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Democracy versus mob-rule

July 18, 2016 //
2

Recep Tayyip Erdogan saved his political ass last week-end by urging his “supporters to take to streets in protest of coup”

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Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan react to a Turkish military tank in front of the Turkish Parliament July 15, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Which they did and the coup eventually failed.

Leading some observers to salute the maturity of the Turkish democracy:
“The most valuable outcome of last night’s events is that many people who are not AKP supporters stood up for democratic values despite the recent crackdowns on the opposition, and despite the tension and the polarization of the country.” (Erol Önderoglu, Turkey’s Reporters Without Borders representative who is currently on trial on terrorist propaganda charges after participating in a solidarity campaign with a pro-Kurdish newspaper.)

“These people do not support Erdoğan, but they oppose the idea of a military coup. Turkey has a history of very painful, traumatic military interventions, so I was not surprised to see such united opposition to this attempt.” (an academic who wished to remain anonymous)

But ‘not everybody is happy in paradise’.
“Everyone spoke out against the coup last night and that gave me hope” … watching events unfold today this hope has shrunk quickly. Last night there was the possibility that the government would use this to return to a more unifying language, to return to the peace talks, to unite the country. But today it looks like they will use [the coup attempt] simply to consolidate power.” (the same anonymous academic)

What’s going on there? Is Turkey a real democracy?
Or, if we dare to look from the other side, ‘what’s wrong with contemporary democracy’?

Is it enough for elections to be held regularly and the votes duly counted for a country to be called ‘democratic’?

I’m afraid not.
Communist Romania did have regular elections, where a huge proportion of the people rubber-stamped the party line.
Putin is currently serving a third mandate as Russian president, after paying lip service to the Russian constitution and letting Dmitry Medvedev fill in between 2008 and 2012.
No major irregularities were noted at the time of the voting in Russia when Putin was reelected but somehow I cannot consider the process fully democratic.

Even in the United States things are no longer what they used to be. Both major parties have put forth candidates that are seen unfavorably by a majority of the people. So unfavorably in fact that 13 % of the registered voters would rather see the Earth being hit by a giant meteor than any of the two as President.

unfavorable trump clinton

Clinton trump unfavorable

clinton meteor

Public Policy  Polling, June, 13, 2016, Raleigh


So, again, what’s going on here?

I’m afraid that what has been known as ‘democracy’ is being slowly eroded to ‘mob-rule’.

You see, in a really democratic situation you get the ‘real deal’ with ‘all the trimmings’ while when having to deal with ‘mob rule’ all you get is some ‘window dressing’.
Or, as the Romanian saying goes, on the outside you are greeted by a white picket fence but once inside you’ll have to deal with a white fanged tiger.

Let me explain myself.
Theoretically democracy is a situation where everybody has some, even if minute, influence over the fate of the community to which he is a part.Practically it means “government by the people; especially :  rule of the majority”.

I’m almost sure that by now most of you have already figured out what I’m driving at.

‘Rule of majority’ can be more dangerous than a regular dictatorship if that majority has been improperly led into voting the way they did.
A ‘dictator’ might be wise enough to know that if he drives the situation way beyond the plausible something will eventually snap but someone callous enough to lie to an entire society doesn’t have such qualms. In fact this is the explanation for why not all authoritarian regimes end up in complete failures.

On the other hand most of them do exactly that while no democracy has failed yet, as long as it maintained its democratic character.

Why? Simple.

Running a complex system – and a country is a very complex system, is a matter of setting goals and avoiding making mistakes.

And while setting goals is important, avoiding mistakes – specially catastrophic ones, is paramount.

If goals are chosen improperly – not bold enough, for instance, or even misguided, that society will experience a ‘hiccup’ but if that society is led into a dead-end then it might never recover. The ‘funny’ thing here being that in many instances the authoritarian leaders were quite good at setting goals but almost always sooner or later ended up in a ditch because they were very poor at avoiding potholes.

But how come democracies are better at avoiding grave mistakes than centralized administrations?
‘Four eyes see more than two’, specially if they look in different directions.
Every authoritarian regime follows the cue of the authoritarian leader and tends to down-play, or even ignore, the rest of the problems. This tendency is accentuated by the fact that those positioned higher on the roster tend to be better insulated from the immediate effects of their decisions. So relatively small mistakes keep piling one atop the other until the heap cannot be balanced any longer.
On the contrary, in a functional democracy – where everybody has a real chance to bring his concerns to the attention of others, mistakes are not only easier to spot but also easier to avoid.
Only this cannot happen as advertised unless the members of a society have a healthy dose of mutual respect. Nobody is going to pay any attention to what is being said by a ‘pariah’. No matter how interesting, or important, that might be.

And this is exactly what happens in a ‘mob-rule’ environment. Nobody listens anymore to what ‘the other’ has to say. People allow themselves to be driven into separate herds and, once there, pay no attention to anybody else but their ‘own’ cattle-driver. Who not only that doesn’t have any respect for ‘his’ herd but usually doesn’t care for anything else but their votes. Reason would ask that he should pay close attention to the well being of his herd but since he is convinced that he can always attract new followers he will usually go for the ‘cheapest’ alternative – taking good care of a flock being more ‘expensive’ than luring some new ‘green horns’.

That’s how people become estranged from one another and end up with their eyes glued to the whip of the cattle driver. That’s how democracy becomes an empty concept.

That’s why an honest count of the ballots doesn’t mean much if the public discussion which preceded the voting wasn’t both free and meaningful.
That’s why reducing democracy to ‘rule of the majority’ is akin to putting the cart before the horse.

The real scope of the whole process being to openly examine as much information as humanly possible before starting to make decisions (vote), not to (artificially) build majorities around (charismatic?!?) political figures. Or should I rather call them by their rightful name? Con men?

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Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, The kind of world we live in, Transparency, Trust

Lack of trust

July 4, 2016 //
1

I recently read an excellent article about how the ever-growing lack of trust in public institutions, governments and experts included, is generating aberrations like Donald Trump becoming the darling of a sizable proportion of the American Republicans.

collapse of trust in institutions

I’m afraid that all of us have contributed to this.

People who get elected to power use it to fulfill  their own goals yet continue to get elected despite the fact that many of those goals do not add anything to – and too many times even subtract from – the general well being.
People who, for various reasons, vote for those mentioned above.
Media pundits who fill the airtime with their versions of the reality, purposefully crafted to fit their own goals instead of honestly trying to present to the public what they have seen/understood of what had happened.

What’s bothering me most is that all of them are behaving in an absolutely ‘rational’ manner.
In the sense that all of them are convinced they are following the current mantra.
“Make the best of the opportunities at hand”

Given the current ethos – that only the pussies do not grab everything within their reach – each of those in places where they might be given things would act foolishly not to accept those ‘gifts’. If they might find a ‘legal’ way to do it.
And the Supreme Court of the US concurs.

“In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the corruption conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

“There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns. It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.””

What happened was that former Gov. Bob Mc Donnell had accepted various gifts from a certain business man called Williams and then (because of them?) ‘set up meetings, hosted parties and called Virginia officials to discuss  a series of meetings to discuss aspects   related to William’s businesses.

Now, is this an example of corrupt behavior or not?

According to the Government and to the lower courts that have sat on this matter, it is.
According to the Supreme Court, it is ‘distasteful and even possibly more than that’ but not yet corruption. Or, at least, not in the way the Government has presented its case.

“But conscientious public officials arrange meetings for constituents, contact other officials on their behalf, and include them in events all the time. The basic compact underlying representative government assumes that public officials will hear from their constituents and act appropriately on their concerns — whether it is the union official worried about a plant closing or the homeowners who wonder why it took five days to restore power to their neighborhood after a storm. The Government’s position could cast a pall of potential prosecution over these relationships if the union had given a campaign contribution in the past or the homeowners invited the official to join them on their annual outing to the ballgame. Officials might wonder whether they could respond to even the most commonplace requests for assistance, and citizens with legitimate concerns might shrink from participating in democratic discourse.” Chief Justice John Roberts writing on behalf of the court.

The way I see it this is nothing but ‘hiding behind technicalities’.
From a formal point of view the Supreme Court’s decision is absolutely correct.
On the other hand almost everybody speaks out, some very vehemently, against ‘pork barrel politics’.

Yet nobody does anything when occasion arises. Forgetting that this is exactly what we, humans, are supposed to do. Make decisions and assume responsibility for them. Otherwise, if we only look out for pretexts to do nothing when those around us keep making ‘good’ use of whatever opportunities they identify, the whole world will soon become, again, encased in the kind of straight jacket Hitler and Stalin were trying to put on us.

Here’s another example.

Less than a fortnight from now the Republican and the Democratic conventions will likely nominate Trump and Clinton as their respective presidential candidates. Each passionately defended by their followers and viciously attacked by their adversaries.
Yet both almost equally disdained by the general public.

“More time on the campaign trail isn’t improving the image of either major-party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.
Some 60% of registered voters held a negative view of Mr. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, compared with 58% in May. Some 29% viewed Mr. Trump positively this month.
Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state and presumed Democratic nominee, fared somewhat better, with 55% viewing her in a negative light, compared with 54% in May. One-third of registered voters held a positive view of her.” (Peter Nicholas in Wall Street Journal, June 27 2016)

What’s going on here?
Why has any of them been picked up as candidate in the first place?

And why none of their detractors mentions the trait of character that both of them have in common?

The complete disrespect both of them have for ‘comme il faut’.
You see, ‘properly’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘being a stickler for the word of the law’ but certainly means following the ‘spirit of the law’.
You’d expect as much from the two contenders for the Oval Office, don’t you?

Yet Donald Trump has a history of trying to use the law in order to drive an old woman out of her house so that he could have build a parking lot for one of his casinos while Clinton is being currently investigated for the highly irregular manner in which she used to manage  her e-mails when she served as Secretary of State.

To me this is a pertinent enough explanation for why a majority of the people do not trust that any of them would have ‘the better interests of the country’ in mind if and when any of them will be elected to office.

Making a step further people might soon develop a distrust for the whole concept of democracy – simply because the system was unable to deliver better candidates/alternatives. Not only in America.

And since the idea of democracy starts with trusting your fellow citizen to be able to make pertinent decisions – even if they happen to be contrary to your own ideas on the matter – it is highly likely that we’ll soon live in a very untruthful world.

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Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, democracy, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Social justice, The kind of world we live in, Trust

Brexit

July 1, 2016 //
1

tainted vote

“It was a fair vote. They may not like the outcome but nobody’s saying that the vote was tainted. Maybe by the misinformation ahead of it … but the actual voting process…”

If there is something to be learned from the current debacle is that democracy is about way more than honestly counting the votes.

In fact, if we resume ourselves to that, we’ll end up tied down in a cage known as ‘mob rule’. Who ever succeeds to stir up more efficiently the public sentiment will rule the day and ‘apres nous, le deluge‘.

In order for the democratic process to be efficient – actually democratic, that is – the electorate must have at its disposal all the pertinent information that is available at that moment. If the electorate doesn’t really care and doesn’t mind that information… that’s it. But the information has to be readily available.

And there’s the catch.

If those ‘in charge’ use the media to spur up public sentiment instead of honestly informing the people about the  situation at hand then we’ll have a beauty pageant instead of a democratic election. Or referendum.

What we really need to remember, fast, is that for a democracy to maintain its function – weed up the really bad leaders/ideas proposed in the public square – we need to add two things to ‘honestly counting the votes’.

‘Mutual respect’ among all members of a given society and a keen enough interest of a majority of the members of that society in the well being of their community.

‘Democracy’ won’t work properly unless the voters respect each-others, and the government they had, themselves, elected. Simultaneously  the government has to treat ‘the people’ with utmost respect, not as if they were hapless children in dire need of close guidance.

At the same time no democracy ever successfully maintained its character unless the ‘leaders’ were constantly remembered of their ‘mortal’ status.

“And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”” Genesis, 3:22

The point being that those who think they can make the difference between good and evil need their feet constantly brought back to the Earth.

In Heaven it was God who did that. Here on Earth God works through the hands of Man. Hence we have to take good care of our own fate.
We won’t be able to do that efficiently unless we start respecting each-others, and each-others’ opinions – because none of us will ever be able to know the entire truth so we’ll be better off collectively if we share our knowledge.
For the very same reason – no one can master all the information that floats around us – all those who try to grab too much power must be treated with ‘extreme caution’. Again, this can be done more efficiently in a collaborative, and respectful, manner.

That’s why I’m convinced that the EU needs to be remodeled, not bulldozed.

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, limited rationality, man induced fragility, manipulation, Mindset, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we live in, Trust

“Look from above”

June 18, 2016 //
0

they keep telling us.

As if it would always be obvious where ‘up’ and ‘down’ are…

In his efforts to figure up how society works Max Weber has introduced the concept of “ideal type”:

“Ideal type, a common mental construct in the social sciences derived from observable reality although not conforming to it in detail because of deliberate simplification and exaggeration. It is not ideal in the sense that it is excellent, nor is it an average; it is, rather, a constructed ideal used to approximate reality by selecting and accentuating certain elements.”

In other words, Weber proposed that in order to better understand social interactions we should first divest everything we consider unimportant from whatever we are studying and then concentrate our attention on what, in our opinion,  ‘makes the world go round’.

Key words here, in my opinion, being “our opinion”.

Common lore, somewhat older than organized ‘science’, used to speak about ‘put yourself in his shoes’.

To me this way of putting it shows two different things.
Commoners are more humble than scientists – none of them pretends to know which are the aspects that have to be taken into account and which are those that should be discarded –  and, maybe even more important, a lot more ‘democratically minded’ – ‘put yourself in his shoes’ plainly states that both opinions, ‘his’ and ‘yours’, have equal value.

In this sense ‘look from above’ seems a rather ‘scientific’ attitude, don’t you think?
By telling somebody that he should search a vantage point and then examine the situation from there actually suggests him to construct one of Weber’s ideal types.

Now, please, don’t get me wrong.
Of course this is exactly how human minds work.
Whenever we look at something – no matter how open minded we believe ourselves to be about it – we do it from a personal point of view. There’s no way that we can reasonably pretend otherwise.

The real problem is what we do next.

When ever we try to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes we have to make a choice.

We can either try to understand/feel what we would have understood/felt if those things would have happened to us or we can try to imagine what the original owner of the shoes understood/felt then, when things were actually happening to him, in ‘real time’.

I’m sure you all see the difference.

This is why, whenever I’m asked ‘please look at this situation from above and tell me your conclusion’, I always start with ‘all I can do is offer my opinion on this, accompanied by a stern warning: My opinion is just that, an opinion. It can happen to be more accurate than yours but it can also be wrong. If you still want it I’ll gladly put it on the table and let us all discuss it.’

On the practical level Nicholas Nassim Taleb proposes that we should shift our focus from trying to determine which is the best option in a given situation to doing our best to avoid choosing the obviously wrong ones.

‘Obvious’ to those who do not allow themselves to become mesmerized by the illusion that ‘best’ can be identified, o course.

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, Transparency, Trust

A prosecutorial Republic

May 25, 2016 //
0

The New York Times, from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, has found out that Calin Popescu Tariceanu, currently the second most important political persona in Romania, as the Speaker of the Senate, is being investigated “for giving false testimony to aid suspects in a wider real estate graft case.”

“Prosecutors said Tariceanu made untrue statements under oath in April when he was called to testify in an investigation in which …”

OK.
So he isn’t investigated for anything he might have done then but for something he had (not?!?) recently said about the whole thing, now.

“Tariceanu denied wrongdoing and fired back at magistrates, saying “we live in a republic of prosecutors based on the politics of dossiers and handcuffs”.”

At this point it is very important to remember that Mr. Tariceanu has been at the fore front of the Romanian political stage for the last 25 years – for instance he was the Prime Minister from 2004 to 2008, and to mention that he is only one amongst  the many Romanian politicians being criminally investigated who deplore the growing importance of the role recently assumed by the Romanian prosecutors.

I’m not going to discuss here the individual merits of each of the corruption cases that have been investigated recently. It is very possible that some of them were started, or closed, because ‘somebody’ had made specific ‘recommendations’. The prosecutors are human beings themselves.

But isn’t it rather strange that so many of the people who have actually honed the finest inner wheels of the contemporary Romanian state are now complaining about the way it works?

During the last 26 years this rather small group of people had countless opportunities to put things on the right track.
It seems that they didn’t succeed. For various reasons.
But it also seems that some of them, at least, had ‘ulterior motives’ for not succeeding.

Some of which are now being unearthed by the prosecutors.

The point being that we shouldn’t become mesmerized by the process.

Let the prosecutors do their job. Under close supervision, of course.
Learn the appropriate lessons.
“Do not steal” is important not so much because it is one of the Ten Commandments but because no society that has condoned theft on a large scale has ever thrived for long long enough to really enjoy the spoils.

Coming back to the Romanian political class – and to the people itself, everybody eventually gets to sleep in the bed each of us has prepared for itself.

If corruption wasn’t so widespread as it is today the prosecutors wouldn’t have been able to launch so many investigations.
If corruption wasn’t so widespread as it is today the ordinary people would have undoubtedly enjoyed a way better life. Maybe one close enough to the point where they wouldn’t have minded so much ‘a little’ corruption.

I have to end this by quoting Traian Basescu, the former President, also a very controversial figure:

“Corruption rests with two sides. I do not want to change responsibility, but it must be shared and assumed. A corrupt civil servant cannot be corrupt if they do not have a partner to put money into their hands, a ministry cannot pay by 50 percent more if there is not a consultant to sustain what the constructor says: ?Yes, we’ll raise the bill’. The ministry finds it impossible to act, because anyone wins in court if one also has the consultant’s advice that they should increase the public works price by 50 percent’, Basescu said at the launch of the Report on the Competitiveness of Romania, an event organised by the Romanian-based American Chamber of Commerce.

The President went on: ‘I believe we must, first and foremost, leave hypocrisy behind. The state alone cannot be corrupt, it has a partner, if there is corruption. The state alone cannot be non-performing, it has a partner. Let us together assume what we have to do. The easiest thing for the private sector to do is to criticise the state and the easiest thing for the state to do is to show indifference to the problems facing the business environment. I believe we are not in such a situation. We all want to have performance, to be competitive.”

Those of you who are interested in learning more about how we got here might start by reading this report by Oxford Business Group.

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Categories arrogance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Social justice, Tara din care traim, Trust

Karma.

May 9, 2016 //
1

There are a lot of meanings attached to this concept.

Varying from “Karma is the law of moral causation” to Aaron Hapel’s “Belief in karma is the coward’s revenge.”

Let me add another one.

Karma is about understanding the nature of the link between cause and effect.

Precisely the kind of understanding needed to break the vicious circle described by “The Only Thing We Learn From History Is That We Do Not Learn.”

My point being that history doesn’t play itself, over and over, mindlessly.

In fact “It’s us who play it again and again, until enough of us make enough sense of what has happened to be able to push the whole circus a little further down the road. And sometimes even that is not enough, a whole chapter becomes forgotten and we have to play it one more time….”

Those of you who haven’t done so yet, try reading “The social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman

“The work introduced the term social construction into the social sciences and was strongly influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz. The central concept of Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other’s actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process of this institutionalization, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people’s conception (and belief) of what reality is becomes embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.”

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Categories Choices we make, cooperation, evolution, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we live in, Trust

Comparing apples with oranges.

May 9, 2016 //
0

Yesterday I read an article which stated that ‘when it comes to violin there are a lot of things that are more important than talent‘.

I must confess that I was taken aback.
Not as much by the call itself but by the very fact that someone would actually make a call like that.
Compare apples and oranges, that is.

OK, both these two can be found in the same department of the grocery store and are somewhat similarly shaped so…

The whole thing made me wonder ‘how is it that we compare things’?

Simply. We choose a standard and then measure the things we want to compare against that standard.
According to our interest in the matter, of course.

That’s why a comparison is not only easier but also less contestable when that standard is actually measurable.
A dimension, for instance. Nobody in his right mind will ever contest a proposition like ‘this orange is larger than this apple’.
Or an evident feature shared by the items being compared. ‘Apples are usually smoother than oranges’.

5989177-comparing-apples-to-oranges-isolated-on-white-stock-photo

In these cases, when the items are easily comparable – sometimes even against the current mantra, we can say that the characteristics used to compare them are ‘parallel’ to each other.

parralel

Here we can, easily and undoubtedly, determine that one is ‘taller’ than the other.

parralel 2

Or we can make that call by measuring the intensity with which a characteristic shared by both categories manifests itself: “Apples are usually smoother than oranges”.

But what if the things we are trying to compare are defined by characteristics which are perpendicular to each other?

Like length and width, for instance.
In fact this particular case is relatively simple. Here we can determine whether one is longer than the other, wider than the other or if the area covered by one is bigger than that covered by the other.
And, for each case, it would be relatively simple to determine which of the two characteristics is more important. According to each individual situation and to our interest in the matter.
After all it doesn’t make much sense to buy a very long and narrow strip of fabric if you want to make a shirt nor to buy a square shaped cloth  if you need some ribbon.

Things are more delicate though if the characteristics are ‘perpendicular’ only in a figurative manner of speaking. For instance talent and dedication. Or opportunity and diligence. In both these situations it’s extremely hard  to make a call as to which member of the pair is the more important. Simply because without any of them the other is utterly useless. Despite our moral biases. Like ‘dedication is more important than talent’. Or ‘Lady Luck will never fail to smile to the really diligent’.

I’m not implying here that preparing yourself for life, like learning and training, is useless. Quite the contrary.
I’m simply saying that you need first to determine what you are really good at.
It doesn’t make much sense to put a lot of effort into something simply because someone tells you that you’ll become better at it if you work really hard.

Yes, the harder you work at something the better you’ll become at it. But what about spending the same amount of effort at something you are talented for?

So go find out what you are really good at.
If you are diligent enough in your search you’ll eventually find out something that you enjoy doing and others find useful.

And that, my friend, is the real happiness.

Or, in Csikszentmihalyi‘s terms, it would mean that you’d have reached the state of ‘Flow‘.

 

 

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Categories Choices we make, cooperation, fail better, Frames of mind, Mindset, Psychology, Trust

“The Constitution is…”

April 30, 2016 //
0

scalia1

It is very rarely that I agree in full with something that I happen to stumble upon over the Internet.

And it’s no wonder that Scalia was absolutely right on the subject.
He had lived for so long in the shadow of the Constitution that at some point it must have downed on him.
The constitution, just as any other legal document, is nothing more, and nothing less, than what we make of it.

After all it was us, citizens, who wrote it in the first place.
Then amended it as we saw fit.
And are now interpreting it. To fit our own purposes, of course.

We don’t seem to agree much, lately, about those very purposes?
So we came up with diverging interpretations of what’s written in the Constitution?

Then the problem is with us, not with the Constitution.

Using it as a weapon, or adjusting it to fit the short term goals of whomever happens to be in power momentarily, won’t solve anything. Actually it will only make things worse.

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Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, Frames of mind, freedom, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Trust

Anger versus getting angry.

April 18, 2016 //
0

Just finished reading, again, another excellent post written by John Faithful Hamer on Committingsociology.com

I remember now that something was nagging me after reading it for the first time. I also remember the pangs of helplessness felt almost a year ago, when I couldn’t identify what was nagging me.

Well, this time I nailed it.

“Getting angry isn’t really like releasing the built-up pressure in a steam engine; it’s far more like exercising a muscle group. Every time you give in to the desire to lose it, you strengthen your “anger muscles”; every time you resist the urge, you weaken them.”….
“So perhaps it’s time to stop preaching the gospel of expression, and revisit the much-maligned virtues of repression.”

“Anger” and “getting angry” are not the same thing.
Anger is just a feeling – and, hence, a source of ‘energy’ – while ‘getting angry’ is the manner in which we allow it, consciously or unconsciously, to take us over.
I fully agree that ‘getting angry’ only worsens the situation only I’m afraid that ‘resisting the urge’ isn’t any better. In fact that would be no different from tightening your arse because you don’t want to fart in public.
The problem is not solved, not at all, only postponed. You still need to relieve yourself.
By widening Freud’s concept of repression to encompass more feelings than the simple embarrassment we might find a reason to continue to look for a manner in which to ‘release that built up pressure’.
Only now we are faced with a new problem, since we’ve already agreed that ‘getting angry’ is not the best thing to do.
Freud, again, to the rescue.
How about widening another one of his concepts, sublimation?
How about learning to express, this time consciously, our intense negative feelings in a socially acceptable, and hence a lot more effective, manner?
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Categories Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, freedom, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Trust

A gun is nothing else but a tool, right?

March 16, 2016 //
0
grandson of sweetie pie

Grandson of TV’s Miss Sweetie Pie gunned down in St. Louis. (AP)

“St. Louis police say they found Andre Montgomery dead at a home Monday night. A second man was taken to a hospital in critical condition with gunshot wounds.
Police say that after someone shot Montgomery, the second man ran upstairs to help him. A third man who was in the home saw the second man carrying a gun and shot that man because he feared for his safety.”

So.
A guy invites some people in his home.
Judging by the way in which they interact they don’t know, or at least don’t trust, each-other.

Somebody – not necessarily from among the invited guests, shots the host.
Somebody else – presumably alerted by the noise, draws a gun and hurries to assist the victim.
A third person, fearing “for his safety”, draws his gun and shots the good Samaritan, simply because he was carrying a weapon.

Is there anything to be learned from here?

OK, by somehow removing all privately owned firearms in America, personal safety, on average, would be somewhat improved. But since something like that would be very unlikely to happen let’s concentrate on something more plausible.

How about taking grater care about who enters your home?

And something else.
Ever since reading about this I cannot stop thinking about the similarity between cars and guns.

Both are tools and both are dangerous. Yet almost everybody has the right to buy one.

But no-one is entitled to use a car without a license while so many people advocate that everybody should be allowed to carry guns, everywhere.

37 000 people dead and 2.35 million people injured or disabled as a consequence of road accidents. Per year.

32 000 people dead by fire arms. Per same year. 60% of them being suicides while roughly 34% are classified as homicides.
On top of this another 67 000 people are injured, per year, by fire arms.

Some could say that there is not any significant difference between the two situations and, as a consequence, a carry permit would not change much.
Are you sure about that?

Currently most guns do not follow their owners when they leave their houses – for various reasons. This is why I’m afraid that if more and more people would chose to carry their weapons, things would become a lot more complicated.

Not because people are bad or ill intended.

Simply because most ‘civilians’ are not trained to asses dangerous situations in an effective manner nor the necessary skills to use their weapons safely.

You see, defending your home – everybody else but you and your family becomes an enemy in this scenario, is very different from trying to help in a complex setting. When people might freak out at the sight of yet another gun.

That’s why not all those who own a gun should ‘drive’ them around without a license.

After all, how safe would you feel when driving in a country where no driver’s license is necessary and where DUI is not forbidden?

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Categories Choices we make, human rights, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mindset, Psychology, Trust
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