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Depression

September 19, 2019 //
1

Laurie Santos – psychology and cognitive sciences professor at Yale, believes that ‘we really need to do something about it’.

” And I saw just students who were, you know, so depressed it was hard for them to get up in morning. I saw cases of students who were so anxious about their summer internships that they could barely function. And I thought, this is — first of all, this is what — not what I expected of college student life. You know, I remember college back when I was there in the ’90s as being relatively happy. And so, it was kind of striking. And the class came out of a goal that I had, which is that we need to do something about this as educators. We’re kind of like — we’re not in the position to really be teaching students if they’re in the midst of this mental health crisis. I think as professors we sometimes think we can teach students, you know, Chaucer and economics and things. But if the stats are right and 40 percent of them are too depressed to function and other two-thirds are so anxious that they can — you know, that they’re having panic attacks, you know, we really needed to do something about it. “

And why shouldn’t they be? Depressed and panicked, that is?

Not so long ago, universities were perceived as fountains of knowledge and dispensers of philosopher’s stones. Having a degree was one of the most coveted things in the world. And one of the most useful.

Nowadays?
Universities are described as the origin of evil.
“Just as Saudi-funded Salafist religious schools have radicalized large swaths of the Islamic world, American universities are radicalizing an increasingly large share of America.  This is aided by the fact that nearly 70% of kids now go to college, where most of them are taught not to think.“

That would explain the depression. But ‘panic attacks’?
Experienced by the young generation of the most civilized and affluent people in the whole world?
Well, just remember the financial burden students and their families have to shoulder…

So. Students are depressed and prone to panic attacks…
Which only proves that the die-hard ‘conservatives’ are right. Millennials and Generation Z are nothing but a bunch of sissies.

Yeah, right.
Only these two generations have grown under our watch.
They are our children. We raised them. We have built the world they have to cope with.

In fact, we are the ones who need to be depressed. And panicked.
Very soon we’ll need to retire. For no other reason than becoming too old to fend for ourselves.
We’ll actually need our arses to be wiped clean and our world to be managed by somebody else but us.

Who will step in our shoes?

Furthermore, what example are we offering the next generation?

Why would they care about us if we don’t care about them? Offering them an extremely expensive education isn’t a proper expression of our love…
Why would they care about us when we don’t care about our fellow human beings? Extremely expensive health care and unaffordable housing isn’t a proper expression of ‘love thy neighbor as you love yourself’.
Why would they care about us, their parents – after we will no longer be of any real use, when we don’t really care about our employees. About those who actually make things happen?
“Amazon goes further than gig economy companies such as Uber, which insist its drivers are independent contractors with no rights as employees. By contracting instead with third-party companies, which in turn employ drivers, Amazon divorces itself from the people delivering its packages. That means when things go wrong, as they often do under the intense pressure created by Amazon’s punishing targets — when workers are abused or underpaid, when overstretched delivery companies fall into bankruptcy, or when innocent people are killed or maimed by errant drivers — the system allows Amazon to wash its hands of any responsibility.“
You see, Jeff Bezos did a very good thing when maintaining that “Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.”
Only words without deeds… might mean that we, the eventually needy parents, might end up uncared for. Sweet-talked to the end but…

On the other hand, depression might be good. Evolutionary speaking, of course.
The depressed have less energy. Hence are unable to put in practice major mistakes. Except killing themselves, of course.
The depressed have a lot of time on their hands. Huge opportunity to think things over. To notice and understand the mistakes that led them here.

Those who will resist the urge to give up – either by actually killing themselves or by falling back into the old morass, will shape ‘tomorrow’.

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Categories altruism, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Castigat ridendo mores

August 20, 2019 //
0

“Do you know why I hate capitalists?

1. All they care about is money

2. They have all the money”

This is a bi-partisan joke. Some of the haves use it to demonstrate that money is the essence of modern life while the ‘lefties’ use it to demonstrate the ‘malign’ nature of capitalism.

Both sides are wrong.

According to Adam Smith, the market consists of many specialized economic actors who sell their wares/services. Thus helping each-other lead a better/simpler life than if each of them had to ‘do everything’. Furthermore, a free market is better than a ‘cornered’ one, simply because competition keeps everybody on their toes.
In this sense, a capitalist is a guy who organizes a group of synergically skilled operators in such a manner as to increase their aggregated efficiency.
In order for the market to remain free, a.k.a. efficient, there must continue to exist a certain degree of competition between the said capitalists. And for the whole thing to remain a market, each of the capitalists must remain but an actor, not become a dictator. A.k.a a monopolist.
Differently put, for the market to remain functionally free, capitalists should remain/must be kept level with the other ‘merchant-men’. The bakers sell their bread-making skills, the brewers their beer-making skills, the butchers their ability to carve carcasses while capitalists sell their ability to organize people. Their entrepreneurial skills.
OK, there is difference. But only in our heads. While each of the others use specialized tools – ovens, vats, knives, etc., capitalists use money. Yet another tool but one which seems familiar to all of us. But very few of us see money as a tool and even fewer accept that using money, a lot of it, implies a huge responsibility.  Hence the enormous misunderstanding. No reasonable human being – except for a carpenter, of course, would dream to amass a huge number of, say, hammers, but a majority of people are convinced that having a lot of money would make them happy.

And why did I say “both sides are wrong”?

Because real capitalists are focused on the needs of their business partners – a.k.a. ‘consumers’, not on their pockets/paychecks. Because real capitalists understand that sellers would go hungry if there was no money to buy their wares.
Because free market capitalists are focused on making money go round – and getting handsomely paid for this, instead of constantly attempting to hoard all the money in their grasp.

It’s not me who says so.
Jamie Dimon, Alex Gorsky, Tim Cook, Ray Dalio….

 

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Categories Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Money as goal, The kind of world we are building for our children

The gist.

August 8, 2019 //
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Decision is the frontier between action and understanding.

All frontiers are, in fact, links.

Present decisions set the stage where future will be played, just as past decisions have built the theater.
While we, “the people”, are the building actors. The script writers. And the spectators who will eventually bear the brunt.

 

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, teleology

Intelligence

July 19, 2019 //
0

Trial an error (motor, muscular, directly related to actions)

Emotional

Discursive

All three depend, evidently, on memory. Different kinds – evidently, again.

This is a stub.

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Categories Bounded rationality, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Stub, teleology, Trust

Reactive, Proactive, Teleological

June 16, 2019 //
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Three things have grabbed my attention this week.

Carrie Lam, the Cambridge educated Hong Kong’s top civil servant, whose career spans more than 40 years, who happens to be a devout Catholic, had tried to fast track legislation allowing the Hong Kong authorities to extradite people to mainland China.

More than a million of the 7.4 million inhabitants of Hong Kong have taken to the streets, in protest.

Across the Pacific Ocean, in Venezuela, a pregnant mother accompanied by her two small children, had joined other 31 people who attempted to flee their impoverished country. They had climbed aboard Ana Maria, a fishing boat which was supposed to take them to Trinidad but never made it across the 20 km wide stretch of treacherous water.

Maroly Bastardo, the Venezuelan mother, was trying to survive. Since it is harder and harder to find food in Venezuela – for themselves and for their children, more and more people attempt to leave the country. Which, despite having an immense natural wealth, is being led to disaster by a group of ultimately incompetent people.

The one million people protesting in Hong Kong have adopted another strategy. They attempt not only to survive, physically, but also to preserve their way of life. Their cherished way of life.

These two are relatively easy to figure out. It’s easy to understand the need to survive. Equally easy to understand is the determination of those who want to continue a lifestyle they enjoy.

But what drives the Carrie Lam’s and the Nicholas Maduro’s of this world?
OK, I might accept the idea that, somehow, each of them might have ‘lost it’.
But what about those around them? How come so many people still consider they can, somehow, contradict the entire human history?
‘This time will be different!” ” ‘This Reich’ will rule for one thousand years!”

Yeah, right…

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Rule of Law, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

From absolute to relative.

May 21, 2019 //
1

“A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

This was how the United States’ Supreme Court was reading the US Constitution in 1973.

Pro-lifers oppose this view. Their main argument being that life is sacred and needs to be protected. Period. For them, abortion equals infanticide. Plain murder.

What we have here is a clash of absolutes.
The absolute right to life and the absolute right to dispose of your own body.

The United States Supreme Court has solved the conundrum by setting a time frame. “until the fetus becomes viable”.
Pro-lifers propose another solution: “make abortion and attempted abortion felony offenses except in cases where abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother“. (Alabama’s HB314/2019)

Let’s see where lie the differences between Pro-Choice and Pro-Life.

Pro-Choice say that agency must be reserved for those who 1. are alive and 2. are directly implied in the matter.
Pro-Life extend the definition of ‘alive’ to cover everything they consider to be ‘living matter’ and thus take the final decision from those who are directly implied into the mater. And give it to those who have to decide the seriousness of the “health risk to the unborn child’s mother”.

In both cases the absolute becomes relative.
In the first case, the absolute becomes relative to the person directly involved in the matter.
In the second case, the absolute becomes relative to those powerful enough to insert themselves, and others, into the equation.

And both sides clamor they are acting in the name of individual liberty…

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, freedom, gender roles, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, religion, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

First generation

April 27, 2019 //
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While ‘fitting’ discount priced toilet paper into my new second hand car, something struck me.

DSC_6406

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.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Economy, In English, man as a measure for all things, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Why are we doing things like these to our fellow human beings?

April 27, 2019 //
0

“A district judge has ordered the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office to release property that deputies took during a child abuse investigation and kept after the charges were dropped.

In October, the District Attorney’s Office dismissed sexual assault charges against a nuclear weapons expert who formerly worked at Kirtland Air Force Base. But the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office didn’t release the man’s property, which included thousands of dollars of electronics and a draft of a book.”

 

“They kept the kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States.

This is according to a new report released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Inspector General, which finds that, since 2017, the Trump administration has separated thousands more children from their parents than it previously disclosed and that it tracked these kids in ad hoc, disparate databases, including Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Sharepoint accounts, further complicating the already tortured process of figuring out where those children are today.”

I have no first hand knowledge about any of these two separate ‘incidents’.
The first one might have been caused by a series of ‘misunderstandings’ while the second is only a portion of a hugely complex matter.

What really bothers me is what they have in common.

Both have been initiated by people belonging to/working for institutions put in place to protect the greater good of children. Children who are nothing but our future. Our only future.
Each of these ‘actions’ have been botched. By those who initiated them.
The institutions themselves had failed. To control the ‘runaway operators’ and to perform adequate ‘damage control’.

“Why are we doing things like these to our fellow human beings?”

Because we don’t consider them, in earnest, ‘our fellow human beings’?
For whatever reason?

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Categories arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, freedom, human rights, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Rule of Law, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Autonomous morality

April 15, 2019 //
1

“The theory that each person imposes the moral law on himself. It is opposed to heteronomous morality, which holds that the moral law is imposed from outside of man by another, and ultimately by the divine Other, who is God, which makes the moral law theonomous.“

I argued in my previous post that in a perfect world the simple fact that we consider ourselves to have been created, in his likeness, by the God we believe in, would have been enough to make us behave in a certain manner.

We don’t. Behave in that manner.

The world exists. And will continue to exist, regardless of whatever we might do in the foreseeable future. Maybe not the Earth as we know it but it’s rather unlikely that we’ll ever be able to destroy the entire world.
Here, on our home-planet, we’ve more or less soiled everything we’d come in contact with. Willingly or unwittingly.
Which suggests that the world might not be perfect but is more or less OK. And that it is us who haven’t yet risen to the occasion.

We may not have fully risen to the occasion, indeed, but we’ve managed to somehow survive. Until now, that is.
How was that possible, given our imperfect nature?

Was our behaviour shaped from outside as the heteronomous morality theory suggests? By (a) God, as the theonomous morality theory pretends?

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

What do we have here?
A couple of people, who are already able to speak, who cannot yet make the difference between good and evil but who can see that ‘the fruit of the tree is good for food’ and ‘desirable for gaining wisdom’.
Furthermore, the couple is not only able to communicate between the two of them, they – or, at least, one of them, are also capable to negotiate with ‘outside agents’.
And, in fact, it was a consequence of a ‘negotiation’ that they had learned to differentiate between good and evil.
Moving even closer to Godhood in the process: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

“So the Lord God banished him (them, actually) from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”

I must confess that things become more and more complicated instead of becoming clearer.
‘Moral law is imposed’…
Adam and Eve have learned the difference between good and evil as a consequence of ‘freely’ interacting with someone from ‘outside’ their ‘immediate community’.
And got punished for it. On a ‘technicality’!

What is moral in all this?
What are they to learn from this experience?
Since all that God had imposed on them was ‘punishment’, are they (we?!?) to understand that ‘moral law’ is equivalent with ‘gallows’?

In this setting, moral law is supposed to be learned exclusively through ‘trial and error’?
No ‘explanation’? No ‘prep school’?
Is this nothing but a form of ‘radical training’? Like that advertised by B.F. Skinner?
Not to mention that for some ‘sins’, the punishment is to be served ‘later’…

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Moral identity

April 14, 2019 //
1

“God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Hence all people, male and female, have been created equal. Simply because all of them have been cast in the same mould.
And all of them, male and female, harbor a spark of divinity. Simply because the mould into which all of them have been cast had been made “in the image of God”.

Simple logic would tell us that all people who believe mankind had been made in the image of God would behave in a certain manner.
Because of the reasons I mentioned above.
That kind of behavior had been called ‘ethical’ by well established thinkers. Plato, for instance.

“Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” “

.
.
.

“This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground”

Same simple logic I’ve invoked earlier tells me that God had created ‘the heavens and earth’ in two different stages. More or less like we do things.
First we think about the things we are going to do – ‘design them’ would be a more modern term, and then we put our thoughts into practice. ‘Execute’ our designs, according to the practical aspects which always limit our actions.

“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

The Bible itself seems to agree with me. When God finally decided to put into practice his idea of a man, he started with something he already had at his disposal. Just like we have to do whenever we attempt to accomplish anything.
“Dust from the ground”.
Man, ‘made in the image of God’, was fashioned from already available material, not from ‘thin air’.

Could this be the origin of man’s limitations?
His ‘earthly’ nature, no matter his divine likeliness?
Could this be the reason for God going back on his words?

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” “

What made God change his mind?
In Genesis 1 – the R&D phase?, he had planned a world where man was allowed to feed on everything under the sun while in Genesis 2 he had established rules about what Adam was allowed to eat and what not.
Furthermore, why make a ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ in the first place? If you were going to forbid your favorite pet from eating its fruit, under the most drastic penalty…

No!
This is not yet another half backed attempt to deny the existence of God under the pretext that the only source describing its existence is full of inconsistencies.
Pretending that God does not exist simply because those who tried to describe him had not been able – or willing ?, to present a more coherent image of him is equivalent to pretending that God exists simply because we haven’t found, yet, an exhaustive explanation for everything.

You ‘see’, the Bible, no matter how holly we might consider it to be, is nothing but an image of God. A Man made image of God.
A Man written image of God, to be more precise.

The fact that the Bible is chock-full of wisdom can not be denied.
Which fact remains true regardless of whether it had been written ‘under guidance’ or ‘on their own’ by a group of ‘free agents’. Or, even, by a combination of both.
Unfortunately, there is another fact which seemingly contradicts the first. The Bible had been used as pretext for horrible crimes. Committed by ‘over-zealous’ believers, by ruthless ‘self serving’ operators or by a strange combination of both.

In order to encompass the simultaneous existence of both aforementioned facts each of us must take a step back-wards.
Extract ourselves from the fry.

Each of us must start thinking for ourselves.

How to do that – become ‘independent’, and yet preserve our chances to survive? As in remain connected with the day to day, hard-core reality?

Stay tuned. That will be my next subject.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust
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