I’m not sure what ‘timid’ meant in those times.
I would have used ‘coward’.
On the other hand, it would have been politically incorrect…
And ‘somewhat’ inefficient! Being blunt, often scares your audience.
And makes them impervious to what you need to share with them.
People act as if the world is as each of them sees it.
The briefest glance into our evolutionary past is enough to see that the more ‘sophisticated’ an animal is, the more it depends on its visual ability. On its ability to see things in a manner which is consistent with its ‘way of life’.
Herbivore mammals, for example, have a very wide vision field while the carnivores feeding on them have a narrower field but a binocular vision. Which makes perfect sense. The ‘defenseless’ herbivores need to see everything around them – so they might be able to flee, while the predators need binocular vision in order to hunt efficiently.
Our evolutionary ancestors, who lived in trees, needed binocular vision in order to travel in their 3D world. They also needed better hand-eye coordination for picking the fruit they were eating. Hence their, and ours, very tight connection between our eyes and our brains. And the big portion of our brain allocated to processing visual information.
At some point in our evolution – we were still animals at that point, we have learned to use sound in order to warn/grab the attention of our ‘correspondents’. Why? Because sound can go around obstacles while in order to notice visual cues the potential recipient needs to… you got it, I’m sure!
Fast forward to when our direct ancestors, already homo sapiens, have started to actually speak. To consciously use sound to convey meaning. Not only to warn but to transmit actual information. Information which could be acted upon. Acted upon as different from reacted to…
And now I wonder. How much time had passed between learning to speak and uttering the first lie?
Lie as in intentionally misrepresenting reality, as opposed to unintentionally failing to convey the entire reality…
Hard to even imagine an answer to that question.
But since I’ve already mentioned the subject, let me make two observations.
It’s a lot easier to lie using language than in any other way.
And it’s a lot easier to be fooled by what you see – and sometimes hear, than by information gathered through the rest of the senses. Unless, of course, that information was a ‘message’ sent/meant to/for us. A perfume versus a naturally occurring smell, for instance. Or an artificial sweetener/flavoring…
I’ll wrap this thing up pointing your attention to the fact that since learning to read we, individual human beings, have shared more information using the ‘visual channel’ than ever before.
Which has produced momentous consequences.
Verba volant, scripta manent!
A written culture is more resilient than a spoken one.
A written lie reaches more people, potentially, than a told one.
For two reasons.
A ‘verbal’ lie needs to be retold in order to survive. It has not only to impress strongly enough the target as to transform it into a relay but also to be reinterpreted convincingly enough by the former victim as to reignite the process.
Meanwhile, a written lie just lies in waiting. Waiting to be read… Not to mention what happened after we had invented the printing press…
The second reason is less obvious. I’ve already mentioned the fact that a spoken lie depends on the teller. On the ability of the ‘interpreter’ to convey it in a convincing enough manner. The problem being here that if the target has the slightest doubt, the lie flops. The liar has lost an opportunity. On the other hand, a written lie can be honed at will before hand. Under no pressure.
Now that I have finished the theoretical part of my post, let’s interpret the following message.
“Dishonesty and intellectual chaos…”
According to some of those with whom we share the planet, it’s OK for a human individual to choose their name but not their gender. Choosing your own name – as in changing the name you have been given at birth, is acceptable while changing/widening the gender you had been assigned to – by others, before you had any opportunity to contribute to the process – is considered to be dishonest and liable to cause intellectual chaos.
On the other hand, we – all of us – should be fully aware of the fact that those who – since always – have ‘found joy’ in ‘exposing’ themselves will use every opportunity available to them.
The way I see it, the situation is ‘chaotic’ enough.
No need for any of us, from any ‘camp’ and belonging to any ‘persuasion’, to further weaponize an already volatile situation.
Do you remember what happened when our not so distant ancestors had ‘determined’ that witches were meant be burned?
“And Jesus said unto them,
Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you,
If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed,
ye shall say unto this mountain,
Remove hence to yonder place;
and it shall remove;
and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”
Matthew, 17:20
Apparently, the quote above doesn’t make much sense.
No matter how much faith one has, telling a mountain to ‘remove to yonder place’ will yield nothing more than a wasted breath.
On the other hand… 2000 years is a lot. Erosion has moved many a mountains in this time… After all, Jesus didn’t say anything about how fast will the mountain remove itself after it had been told to…
OK, jokes aside, nowadays it’s a lot easier for us to remove a (smallish) mountain than it was in those times. We currently use cranes and lorries instead of mere words … but we still wouldn’t start before convincing ourselves that it’s possible.
That our goal is within our grasp. At least notionally.
The truth of the matter being that we live now in a better world.
According to our benchmarks.
We live longer and have it a lot easier!
But is our world really better?
According to other benchmarks…
Biodiversity loss, spoiled environment, continued human exploitation…
Let me put it differently.
What was the thing which had set apart the abrahamic faith from all other religions?
The notion that all people had been made in the image of the creator god.
As a consequence of how they’ve been made, they – the people – are not only equal – cast in the same mould, but also harboring a divine spark. The image they share being that of a god, not an ordinary one…
What difference does this make?
Democracy, capitalism, free market… all things we consider to be capital to our well being are based on the notion that all people are equal and have to be treated as such.
Otherwise why bother with what the other has to say about anything?
I’ll repeat the question.
Is our world really better?
Forget about biodiversity, pollution and quality of life.
Do we continue to consider our brethren to be equal to us?
Do we really hear them out when they speak to us?
How are we to achieve our goal – whatever that might be, if we don’t coordinate our faith?
If we don’t hear out what the others have to say about anything?
My previous post was about reification.
About the fact that each of us acts according to their faith. According to their belief that the world is as each of us sees it.
|How are we going to coordinate our efforts towards a common goal – a better place for all of us to live in, if we don’t hear what each of us has to say about where we’re going?
Holidays are very good opportunities to reconsider,
And to learn new things.
These days I learned that while having nothing makes you feel ‘uncomfortable’, having too much can be very limiting.
If you have just enough, you can go forward. Explore new venues. Learn new things.
Enjoy life!
If you have too much, you spend too much time and energy protecting what you already have. Trying to get more…
The venues open for you to explore are suddenly reduced to one! Only one… You become the guardian of your fortune!
Can you enjoy such a life?
Are you sure? Have you examined the alternatives? In earnest?
‘Are you implying that all wealthy people are unhappy?
Unable to enjoy their lives?!?’
On the contrary, my dear Watson!
I’m only saying that being wealthy is complicated.
“Just enough” is a matter of individual ability to cope.
That enjoying wealth needs a lot of skill.
And that being wealthy comes with a lot of responsibility!
Towards yourself in the first place!
And towards your kids, family and the rest of the gang…
“Tough times create tough men. Tough men create easy times.
Easy times create weak men. Weak men create tough times.“
American proverb
“Wealth lasts only for three generations: one to make it, one to keep it, one to squander it“
Chinese proverb
“If you raise your children, you get to spoil your grandchildren.
If you spoil your children, you get to raise your grandchildren.“
Popular word of mouth
There’s no denying that, on average, each generation fares better than its predecessor.
Then why some people end up worse than their parents?
Is it a social thing?
Is it in their upbringing?
Is it the consequence of bad personal choices?
The easy way out would be to consider that legislation, material status, the culture one was born into and even the upbringing offered by the parents are nothing but circumstances. And, ultimately, it’s the individual who makes the call. And bears the consequences…
But the above mentioned individual doesn’t rise from and into a complete void… so I need to go deeper!
An equally true but somewhat more useful observation would be that we’re dealing here with something more important than mere wealth.
‘There’s no such thing! Nothing is more important than Wealth!’
Yeah, right… Individual people keep squandering the personal wealth accumulated by their forefathers, the humankind keeps going forward and you tell me personal wealth is the most important thing here…
But you do make a good point. Your insistence, obsessive even, about wealth being the crux of everything is very relevant.
Since I agree with you that wealth is important, indeed, then maybe it’s the ‘insistence’ which is causing the problem…
First of all, allow me to make a simple distinction.
There is wealth – structured opportunity, I’ll discuss this notion in another post, and there is personal wealth. Opportunity which belongs to somebody.
When an individual squanders the wealth inherited from their parents – or even that which they had managed to put together themselves, the wealth itself – the accrued opportunity – doesn’t disappear from the face of the earth. It just passes from one hand to another. Most of it, anyway. For the simple reason that most of today’s wealth is expressed in money. Which is fungible.
‘OK. So individual people squandering their inherited wealth do not represent such a big problem. The total wealth already present ‘on the face of the Earth’ remains (more or less) the same, no matter who owns it. And since new wealth is created everyday, the humankind, on aggregate, goes forward.’
That’s how things used to be. That’s how things had evolved for the last ten millennia or so. Ever since our forefathers had invented agriculture. Agriculture and money… Land and money cannot be destroyed. Buildings and almost everything else which carries value can. Be destroyed. Land and money also, actually, but it’s a lot harder to do it.
But there’s a catch here.
For wealth to do its trick – to function as an opportunity, people have to have access to it.
That’s why, for example, people do not keep their money under the mattress. When deposited in a bank, money will end up being used. The bank will lend them to somebody who needs it and that somebody will put that money to work, In no matter what shape or form. Kept under a mattress, money becomes mostly useless. At least for the time being…
And this is where ‘insistence’ – our obsessive insistence – that money is the only worthwhile goal for any respectable person becomes counterproductive.
‘Are you a communist?!?’
On the contrary, my dear Watson!
In fact, Marx had been just as infatuated with money as Milton Friedman was going to be a century later. With more or less similar results…
Friedman taught us that greed is good. Profit uber alles. That getting money trumps everything else. That getting money is not only good for the individual itself but also commendable. That everybody should make it their goal to become rich!
Marx, on the other hand – please remember that the ‘other’ hand is nothing but similar to its twin – advocated for all wealth to be stripped from its rightful owners.
See what I mean? Both Marx and Friedman had been thinking only about ownership. Who owns that wealth!
On average, we deal with the same situation.
According to Friedman – pushing his advice to the very limit, there’s no problem if someone owns all the money in the world. If it so happened, so be it.
According to Marx, nobody should own anything.
On average, the wealth corresponding to each living human in both situations would be the same.
We already know the consequences of Marx’s teachings. When all the wealth present in one country is managed by a very small number of people, the whole situation goes south. Fast. Very fast!
We also know what happens when the market is cornered. Becomes suffocated by a monopoly. The whole situation goes south. That’s why we cherish the freedom of the market!
Doesn’t make much sense?
To insist that the market must be free and simultaneously maintain that ‘greed is good’?
Yep! My point exactly…
In the beginning was the word
– How did you manage to mess things up so thoroughly?
– By allowing too much coherence to slip away. After we – well, some of us, already had a fair understanding about how things worked. About how we got there in the first place.
– Would you care to elaborate?
– Things went on more or less linearly up to when we had learned to speak. That was when it had all started. When we had realized what a start was.
And that was it.
Speaking to each other allowed us to access the second level of consciousness. Self awareness.
Speaking to ourselves – a.k.a. ‘thinking’, gave us the illusion of ‘knowing’.
‘Knowing’ led to ‘knowing better’ and ‘knowing better’ gave birth to arrogance.
For a while, this process had been kept in check by the harsh reality. People, like all living organisms, have certain needs. Basic needs. Food, shelter… During most of our evolution, getting enough food and shelter consumed most of our resources. And time. Only a very small number of people had enough spare time. And energy left for thinking. And only a very small percentage of this already small number of people used their minds to think about anything else but how to preserve their privileged status. Which status was the source of their ‘spare time’ in the first time…
Slowly but surely, those having something else in their minds besides their selfish self interest have come up with a thing called ‘technology’. By carefully, and considerately, watching those who worked, the selfish thinkers have noticed that from time to time and from craftsperson to craftperson there could be noticed small differences in how things were done. Hence the concept of ‘how things are done’. With the natural sequel of ‘let’s do things in a better way’.
Technology made it possible for workers to be more productive. Communities as a whole became more productive. Hence increased the possibility for more people to have spare time for thinking.
Some communities made good use of this new possibility while others failed to do so. Usually for reasons depending on the ‘general conditions’ and not at all imputable to the communities themselves.
Unfortunately, technology also had two less fortunate consequences.
By freeing more and more people from want, it also freed them from ‘religion’.
Until that moment, people who were ‘excluded’ from society – who did not partake in ‘religion’, could not survive on their own for any significant length of time. After the advent of technology, reclusion no longer meant almost instant death.
Technology also produced ‘hard science’. A corpus of knowledge about how nature works. Which knowledge can be summarized as a collection of natural laws.
No longer depending as much on their contemporaries and cognizant of those natural laws, some of the thinkers – whose numbers had been constantly swelled by the continuously improved technology, have reached the conclusion that through thinking a human might, given enough time and resources, understand basically everything.
Some of those had become dictators. Others had become consultants.
Both categories extremely confident in their own knowledge. Arrogant, even.
This is how we messed things up. This bad.
Word of mouth has it that a dissatisfied customer will be more vocal than a happier one.
A search over the internet yields unconvincing results. The statistical jury seems to be still out on this one.
A misspell in the search window unveiled something a lot more interesting.
The brain is hard wired to recognize an angry voice. As well as an angry face.
Are we aware of all this?
Probably not. Statistically speaking…
And this is important why?
Being able to recognize anger makes it easier for us to deal with conflict.
Individuals who do it better have more chances to survive when involved in dangerous situations. Or even to turn them around. To find ways in which to use conflict in a profitable manner. Profitable for them… And only time will tell for how long!
Communities adept at taming conflict into something useful have greater chances to survive than those less able to deal with it.
Now, where are we in this moment?
Do we talk to each other? Are we aware of what’s going on around us? Cognizant enough to take the appropriate measures?
Or do we just vent out our bile? Creating such an environment that no coherent answer will be presented when needed?
Are we, each of us, part of the solution?
Or we just create more and more problem?
Trying to make sense of this this proverb, one might find handy a deeper understanding of ‘it’.
I’ll be arguing in a future post about the synthetic nature of equality. A concept we came up with, based on things found in the natural world. But the concept itself has no natural precursor. It was invented by us and exists exclusively in our minds.
On the other hand, liberty – the ‘it’ I’m writing about right now – is ‘artificial’. Another concept we’ve came up with, based on things found in the natural world.
But one which has evolved from a natural precursor. It still exists exclusively in our minds – like all other concepts, but we didn’t actually invent it. We only noticed its natural precursor and built on in.
Orangutans are freer than us. They live individualistic lives, depending on no one but themselves. They are strong enough to do this and they live in such a manner and place that they don’t have to face any natural enemies. We, humans – their cousins, are the only agents powerful enough to represent a real danger for them.
Gorillas are less free than us. They live in strict autarchies, where they need nothing but what already exists in their domains – the plants they feed on, and where they respect the strict discipline imposed by their strictly authoritarian male leaders. Which are the only free(ish) members of the groups.
Chimpanzees and bonobos, each in their own way, are the closest to us. Some freer than others but none as free as the orangutans.
None of our cousins have the concept of liberty. As far as we know, they long for it – for freedom, that is – when they lose it. Hence they feel (for) it. But they haven’t, as far as we know it, came up with the notion of it. This being the reason for which the concept of liberty might be synthetic – like all other concepts, but liberty itself is artificial.
Our experience of liberty has a lot in common with what our cousins feel when they lose theirs. When they lose theirs to us!
We being the only agents who, after synthesizing the concept of liberty, have taken the process a step further.
Have started to take prisoners. And to justify our actions!
