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Karl Marx and Max Weber, two different pupils of Plato.

February 28, 2015 //
5

Karl Marx. The world is crooked – there is too much exploitation imposed by the haves upon the have-not’s – so it has to be righted by those who have the right answer to the problem. And because the world doesn’t know what’s good for it, the ‘enlightened’ – the communists who are at the forefront of the class struggle – have the duty to impose the revolution by force.
The crux of the ‘solution’ being the abolition of both private property and the state. The private property because it is the tool with which the haves dominate the have-not’s and the state because it is the tool used by the haves to protect their private property from the have-not’s who continuously try to steal it.
But what tool can be best used to enforce the dissolution of the private property and to insure that the misguided and the ill intended don’t revert to the ‘old and corrupt ways of the bourgeoisie’? The state, of course. Hence we’ll have to postpone a little its dissolution, only until the first chores would have been completed, of course.

Max Weber. The world is too complicated to be understood/run by a single man, no matter how capable. That’s why the decision making process must be rationalized. Weber’s main methodological tool was the ‘ideal type’, a mental construction that is to be substituted to replace the real problem that has to be solved or the real thing that is being studied. This ideal type being stripped of the ‘unimportant’ aspects of the reality will make it a lot easier for the ruler/decision maker/scientist to understand what is going on there and to come up with the ‘correct’ decision or ‘clear’ understanding of the matter. This means that Weber was convinced that individuals are able, in certain conditions, to reach valid conclusions. Which is, of course, OK. Furthermore Weber had ‘reached the conclusion’ that if larger problems are to be solved then the efforts of single individuals are not enough and that in order to fulfill this task in a satisfactory manner many rational decision makers (which have been properly trained in their strict domains) have to be inter-connected into a well structured ‘net’. This way the big problem will be sliced into more manageable sub-problems which will be analyzed by specialists and then the final solution will be re-assembled by people specially trained for exactly this task. Nowadays this entire concept is known as ‘bureaucracy‘. In theory it sounds right, doesn’t it? What could be better than an all encompassing net comprised of rational/professional decision makers who act according to a well considered and well intended ‘ideal type’? Whose ideal type? Good question, indeed. Just as good as ‘who and how trained the ‘decision makers’?’.
(There is something we must keep in mind when discussing Weber, as a person. He died relatively young, before having a chance to reach a ‘final conclusion’, or at least one to satisfy him. That also has to be the reason for which he hasn’t published much during his lifetime.)

Plato. Society (the city, the “Republic’) should be run by a specific kind of (dedicated) people and because “those with the philosopher’s natural abilities and with outstanding natures often get corrupted by a bad education and become outstandingly bad” this ‘special kind of people’ need to receive “the proper kind of education“. Meaning that ‘a true philosopher’ has to be versed in ‘the Forms of Good’, which are amply explained in ‘The Cave Allegory’.
The gist of the matter is two layered.
1. The reality is hidden behind some ‘veils’ (or in ‘shadows’ if you prefer the original metaphor) but properly trained professionals (the philosophers) can be taught to see what Plato describes as ‘the ultimate truth’.
2. These professional truth seekers have not only the right to lead the rest of the people ‘into the light’ but the obligation to do so! Furthermore, for Plato the ‘ideal political structure’ – the Republic – would be so organized as to ‘force’ into public duty those who have been specially ‘bred and trained’ to perform such duty:
“Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the cave, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.”

I believe that by now you have grasped where I’m headed to. There is not much difference between Marx and Plato and a very close relationship between these two and Weber. Still, the fact that Weber was not yet done thinking about this matter at the moment of his untimely death makes me believe that if he had some more time at his disposal he would have understood what Laozi taught us about the concept of “nonaction”:

And isn’t it very strange that the best (short) presentation I was able to find about Laozi is hosted by a site called “Plato.Stanford.edu”?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
http://www.academia.edu/4192854/Weber_s_methodology_understanding_concept_of_ideal_type_as_necessary_element_of_Weberian_comprehensive_sociology_Working_paper_
http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/undergraduate/introsoc/weber12.html
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-the-wicked-leader-is-he-who-the-people-despise-the-good-leader-is-he-who-the-people-revere-the-lao-tzu-188515.jpg

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, politics, Social justice, The kind of world we live in

“Nothing to see here people, move along…”

February 26, 2015 //
0
This was inspired by the title of a Facebook post that shared an article from The Telegraph.
“A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a man to death for apostasy after he filmed himself tearing up a copy of the Koran.”
The guys ‘in charge’ of Saudi Arabia must be in a terrible situation.
Punishing the guy according to their own laws will further the perception of Islam as a ‘violent religion’ and thus make it less acceptable for the rest of the world.
Not punishing him would mean tacit acceptance of the fact that laws are made and applied by humans, not by any God, thus totally demolishing the brand of legitimacy the Saudi’s have worked hard to build for themselves.
Terrible predicament. I suggest we allow them to settle this among themselves.
Blaming ‘Islam’ indiscriminately for some horrible acts perpetrated in its name by a bunch of zealots would make things worse for everybody. So yes, let’s ‘move along’!
What we can, and definitely should do, is to insist on the ‘humanitarian’ side of the whole business.
PS Here is an interesting article about Sharia: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/11431509/Saudi-Arabia-court-gives-death-penalty-to-man-who-renounced-his-Muslim-faith.html
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Categories Choices we make, Culture, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Why keep wasting money on ‘toothless’ constitutional monarchies?

February 25, 2015 //
4

I happened to stumble on an article about the tragic fate of Sophie Chotek.

The beautiful daughter of an impoverished aristocratic family attracts the attention and later becomes romantically involved with the heir of one of the most important European thrones of the time. Looks like a prequel for ‘Love Story’, right? … only worse, unfortunately. The reigning Monarch wasn’t happy about the whole thing and, to make things worse, ‘the law’ wouldn’t allow their union.

After huge complications that involved the intervention of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and Pope Leo XIII in favour of the ‘young lovers’ Emperor Franz Joseph gave in and yielded to the marriage, on condition that the children of the couple will not be able to inherit the throne and that the bride will never be treated as a queen or attend official functions at the side of her future husband.
And the worse was yet to come. After 14 years, to a day, of happy marriage both she and Franz Ferdinand, her husband, were assassinated together in Sarajevo.

Reading about the treatment she had to endure cannot but make me wonder about why would modern democracies still ‘entertain’ royal courts? Specially after what happened to Lady Di…

“The Emperor expressed his disapproval by not attending his heir’s wedding, as did Franz Ferdinand’s brothers and nearly every member of his family. The Imperial court, led by its chief overseer the Prince of Montenuovo (who was the child of a morganatic marriage himself) continued to humiliate the new “Princess of Hohenberg” at every opportunity. If for example the Imperial family were to hold a ball then Sophie would not only have to sit apart from her husband but be last in line to enter behind every other Hapsburg relation no matter how obscure. All contemporary reports state that Sophie never complained or even show displeasure at this treatment in public, earning the sympathy of many outside the court for her dignified response. Less inclined to forgiveness than his wife, Franz Ferdinand allegedly drew up a list of particularly obnoxious aristocrats for whom he intended payback when he became Emperor.”

So?

Well… It’s not so easy to dismiss the fact that some of the most successful nations, by any standards, are exactly those that have managed to balance the survival of the monarchy with ‘full blown’ democratic government. Not only in Europe.
Great Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Thailand, Japan … There must be something here!

Two things constitute the common denominator between these countries, besides being run as constitutional monarchies. They have all found their own road to democracy/rule of law and they had traveled this road in a relatively peaceful manner. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Japan had been ‘opened’ up by Matthew Perry and then defeated in the WWII. The Japanese emperor had been powerless since long before Perry and the ‘fathers’ of the Meiji Constitution might have been inspired by the German Imperial one but the transformation was instrumented by the Japanese politicians themselves, not by nor after being prodded by a ‘foreign power’. Furthermore by 1915 the Japanese Constitution was modified to include universal male suffrage.

Meanwhile the XX-th century has witnessed a very mixed performance by the rest of the democracies, with the notable exception of the US. No, I haven’t forgotten Canada, Australia or New Zealand. They are constitutional monarchies too.
Latin America. I don’t think you’re going to dispute the fact that there is no single nation inhabiting this part of the world which hasn’t ‘enjoyed’ at least a few years of dictatorship that has started with ‘free elections’.
Africa. Until very recently there wasn’t a single functional democracy on this continent.
Asia. With the notable exception of India – which has inherited strong democratic values from her imperial power and enjoys special circumstances – no other real democracy besides Thailand and Japan until very recently.
Europe, the birth place of democracy. Hitler and Mussolini were democratically elected before becoming two of the most horrendous dictators in the history of humankind. Eastern Europe countries, including Russia, were governed for many decades as ‘popular democracies’. In reality they were ruled by oligarchies which were hiding their criminal nature behind ideological smoke screens.

Any explanation for this?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/28/1310194/–Franzi-and-Soph-the-personal-tragedy-that-sparked-WWI#
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/373298/Meiji-Constitution

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Rituals

February 22, 2015 //
4

This post is dedicated to my friends who do not yet accept that rituals still play a huge role in our lives.
No matter if we are religious or not, in the conventional sense of the word, we all feel something special when witnessing rituals being observed.

To me this is a powerful proof that we need to belong, that our need to be an accepted member of a community is ingrained somewhere deep inside us. And for good reason because none of us would be able to survive on its own for more than a very short time.
In fact this is the real meaning of ‘religion’.
“Religion (derived from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’) binds people together.”

From time to time religious teachings become perverted, in most instances by precisely those who were supposed/’entrusted with the divine mission’ to preserve and pass them on to future generations. We shouldn’t allow these manipulators to destroy our livelihood.

Maybe time has come for us to understand the entire process and to rebuild religiosity/togetherness on mutual respect?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HW3QVLlK-kE?feature=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0W7YdKYPl0
https://www.wordnik.com/words/religare

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Doomed to succed.

February 20, 2015 //
0

Some of us go by ‘the winner takes it all’.
For them each ‘win’ is another step that must be climbed on the ladder towards ‘success’.

Until the inevitable failure, and a single one is enough for the kind of game this people choose to play, brings them back at the foot of the ladder.

Samuel Becket suggested and then Nicholas Nassim Taleb amply demonstrated that there is an alternative to this scenario.

Next time ‘fail better’ was how Beckett taught us to deal with life’s inevitable downs while Taleb’s notion of ‘antifragility’ is the key that unlocks the door towards the understanding that the real success is to be able to survive everything that life throws at you.

In fact that’s what we’ve done, as a species, until now. We are still here, right? Even more, we managed to overcome all hurdles and became the dominant species on  Earth.

There is one small thing though. We’ve apparently grown close to the limits of our planet. We’ve explored almost all of the land mass and we’ve discovered many of it’s natural resources. And now we have become aware of all this.

We have some obvious venues in front of us.
Start fighting among ourselves for the control of what ever resources still are out there. Depending on what kind of weapons we’ll use this scenario might lead to total destruction or to a long war of attrition that will be won by those who have the less to loose. Any of these two will lead to a lot of misery.
Or extend competitive cooperation – the kind that is currently known as ‘really free market’, no monopolies/bullying allowed – to cover up the entire planet. The demographic pressure will ease up considerably – what we currently describe as ‘advanced nations’ have a lot less children than the rest of the population – so we’ll be able to stretch out existing resources for longer. This way we’ll have a lot more time at our disposal to develop sustainable technologies that will enable us to survive on the really long run, potentially until the Sun will grow nasty on us.
And who knows what will happen until then.

But to find out what the future has in store for us we’ll have to survive til that moment. And in order to do that we’ll have to re-learn what it means to trust, respect and love our fellow human beings. All of them.

http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/4362/

https://www.facebook.com/PrinceEaHipHop/photos/a.10150198151749769.315787.71760664768/10153123610239769/?type=1&theater

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Categories Choices we make, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

To keep or not to keep…mum!?!

February 17, 2015 //
2

broadcast to the Universe

“Professor Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, warned in 2010 that humans should keep as silent as possible because alien civilisations may be attracted to Earth and have the technology to travel here and exploit its resources. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.”

Let’s accept for the sake of the argument that an ‘imperialistic and inconsiderate’ civilization (like the western Europeans were during the time of Columbus) manages to reach the technological prowess of being able to travel at velocities higher than the speed of light – otherwise no one would bother to leave their native planet except for a real emergency since building an empire in this circumstances is impractical.
Would you think they would wait for an invitation from us? Or that they would even need one to know that the Earth is a ‘hospitable’ planet?
If ‘they’ are as belligerent as we were, and still are, the Universe would be either divided into at least two empires busily trying to bite each other’s throat or a huge one who continuously gobbles up new and new planets.
We are still free after so many eons since the galaxy has been in place so chances are that either ‘they’ are a lot more peaceful or interstellar travel is not a feasible thing. Not in any recognizable – by us – form of animal life, anyway.

What we are left with is another, and for me a lot more plausible, hypothesis.
Long range travel has indeed been mastered, in one form or another. After a prolonged interstellar war or even from the very beginning the ‘travelers’ have understood that peace is a lot more ‘profitable’/nice/cozy than generalized war so they don’t allow ‘beligerant’ civilizations to get out of their planets until the would be new-comers ‘grow up’ from their ‘waring’ pubescence.
For instance by installing monitoring stations around ‘promising’ planets and actually sabotaging their efforts at ‘conquering the space’ until they reach a comprehensively peaceful stage of social development.

I remember that one of the conditions for Romania to be accepted in both European Union and NATO was for it to have good relations/’friendship treaties’ with all its neighbors. If we were wise enough to do such thing don’t you think that a civilization that has mastered space travel should have reached the same conclusion way back in their development?

It seems that our fright about the ‘aliens’ tells more about the way we are than about anything else…

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Science and technology, where are they headed?

February 16, 2015 //
0
 
Scientific thinking gave us vaccines, planes, computers, plenty of food through higher yield crops and state of the art health care, among other things.
Most of us have decided that using computers is good, including for our children, despite the fact that many of them develop “Facebook addiction”, that planes are safe enough to transport us and our children from place to place and that antibiotics tainted beef isn’t that bad tasting after-all.
Simultaneously some of us decided, all of a sudden and after more than 200 years of successful and safe use of the method that vaccination is ‘bad for you’. No, almost none of those have yet given up the use of planes and still surf furiously on the internet in their quest to convince others of their new found truth. Some of them have indeed shifted to organic food, whenever they can afford it.
Meanwhile the Taliban have started to shoot down the health workers that work hard to immunize Pakistani kids against polio.

And all this came to be because some reckless people who should have known better started to misuse the principles of the same scientific thinking by:
– Trying to produce perfect assassins through the use of LSD,
– Building an eavesdropping net the size of the entire Planet,
– Producing so many almost poisonous food additives and by promoting almost useless but very expensive drugs that regular people have lost their faith in both big pharma and ‘regular’ food industry,
– By the CIA using a “a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where” bin Laden was hiding in a failed attempt to find him.  (As we all know the good news are that they found him after-all, using more straightforward methods.)
The bad news are that if we don’t clear up our act people will slowly but totally loose their trust in what we now call ‘scientific attitude towards the world’.
And, in fact, the real question is not about where are science and technology headed to but what do WE use them for!
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Categories Choices we make, psihologie, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

small Bang.

February 13, 2015 //
3

“Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.”

Ever since Man became aware of the world around him he tried to find explanations for each and every individual occurrence that  grabbed his attention.
Eventually he became aware of the various links that exist between ‘things’ so he started to look for a ‘theory of everything’.
Right now Man seems stuck in the middle of the road.
I’ll assume the presumptuousness of my proposal but what about getting out of this sink hole by giving up mathematics as the main tool of investigation into the matter?
After all mathematics is nothing but just another language. A special kind of language, OK – a lot more precise than all the others, but still a language – nothing but another medium for rational thinking. And just as it happens in any medium/language, nothing can be expressed in that medium before it has been ‘grappled’ with the mind.
Of course that I don’t propose to give up mathematics altogether, that would be both ludicrous and absolutely inefficient.
The problem with our over-dependency on mathematics is that we no longer think first in words/concepts and then translate those into mathematical equations for verification but proceed the other-way around. We first ‘do our math’ and only then try to describe with words whatever imaginary place we have arrived at by using calculus. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Specially if one looks at it from this angle…
So what do we know about this so called Big Bang?
– Planck says that things cannot be divided further than 1 quantum.
– Heisenberg says that we cannot calculate anything with absolute precision.
– Einstein says that everything is tied together – ‘relative’ to each other.
– Stephen Hawking demonstrated – using calculus, of course – practically the same thing as Einstein when he convinced us that black holes are not exactly one way highways to nowhere. The implication of what Hawking says being that the ‘known’ Universe is somehow encapsulated towards the rear and has only one ‘open side’, the one that faces towards the ‘future’ – whatever that means.
And we still look desperately for a precise description of what happened during and even before the ground/moment 0… Really?!?
How about adopting a more practical attitude and accepting that each level of organization implies a certain amount of “in-determination”, the equivalent of those demonstrated by Heisenberg for the sub-atomic ‘world’ and by Schrodinger for ‘cats’ in general?
Maybe this way it would be easier for us to accept not only that we’ll never be able to find out what existed before the ‘Big Bang’ (if anything even imaginable in our terms) but also that it would be absolutely useless – my hunch being that we cannot ‘go back’ completely through a ‘layer’ of in-determination. A plastic analogy would be that we can see through a soap bubble but we cannot actually cross it and a more scientific one that Hawking taught us how to calculate what happens inside a black hole but never advised us to go there and check for ourselves…

And now, that we have reached this point, here is my scenario for what happened during … call it what you like.

At first there was nothing. No space, no time, no matter/energy of any kind.
‘Nothing’ in the sense that everything that existed – and that still exists – was so ‘indiscriminate’ as to be completely uniform. The pure bred scientists would use ‘congruous to itself’ to describe this state. Amorphous would be a very weak term for what I have in mind.
White light is a very pointy thing while pitch black is a lot more than its opposite. Light creates shadows, black creates opportunities. There can be ‘nothing’ between a light source and the observer while absolutely everything can hide in the dark.
That was that existed ‘before’. An immense ‘black nothing’.
Everything started/changed when the first ‘symmetry’ crashed in shatters – and who really cares about the ‘why’ of the matter since there was, by definition, no possible cause for anything, for nothing existed yet? I don’t know which symmetry and, again, I don’t really care. For me it is enough that from then on the continuous nothing became divided into ‘quanta’ that started to simultaneously aggregate furiously among themselves and disperse wildly.
The aggregation process gave birth to what we now call ‘things’ (mater, energy) while the ‘dispersion’ gave birth to both space and time.

Coming back to where we started from – ‘math can explain only what happened…’ – I must remind you that math cannot explain anything. Only people can do that, including through the use of ‘math’.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html#jCp
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Categories physics, physis, The kind of world we live in

Lice, Mayo, Plastic Bag. And Death.

February 13, 2015 //
1

“(Reuters) – A western Massachuetts toddler died over the weekend after suffocating while undergoing a home treatment for head lice involving mayonnaise and a plastic bag, police said on Thursday.“

OK, one thing at a time.

– Lice. Pestiferous insects that can carry dangerous diseases – typhus among others – usually associated with deficient personal hygiene but also with low standards of living/economic hardships. Last huge outbreak of typhus took place during WWI in Eastern Europe where both conditions for lice infections were met simultaneously. Deaths were numbered in millions, one of my great-grand fathers among them.
– Mayonnaise. Delicious – if well prepared – sauce comprising egg yolk and vegetable oil. Or various presumably edible chemicals, if bought in a jar. Some, as in this example, try to use it as treatment for lice.
Supposedly the fats that make up most of the ‘regular’ mayo will “suffocate” adult lice and the nymphs while the eggs will ‘survive’ the treatment. A second operation, involving vinegar, will be necessary to finish the business.
Anyway here is the ‘disclaimer’ that can be found on one of the sites that ‘promote’ this kind of ‘treatment’: “There are no scientific studies that prove the effectiveness of mayonnaise as a treatment for head lice, but there are many parents who have been using it for years and are very satisfied with the effectiveness of this home remedy against adult head lice.”

NB. This particular site actually warns that the mayo treatment is not suitable for children – who might try to eat some of it out of their hair. They also warn against covering children’s heads with plastic wraps after applying the mayo. These two warnings practically ban the use of this treatment whenever children are involved, right?

– Plastic Bag. Useful industrial product. So versatile that has become almost ubiquitous and so resistant that has become a rallying point for the environmentally minded people: they try to ban it because it ‘clogs’ the waste management systems. It also has been known to having produced accidental deaths, specially among children, by suffocation.

– Death. An otherwise normal occurrence for all living organisms.
It can also be induced intentionally – as in suicide/murder/self defense, hunting/culling or butchering/harvesting, unintentionally – when negligence/callousness is involved, or even against the will of the ‘perpetrator’ – by his own failure to take into consideration obvious aspects of the reality because of temporary ‘blindness’ induced by ‘ideological lenses’.

What has ‘ideology’ to do with anything?

People tend to forget that the concept of ideology has at least two sides and concentrate on the practical one. Most of us see ‘ideology’ as “a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation“ and forget about the ‘beacon’ role it plays to our minds: ideology understood as “the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group”.

Why on Earth would somebody subject an 18-months old child to an “unproven” treatment involving mayonnaise and vinegar for a condition that can be cured simply and effectively with FDA approved ‘chemicals’?
Two situations come to my mind: ‘regular’ treatment was applied, several times, and failed or the person resorting to the ‘mayo treatment’ is convinced that ‘FDA is a bunch of liars’.

In both cases that person did a poor job as a researcher. “And if you prefer mayonnaise with French fries and really don’t feel like putting it on your children’s heads, you can instead use an olive oil treatment, this will also be very effective.”

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/611812/typhus
http://headlicecenter.com/head-lice-mayonnaise/
http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/head/treatment.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/head_lice/page5.htm
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ideology

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Categories Psychology, The kind of world we live in

How deep do we need to dig?

February 5, 2015 //
0

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit another salt mine, an active one this time,

My mother worked in the mining industry, my father in law was a miner almost all his life, my first job was in a factory building mining equipment, I went down another half a dozen mines before, both active and transformed into touristic attractions. I thought I had a fair imagine about what it means to be a miner.

In the mine I visited yesterday there was a small church, entirely carved in salt of course. On one of its walls the visitors can read:

“Afara-s doar chinuri si nevoi,
Aici, in mina-i Dumnezeu cu noi.”

(Out there, topside, nothing but trouble comes in sight.
Down here, deep into the mine, we have the Lord on our side.)

How deep into our souls do we need to dig in order to find our good nature?

And then I found this picture on Facebook:

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in
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