Archives for category: Trust

What if Obama’s tears were genuine?

January 6, 2016 //

” But when you look closer at the picture, when the illusion of power gives way tot the reality of pain the world at which this woman sits, our world, that is a world which is torn by war, destroyed by hate, devastated by despair and devastated by distrust. The world on which she sits is on the very brink of destruction. Famine ravishes millions of the inhabitants of this world in one hemisphere while feasting and gluttony are enjoyed by inhabitants of another hemisphere. A time bomb ticking is the world on which she sits with apartheid in one hemisphere and apathy in the other hemisphere and enough nuclear warhead scientists tell us to wipe out all forms of life except for cockroaches and that is the world on which this woman sits. A world which cares about more bombs for the enemy than it does about bread for the hungry. A world that is still more concerned about the color of skin than it is about the content of character. A world more finicky about the texture of hair or what is on the outside of your head than it is about the quality of education or what is on the inside of one’s head. That is the world on which this woman sits. You and I think of being on top of the world as being in heaven, but when you look at the woman on Watt’s painting a little closer what you discover is that this woman is in Hell. And that artist Watt dares to entitled the painting “Hope.”
“with her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music and praise God … To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope… that’s the real word God will have us hear from this passage and from Watt’s painting.” (Jeremiah Wright, The Audacity To Hope)

What happened during his tenure that made him change his attitude so drastically as to resort to administrative measures in order to effect the ‘change we can believe in’?

I still remember the joy I felt when he was elected. I hardly knew anything about him, of course, but the way he talked made me hope he was going to behave differently than the one before him.
Even more important than his personality was that I had seen his election as an about-face of the American political scene. I presumed that by electing Obama to the Oval Office the American People was sending a powerful signal.
That they wanted to tell everybody, politicians included, that they had understood how much damage had been done by the constant bickering and extreme mutual distrust that was plaguing the political establishment. And that they had enough of it.

Could it be that Obama’s tears of yesterday were shed for the fact that he didn’t really deliver? That from the height of his position he had got an even clearer picture about the State of the Union than he one he had before becoming President yet he wasn’t able to do anything meaningful about it? Precisely because the Union is even more divided than before?

About almost everything?

Why have we allowed our respective ideologies separate us to the tune of making us see two different realities where there is only one?

Why do we have to get down to a ‘single string left on our harp’ before understanding that?

Tags Barack Obama, George Frederic Watts, Jeremiah Wright, The Audacity of Hope

Categories Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

“Property”.

January 1, 2016 //

For some time now I’ve been wondering how come so many people who define themselves as being Christians – “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.“, Matt 19:24 – are so passionately defending the very concept of (private)”property”.

Could it be that Marx was right after all: “Private property is the result of alienated labor.” ?!? And so many of us have been wrong for so long?

“The right to private property is the social-political principle that adult human beings may not be prohibited or prevented by anyone from acquiring, holding and trading (with willing parties) valued items not already owned by others. Such a right is, thus, unalienable and, if in fact justified, is supposed to enjoy respect and legal protection in a just human community.”

Trying to understand the source of this dichotomy I adopted a two pronged strategy. First I looked up the word itself and then I tried to deepen my understanding of the entire concept.

It’s absolutely obvious that ‘property’ comes from ‘proper’.
‘Proper’, in its turn, has two basic meanings: ‘fit for use‘ and ‘pertaining to one individual‘. The first one has evolved into ‘propriety’, “the state or quality of being correct and proper” while the second has become ‘property’, “thing owned“.

So, do all these etymological arguments make it any easier for us to accept that respecting each others’ right to private property is what introduced a certain degree of functionality in the human society?

‘But aren’t you contradicting yourself?
At the beginning of your post you suggested that ‘property’ might not be as good as advertised and now you say that the ‘right to private property’ is ‘good for you’?
Will you make up your mind, for Christ’s sake?’

Now, that I’ve reached the conceptual stage of my analyses, I must bring to your attention the fact that a right is nothing but an opportunity while each (piece of) property is a thing – even those which are not of a ‘substantial’ nature. ‘Intellectual property’, for instance, is a ‘measurable thing’ even if you cannot put your finger on it while the ‘right to intellectual (or any other kind of) property’ is (an infinite) something which patiently waits for (a rightful) somebody to make (proper) use of it.

Maybe this is what Christ tried to tell us in the first place. That it’s not property itself that stands between us and our salvation but our (improper) attitude towards it. That it’s not the object of our property that is the problem but how we make use of our right to private property.
After all Christ told the “young rich man” “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” (Matt 19:21). ‘Go sell, give and THEN follow me’, not ‘come help me ABOLISH the very right to private property’, as Marx used to preach to his followers.

To understand the difference between what Christ and Marx said about this subject let’s see how these two relate to the notion of ‘Man’.

In Christ’s book God took a lump of dirt and ‘made Man in His own image’ while in Marx’s narrow materialistic vision “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Basically both of them start with the same ‘materiel’ – the mundane ‘star dust’ that Mendeleev distributed throughout his table – but what a difference at the end of the ‘assembly line’!

Being made ‘in His Own image’ not only means that all Men (and Women) are created equal but also that each of them shares in His Divine Nature. Hence the origin of our free will, of our ability (‘right’, opportunity) to be saved. Compare this to how Marx described the human society:

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.”

As somebody who has lived for 30 years under communist rule let me translate this from ‘Newspeak‘ into plain English:
‘History suggests that those who figure out the inner workings of this world have, from time to time, the opportunity to take over the show. Now is one of those moments. The ‘fat cats’ have been so greedy lately that the regular people are growling under the very heavy yoke that has been placed on their shoulders. That’s why we have the opportunity to unsettle the ‘old’ from their positions and to plant our fat asses in their comfortable chairs.
And the first thing we must do in order to achieve that goal is to abolish the right to private property. People are so fed up with what was going on lately that they’ll go along. They have grown to hate so much the ‘greedy plutocrats’ that most of them won’t notice that in the (revolutionary) process they’ll lose the very last shrouds of personal autonomy they still have. Without the right to dispose of the results of their own labor they’ll be at our mercy’.

Who was right between the two?

Well… Both, unfortunately.

The communists did run the show, at least for a while. And we all know to which results.
On the other hand it seems that in the longer run miss-using the right to private property is indeed a powerful drawback. The already too long sequence of economic crises caused, ultimately, by nothing else but our own greed has indeed given birth to a generalized state of psychological malaise.

I don’t know about what’s gonna happen in the next world – or if it exists at all – but I’m sure that if we don’t learn, fast, how to use, properly, the right to private property things will become too hot for our own good in this one.

The only one we are sure about.

Further reading.
During my research for this post I found this very interesting take on the same subject:

“Zwolinksi argues that libertarians are right to support private property, but also that private property is more complicated than we sometimes think.”

Tags Christians, communism, Economic Crises, Jesus and the rich man parable, Jesus Christ, Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski, Property, propriety, the right to private property

Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, Frames of mind, human rights, limited rationality, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, religion, Rule of Law, Social justice, The kind of world we live in, Trust

How about more determined citizens?

November 19, 2015 //

Terrorism needs three things in order to produce victims.

Some disgruntled/deranged individuals to perpetrate the actual crimes.

Some callous individuals who for various reasons organize/support the disgruntled/deranged.

A large enough section of the community which is too tired/despondent/discouraged to care about what’s going on in its close vicinity – that’s where the terrorists (hit men and the support network) hide while preparing a hit and where the support network will try to sink itself afterwards.
Since it is practically impossible to corral all the deranged and to smoke out all the schemers beforehand the only really viable strategy remains to make it so that the general public no longer assists catatonically to whatever is happening in its close vicinity. Until it’s so late that even drawing a gun is no longer very helpful.

I don’t even think that arms are such a must.

They might come handy in certain occasions but what we really need is a much more active attitude. A calm and considerate one but firm enough to impose respect.

Tags Active public, Armed citizens solution for terrorism, firm calm attitude

Categories altruism, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, Frames of mind, Social justice, Trust

“The Social Construction of Reality”

November 19, 2015 //

Some say that God created the world, a long time ago, and that’s why he is the only one who can forgive.
Some others remember how the elders taught them that keeping a grudge is far worse than having an ulcer. It will eat you alive, like a cancer.

I, personally, don’t know anything about God creating the world. I wasn’t there at that time so…
What I do know is that playing God is extremely dangerous. Not only for the impersonator but mostly for those around him. Exactly those who were amused at first by his performance – enough so that they encouraged him to continue, only to find out later how annoying the show will soon become AND that the exit door had been paddled shut behind their back, while they were happily clapping after the first gigs.
At the very end, after the impersonator had left the scene – by his own will or simply carried out, he will end up shouldering the whole blame – as he should, of course.
But I can’t stop wondering how much suffering could have been avoided if the crowd were just a tad more circumspect?

Not making very much sense, do I?

OK, first take a look at this:

Then watch this:

Do you really think this is funny? Well… more than 38 000 of the almost two and a half million who watched this say they enjoyed it and only two and a half thousand became worried enough to express their feelings.

Most of you have not experienced how it is to live under dictatorship so I’ll use another metaphor.

You are probably quite familiar with this guy:

He was lionized during the ’70’s and the ’80’s for impersonating a no-nonsense cop who cut through the red tape and got things done.

Mostly by shooting the bad guys.

Don’t get me wrong.

They didn’t get anything else than they actually deserved.

What I find really troublesome about Dirty Harry is the casualness with which he killed people. And his over-reliance on guns. On brute force, that is. “Go ahead, make my day.”

It is true that at that time people were exasperated with the daily occurrence of violent crime and were desperate for a way out of that situation. I’m not going to offer you statistics or stuff, you can look them up yourself. I’ll just tell you that the Romanian television was having an almost daily news bulletin presenting the latest violent acts committed Stateside. It was all part of the propaganda, of course, but the facts were real. And plenty enough to make me wonder, I was a teenager at that time, what on Earth is going on there?

That wave of violence has subsided, as we all know. Some say it happened because of ‘broken windows policing’, some ‘freakin’ others ‘blame’ ‘Roe vs Wade’ for it while I suspect that all of the above had something to do with it but that the main ‘culprit’ was the economic upsurge that followed the ‘stagflation’ period.

Nowadays we find ourselves in another economic and psychological down-turn. With a twist though.
The recent economic troubles were brewed at home while then it started with the Oil Crisis. Much of the violence no longer starts as a robbery but has a psychological motivation – disgruntled and socially disconnected young people commit multiple acts of homicide, either by indiscriminately shooting their victims or by blowing themselves up, along with a huge amount of explosives, in densely populated areas.

And how do we respond to this fresh wave of violence?
By turning a blind eye to heavy policing? By digging fresh trenches that further divide our already highly polarized society? By another wave of over reliance on guns?

“I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer’s eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on.”

Go ahead, click on that quote and read the entire article. My post won’t go anywhere.

What’s the connection between what happened to Kyle Monk, the Dirty Harry movies and Putin?

For starters all those involved were …human individuals.
Kyle’s neighbor who called the police and who, when asked by Kyle ‘why did you do it’, chose to end up the conversation with “I’m an attorney, so you can go f— yourself.”
All of the nineteen policemen who played a role in this drama – and who treated a 125 pound, scantily clad, woman as if she were an armed and dangerous criminal were also human individuals.
The heads of the public administration, those who adopt and enforce policing policies are also human individuals.
The financial wizards who engineered the recent crisis belong to the same species as we do.

We, the guys who admired Dirty Harry for his toughness, are the parents of the hapless generation who blows itself up or mindlessly shoot their colleagues in campuses.

We are also the guys who are amused when bored magazine writers attribute to Putin such silly quotes as ‘it’s my job to send them to Him’.

And it’s us who applaud the Putins of this world. Only to find out, on our own skin but too late to be able to do anything about it, that the ‘hug of the bear’ is not that comfortable as it seemed from a distance.

Tags Dirty Harry, It's my job to arange the meeting, Kyle Monk 19 cops, Putin

Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., arrogance, authoritarianism, Choices we make, democracy, forgiveness, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

“Freak out!”

November 4, 2015 //

Somebody shared a picture on FB and I finally understood the strange relationship between the American People and their Government.

“One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics,” Zappa went on to explain. “Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it…And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what’s in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?”

The quote belongs to, obviously, Frank Zappa. I found it in an article written by Kevin Courrier and published in CriticsAtLarge.com.

What grabbed my attention was not the fact that a musician is so passionate about politics but the huge confusion that sits at the bottom of his political weltanschauung.
The American Constitution, any constitution for that matter, is not at all a contract between the government and the people but a contract that binds together the citizens that inhabit a country. The government, any government, is ulterior to the signing of that contract so it cannot be a part of that contract.

OK, I can understand how that confusion came to be only I cannot understand how it could survive for so long.
For more than two centuries, that is.
As we all know the US were, at first, British colonies. For the last nine centuries or so Britain was run more or less according to Magna Charta – which is indeed a sort of contract between the Monarchy and the British people. But that is valid for Britain. It is the Great Britain that traces its ‘essence’ back to the idea of a divinely sanctioned Monarch who owned, entirelly, the whole country and who autocratically ruled over all the aspects of its life. And that at a certain point in history the Monarch agreed to sign a contract with his subjects, promising to treat them fairly.

But at an ulterior point in the history of the British Empire the American people had decided that they didn’t want anymore to be subjected to any worldly authority so they had sent the British Governor packing. From there on the essence of the American state was no longer the persona of the Monarch but ‘We, the People’.

That’s why the American Government is, by right, nothing more than an employee of the American People while the British one is a servant – or an employee – of the Monarch.

Let me put it a little differently. America is like a huge corporation while the citizens are its shareholders. The people own the country and the Government who runs it is the Board of Trustees. The people are the employers and the members of the government are the employees.
In Britain the Monarch is the ‘owner’, the people are ‘tenants’ and the government is the administrator of the whole business. The government is employed by the owner and payed by the tenants – who have a say because they are paying the rent, otherwise known as ‘taxes’.

Then how come, two hundred years after the Constitution that settles the conditions of ‘incorporation’ was adopted so many Americans still see the Government as being different from the ‘people’? Could it be that Zappa is right? That too few people have understood that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”?

I know, I know… These words are not from the American Constitution – they are widely attributed to Lincoln. But they describe perfectly its spirit, even if some people accuse Lincoln for being a dictator – because he didn’t allow the South to seccede, as if this decision was his to make… You see, the confusion is deep indeed. When people are passionate about something they tend to pick up from the entire picture only the pixels that fit their view of the world…

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Then why so many of the ‘we the people’ still believe that the constitution is a contract between them and their Government?
Or maybe Zappa was (half) right after-all? Civics should indeed be brought back …

PS
Coming back to ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ some people attribute these words to John Wycliffe and still others to Thomas Cooper.