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We, the users, are the ones who make the difference.
Archives for category: Psychology
For some time I’ve been ‘wriggling’ my brain continuously yet I failed, as of now, to find the difference between those who ‘paint Islam using a big brush’:
and those who use a more subtle one to poke fun at Jews:
I only hope that people like Reza Aslan will go on explaining to us that ‘Islam is just a religion and like every other religion in the world it depends on what you bring into it”.:
and that those who ‘spread bullshit about religion’ will finally understand that they are not helping anybody. OK, they do increase their audience but at what price? Is it really worth it to pitch one community against another just in order to make ratings?
https://nicichiarasa.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/george-carlin-spreading-bullshit-about-religion/
This video is funny as hell and more than half true.
Unfortunately Carlin belongs to that group of people (religious as well as un and anti religious) that confuse ‘religion’ with those who ‘administer’ (use) religious passions of the people in order to reach their personal goals.
‘Religion’, per se, is nothing but a set of convictions held in common by the members of a community, convictions that have been accumulated in time and represent the affective memory of the community that partakes in those convictions.
‘People’, on the other hand, are individual members of the community who have been influenced all their lives by the afore mentioned convictions – regardless if a particular individual currently holds those convictions or not – and who lead their lives negotiating continuously inside their minds, consciously or unconsciously, about how to apply those convictions in their daily lives.
In this respect every ‘bullshit’ – perpetrated in the name of religion, against it or having nothing directly to do with it – is the ‘work’ of ‘people’ – who have ‘free will’ (= personal autonomy) – not the direct result of ‘religion’.
Christian teachers tell us that god works through man, never directly. Same thing applies to religion.
That’s why blaming ‘religion’ for anything is logically equivalent to blaming god for everything.
Not a very ‘atheist’ attitude, is it?
‘Selective focus’ is a technique used by skillful photographers to grab the attention of the viewer by opening the lens at its widest and focusing it on the most interesting part of the picture. This way everything else is left ‘out of focus’ and more or less blurry so the viewer concentrates his attention on the clear part it. Nowadays, when most pictures are taken using smartphones or pocket cameras this is no longer possible because the lenses in those cameras are too short for this technique to work. There are computer that can mimic this but it’s not the same thing.
The point is that if we are not really careful our attention can be grabbed by glitzy but insignificant aspects of the reality while the more mundane but infinitely more important ones remain hidden in full view.
Here for instance.
Frankly I don’t care about how they live, that doesn’t concern me. Not in the least.
The problem is that by being so few they induce a lot of fragility in society.
Empires and other totalitarian regimes fail inevitably because they are run by very few people while more democratic countries survive/thrive for longer periods of time because they make better use of whatever human potential they have.
By allowing more people to have their say democracies have a way bigger pool of potential solutions for the problems they have to face while totalitarian regimes have to make do with only the very few solutions envisaged by those who happen to be at the top when a particular problem has to be dealt with.
Humankind is a vast and extremely diverse collection of human individuals grouped in various ‘nations’.
Each of these nations have evolved in certain geographical and historical circumstances and, because of that, is different from all others.
Still, there is one thing all of them have in common, one thing that has happened, in various degrees, to all surviving nations.
Statistically, individual members of all nations have constantly grown more and more autonomous.
True, this was not a linear development. Actually it was not even consistent, from time to time some nations have reverted, for longer or shorter periods, to states where individual autonomy was curtailed but on the whole personal autonomy has constantly increased.
And another thing. Those instances when the ‘march’ towards more individual autonomy was halted or reversed coincided with historical hiccups: civil wars, economic hardships, natural disasters, external aggression… things like that. Never in the entire history of man has this process been halted without that stop being caused by some forceful event, just because an individual or a collection of individuals have decided so.
Franco transformed Spain into a dictatorship only after being helped by external military forces.
Hitler became ‘Fuehrer’ in the special set of circumstances created by the inept way in which the allies treated Germany after WWI combined with the Great Depression.
Lenin transformed Russia into the biggest gulag on Earth helped by circumstances produced by the same WWI while Mao rose to power in the aftermath of WWII.
In our days Putin has been able to tighten, again, the screws on Russia mainly because of the corruption and greed that sapped from within the Russian society while the ‘Western World’ has become, almost overnight and completely against the natural course of nature, an immense Big Brother set only after some nuts declared war on the civilized world under the pretext of Islam.
What is going on now in Hong Kong is a first. An entire community, and not a small or insignificant one, is having its freedoms curtailed simply because some people gathered around a table have decided so.
Karl Marx’s version or Max Weber’s?
“the difference between truth as the “unhiddenness of beings” and truth as the “correctness of propositions” (Martin Heidegger)
Only after reading (again) the Essence of Truth I started to grasp the huge mistake made by Marx and his followers.
His declared motives were ‘the emancipation of the oppressed’ and if we are to grasp his work we need to read him in this key.
Only this way I could finally understand why for him ‘capital’ means exclusively ‘trade-able wealth’, money or things easily measurable in monetary units.
Only this way I could finally understand why for him ‘capitalism’ was exclusively about personal profit and hence despicable.
All this had happened because Marx wasn’t really interested in understanding how capitalism works, what it means and how it generated a medium in which creative and hard working people could make better use of the available resources than in previous social settings.
Marx was a man of a mission (it’s not that clear for me if he considered himself a saint that was meant to free the working class, a con-man who swindled a lot of money from Engels under the pretext of helping the poor or both at the same time) and we need to accept that almost all he did write was dedicated to this mission of his, whatever that was.
On the other hand Max Weber was also a man of a mission only his was different from Marx’s.
What he set out to do was to understand the inner workings of capitalism, how it came about and what consequences it might have.
This is a brief excerpt from Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – retrieved, ironically, from an internet site run by “marxists”, http://www.marxists.org.
Weber is quoting here Benjamin Franklin in an attempt to make us understand what is the true spirit of capitalism.
At the first glance we might say it corresponds closely to what Marx had said about the subject – that it all boils down to money – only after further consideration it becomes apparent that while Marx had stopped there, at ‘money’, Weber and Franklin had seen way deeper than that.
Capitalism is not that much about mere money as it is about credit. Trust that is.
No one would extend credit without trust, no one would enter a contract without mutual trust and so on.
So what would it be? Which version of capitalism would you prefer?
The one in which we would strive to get hold of as much money as possible or the one in which each of us is held responsible by the others for his actions and holds those around him responsible for their actions – this being the only manner in which real trust can be established among us?
Please note that in reality these two sides of capitalism are like the two hands of a working man. For a short time one can get along with only one of them but no sane individual would prefer to live, and work, with only one hand, right?
Then how come our obsession about mere money has come to trump almost everything else?
So, what’s it gonna be?
Pursue your dreams no matter what?
Give up completely and join the ranks indiscriminately?
Use discretion and common sense, join your fellows in their efforts to bring about changes that will help the entire community, do your best to ‘make yourself a better human being’?
Some people find them both ‘stinky’, some-other ‘delicious’ but the fact of the matter is that both are essential.
No one can live in complete falsehood and it is extremely hard to put up a decent meal without using any onions.
There is more.
Truth, exactly like onions, comes in layers.
You peel one, think your knowledge has deepened, peel another one, then another one… and end up having nothing….
The onion is gone and if you dig deep enough into any problem you reach a level which seems incomprehensible for a rational mind – the only visible explanation being pure hazard, something we are not yet prepared to accept.
Not even one of the most gifted scientific minds: ““All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck” After he discovered that the world is made up of small bits and pieces (quanta) coming together, at first, in a purely haphazardous way, he still needs to find out what lies in between those bits and pieces. So strong that need that he had to come up with a ‘spiritual’ explanation if he couldn’t find a rational/scientific one that didn’t involve pure chance.
And the third thing that truth and onions have in common is man.
Or, more exactly, a self-conscious observer/operator to search for the truth while gorging on peeled onions.
Ce se intampla acum in spatiul politic, si nu doar la noi, nu mai este de mult democratie ci dominatia/manipularea gloatei.
Democratia autentica nu se rezuma la dreptul de a vota, asta este doar ultimul gest dintr-un proces cu adevarat democratic.
Democratia reala incepe cu posibilitatea fiecaruia dintre noi (nu doar dreptul ci posibilitatea reala) de afla realitatea si de a-si spune si raspandi parerea despre ce se intampla in jurul lui.
Abia dupa ce fiecare dintre noi afla cat mai multe dintre cele ce se intampla in jurul sau si ce parere au ceilalti despre ce se intampla, abia atunci poate alege in cunostinta de cauza.
Si inca ceva. Democratia nu este despre a cauta cea mai buna solutie posibila – nu ai cum sa determini care este aceea, poti afla cel mult care este parerea unei majoritati despre ce considera ea a fi cea mai buna solutie – ci doar despre a nu face greseli evitabile.
Asta este rolul circulatiei libere a informatiei, sa nu tot repetam aceleasi greseli la nesfarsit. E imposibil ca un grup de oameni sa cada de acord asupra unei solutii care sa ii multumeasca pe toti, este foarte usor insa ca acel grup de oameni sa realizeze ca ceva le va face rau. Cu conditia ca informatiile despre acel lucru sa nu fie blocate/manipulate pe undeva/de cineva.
Heidegger spune la un moment dat ca nimeni nu poate formula o fraza astfel incat informatia din acea spunere sa fie perfect corecta si ca ‘adevarul’ consta, de fapt, in onestitatea celui care face declaratia respectiva. In primul rand fata de sine insusi. Dar asta nu inseamna ca ceilalti nu au obligatia, tot fata de ei insisi, de a verifica.
“The Essence of Truth must count as one of Heidegger’s most important works, for nowhere else does he give a comparably thorough explanation of what is arguably the most fundamental and abiding theme of his entire philosophy, namely the difference between truth as the “unhiddenness of beings” and truth as the “correctness of propositions”. For Heidegger, it is by neglecting the former primordial concept of truth in favor of the latter derivative concept that Western philosophy, beginning already with Plato, took off on its “metaphysical” course towards the bankruptcy of the present day.”
http://books.google.ro/books/about/The_Essence_of_Truth.html?id=6s8FYTDw9TYC&redir_esc=y
