on the right had been just a tad more considerate.
And here’s the catch.
There’s no such thing as a good left but there are a good right and a bad right.
The bad thing about the left – about the entire left – is the fact they ‘know better’. All of them. The left is choke full of solutions. Whenever somebody says ‘I noticed there’s a problem with… What are your thoughts about this subject?’ somebody from the left will surely grab the opportunity: ‘we’ve already told you that this and that had to be done a long time ago in order to solve this thing before it even happened’!
The bad thing about the right, the militant portion of the modern right, is that they’ve become just like their sworn enemies. They’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and that’s what they did. They joined the left in battle. Using the very tools they have borrowed from the left and adopting the very same attitude.
The bad kind of right are also convinced that ‘they know better’. That you have to be a moron in order to be a ‘liberal’. Or, at least, a ‘greenhorn’. “If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain”.
In fact, it’s exactly this infatuation with their own ‘brains’ which is the worst thing about the left. And about the bad right.
I see no difference between Marx’s “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” and Trump’s ‘truthful hyperbole’.
You see, Trump isn’t a self made man, as he pretends to be.
He would have never become what he is today if Tony Schwartz, a liberal, hadn’t ghostwritten the Art of the Deal.
Furthermore, Trump would have never become the 45th President of the United States of America without the support of the ‘activist republicans’. The ones convinced that Roe vs Wade must be reversed. At all costs.
The ones convinced, just like the ‘liberals’ are, that they ‘know better’.
And, by the way, this is a fake.
Something that Orwell would have agreed upon but was never actually written by him.
“As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”
James Allen
Sometime ago – more than 45 years, when food was still plentiful in communist Romania – I heard for the first time that ‘many people dig their graves with their teeth’.
I was too young to understand the deeper meaning of this. That sooner or later each of us will meet the consequences of our previous decisions.
15 years ago I read a book written when I was a toddler. Almost 60 years ago.
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann.
Nowadays, the social media is full of messages stating that the posters actually don’t care about what other people think of them.
What happened to “society is, in fact, habit”?
Have we become self-sufficient enough to live, each of us, on their own?
Really?
Do we really think like this?
Cocky enough to give the finger to everybody else?
Don’t we realize that we’re building a new pattern here? A new habit?
Will our children say that we’ve built the hell they’ll be living in by carelessly talking about it?
After all, the most dangerous enemy is that who worms its way from within.
Conceit cannot be survived!
“Propaganda machines give too much power to symbols;
they tell you the confederate flag is offensive!”
The fact that propaganda machines give too much power to symbols doesn’t mitigate the fact that some people find that flying the confederate flag is intended as an offense.
On the contrary, actually!
I’m convinced Putin still believes he might get away with it.
With whatever he wishes to accomplish…
Why?
Because he is convinced that the only thing which might prevent him from achieving his goal is ‘the West’.
You see, he is adamant that without the ‘western influence’ he would have imposed his will upon Ukraine a very long time ago. After all, he’d already done that in Russia, didn’t he?
And the West seems to be loosing its focus….
A lot of ‘distraction’. Trump is indicted on 37 counts, mainly for mishandling highly sensitive information, while Boris Johnson quits his MP chair claiming he is the victim. ‘I did mislead the Commons but I didn’t do it on purpose’.
According to Putin’s book, there’s no difference between him and these two guys. All three of them have nothing in their mind but their own interest. In this respect, Putin is absolutely right.
What he fails to realize is that Trump being indicted and Johnson being investigated by the Commons are signs of strength. The US and Britain, respectively, seem to have came back to their senses. And started cleaning up their act.
He, Putin, also fails to realize that the Western help might come in handy. For the Ukrainians.
But what keeps them fighting is their will. Their quest for freedom!
The very same thing had happened during WWII.
The West did carry huge amounts of weaponry to the former USSR. Which weapons had helped the Red Army resist – and then defeat – Hitler’s attempt to enlarge the German Lebensraum. But without the ordinary Russians putting up with the war… all western help would have been lost!
Same thing is happening under our own eyes. The arms beefing up Ukraine’s army might come in handy but it’s the Ukrainian determination to lead their own, independent, life which will eventually douse Putin’s ambition.
One final thing.
Nazi Germany had ultimately failed because it was an ‘imperium’. A socio-political arrangement where all decisions were made in a highly centralized manner. Where mistakes accumulated and eventually made it impossible for the arrangement to survive. Because unsolved past mistakes make it impossible for a system to evolve. To solve present day challenges.
Any resemblance to what’s going on in present day Russia is nothing but yet another proof that failing to understand history forces you to repeat the lesson.
For something to become a resource, it has to be identified first. As such…
Coming back to Kissinger, we need first to accept that he is the product of the world before him and one of the factors who continues to shape the current one.
We can learn from him – and coldly assess the present situation in order to avoid past mistakes going forward – or … we can let him win! And follow in his footsteps: Divide et impera, manipulate people into doing things against their own nature, despise everybody who thinks differently than what we consider to be right …
“To set a wolf to guard sheep“
Latin proverb.
A first glance, it doesn’t make much sense to put an oilman in charge of a COP conference.
Nothing more than setting a wolf to guard sheep, right?
On the other hand, shepherd dogs are nothing but ‘converted’ wolves.
Wolves who had somehow figured out that it’s more sustainable to live with the humans than in the wild.
Former wolves who had somehow figured out that’s far more sustainable – for them, to protect the sheep than to prey on them.
OK, the agent driving the process had been human. But the facts remain. Dogs have evolved from wolves.
What are we waiting for?
If the descendants of the wolves had been able to ‘cross over’, why so many reasonable people continue to believe that the ‘Global Warming’ is a hoax?
After all, we’re the ones supposed to be reasonable…
And the way I see it, it’s unreasonable to believe that burning fossil fuel accumulated during millions of years can be ‘sustainable’. Forget about ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak gas’ and remember how hot the Earth was when the first drop of fossil fuel had been set aside by Mother Nature.
‘Self awareness’ is how we call our ability to observe ourselves while observing others.
Humberto Maturana
First and foremost, existence is a concept.
Something our forefathers had coined. A mental construct built by talking about it.
Nothing existed before we saw it AND talked about it!
Think about the stars nobody knew about until we used Hubble to peek into the history of the Universe.
Think about the stars which ‘sit’ there and no man will ever see. Or otherwise perceive.
Think!
Do they, the stars, actually exist?
In the sense that has their being been ‘measured’ into existence by a self aware observer?
Has that observation been communicated by the observer to anybody else? Who had confirmed that that observation was anything more than a mere illusion?
You see, both actually – my rantings on your monitor – and figuratively, I don’t need to be told about the existence of the steps I have to climb up and down when I leave my bed each morning. On the other hand, I know that the Amazon exists because I’ve been told about it. Further more, I see for my self the steps in my house but I have a name for them – and I can write about them – because our forefathers had learned to speak. About the world they were discovering around themselves.
My point? We speak things into existence, not into being.
‘How about the things we talk about before we’ve ‘seen’ them? Neptune, the planet, had been ‘calculated’ before ‘seen’ and all mass manufactured things are first discussed and only then launched into production.
Which was the exact moment when each of them had started to exist?’
Good question!
I’m afraid I have no valid answer. This is a matter which will remain open for further debate!
After all, how else to justify our existence?
How else to find our own meaning? Other than by talking about it?
All people, men and women alike, are born, nursed and initially educated by their mothers.
By their mothers, inexorably women!
Some of the feminists, mostly women, act as if they want to exact revenge over their former ‘masters’.
Over men. Whom they perceive as oppressors.
Most of the feminists, from both genders, believe that women should be equal to men. That they are not yet so and that this is the most important problem which has to be solved in order for mankind (?!?) to go forward.
Being raised under communist rule – where women had been put to work, hence granted a lot of ‘equal rights’ – by a very ‘progressive’ pair of women – mom and grandmother – I grew up having the impression that men and women considered themselves partners. That being how my father and mother treated each-other.
I used scare-marks around progressive because neither my mother nor my maternal grand-mother considered themselves as such. Only behaved in that manner. Which I grew up considering to be normal.
Illusions, like always, end up being shredded.
Very soon I learned that not all people had been born equal.
And that I had been dealt ‘the better hand’…
So I didn’t waste any more time/energy to consider the matter!
For 40 or so years…
This is not the good moment to delve into details.
Enough for me to say that my quest – to understand as many as possible of the consequences ‘inflicted’ by the limited nature of our consciousness – led me to feminism. To ‘feminism’ seen as a social phenomenon.
Already convinced – since early childhood, conviction beefed up by the relation built in concert with my wife, that men and women are equal partners in the adventure called life, I was confronted by a huge dilemma:
Why on Earth so many women raise their children – both future men and future women – in the conviction that men are entitled to be served and women are meant to indulge their wishes?!?
Is it an attitude imposed by the overbearing men?
Hence easy to unlearn?
Or is it an evolutionary thing?
Hence harder to leave behind…
I continue to be under the impression that my most important break-trough to-date is that each individual conscience is primordially concerned with its own survival. Not as much with its ‘physical’ survival as with the conservation of the good impression it has about itself. With maintaining its self-esteem!
For instance, this is the reason for so many of us having such a hard time when trying to ditch a bad habit! Because we have to admit first, before ourselves, that we’ve been wrong for so long! That we’ve been acting foolishly since adopting that habit.
Coming back to the main subject, who would like to be?
The proud mother of a highly successful man or the mother of a below average Joe?
Small wonder then that in the current cultural environment we continue to raise highly assertive men. And, sometimes, women.
On the other hand, if you’ve been a submissive woman all your life, how do you feel in the presence of assertive women? Uncomfortably? Even more so if the assertive woman happens to be your daughter?
So, could it be possible that we are stuck in the present situation because we’ve conditioned ourselves to over-value the glitzy part of what we call ‘success’?
And because we’ve not yet learned to forgive ourselves for past mistakes?
Ernst Mayr, an evolutionist, put it this way:
‘Evolution is no way about the survival of the fittest.
“Fittest” to what ?!? since evolution is about being able to cope with change…
In reality, evolution is about the demise of the unfit!’
Same here.
We can fight ourselves into the ground, chasing ‘success’.
Or we can thrive together.
As equal partners, complementing each = other.
nicichiarasa 