We’re in the middle of a crises. Some people believe the crises has been only triggered by the virus. And that it has been mainly caused by ‘globalization’.
I beg to differ. In part.
The crises was indeed triggered by the virus. But the fact that we are so fragile isn’t the consequence of globalization. Only by what we have done in the given circumstances.
It wasn’t globalization itself which had made us fragile. Globalization only extended the opportunity field we had at our disposal. It was our way of developing those opportunities which had made us fragile. We had chosen ‘financial efficiency’ over ‘resilience’. We had chosen to increase profit instead of making it ‘more and more sure’ that we’ll be able to survive. In a sense, we have been acting as if we’d lost touch with reality. With the hard reality….
There is nothing to suggest that we knew what we were doing. Then. But we won’t have any excuses left once that we will have reached the other side.
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.
How often do you hear this expression? Are you OK with it? Because you’ve grown accustomed with it or because you are OK with the idea of politics being a contest? A game to be won?
In a certain context, I’ve been asked which game is a more ‘fitting description’ of politics. Chess or Go?
Both being, as I’m sure you already know, strategic games where all ‘tactical’ information is above the board, where the scope is to ‘control the territory through the smart use of available resources’ and where neither of the competitors have any real idea of what their opponent might have in mind. Yes, there are rules and limitations. Of course. So each of them are able to divine a ‘probable course of action’ but …
Going back to politics, I’ll just quote myself:
“Politics like Go… very interesting question. Go is a game. Something to play with. And play is very important, indeed. Through play, we hone skills used in real life. When playing, it doesn’t matter whether you win or loose. There’s something to be learned in both situations. While in real life, loosing is not an option. In playing, all that matters is to participate. In life, all that matters is to survive. When playing, we improve our skills by competing against each-other. In life, we survive by helping each-other. In this sense, politics is an exercise of cooperation more than a competition. A process through which the whole community finds its way forward rather than a beauty pageant where the next beauty queen is nominated to carry the torch through the dark. For a while… The point being that all community/nations which had allowed personal interest – lust for wealth/power, to trump the collective need to survive have eventually collapsed. From Ancient Rome to Soviet Russia. This being where Marx was hugely mistaken. While he understood history as a succession of class struggles – to be ended by the mother of all dictatorships, in reality is was a continuous evolution/honing of cooperation. From slavery to feudalism and to democratic capitalism people learned to do more and more things together. The status of the individual – of all the individual members of any given society, gradually improved while the communities have become more resilient and more productive. And all attempts to revert to more ‘centralized’ alternatives – no matter how the ‘winners’ were supposed to be determined, have failed. All political and economical dictatorships – authoritarian-isms and monopolistic situations, have crumbled. Not before incurring a lot of pain to those who allowed them to happen, helas. Contestants and spectators alike.”
Now go fight for your favorite political figure. And allow hate to alter your perceptions.
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.”
After a while – if you live long enough, that is – you realize the available alternatives are only marginally different. Or you can choose solitude, of course…
And something else. Divorce, like marriage, cannot be done by yourself. Actually, it can. But it’s so ‘uncivilized’ that I don’t want to speak about that possibility.
Each of these episodes can be construed as an opportunity. To ‘leave’ or to evaluate what went wrong. And to reconsider the union, of course.
No ‘evaluation’ can guarantee success. But it’s a start.
‘Leaving’, on the other hand, creates a completely different situation. Those who choose to leave will, eventually, learn something. On their own skins, of course, but they did it to themselves. Specially if they made no serious effort to ‘evaluate’ first.
But what are the chances for the ‘left’ ones to learn anything? Specially since they are the ‘many’? Is it possible that they may find ‘comfort in numbers’? And consider the others were ‘the odd man out’?
Will they ‘evaluate’ on their own? Will they make a significant effort to understand what had driven the ‘others’ to leave?
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.
People may find themselves in three situations. ‘Coasting’, trying to climb back up to their former position or hitting a glass ceiling.
All societies – past, present and future, were, are and will forever be composed of various mixtures of ‘coasters’, ‘back climbers’ and ‘glass ceiling hitters’.
Please note that I’m dealing in self-referentials here. This is about how individual people describe themselves when speaking to themselves. The coasters enjoy the life they had designed/expected for themselves. The ‘back-climbers’ attempt to regain the position/status they believe it was rightfully theirs but had been robbed of in circumstances outside their control. The ‘glass ceiling hitters’ are… busy hitting the famous glass ceiling.
If a society is composed of a ‘healthy’ number of coasters combined with a manageable number of ‘back-climbers’/’glass ceiling hitters’ then the frustration felt by the latter – which tends to tear apart the social fabric, can be compensated by the sheer mass/inertia of the joy experienced by the former. Hence the society can be described as being ‘stable’.
Whenever the ‘back climbers’ or the ‘glass ceiling hitters’ get the upper hand, things start to unravel. Or to fall apart…
To understand what I’m driving at, please consider the pre-revolutionary Russia and the German society after WWI.
Russia was an extremely hierarchical social organism. The birth-place was ‘definitive’. And most of them led to very unpleasant lives. The vast majority of the population, from muzhiks to intelligentsia, could not break through the glass ceilings allocated to each of them, at birth.
The defeated German population had found itself in a very unpleasant situation. After having been told they had been instrumental in preserving order in Europe – as the back bone of the army who had defeated Napoleon Bonaparte and kept in check Napoleon III, they found themselves at the receiving end of history… After their fathers had witnessed the Parisians eating their zoo animals during the 1870 siege, the Germans were reduced to hunting food scraps themselves.
Hence the difference between communism and nazism. Both equally authoritarian in nature, each of them springs from completely different social circumstances. Which explains why ‘progressives’ have such a high tolerance for communism…
While the ‘back climbers’ attempt only to reinstate the order they were accustomed to – order which has already been proven dysfunctional by what had happened, the ‘glass ceiling breakers’ are always attempting to open new roads. Very enticing from the ‘progressive’ point of view…
Fact is that both communism and nazism/fascism are artificial. Figments of frustrated intellectual imagination. Both ideologies have been put together by thinkers and only followed by ordinary, desperate people.
The words, attributed to John Swindon by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais were supposedly uttered sometimes in 1880.
Nowadays, back in 2019, more and more people blame the MSM – main street media, for the sorry state the contemporary society finds itself in. In fact, those who consider the media to be the source of all evil have been numerous, and focused, enough to elect somebody from their ranks to the highest office in Washington…
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naive enough to pretend that journalism is any different from any other human activity.
And this is exactly my point. Journalists are humans. Like all of us. There is no way that they’ll behave any different than the rest of us. The day to day practice provides ample proof that far too many of us currently “are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes”. Sometimes even without being aware of it… but that is another issue. While it is true that too many of the journalists function as “intellectual prostitutes”, the same thing is valid for the members of too many other professions.
Then why do we – all of ‘us’, demand that journalists behave any differently from the rest of us? Why do we accuse them for not being saints when we are sinners ourselves? Our sins are lighter? Have less impact?
Are we so thick in our vehemence against journalists that we are deaf to Swindon’s real message?
Wilhelm von Humboldt had initiated a current of thinking, linguistic relativity, which posits that the language used in a cultural space is a reflection of the ideas populating that space. And that there is a strong link between the workings of that language and the manner of reasoning favored by those who use it.
‘Dull as fuck’ is a perfect example.
Nowadays ‘conventional’ fuck is considered to be boring.
We’ve arrived to need all kinds of ‘gadgets’ and a cornucopia of titillation.
nicichiarasa 