I’ve always been fascinated by quotes which are ambiguous enough to be simultaneously wrong and right.
In this situation, the ambiguity comes from ‘government’ covering three ‘patches of ground’.
‘Method of running a place/country’. (Self)Organized versus chaotic. ‘System in place’ which is used in running a country. A particular group of people who man, at any given moment, the above mentioned ‘system in place’.
Now, which of the three meanings was at the top of Reagan’s mind when he was uttering those ‘famous’ words?
The way I see it, government ‘as a manner of running things’ is a very powerful method. Which had served us rather well, on aggregate. Only it is not fail-proof. Or, more exactly, fool-proof. Government as a ‘system in place’ is a work in progress. We’ve been improving it since we’ve invented government as an alternative to chaos. Only we need to be very careful. As a man made system it will always be far from perfect. It has not been perfect in the past and, no matter how much effort we’ll put into it, it will always remain perfectible. Finally, government as ‘the team temporarily in charge’ ‘suffers’ mainly from being composed of humans. Hence both corruptible and attracted to power. Hence liable to do everything to maintain their positions.
‘Liable to do everything to remain in power’. Which means that it’s our job to keep them on the straight and narrow. We, The People, are the first to experience the consequences of their decisions. Hence we, all of us, are those who need to keep Government – ‘the team in charge’, on a short leash. If they want to remain in power, they need to keep us ‘alive’. They need to keep the system in shape. Working good enough for the vast majority, not for just a few of us. For a few of them, to be more precise.
Otherwise ‘government as a manner of keeping chaos at bay’ would have failed.
Until thirty one years ago, the Eastern half of Europe was self isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Which had suddenly disappeared in a matter of months.
Nowadays, when SARS-CoV-2 has forced each of us to shelter in place and our nations to self isolate behind the borders, we have not only the opportunity but also the obligation to re-evaluate our take on many of the things we took for granted.
The most important one being our Weltanshauung. The way we see the world. The fact that we have convinced ourselves – simply because our lives have been good enough, that we’ve been doing things the right way.
Marx’s communists had been convinced that dialectic materialism – supposedly backed up by science and a generous political doctrine, was the way in which humankind was going to built its future. Not the best way, the only way! For which reason, no transgression from the official line was allowed. Solutions were to be found only where the official doctrine mandated that answers might have existed.
Communism had fallen. Mostly from within. Which has prompted those on the other side of the fence to consider that their vision had been better. Which was obviously true. Slowly, people on both sides of the previous fence have started to convince themselves that their vision was the only correct one. The only alternative had proven itself to be a failure, didn’t it? Which seems also true. I know of no better alternative. For us. I know of no alternative which would be more helpful for us. Only the fact that I’m not aware of an alternative doesn’t mean much. The alternative might as well exist. Or not….
And here’s the problem. Marxism had failed for no other reason than those who followed it behaved as if they were convinced that Marxism was perfect. They were implementing the Marxist doctrine by the letter. Not that its spirit was any good… long discussion. My point being that arrogance was built in the Marxist spirit. Marx had actually given carte blanche to his adepts to impose communism, by force, to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, the last 30 years had convinced me that many individuals belonging to the dominant culture, to any dominant culture, have a hard time keeping their cool. Too many of them reach the conclusion that ‘theirs’ is the best way. That all the rest are wrong. Which conviction has a malignant consequence. It makes them deaf. They no longer consider any other option but theirs. They no longer hear anything but their inner voice.
For all it may be worth, here’s what I learned about liberty during the last 30 years.
Liberty as breadth. Liberty is the breadth of the opportunity field where we might search solutions for our problems. But no matter how large that breadth might become, we’re never ‘out of the woods’. Liberty is but an opportunity, never a guarantee. We are the ones still responsible for the solutions we pick. For the simple reason that we’re going to bear the brunt of the consequences.
It is easier to search for solutions in a freer environment. Hence better solutions might become available sooner. But it’s still our job to look for them. To experiment. To widen our scope.
Liberty as a form of social interaction. We can relate to freedom in at least two manners. As an individual goal – ‘I want to be free’/’I want freedom for my people’, or as a ‘manner of doing business’. We are free, together, because we respect, and trust, each-other. We are free, together, because generations and generations of us have build a social arrangement based on mutual respect. A social arrangement which includes certain mechanisms which attempt to bring things back on track whenever disturbances appear. Some of which mechanisms have been put into formal law, while others have remained in the ‘public domain’.
When we put these two visions together, the ‘binocular’ image starts to develop ‘depths’.
A social group may enjoy freedom – a wider opportunity field, only as long as its individual members – all of them, enjoy their individual freedoms. For only as long as all individual members are free to roam the entire opportunity field discovered/maintained by the community. And as soon as some individual members start to corner portions of the opportunity field for themselves… the whole social mechanism will grind to a halt.
Sooner rather than later. The more intense the desire of the individual members to increase their ‘own’ individual liberty, the narrower the aggregated opportunity field becomes. Each of the individuals guarding their plot means each of them staring at their feet. Individuals become more interested in guarding their fences rather than in raising their eyes to the horizon.
People obsessively defending their past will never be ready for the future. Meanwhile individuals charging ahead with no consideration for the rest of the team will soon find themselves stranded on thin ice. With no one around to help.
This being the most convincing argument that we really need to quit ‘smoking’.
Just think of it. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale…
I know you can do this, breathe, without thinking. You’ve actually done it since your birth. And you’ll continue doing it after you’ll have reached the end of this post. But right now you should be fully aware that your lungs have only one opening.
What has to come out – what doesn’t belong in there, needs to exit from where it came in in the first place. Which is rather hard for anything which isn’t air. That’s why dust, tar, or even microbes, should not go in there at all.
Quit smoking. And quit belching smoke into the atmosphere.
Let’s get to the second part of the post. Presumably, the more interesting one. Click on the image and read the whole thing. Now tell me why would somebody attempt to ‘debunk’ such a lie in the first place? Is smoking something worth arguing for?
Oops… so the whole thing revolves, again, around money… And, if I understand correctly the point proposed by the author quoted above, a certain Fredrik Eich, there isn’t much of a difference between being duped into giving up and starting/continuing to smoke.
No, I don’t like being duped myself. That’s why I’m telling it straight. Lungs have only one opening. Don’t let yourselves be duped into believing that smoking isn’t that bad for you. That some smog is inevitable for a thriving economy. After all, this is how ‘they’ make ‘their’ money.
Now, after proof-reading this, I wonder. What do the dupers breathe? Do they have their, private, atmosphere? Have they duped themselves into believing everything is as pink as a pair of healthy lungs?
We’ve ‘invented’ mutual respect. Based on it, we created the two institutions which allowed us to get where we are now. Democracy and free market capitalism.
I’ll make a short detour for those who are not ‘convinced’.
Democracy, the functional kind, starts from the premise that it is impossible for an individual to know everything. And that together we know much more than each of us. This being the reason for any democratic process starting with an intense discussion. Whoever has something to say, takes the stand and whoever is interested in the well being of the community pays attention. To learn where to cast their votes.
Free market capitalism starts, too, from the premise that it is impossible for an individual to know everything. That nobody, be it an individual or a group of people, might be smart enough to call all the economic shots needed for entire society to ‘feed itself’ on the long run.
These two fundamental institutions operate on the basis of mutual respect between those who live within them. The people exchange ideas and goods on the principle that the transactions are done voluntarily and in good faith. That deception is just an exception.
These two institutions made it possible for us to cooperate into building the present reality. We have developed enough technology that we are able to produce enough food for everybody. We went to the moon We have enough weapons to destroy the entire planet. Each of us can communicate, almost instantly, with almost anyone on the planet.
And? What do we do in these conditions? Although there still are many of us who are starving, we throw away food. For various reasons. Most satellites are used (and) for military purposes. Although we could not have ‘arrived’ if we hadn’t ‘invented’ mutual respect, we currently use information technology mainly to spread fake news and ‘consume’ pornography.
Is this really okay? How much longer is this going to last?
The first quote comes from the letter sent by the 105 pastors to the school districts in Ohio. The second expresses Terry Firma’s own thoughts. Terry Firma being the author of the article…
Until reading his opinion I was convinced nobody else but those 105 pastors actually believed yoga could be considered a religion. Not in the First Amendment’s sense, anyway.
Here being the problem. A huge one. By enlarging the definition of religion to encompass yoga – which is basically a practice, you end up with a wide enough definition to ‘engulf’ many other things. Science, and atheism, included.
Which, at some point, will be bundled with the items banned from being studied in schools.
What’s going on here? Nothing much. This is how ‘being rational’ works. You marshal all the resources you can identify towards reaching your goal. Can the First Amendment be ‘helpful’ towards what ever I have in mind? Does it mean that I’m going to actually weaponize it?
SARS-CoV 2 lock-downs have intensified the already heated discussion about ‘rights’. About “our rights”. Which have to be defended “at all costs”.
The way I see it, rights can be evaluated from two directions. As ‘gifts’. Either gifted to us by ‘higher authorities’ or conquered for us by our ancestors. Or as ‘procedures’. Elaborated in time by society and coined into law by our wise predecessors. Who had duly noticed that societies which respect certain rights work way better than those who don’t.
After all, societies are nothing but meta-organisms. Which, like all other organisms, function for only as long as the components interact according to certain, and very specific, rules. The ‘better’ the rules, the better the organism works.
In this sense, ‘rights’ are the code we use when interacting among ourselves. The rules we use when cooperating towards the well being of the society.
You don’t care about the society? Only about ‘your rights’?
OK, but if the society, as a whole, doesn’t work properly, who’s going to respect ‘your rights’? Who’s going to help you when a bully will try to snatch ‘your rights’ away from you? And bullies trying to separate you from ‘your rights’ are the most certain occurrence whenever societies cease to function properly. Whenever the individual members of a society no longer respect each-other enough to collectively uphold their rights. Their rights.
Knowledge is being constantly (re)generated by us.
Everything we know, individually and collectively, has been first felt, then interpreted and finally communicated by us.
For something which has happened inside our sensorial sphere to become a piece of information we have to first notice it, then evaluate it and, finally, deem it important enough to remember. To codify it as information.
For something to make sense – whatever that means, the information we have about that something has to fit in to the rest of information we already have.
These three premises, which I hold to be self evident, lead me to the conclusion that:
Individual human beings will always have but a limited knowledge/understanding about/of the world. A group of people are able to develop an aggregate understanding of the world which might be wider than those belonging to the individual members. In time, a community of people will cobble together an even more complex weltanschauung. But still an incomplete one. For no other reason than the fact that the sum of a finite number of finite quantities will always be finite.
Consequences.
Since our understanding of the world is finite, determinism doesn’t make sense. This being the reason for all authoritarian regimes/monopolistic arrangements caving in sooner rather than later. For the simple reason that those regimes/monopolies use but the brain power of those in power and waste the rest. Our understanding of the world being finite, there is no way to demonstrate or refute God.
Which God is, anyway, nothing but a figment of our imagination. Because of the very reasons I mentioned above. Even if God itself would appear right now in a public square and on all the TV monitors in the world, the impression/understanding of him we would be left with after the experience would be of our own making.
Incomplete and inexact. Heavily dependent on everything else we already know.
In nature, most organisms feed on other organisms. Deer eats grass, wolf eats deer. Scavengers and microbes eat poop and corpses. All together ‘eventually’ enrich the soil. Allowing for more grass to grow.
One way to look at this is to call it ‘fight for life’. ‘Survival of the fittest’. Yet this entire ‘carnage’ has a very interesting ‘conclusion’.
A fine tuned ecosystem. Which has lasted, as a system, for a couple of billions of years. Becoming more and more elaborate in the process. And which has survived – as a system, I repeat, momentous events. Asteroids, geomagnetic reversals, continental drift…
The ecosystem has been so stable that it allowed one creature to evolve so much as to develop a special trait. Self-awareness. Which has eventually given birth to ‘reason’. To ‘rational behavior’.
Which means that while wolves eat deer to satisfy their hunger we start wars to satisfy our egos.
They were there, alright. But didn’t existed, yet.
Most dictionaries do not discriminate between ‘being’ and ‘existing’. But I still recall, vividly, those moments when – as a teenager, I tried to make myself remarked by the girl I fancied at that moment. More often than I’d like to remember, it was as if I didn’t existed at all. I was standing there, making a fool of myself, yet I didn’t existed at all.
Simply because I wasn’t noticed. By the significant one.
– Suficient loc. Care să fie și adecvat. – Suficiente resurse. Care să fie și adecvate. – Un factor declanșator. Specific…
‘Trivial…’
Perfect. Înseamnă că știai deja ce vroiam să spun. Că pentru a încerca să controlezi ceva trebuie să: – Ai habar de existența acelui ceva. – Să-l înțelegi. – Să-ți pui mintea cu el.
nicichiarasa 