Archives for category: Psychology

“I have my values and I stand by them!”

September 13, 2016 //

That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

What would we be without ‘our values’?
How could we judge things/people and evaluate situations without being guided by them?

But what if the ‘objects of our judgement’ do not belong to the same value system as we do?

What then?

I’m writing this immediately after reading a FB post. A female teacher, who ‘tries to be vegan’, has rather abruptly informed one of her female students “I don’t eat animals”, right after she had finished boasting about hunting a deer with her father. The student’s face ‘fell of’ and the teacher was wondering whether the Principal will chastise her.

So.
Is ‘not eating animals’ a value?
What is a value, after all? And do we go on affirming our values on every occasion?

By Google-ing ‘value’ one gets “principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement of what is important in life.”they internalize their parents’ rules and values””
It seems that a value is something extremely personal, ‘one’s judgement of what is important in life’, but also something that is learned from somebody else, “they internalize their parents’ rules and values”…

In this situation it would it be safe to say that a value is something which is simultaneously considered important by both a group and the individual members of that group?

Doesn’t make much sense? Except from an ‘arithmetical’ point of view?

Well… Let me give you an example.
Europe used to be a Christian continent.
Not anymore. A considerable number of Europeans no longer belong to any church and a lot of them do not consider anymore that God is their Maker.
But, on the whole, most Europeans still consider Christianity to be a ‘value’. Because they understand the role played by Christianity in the development of humankind, because there still are a lot of people who share this faith… the really important thing here being that very few Europeans would purposefully deface a Christian symbol, even when/if nobody would ever find out who did it. And this is valid even for the majority of the hard-core atheists.
At the same time, very few Europeans would – even among the believers – dream of imposing their creed, by force, on other people.

So what is the real value here? ‘Faith in God’ or ‘Live and let live’?

Actually I’m convinced that there is a direct connection between these two.

The Old Testament teaches us that ‘God made Man in his own image.’
It is very simple to make another step forward and understand that those who had written this believed that all men (or at least all those who shared their values) were equals among them (simply because they had been cast in the same ‘mould’) and, at the same time, that each of them shared at least a spark of divinity (the mould having a divine origin).
Europeans shared this value for two millennia.
No wonder that at some point it had morphed into what we now call ‘the human rights’ – a very similar concept/value, which produces the same social consequences: ‘Live and let live’.

Then how come some of the Christians felt very comfortable when using the sword as an argument to convert ‘the pagans’ to the only ‘true religion’?

Well… an alternative definition for ‘value’ could be ‘a certain conviction, reached out rather as a consequence of a specific set of circumstances than as a rationally deliberated conclusion, and shared by the members of the group living under those circumstances’.
According to this hypothetical definition the functional role of a value would be to ‘make it easier’ for each of those people. The ‘shared’ value would constitute a communication medium among the members of the community and a standard/guide for each of the individuals.

The problem with all this, as proven all along the human history, being that from time to time people act as if ‘values’ are ‘castles to be defended’. Or even ‘banners which have to be implanted on conquered soil’. Remember the Christians who used the sword to baptize pagans? Or the pyre to cleanse the souls of the sinful witches and those of the wicked heretics?

What happened in those moments with ‘Live and let live’? What drove those people to forget that ‘the others’ were also made ‘in His image’?

Or, in our days, how come there are so many people who consider that it’s OK to practically insult others while professing their own ‘values’. Which are not so widely shared as they would like them to be.

The strangest thing of all being that this very insistence, which sometimes becomes bullying, constitutes one of the reasons for which some of those values have such a hard time being accepted by ‘the others’.

Tags values

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Psychology, religion, Rule of Law

Skills, Meta-skills and Proofs of Your Real Self

September 12, 2016 //

Plant and fungi simply exist.
Animals ‘perform’.

Basically the main difference between plants and animals is that while plants – and fungi, ‘digest’ parts of their environment, the animals actively search for food and perform other activities which help them survive or result in the individual performer experiencing ‘pleasure’.

Most animals, number-wise, behave as if they were pre-programed. They act ‘instinctively’. Almost plant-like, only enjoying a lot more physical freedom. A bed bug will move a lot more than the plant on your night-stand but that doesn’t mean the bed-bug is considerably more intelligent than the lavender which guards your sleep.

At least some of the animals can learn. Meaning that individuals can alter their behavior, consistently, to suit changes in their environment. As if the ‘programs’ that have been ‘hard wired’ in them allow the individual members some leeway. As if parts of those programs can be re-written, at will, by the individual members themselves. And they don’t even need a brain to do that. These kinds of animals seem to enjoy a different sort of liberty than the simple liberty of movement

As we climb higher and higher up the evolutionary tree we encounter ‘trainable’ animals.
Which can be ‘convinced’ to perform a certain skill. For instance Norman, a dog, who has been bribed/trained to ride a bike.

Animals who can be trained usually can also learn by themselves. Wolves, and dogs, learn how to hunt by watching their brethren while a simple slime, as we learned earlier, can learn how to deal with certain chemicals.

Men have taken this to the next level.

Animals, as opposed to plants, have a certain liberty. They can move. It’s exactly this liberty which sets the stage for their ability to be trained. By the environment – the wolf who doesn’t learn to hunt ends up hungry, or by a trainer – the dog who rides a bike gets tasty treats.

People, the human beings, enjoy an even wider liberty than the rest of the animals. Those who grow up surrounded by other human beings, of course.
The handful of individuals who had the misfortune to grow up lacking adequate attention from members of their own species had failed to develop a certain part of their mind, hence they remained prisoners, even after being ‘found’, in the ‘animal kingdom’.
It’s as if a certain ‘opportunity window’ has to be used before it inexorably closes, sometime between the 5-th and the 10-th anniversary.

If all goes well, human individuals are conditioned – first by training and later by learning – by those around them into something which is deemed to be the ‘acceptable behavior’, as per the social standards valid at that moment in time.
During this conditioning process most individuals also learn – mainly by trial and error, as opposed to ‘being trained into it’, how much individual freedom is included in those social standards.

At some point during this conditioning process, which actually never stops, the individual is considered ‘mature’ enough to be held fully responsible for his fate/actions.
This ‘moment’ has varied significantly during our history and it depended on many variables besides the obvious one – individual proficiency. Well… usually even that was measured indirectly, by considering the age of the individual.
And, for most of the time, Lady Luck has been the most important factor in determining how much freedom was going to be enjoyed by a certain individual. One could have been born a slave, a slave owner, a free person, a man, a woman, a serf, a landowner, in Europe, in sub-Saharan Africa during the TransAtlantic slave trade, in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in North Korea…

In each of these situations he had to learn, fast, a skill. In order to make himself useful enough to the rest of ‘his gang’ so that they would ‘make some room’ for him. So that he would be able to trade the results of his skillful work for the ‘resources’ he needed in order to survive or even to prosper.
In order to be efficient, one must also become ‘meta-skilled’. Being skilled, at anything, is almost never really useful if one doesn’t know when/how to use his skills.

And, on top of all this, one should also learn to what end to use his skills.
Choosing properly one’s goals – and being able to evaluate correctly what others do or promise to do, is important not only for each individual but also for those who had helped into his conditioning – if they are still around, for his other contemporaries and also for their children.

Let me give you an example.
Driving a car is a skill. A rather basic one. So basic that a monkey could do it.
Learning to refrain from driving when you are too tired, or in a blizzard if the vehicle is not suitable, is a meta-skill. Sometimes a lot more important than the mere ability to start a car and to drive it from A to B.
Volunteering to drive an unsuited vehicle trough a blizzard to save somebody’s life or refusing, despite being offered a huge bribe, to drive a lorry full of hazardous waste to an illegal dumping site is what gives the real measure of your true self.

And, also, how free was the society that helped in your ‘conditioning’.

Categories Choices we make, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, freedom, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

The “What” Question

September 8, 2016 //

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Donald Rumsfeld (b.1932)

“Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that [or “how”] they are, and of things that are not, that [or “how”] they are not.”

Protagoras of Abdera (c.485 – 415 BCE)

“Making (political) decisions requires judgement and skill. It should, Plato urges, be left to the experts.”

Plato (c.425 – 348/347 BCE, ‘translated’ by Johnatan Wolff in
An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 2006)

“The Prime Mover causes the movement of other things, not as an efficient cause, but as a final cause. In other words, it does not start off the movement by giving it some kind of push, but it is the purpose, or end, or the teleology, of the movement. This is important for Aristotle, because he thought that an effective cause, giving a push, would be affected itself by the act of pushing. Aristotle believed the prime mover causes things to move by attraction in much the same way that a saucer of milk attracts a cat. The milk attracts the cat but cannot be said to be changed in the process! “

Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE)

“Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the Earth”

Archimedes (c.287 – 212 BCE)

“For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action”

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727)

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form”

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

“Einstein deduced that there is no fixed frame of reference in the universe. Everything is moving relative to everything else….
… space has three dimensions, and the fourth dimension is time.
Space-time can be thought as a grid or fabric. The presence of mass distorts space-time.”

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

“”Heidegger’s analysis of Plato attempts to show that a transformation occurs in the nature of truth in Plato’s philosophy, as a consequence of which Being is subordinated to the correct perception of beings. This subordination, Heidegger maintains, characterizes the history of Western philosophy as metaphysics.
The allegory of the cave is, for Heidegger, an illustration of the nature and process of paideia. At each level of ascent — within the cave to the light, and out of the cave to the sun — the individual experiences a painful blinding. Each stage requires an adjustment and transformation in vision. This transformation in vision expresses the turning of the soul from what is disclosed in one region to what is disclosed within another. This is paideia, according to Heidegger. The relationship of paideia, in this new sense, to alétheia is not apparent because, as Heidegger sees it, we have not only misunderstood the nature of education but, more importantly, have misconceived the nature of alétheia by conceiving it as “truth.” If paideia is a transition from one abode to another, affected by the soul’s receptivity to what is disclosed within each region, then alétheia is disclosure itself: “At first truth meant what was wrested from a concealment. Truth, then, is just such a perpetual wresting-away in this manner of uncovering.
Heidegger indicates that what “truth” means is not so much a correspondence as it is a disclosure.”

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

“The depth of the uncertainty principle is realized when we ask the question; is our knowledge of reality unlimited? The answer is no, because the uncertainty principle states that there is a built-in uncertainty, indeterminacy, unpredictability to Nature.“

Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976)

“Contrary to the tenets of classical economics, Simon maintained that individuals do not seek to maximise their benefit from a particular course of action (since they cannot assimilate and digest all the information that would be needed to do such a thing). Not only can they not get access to all the information required, but even if they could, their minds would be unable to process it properly. The human mind necessarily restricts itself. It is, as Simon put it, bounded by “cognitive limits”.

Herbert Simon (1916-2001)

‘Evolution is not as much about the survival of the fittest as it is about the demise of the unfit’

Ernst Mayr, (1904 – 2005, What Evolution Is)

“We human beings can reflect on ourselves, on what we do as well as on what we do not do, on what we imagine and on what we do not imagine, that is, we are self-conscious beings. Yet, how do we do this has been, and still is a mystery for many philosophers, scientists, and mystics that reflect on the matter. So, the search for an explanation continues, with some people hoping to Þnd some unique entity, different from what we connote or intend to connote as we speak of our self, that by itself may provide us (that which we are without it?) with this ability. Others look for some property of the operation of our brain that realises in us the ability that we call our self-consciousness. The old dilemma entailed in these and other different attitudes can be stated as follows: Is our operation as self-conscious beings a property of our brain, the gift of some external agent, or does it consist in some particular manner of our operation as organisms in our interactions?”

Humberto Maturana (b. 1928)

” “Consider a turkey that is fed every day,” Taleb writes. “Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say.

“On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.” “

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960)

It seems rather obvious that humankind has ‘consistently’ oscillated between two opposing views on things.

Some of us are convinced that the (whole) truth can be achieved (and that ‘they’ had already done that) while others have reasons to believe that while ‘individual efforts’ are indeed the source of everything that exists, the final results of those efforts are always being shaped/conditioned/reacted to by the medium where they are exerted and by those who bear the consequences.

Coming back to Rumsfeld’s words it seems that the most important (dangerous?) category is, contrary to our first impression, the (presumptive) ‘known – known’.
We cannot do anything about the unknown-unknowns, except for preparing ourselves in a ‘general manner’, and we can always ‘dig up’ something fresh about the known-unknowns but it seems that nothing can convince us that what we consider to be the known-known is but a thin layer of ice floating on a very deep lake.

So the real question that awaits our response is ‘What are we going to do, now that so many have told us what’s been going on?’

Tags Black Swan, Bounded rationality, Man as a measure of things

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Transparency

The phones of our wrath

September 8, 2016 //

Quite a lot of things are currently going on on our Earth.
Many of them have a planetary importance and some of them make it into the news bulletins.
The manner in which they are selected by the editors speaks volumes about our, collective, mind set.

So let’s see what BBC, one of the most important news outlets, deemed as being important enough to make the cut this early morning – September 8, 2016.

US elections, Technology, A peek into how the Chinese Government manages its country, A little ‘human touch’ – an Australian family caving in to mental illness, A short but heated discussion about ‘ugly buildings’…

An so on…

The Middle East Crises is buried somewhere in “More World News” but still only two clicks away from the main page while if you want to find out more about the “Worst SE Asia Haze for 20 Years” you have to specifically search for it despite BBC itself wondering, only three short days ago: “Could air pollution cause brain damage?”

OK, but what about those ‘damned phones’?

So don’t you find it rather strange that ‘Apple’s new IPhone ditches headphone socket‘ makes it to the ‘first page’?

Tags Apple, Headphone socket, IPhone, Panama Papers, Polution Brain Damage, Syrian Crises, Worst SE Asia Haze

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, yes but

Maslow, an Actualization…

August 24, 2016 //

Abraham Maslow, the initiator of ‘humanistic psychology’, has been described as being “concerned with questions such as, “Why don’t more people self-actualize if their basic needs are met?” and basically why don’t people try to reach their full potential.”

“To over simplify the matter somewhat it is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half. Perhaps this health psychology will give us more possibility for controlling and improving our lives and for making ourselves better people. Perhaps this will be more fruitful than asking “how to get unsick”. (A. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being,)

In a sense Maslow follows in the footsteps of J.J. Rousseau.

“Although, in this state [civil society], he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man” (J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract)

In more than one sense.

Both consider that society presents its members with almost endless opportunities for self em-betterment, both wonder how come so few make good use of those opportunities and both have been accused of things they have never done.

Rousseau has been falsely accused of being the father of the ‘Noble Sauvage’ – and the quote above proves his complete innocence, ‘stupid and unimaginative animals’ can be mistaken for ‘noble savages’ only by those ‘abused’ by their ‘new condition’ – while Maslow’s detractors – who have failed to scientifically validate all aspects of ‘the hierarchy of needs’ – are questioning the scientific nature of Maslow’s ideas instead of reconsidering their own positions. (The truth being that Maslow had stated upfront that “I yield to the temptation to present it (his notion of a ‘Psychology of Health’, which includes the concept of ‘self-actualization’) publicly even before it is checked and confirmed, and before it can be called reliable scientific knowledge“)

Unfortunately it is rather obvious that while Maslow has successfully detailed what it takes for an individual to ‘ripen’ into the situation of being able to ‘reconsider its own self’, he failed to reach as far as Rousseau was able to. While the latter deplored the fact that ‘the abuses of his new condition often degrade him below that which he left’ the first blindly entertained the notion that self-actualization is necessarily a positive process.

I’ll use only two examples to illustrate my theory, even if by doing so I’m presenting myself as a target for the ‘science-nazi’.
First take a glance at those who founded/were involved in running LTCM. All of them had very respectable careers behind them at that moment. Why did they feel the need to get involved in such a risky business? For those of you unfamiliar with the financial world LTCM was a hedge fund which had to be bailed out in 1998 after losing $4.6 billion, a huge amount of money for those times.
Then tell me what drove Bernard Madoff, an already very successful ‘operator’ in the financial market to transform the wealth management branch of his company into a huge Ponzi scheme that eventually lost some $18 billion of actual money ($65 billion if the fabricated gains are added to the total)? Not to mention the fact that he involved his family into the daily operation of his company, leading to his brother being sentenced to 10 years in prison and one of his sons committing suicide… – the other one died of lymphoma a few years after Madoff had been incarcerated.

Could it be that this ‘self-actualization’ business depends on two things, the character of the individual involved and the kind of interaction that exists between him and the community of which he is a member? Meaning that if the ties are weak the character of the individual becomes the dominant factor?

And since nobody’s perfect…

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” (Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear)

But also

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

I’ll end up saying that it’s not the governments that have a ‘recurring problem’ but the peoples themselves. By definition governments come and go, it’s the peoples that stay behind and must suffer the consequences of ‘self-actualizations’ went wrong.

Tags Bernie Madoff, J.J. Rousseau, LTCM, Maslow, Maslow's Pyramid, Noble Savage, Ponzi scheme, Psychology of Health, self actualization, Social contract, the Hierarchy of Needs

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, politics, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

Police state

August 22, 2016 //

Recent riots in the US and the need to respond in force to the ever growing number of terrorist acts happening in the Western Europe has prompted some to worry about the specter of a potential ‘police state’ that might be lurking somewhere in the future.

Those who have first-handedly witnessed what it means to live in a real police state have a dissenting view on this subject:

“I live in a bona fide, real world, living, breathing police state: the People’s Republic of China. I live, in short, in the real thing, not in the cartoonish caricature of a police state that people have in mind when they hear the term. . . . The role of the police in a police state isn’t to control citizens’ lives. That’s a myth that’s almost laughable. . . . The role of the police in a police state is to protect the power structure from change. That is it in its entirety. Anything which doesn’t endanger the powers that be is unimportant to the police. Anything which does endanger the powers that be is brutally suppressed. . . . I have more direct, personal freedoms here in China than I ever had in Canada. So do most Chinese people. The only freedom they (we) lack is the freedom to criticize the government in public. . . . A competent, stable, secure police state doesn’t need brutality to keep itself in power. It’s insecure states (of any kind!) that find the need to brutalize their citizens to ensure compliance.” Michael Richter courageously posting on his FB wall.

Having myself lived for 30 years in a real police state – one that was insecure enough to terrorize its citizens – I can vouch for what Michael Richter tells us.

On the other hand police, in every society, acts like an ‘immune system’. Its job is to maintain the status quo. Basically it tries to maintain the entire ‘organism’ in ‘working order’. And here come the differences.
If that society is a normal one the police tries to maintain an ‘unbiased’ order.
If the society itself is biased the police will favor one side of the society.
Those who are favored by the police will consider this to be ‘normal’. Those who feel the brunt of the police action will reach the conclusion that they live in a ‘police state’.

Evolutionary theory teaches us that living things are able to maintain, for quite long time, a certain level of in-balance. For instance, warm blooded animals are, for most of their lives, either hotter or colder than their environment. And yet they manage to survive.

If the balance is not tilted too much, in either direction.

Same thing with the ‘police state’.

Basically all societies are biased. And all police forces in the world have to guard an in-balance or other.

As I mentioned before, as long as that in-balance is manageable – and the population at large is OK with it – the police can do its job without stepping over too many toes.

But if the in-balance that the police has to maintain becomes unmanageable, more and more people will consider they live in a police state and, at a certain point, something will break. The people’s acceptance of the police, the police-men’s willingness to impose that in-balance over their fellow citizens or even both at the same time.

This is so obvious that even the Ancient Romans issued a stern warning on the subject.

In reality ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum’ doesn’t mean “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” but ‘Let justice be just, otherwise the heaven will fall upon your (collective) head’.

Tags Fiat justitia ruat caelum, Police state

Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

Delayed gratification?!?

August 8, 2016 //

At some point some of our ancestors figured that saving for tomorrow some of today’s bounty might increase the chances of survival for those who consistently practiced the habit.

Probably this happened in the temperate regions, where’s a marked difference between seasons and where the cool winters make it easier to store food.

And this is how thrift has become a commendable behavior.

Flash forward to the Enlightenment.

Drawing heavily from the Christian tradition prevalent in that cultural area – ‘God made Man in His own likeness’ – the ‘enlightened’ thinkers of the era determined that ‘Men were (created) equal’ – since all of them bore a certain likeness to the same standard.

Hence they must enjoy equal rights too. Including the right of pursuing happiness.

Go ahead. Click that link and read all about it. The guy writes a lot better than I’ll ever be able to. He even has an PhD on the subject.

The only problem is that he’s got it upside down. Using logic as a flash light to flush out happiness is like raping a woman in order to help her experience an orgasm.

But there’s another way to get there.

Csickszentmihalyi, who also has an PhD in psychology, noticed that people are a lot more likely to experience happiness by doing things and enjoying the results of their work than when trying to reach happiness ‘directly’. Even if he still uses the same term, “pursuit of happiness“, his approach is completely different from the one I mentioned first.

In this second scenario, happiness is no longer a goal per se but simply an indication that we are on the right track.

Towards what?

I simply don’t know.

I started with what our ancestors figured out. Imagine, for a moment, what those guys felt when a handful of them were gathered around a fire inside a cave, in the middle of February, munching on some fried meat that had been ‘preserved’ sometime in the autumn, specially when the north-easterly winds were howling outside. Was it happiness?

Again, I don’t know.
But please consider this: Did those guys stash wood, smoke hams and gather berries all autumn so that they might enjoy some moments of happiness in February or they did it in an attempt to survive the winter?

So why do we keep speaking about ‘gratification‘?
What’s the real difference between ‘instant’ and ‘delayed’ gratification? As long as we continue to see it as ‘the ultimate goal’?
A junkie who stretches his stash of dope for longer is any wiser than his mate who ‘enjoys’ his in one go?

Tags Delayed gratification, Pursuit of Happiness, Steve Jobs

Categories Choices we make, Frames of mind, human rights, limited rationality, Psychology, religion, Trust

The Past. Resource, ballast or both at the same time?

August 2, 2016 //

Funny, isn’t it?

Or yet another reminder that constantly cracking jokes about everything and everybody is not exactly the best thing to do… Let’s compare the relative importance of the British Empire during Shaw’s coming of age – the period when he developed his habit of cracking jokes about everything, no matter how serious the subject, with the fact that Scotland is seriously planning a second independence referendum.

Or let me remind you of another Brit who enjoys cracking annoying jokes:

Not funny anymore?

OK, let me try another tack.

What if

Could it be that the problem resides with us?

That this is basically a matter of what we do with whatever (history) has been passed to us by our forefathers? That what has been passed to us does have its own importance but that we can’t do very much about it?
History can only be rewritten but never changed…
We, on the other hand, can and should learn to deal with the dynamics of this world.

How come ‘those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it’?

Could it be that some of the ‘students of history’ are doing something wrong?
Misunderstand the very lessons they try to impose on the others?

Cracking annoying jokes about the matters at hand instead of honestly helping others to reach intellectual autonomy and then respectfully allowing them to develop their own interpretations of things?

Tags Collapsing empires, Goerge Bernard Show, history, Mistakes, Nigel Farage

Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, democracy, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

The Lesser Evil

August 1, 2016 //

I hear a lot of people discussing about the need to choose ‘the lesser evil’.

Otherwise the ‘greater evil will prevail’ they warn us.

I’m afraid that those who fall into this trap actually validate the idea that ‘evil is acceptable’.

Every time this subject comes up I keep remembering the joke about an older man asking a young lady:

‘Would you sleep with me if I gave you a million bucks?’.

‘Well, I’m not that kind of girl… but you know, that’s an awful lot of money… I could help my old parents… I could go back to school… OK…”

‘But what if I gave you $100?’

‘I told you I’m not a hooker!’

‘That’s already been settled. All that’s left for us to do now is to negotiate the price.’

Same thing with ‘choosing the lesser evil’. Once you’ve accepted that evil is inevitable … you’re sure to get some. And keep getting it until you quit playing their game.

That doesn’t mean we schould quit voting all together. It would send the wrong message. Even if you don’t go to the voting booth because you are disgusted by the available options the ‘analysts’ interpret your stance as ‘they’re so despondent that they don’t care anymore about their own fate. They they don’t have enough energy left in them to protest so no need to change anything. Or, maybe, things might be allowed to become even a little worse. For them, of course.’

What we need to do is vote what we really like, even if that candidate doesn’t stand the slightest chance. This way the intention of the voter is absolutely clear – ‘I want exactly this’.
If there is no acceptable option, we can always check the ‘non of the above’ box – if available – or take the necessary steps to annul your vote – the specifics depend on local rules and regulations. Again, this sends a rather clear message. ‘I refuse to play into your hands and accept that evil is inevitable’.

Tags the lesser evil

Categories Bancuri, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, The world as described in jokes, Trust

Bullshit

July 30, 2016 //

I’m not a Trump fan. How could I be? Just look at his face!

On the other hand….

“I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” Abraham Kaplan

Or, in this case, convince a journalist of something and he will ‘dress’ the facts to fit his new conviction.

As I said before, I don’t like Trump.
If I didn’t have a lot of trust in the overall resilience of the American democratic system I would be scouring for a big enough rock to hide behind if/when he might ascend to power.
Unfortunately the present most likely alternative isn’t any better.

But that’s another topic.

Let me go back to the present one.

What we have here is a news/opinion outlet which has a clear political option.
OK, I can live with that. I have some opinions of my own and I love to argue and defend them. In private as well as in public.

But I do believe that the quality of the arguments used in a debate are of paramount importance.

Let me analyze the four I mentioned above.

“Within 20 seconds at a press conference on Wednesday, actual Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went from suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin had once called President Barack Obama the n-word to saying he hopes Putin likes him.”

The apparent implication here being that Trump has trouble maintaining logical consistency inside a rather short discourse and that he is rather gullible – “For the record, there is literally zero evidence that Putin ever called Obama the n-word. It’s hard to say where Trump got this idea, but he has a long history of naively restating things he heard from one person — even random people on Twitter.”

Hard to argue against this, specially since there is ample video testimony that he really said it.

Well… after actually hearing him, things are not so clear anymore.

“Putin has said things over the last year that are really bad things. He mentioned the n-word one time,” Trump said from his resort in Doral, Florida.
“I was shocked to hear him mention the n-word. You know what the n-word is, right?” Trump continued. “He has a total lack of respect for President Obama.”
Putin doesn’t like Obama, Trump told reporters.
“I think he’s going to respect your president if I’m elected, and I hope he likes me,” Trump said.
Earlier in the news conference, Trump claimed he had never met the Russian leader.”

Not a trace of either ‘gullibility’ nor of any logical fracture here. So why not call Trump for what he really is – a callous manipulator – instead of using convoluted makeshift allegations?

Absolutely impossible not to agree with everything written here, right?
No matter what side any of us belongs to…but wait!

“The Democratic Party’s convention was a normal political party’s convention. …”
“The Republican Party’s convention was not a normal political party’s convention….”

A new cleavage in American politics: normal versus abnormal

America’s main political cleavage is between the Democratic and Republican parties. That split has meant different things at different times, but in recent decades it primarily tracks an ideological disagreement: Democrats are the party of liberal policies; Republicans are the party of conservative policies.

But in this year’s presidential election, the difference is more fundamental than that: The Democratic Party is a normal political party that has nominated a normal presidential candidate, and the Republican Party has become an abnormal political party that has nominated an abnormal presidential candidate.

No, I’m not going to take sides here. Not only because I’m not an American citizen so I’m not entitled to vote. But simply because Democracy relies mostly on mutual respect. You cannot refuse to the other party the very right to exist yet still call yourself a democrat. Pretending that your opponent is ‘abnormal’ means that you’re convinced that your opponent should not exist at all.

The way I see it ‘America’s main political cleavage is indeed between normal versus abnormal’ only it seems that both the Democratic and Republican conventions, if not the parties themselves, belong to the realm of the ‘abnormal’.

But wait, things are getting even more juicier.

When women speak, people tend to mentally turn up the volume

Women, and women leaders in particular, often get criticized more for how they say something than for what they actually say. They have to walk a difficult line of being assertive but not too aggressive, likable but not too much of a pushover.

Even though women are interrupted more often and talk less than men, people still think women talk more. People get annoyed by verbal tics like “vocal fry” and “upspeak” when women use them, but often don’t even notice it when men do.

The same mental amplification process makes people see an assertive woman as “aggressive,” which gets in the way of women’s personal and professional advancement. Women are much more likely to be perceived as “abrasive” and get negative performance reviews as a result — which puts them in a double bind when they try to “lean in” and assertively negotiate salaries.

These kinds of implicit biases are sexist, but having them doesn’t make someone “a sexist” — or if it does, it makes all of us sexists. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or whether you are a man or a woman; everyone has some implicit biases against women.

And that may be one reason why this is the first time a woman has ever won a major party’s nomination.

OK, so what should people do? Vote for Hillary Clinton simply because she’s a woman?

And no, I don’t have any implicit biases against anybody. I cannot vouch for anybody else but I cannot see myself as ‘abnormal’ so I expect there are others in my situation.
Hence I strongly believe that candidates should be evalued ‘all around’, without any biases based on their gender.

Or race.
Hey Trump, this one is specially for you.

I’m afraid that Dara Lind, the author of the article I just quoted above, has got her ‘butterfly’ wrong.
It’s not Obama that inadvertently caused any hurricane.
Do you remember the intensity of the birther campaign that had swept across America both before and after Obama was elected President?

And while it’s clear that Trump was one of the most vocal ‘birthers’ do you know who started the whole thing?

“You know who started the birther movement? Do you know who questioned his birth certificate, one of the first?” Trump asked.

“Hillary Clinton, she’s the one who started it. She started it years before it was brought up by me.”

Trump said he no longer talks about the issue because it always breeds controversy but promised to “raise it against” Clinton in a general election.

OK, we don’t have to take Trump’s word on this, even if he’s quite an authority on the subject – given his passion about the issue.

In a March 2008 interview with “60 Minutes,” Clinton said she took then-Sen. Obama’s word that he was not a Muslim, but when pressed if she believed he was, she replied, “No. No, there is nothing to base that on — as far as I know.”

What we see in 2008 from Clinton is a subtle stoking of questions about Obama’s identity, but she never went as far as Donald Trump did in 2011 in an interview with Fox News.

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that,” said Trump in the 2011 interview.

Bottom line: Clinton stoked questions about Obama’s identity. But Clinton herself never questioned Obama’s birth certificate.

The last quote is from an article published on the CNN site. Click on it if you want more specifics.

OK, so where does all these leave us?

Scratching our heads while trying to figure out what went wrong around the ‘deep well of anxiety about America losing its culture and values’?

Or rather staring at those who drew from deep within this well and used the proceedings to stoke people’s emotions in order manipulate them? One way or the other?

Trump had been toying with a run for president for decades. And while some of his policy stances have definitely shifted (to say the least) since then, his history as a racial provocateur goes back decades.

It seems the he wasn’t the only one. Wannabe presidential candidate and ‘racial provocateur’.

So why keep on hoping that by choosing the ‘lesser evil’ we’ll ever reach the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’?

However, the sad news is this my friends — your party isn’t going to change just because you stick around. By giving them your time, talent, money, intellect and faith, you allow them to continue to abuse you. Like an alcoholic parent, they’re certainly not going to change because you hope they will. Sometimes, it’s just best to leave and go out on your own.

Why keep on trying to manipulate people one way or another instead of finally calling both ’emperors’ for what they are?

Tags Barack Obama, birther movement, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the n-word, Trumpism, What goes around comes around

Categories Choices we make, democracy, Frames of mind, gender roles, limited rationality, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

A new cleavage in American politics: normal versus abnormal

When women speak, people tend to mentally turn up the volume

Share this: