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Back-walking

January 26, 2017 //
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“If democracy and open societies depend on constantly providing their citizens with more wealth tomorrow than today, then the Western world — and soon enough the whole world — is in for tough times.” (Zachary Karabell, Forget Dow 20,000 — the Boom Times Are Over. Is Democracy Next?, Foreign Policy, 2017/01/26)

Shouldn’t we ‘back track’ and try to identify what and when, if any, we’ve done wrong before attempting to go any further?

The author identifies, with surgical precision, the stepping stones that have led us to where we are now.

We, in the West, have grown to associate material affluence with capitalism, democracy and liberalism.
In the process, we got “addicted” to a special kind of ‘economic growth’,  the one measured in monetary terms.Lately, after people no longer had as many children as they used to – which, supposedly, is going to hinder and eventually halt ‘economic’ growth, things are no longer seen in the same light.
The economic boom in China and recent developments in Philippines, Turkey and a few other places which “have seen a surge in nationalism of late, a questioning of democracy and skepticism about liberalism even as economic growth has been strong and deep”  are adding to the confusion.
Even “more surprising is the erosion of support for democracy and the norms of liberalism — even of capitalism — in the United States, France, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere”.

He also identifies, with equal precision, some of the barriers that prevent us from seeing the wider picture.

That we haven’t yet developed a clearer understanding of what liberalism and democracy might be. In his own words they still are “adolescent concepts relative to the tenure of recorded history”.
Then there is the matter of how we understand ‘economic’ growth.
“Politicians and governments rise and fall based on how successfully they have been seen to address the problem of wealth and jobs — not the problem of food, shelter, health, and quality of life.”
“we know no other way to assess economic strength and societal success except by the metric of growth. Three hundred ago, the metric was armies and territory. Today, it is GDP, jobs, and wages. You could craft a lovely society with zero growth, but nobody would believe it if GDP, jobs, and wages were shrinking and the rewards remained unevenly dispersed.”
And it’s not only a matter of understanding but also one of perception. “How people react to inequality is hardly straightforward; the populist wave that elected Trump doesn’t yet mind a billionaire cabinet. But the perception that some are reaping rewards at the expense of the many is deep and strong; that, too, was a line almost verbatim in Trump’s inaugural address.”
Which perception leads to a certain way of seeing things. “We clearly are able to provide basic material needs to everyone. But in the developed world, we are failing to provide a sense of security even while most people’s lives are de facto more secure.”
On top of this, there is “anger”. Produced by the “evidence that we have the ability to meet our collective needs and wants” corroborated with the “ample evidence that many countries lack the political will or social consensus to make that happen”.

So, what next?

In Mr. Karrabell’s terms, we need to brush off skepticism, fear and anger – since they “are not themselves barometers of the future” – and …

“The greatest questions for the coming years is whether material stability is enough to mitigate against political chaos and societal decay.”

I’m sorry but I really don’t like this kind of ‘wait and see’ attitude.
It doesn’t make much sense to bother about something that will happen outside your sphere of influence, does it?
Place a bet, if you are a betting guy, and go back to whatever you might be able to actually do!

How about rephrasing that question?

What is it that might bring about the “political chaos and societal decay” we are so afraid of?

Now is the moment for me to make a confession.
I’ve altered, just a little bit, the narrative.
While Mr. Karrabell did mention “anger”, he only said about it that it was “evident” – without providing any cause for it. It was I who associated that anger with the “ample evidence that many countries lack the political will or social consensus” to “meet our collective needs and wants”.
The way I see it there is no way that any country might ‘meet our collective needs and wants’, no matter what amount of ‘political will or social consensus’ might be involved in the process. Not in the longer run, anyway.
All communist regimes – which were, declaratively, trying to accomplish exactly that – have failed. Abysmally.  Not because, in reality, all of them did nothing but cater for their ruling elite but because all of them used to be run according to a ‘central plan’.

And stop calling China a ‘communist’ regime. Or Vietnam, for that manner. As long as the ‘means of production’ are more or less private, and their owners free(ish) to use them as they see fit, those countries are not ‘communist’. They might not be entirely free but they are not at all ‘communist’. Venezuela, for instance, is a lot more ‘communist’ than China.

But let’s return to the countries that might attempt to make it so that ‘our collective needs are met’.
How are they going to do that?
First of all, those in charge – the government, right? – would have to determine what those ‘needs and wants’ are and only then make the necessary arrangements for them to be met. But not more than that, because that would be wasteful.

Do I hear any chuckles? You figured out that those ‘willing’ countries would have to use the same ‘central planning’ system that has already led to the failure of the communist regimes?

How about re-framing the whole situation?
How about the “ample evidence” mentioned by Mr. Karrabell suggesting that too many countries – including the one that has recently inaugurated Mr. Trump as President – no longer have “the political will or social consensus” to allow their citizens enough real freedom and enough real opportunities to pursue their own “needs and wants”? As they see fit?

Then shouldn’t we next try to understand the process through which the erstwhile ample opportunities have been curtailed?

As I mentioned before, I’m going to use the ‘back-walking’ method.

First step, anger. We really need to loose that. Nothing good ever came out of it.

Specially when considering the next steps, perception and understanding. If we allow anger to cloud our thinking both perception and understanding will yield errors instead of knowledge.

Which brings us to our obsession with (monetary measured) growth. Could this obsession be explained by the fact that money is the easiest thing to distribute but also the easiest thing to hoard? Panem and circenses eventually failed… Why do we still see hoarding money as a legitimate goal (after amassing more than one could ever spend, with the entire family, in a hundred years)… beats me.
But explains what’s going on.
As long as enough of us see hoarding money as a legitimate past-time, more and more people will engage in it. More exactly ‘try to engage’ in it. And this is the very behavior which produces ‘bubbles’. As in ‘market bubbles’. And, eventually, crashes.

But not only crashes. Misconceptions also.

“There is little evidence that democracy and liberalism (and capitalism) in their current form are the best or only conduit for providing for economic needs and wants for all. If they were, there would be less roiling discontent.”
My point being that none of those, in any form, are ‘conduits’ for anybody to provide, through them, anything for anybody else.
Democracy, liberalism and capitalism, together, determine the three dimensional ‘space of opportunity’ where we, human individuals, try to provide for our own needs. If allowed to, of course.
It fact it is not the “politicians and governments” mission to “address the problem of wealth and jobs”. In a full-fledged liberal democracy the government does nothing but guards the freedom of the economic market  and the safety of the citizens – including their ‘human’ rights and private property.

As for capitalism… it doesn’t provide anything. Lest of all “incentives”. People provide incentives. Capitalists provide their employees with incentives to work and politicians provide the capitalists with incentives to engage in such or such enterprises or to refrain form others. And while the first kind of incentives, those provided by the capitalists themselves, work as intended – increase productivity, that is, if employed wisely, the latter end up curtailing the freedom of the market. Which can no longer work smoothly enough. This being the moment when opportunities disappear for the ‘man in the street’ and when those ‘connected’ to the government start to ‘flourish’.

You see, real capitalism is not as much about money as it is about trust.
Trust that your business partner – well, most of them – is going to fulfill his end of the bargain, not try to rip you off. Trust that if things go wrong – in the rare event that he does try to rip you off – the government will move swiftly on your behalf.

That’s all.
That’s what Deng Xiaoping meant by ‘I don’t care about the color of the cat, all I care is for it to catch the mouse’. That’s why the Chinese imported capitalism works. Because the Chinese government has learned that the market cannot do its job, in the longer time frame, without a certain dose of ‘liberty’.
The problem being that China is but an exception. Along with a few other examples, mostly in South Asia, they are the very few countries whose authoritarian governments have learned to refrain from interfering too much in their economies.

Looking back in time, ‘back-tracking’ that is, we’ll notice that capitalism has emerged in places where the entrepreneurs had both considerable individual liberty and enough wisdom to refrain themselves from trying to con their business partners. Otherwise the whole (budding) economic effervescence of the time would have very quickly been smothered by greed.
Think of the Medieval Venetians trading with the Arab merchants of the time. This being the reason for why the oldest surviving bank in the world, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, is based in Italy – the least centralized country in the Medieval Europe.
Or think about how a hand shake used to be enough to seal a deal between two Americans. Some time ago… nowadays you need an army of lawyers to buy a car… not to mention the flurry of official permits needed in most cases…

So, what we need to do, if we want to continue to be a source of inspiration for the rest of the world, is to restore democracy, liberalism and capitalism to what they used to be. Dimensions which described the space of opportunity that used to be open for all of us.

OK, hindsight is always 20-20… or so they say…
I’m afraid that what I just described was an idealized mental construction but I’m sure that you got my drift.
After-all, if the Chinese were able to learn it from us … we’ll surely be able to restore it to its old glory.
Or else…

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/26/forget-dow-20k-the-boom-times-are-over-is-democracy-next/

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Categories authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, collective identity, cooperation, Frames of mind, politics, The kind of world we are building for our children

Moral Hazard.

July 8, 2015 //
3

“Why should the European taxpayers bail out the profligate Greeks?”

That’s the mantra I’ve been hearing for some time now, even though a way bigger, and darker, cloud slowly builds up on the other side of the world.

As almost all mantras there is a small nugget of truth in here, even if things are not at all as some want us to believe. Jan Strupczewski wrote this almost prophetic article for Reuters, more than two years ago.

So?

First of all I’d like to quote the definition proposed by Investopedia.com for ‘moral hazard’:

“The risk that a party to a transaction has not entered into the contract in good faith, has provided misleading information about its assets, liabilities or credit capacity, or has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.
Moral hazard can be present any time two parties come into agreement with one another. Each party in a contract may have the opportunity to gain from acting contrary to the principles laid out by the agreement…..
.
.
.
Moral hazard can be somewhat reduced by the placing of responsibilities on both parties of a contract….”

The way I understand this definition is that it is the job of both parties who enter into a contract to perform every diligence they see fit before committing to that contract  and to assume the responsibility afterwards.
Let’s see if this definition sheds any light on today’s subject.
The Western World tends to act as if all countries were functioning as communities. If we don’t like what Putin does in Ukraine we impose sanctions that hurt the entire Russia in the hope that people will do something about the situation. That tactic works very rarely – see what happens in N. Korea and in Iran. Even more, sometimes it even backfires. Look at how popular Putin has become after the sanctions have been put in place.
Coming back to Greece we have become fed up with the shenanigans of the Greek politicians – right, left and middle – and now we insist on harsh ‘austerity measures’ in the hope that the Greek voters will somehow find among themselves an honest knight in a shinning armor that will appear from somewhere and teach them to pay their taxes – and by doing so they’ll dully repay the entire debt that has accrued over the time.
After all it’s their responsibility, isn’t it?
It was them, the Greek voters, that have elected the corrupt politicians in the first place. It was them, the Greek voters, that didn’t do anything when they noticed that their Government was corrupt. Even more, some of the ordinary Greeks must have helped the corrupt politicians – nobody can be corrupt by it’s own, somebody must be at the other side of the deal. On top of that dodging taxes was, and still is, a national sport in Greece – well, that’s actually a rational thing to do: ‘who in it’s right mind would willingly pay his taxes, knowing that most of the money would be squandered away’?
Does that mean that the Greeks should be made to reimburse, in integrum, what their creditors demand of them?
OK, lets forget for one moment that this not possible and that if Greece defaults not only the Greek people will have to endure harsh conditions for a while but also the creditors will loose a considerable amount of what they are due.
Let’s presume that a completely different Tsipras somehow convinces the Greek people to accept pension cuts, tax hikes and, lo and behold, to pay their taxes in an honest way.

Then we’ll still have a fine example of ‘moral hazard’.
We have just established that in a democracy the voters have the final responsibility for the actions of those elected/hired into meaningful positions.
And what did the elected officials, from Brussels as well as those from the rest of the EU capitals? Turned a blind eye when Greek politicians ‘cooked the books’ before Greece was admitted into the EU and, after that, into the Euro zone? Then, when the private banks that had unwisely extended credit to the profligate Greeks had troubles recouping their money, the same elected officials said nothing while Jean Claude Trichet, the then president of the ECB, helped transfer the entire burden – mind you, no ‘haircuts’, unto the ‘wider’ shoulders of the European tax-payer? Who said absolutely nothing!
Only now some of the elected politicians, afraid that their constituents might finally protest, have started to notice the irresponsible attitude of Greece, to demand harsh austerity measures and to refuse even the idea of any debt relief.
So how come we can speak of moral hazard when we describe what the Greeks (governments, tax dodgers and general public) did but never mention in this context the lack of financial responsibility displayed by the investment bankers that helped the Greek governments cover up their shenanigans, the European officials who turned a blind eye to what was going on and the wide European public who didn’t care about what was done with their money by those hired to take good care of the European finances?
What is going to happen from now on?
Before trying to gouge that we need to understand what sets Greece apart from the countries that have dragged themselves out of the worst phases of the latest crises – Ireland, Spain and Portugal: Greece is a country deeply divided by rampart corruption.
In most of Europe corruption is a cancer that reaches across the entire social organism, in Greece it divides the population in two almost equal parts: those who work for or do business with the Government and all the rest.
The situation is made worse by the fact that Greece has become independent rather lately, specially compared with the Western Europe. Furthermore, the process was a lengthy one, it started in 1821 and ended right after WWI, only to recommence during WWII. Add to that the long list of authoritarian leaders and you’ll understand the deep mistrust between the people and the Government – which is not at all ‘their’, despite Greece calling itself a democracy. I have a distinct impression that even those who work for or do business with the Government doesn’t really trust it – they know too much about what is going on there. Small wonder, in these conditions, that dodging taxes is a national sport…
What we have now is, on one side, some European leaders who were elected on a conservative/popular ticked and who have already introduced some austerity at home and, on the other side, a leader who has promised to end austerity.
For these people to reach an agreement both sides have to admit failure: the European leaders must accept the past errors and take responsibility for them and Tsipras must convince his constituents that they need to change their attitude. Completely.
Does any of this have any chance to come true?
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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Choices we make, Economy, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Psychology, Social justice

The winner takes itall.

April 19, 2015 //
2

What on Earth is ‘itall’ and why would anyone bother about it?

Let me re-frame that.
Why on Earth are we so obsessed with winning in the first place?
It’s indeed nice to win from time to time but aren’t we overdoing it? Regardless of costs?

“Suppose that you are charged with selling a single food item to at least a hundred million people in a highly diverse society.  You can pick whatever item you wish, but you can pick only one.  If you fall short of getting at least 100,000,000 people to voluntarily choose your item over a rival item that will be offered by a competitor, you lose.  (Your competitor is playing by the same rules that you are playing by.)

Being highly competitive, you hate losing.  So you carefully go about selecting which item to choose.”

Already been there? You must surely understand where I’m driving at. Even if you are not ‘that competitive’ yourself you must’ve been wondering why hamburgers taste the same almost all over the world, and not only those mass produced by McDonald’s.

You see, there are two sides of the winning game. No, not those two obvious ones – the two players.
There are the players and the spectators. None could exist without the others but only the players, and the trainers, are aware of this.
Yet the very existence of the game and the manner in which it is played heavily influences the life of the people belonging to both categories.

As Don Boudreaux explains us in “Insipidness Guaranteed” our very fondness of winning big leads to the market being inundated by the very blandest – but generally acceptable – of products. Originality becomes stifled, contrary to the very fact that, from time to time, it’s exactly the original thing that gets the jackpot.

Three things concur to this.

I already mentioned the first.
Most players, or at least those at the top, know what’s going on while most of the (paying) spectators don’t. This leads to the spectators watching mesmerized what’s happening in the pitch while the players ratchet up the tension till it becomes unbearable least the spectators become bored and leave. So the spectators spend their time, and resources, watching instead of creatively using their brains to build something new – and potentially useful.

Our culturally enhanced obsession for winning.
Those players insist because they are plainly ‘hooked’. ‘Adrenaline is one of the most powerful drugs‘. This is true, if you don’t believe me check it on Snopes.com. The problem with this particular addiction is that adrenaline is produced naturally in our body when we compete and that the winning moment is ‘scored’ in the brain by a powerful shot of dopamine, another hugely addictive natural drug.
On top of winning being highly pleasurable, and addictive, it is also positively sanctioned by the society. Drunkenness and being high on drugs are shunned by a considerable number of people while winning is applauded by all.

It also helps.
Yes, winning helps a lot. Otherwise ‘the quest for winning’ would have withered away a long ago by the very same mechanism that encouraged the advent of the moderate altruistic behavior – natural evolution.
No, this is not about ‘the survival of the fittest’ – that’s a mirepresentation of Darwin’s words, set straight by Ernst Mayr in ‘What Evolution Is‘ : ‘It’s not about the survival of the fittest but about the demise of those who cannot cope’.
So, competition is good in the sense that it’s telling the loosers ‘stop trying this and look for another venture if you want to thrive/survive’. The real winners are exactly those who understand something when they loose.

Just as we need to balance altruism with the need to preserve our own personae, both physically and psychologically, by constantly adjusting that balance according to the prevailing circumstances, we also need to understand where our obsession for winning has brought us.

When all we want is to win, we tend to forget that survival is, most of the times for individuals and at all times for the communities, more important than winning.
Darwin had titled his most important work ‘On the origin of species by means of natural selection‘ and had amply demonstrated there that ‘natural selection’ (= competition) is just a means toward the ultimate survival. Evolution, that is.
That’s why we are hard wired to compete among ourselves – so those more adapted to a certain environment might continue doing what they are good at while the others are ‘encouraged’ to look for something else to do. But natural selection never works on the premises that ‘the winner takes it all’: very seldom competitors that belong to the same species kill each other.

Ernst Mayr demonstrates in the book I already mentioned that overspecialization is bad for you. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is stupid precisely because of that. ‘Being the fittest’ – and doing it for any considerable amount of time – means gradually becoming unable to cope with the slightest change that might occur in your environment.
That’s why natural selection includes a mechanism through which small alterations appear haphazardly in our DNA – those who are benign enough survive and provide the individuals that carry them with additional capabilities, so that they might take advantage of slightly different conditions than those where their ancestors have evolved.

We, the humans, have raised this to a new level. By becoming self-conscious – ‘aware of our own awareness’ in Humberto Maturana’s terms – we have developed a certain individual originality – and the need not only to manifest it but also to convince those around us that our ideas are better than theirs. Sometimes by any means at our disposal.
If you don’t believe me read again Plato’s Republic: “Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all-they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.”

Maybe it is high time for us to understand that a 2500 years old fallacy is still a fallacy. Plato marked the pinnacle of the Greek civilization, not it’s start. After he published his works, and Pericles had finished building his architectural wonders, Athens went slowly downwards and gradually lost it’s significance. Telling people what to think is the sure fire recipe for disaster. Ask the Soviets if you think what happened to the disciples of Plato isn’t convincing enough.

Coming back to where we started, winning, I have to remind you that a fundamentally aggressive attitude leads to the complete disappearance of respect. The aggressor becomes so engrossed in what he does that not only ceases to respect those around him – “He who is not for us is against us” was how Lenin used to see the world – but also looses sight of what he does to himself and to where he is leading his followers.

At the end of the article that spurred me into writing this, Dan Boudreaux, the author, bitterly ejaculates: “No one should be surprised that candidates for the U.S. presidency transact mostly in platitudes and are forever performing deeds on the campaign trail that any self-respecting person with independent judgment and a genuine sense and appreciation of his or her uniqueness would never in a million years dream of doing.  And the closer a candidate gets to the political promised land, the more intense becomes the pressure for him or her to be the political equivalent of a Bud Lite.”

Why, I ask all of you, would they – or any other of the putatively democratic candidates – do any different if we, the voters, continue to behave as hapless spectators and choose to watch as they fight for power instead of reminding them that they are being interviewed for a job, not wrestling for the privilege to take home the prom-queen?

And if they don’t get it – cause they’re too busy flaunting their feathers, we don’t get it – cause we’ve been hypnotized by those very same feathers as they are, how come the trainers – those close advisers who handle the players at every occasion – don’t get it that the whole bandwagon has started to go astray?!?

Real democracy means that the would be leaders put on the table the important issues, discuss them honestly till the voters develop a real understanding of what is going on and then some of them get elected by a knowledgeable community to implement a set of policies.

Where do you see this happening in our days?

http://cafehayek.com/2015/04/insipidness-guaranteed.html
http://www.everythingaddiction.com/science-of-addiction/addiction-news/adrenaline-the-strongly-addictive-drug-with-serious-life-consequences/http://thebrainbank.scienceblog.com/2013/11/26/gamblers-mind-the-thrill-of-almost-winning/
https://nicichiarasa.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/altruism/
http://www.amazon.com/What-Evolution-Science-Masters-Series/dp/0465044263
http://books.google.ro/books/about/On_the_Origin_of_Species.html?id=sX_hAwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
Animal Talk: Breaking the Codes of Animal Language: https://books.google.ro/books?id=r49kIaUMrC0C&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=bluffing+instead+of+fighting+natural+selection&source=bl&ots=lI9Po_MjLw&sig=6a-7QhZLVGsZlTpEXU3YK85fm_0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qlEzVa2KLIKzPNTqgYgO&ved=0CEYQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=bluffing%20instead%20of%20fighting%20natural%20selection&f=false
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/pub/hvf/papers/maturana05selfconsciousness.htmlhttps://books.google.ro/books?id=xxGttzFXqaYC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=lenin+who+is+not+with+is+against+us&source=bl&ots=t1mdQsdmGh&sig=kbxcK2ctK2Q_fw79k0nJN8yBQNs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6V0zVd9GptXIA7uRgcAD&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=lenin%20who%20is%20not%20with%20is%20against%20us&f=false

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

Let’s speak about ‘ratio’.

April 13, 2015 //
0

Some of you might know that ‘ratio’ comes from Latin, where it’s original meaning was linked with the mental operation of dividing.
Yep, the first ‘rational’ thing made by man was resource allocation: how much food each member of the clan will get, according to a huge, and variable, set of criteria. I won’t get into details now.

My point is that we shouldn’t be bragging about how rational we are. At most we are ‘rationalize-rs’.

You see, for a decision to be perfectly rational it has to fulfill three criteria. The decision maker must:
– Have at his disposal all pertinent information regarding the entire situation under consideration,
– Be able to act in a completely unemotional way,
– Be in possession, and willing to use it to the maximum, of a brain not only in perfect working order but also able to process that huge amount of information in such a short time that nothing significant changes while the decision is being made.

So, which of you still thinks we are actual able of reaching actually rational decisions?

In reality we function in a completely different way.

From time to time an IDEA flashes in our heads. Again I won’t enter into details about how this outcome is influenced by our needs, emotions and previous experiences, for now I’ll just deal with what happens after that idea has already ‘sparked’.

Depending on a plethora of individual characteristics people differently when something like this happens to them.

Some shun it as if displaying any degree of originality was a mortal sin.
Some honestly and straightforwardly set to examine it as thoroughly as they can. They take into account as many information as they can muster about the subject and not only carefully balance costs against possible benefits but also try to determine as many stakeholders as possible and determine, to the best of their knowledge, whatever consequences might befall upon them if that idea is put into practice. And they proceed only after this entire process has been followed step by step.
Some take a different route after the cost analysis. If they reach the conclusion that the whole thing might prove to be profitable enough for them they start identifying who might object, for what ever reasons – no matter if valid or not – and thoroughly plan how to stifle the opposition.Some don’t even care about the costs. If they become, by any means considered to be proper by themselves, convinced that that particular idea has to be implemented then they will stop at nothing. They will employ all means at their disposal in order to put that idea into practice, no matter what those around them might feel, think or even suffer.

Please observe that the last three are all using their rational brain to the utmost. Yet only the second one might be described as reasonable, right?
Most of us are culturally conditioned to think about the third that he is a callous manipulator and about the fourth that he is an aggressive bastard. Right again, ain’t I?

Well, not so fast.
According to Plato the fourth is doing the right thing. ‘He who sees the light has not only the right but also the obligation to take the others with him towards that light’. (Plato’s Republic). One might think that this is a very dictatorial attitude that doesn’t, in any way, resemble Socrates’ manner of dealing with things – after all he was convicted exactly for teaching the young how to make their own decisions – but this is another discussion. Coming back to the manner advocated by Plato it is indeed extremely authoritarian – all dictators have followed it to the letter – but it is not altogether without merit. What should a doctor do when you are brought to his ER with a mangled leg? Wait for a couple of days for you to come about and decide if you’ll accept the amputation – while the already dead tissue poisons you beyond any therapeutic possibilities – or proceed with cutting away your limb and thus saving your life but assuming the risk that you’ll sue him for his last dollar?
According to the modern business practices the third guy is acting in a quite conventional way. Most of us agree that planned obsolescence is good thing – it provides a lot of jobs – doesn’t it? Well, I don’t, not on the scale we are using it anyway, but that again is another subject.
And now that we have reached the presumably respectable and the only reasonable ‘second decision maker’ I’ll just add some of George Bernard Show’s words on this matter:

the-reasonable-man-gbs

So it seems that there isn’t such a thing as an always valid manner of thinking, right? Things depend a lot more on our individual judgement than a lot of people feel comfortable with. Rational thinking isn’t at all that panacea some people believe it to be and in reality reason is nothing but a mental tool and the manner in which we use falls squarely in  our individual responsibility
That’s why Plato thought he was doing a service to his fellow citizens when he wrote: “I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.” Let me remind you that Plato was contemporary with the Golden Age of the ancient Greek civilization and with the last days of the Athenian democracy. I’m not going to pretend now that the demise of the Greek democracy  or the relative rapid decay of the Greek civilization after Pericles and its replacement by the Roman and Persian ones were influenced by Plato’s writings. No. In fact it’s all the way around. Plato had only witnessed and put in writing the attitudinal changes that affected the Athenian/Greek society and which eventually caused those developments.

And now that we have reached the subject of democracy here is why maintaining a democratic attitude is extremely important for the long time survival of a society. Real democracy means that a considerable part of the people pay active attention to what is happening to their lives and have the ‘constitutional’ possibility to intervene peacefully if they don’t like where their leaders take them. We have seen that we cannot depend, as Plato urges us to, on the wise guidance of a ‘specialist leader’ since there is no such thing as ‘perfectly rationality’ being attained by a man. A widely disseminated attitude of the general population is the only way in which individual mistakes made by the leaders are eventually acknowledged and fixed. Any other ‘political arrangement’ leads to these mistakes being rationalized away and their (disastrous) results constantly accumulating until the entire system collapses.

One other thing before I wrap this up. The first argument I made, that the first rational thing made by man was the rational allotment of food among the members of the clan, is also a rationalization. That’s how we, who like to believe about ourselves of being rational, think it must have happened. That the inhabitants of the temperate Europe were the most rational among the peoples of the Earth and that’s why they have reached such a dominant position as they used to enjoy until not so very long ago.
Sorry, it happened exactly the opposite way. Europeans, because of the harsh conditions they had to face – coupled with the relative abundant resources and a special geographical layout – they have developed a (relatively) rational way of thinking. It was this or else… just as Ernst Myer says: ‘evolution is not about the survival of the fittest but about the demise of the unfit’. In order for us to develop ‘rational thinking’ we needed the very special environment to force us to do it.
We are any special – if at all – not because we are any different but because we had the good fortune of being born in the right place. OK, we made good use of that happy act of hazard but that’s all.

For those of you who want to read about how ‘mere’ geography decisively determine evolution I highly recommend Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel.

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, politics, Psychology, Respect Mutual., 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

What kind of government.

January 30, 2015 //
0

I started to comment on “The reason the economy crashed and has been slow to rebound is because of government intervention, not the market mechanism” by Nick Sorrentino and got carried away. So I transformed the comment into a post of my own.

I fully agree with your conclusion “I prefer an open sourced economy to one which is manipulated by programmers writing in a language which is full of bugs and which brings the system down periodically.” but I find your initial assumption to be too vague.
The current situation was indeed heavily influenced by government decisions. And yes, they were completely out of touch with reality – central planning never works.
But here is where our ways depart.
The solution for the current situation is not at all ‘less’ government. Or, god forbid, ‘no government’!.
Free market is the most efficient way of running an economy only it has two limitations. It is populated by people and the total amount of trade-able goods is limited. Hence the market is never really free. We do need a free market only the natural evolution of any limited system is to gradually loose it’s freedom. So it is us who have to guard the freedom of the market.
And this is what ‘government’ business should really be. Not to tell us what to do – to plan for all of us – but to make sure that nobody becomes so powerful as to be able to dictate to others what to do.

Some of you might wonder “Why should we not accept any monopoly if it has been ‘lifted to power by the free market'”?
I mentioned earlier that there is no such thing as a really free market.
OK, you might disagree with that, after all we both advocate freedom and I’ll use a reason we both agree upon: “central planning doesn’t work“. Ever! So why do you think that a private monopoly would be able to function any better than a public one? Just because it’s private? I assure you that Lenin saw the entire Russia as his back yard and that didn’t stop him from messing that country so big that it’s still reeling under the consequences. King George saw the American colonies as his private possessions and that didn’t make the early Americans any happier.
So what we have to implement is a completely different kind of government, not a weaker one. Blaming ‘the (notion of) government’ instead of specific government decisions only induces the impression that ‘government’ as a whole is useless/despicable and that drives people away from (the concept of) government.

What we really need, that different kind of government I was speaking about, is a government that is closely watched by the people and who jealously defends both the political and economic freedom of the individuals, not either notion of ‘central planning’ or ‘vested interests’ – which, in the end, are uncannily similar.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2015/01/the-reason-the-economy-crashed-and-has-been-slow-to-rebound-is-because-of-government-intervention-not-the-market-mechanism/

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Choices we make, politics, Respect Mutual.

“The land of the free…”

November 16, 2014 //
3

the-best-blow-chart-ever-bird-shit

It took me a while.
Long enough to become ashamed of myself…
But I finally got it!

All those individuals are birds! In order to get there they had to fly!

In human terms they were free, nobody forced them to get in those relative positions.
If living in a democracy, those above the basic level had run for those positions and their attempts had been validated by those residing on the lower branches!

So what’s keeping them there?

Do they really enjoy it?
Are they afraid that if they leave, even temporarily, somebody else would take their places?
Have their wings became so stuck with shit that they are no longer able to take off?

Besides that, what kind of leader can find any satisfaction in presiding over such a filthy mess?

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Culture, politics, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in, The world as described in jokes

Selective focus

September 30, 2014 //
0

‘Selective focus’ is a technique used by skillful photographers to grab the attention of the viewer by opening the lens at its widest and focusing it on the most interesting part of the picture. This way everything else is left ‘out of focus’ and more or less blurry so the viewer concentrates his attention on the clear part it. Nowadays, when most pictures are taken using smartphones or pocket cameras this is no longer possible because the lenses in those cameras are too short for this technique to work. There are computer that can mimic this but it’s not the same thing.

The point is that if we are not really careful our attention can be grabbed by glitzy but insignificant aspects of the reality while the more mundane but infinitely more important ones remain hidden in full view.

Here for instance.

Selective focus

Frankly I don’t care about how they live, that doesn’t concern me. Not in the least.
The problem is that by being so few they induce a lot of fragility in society.
Empires and other totalitarian regimes fail inevitably because they are run by very few people while more democratic countries survive/thrive for longer periods of time because they make better use of whatever human potential they have.
By allowing more people to have their say democracies have a way bigger pool of potential solutions for the problems they have to face while totalitarian regimes have to make do with only the very few solutions envisaged by those who happen to be at the top when a particular problem has to be dealt with.

 

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., politics, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

We are aware, we care and yet we dare.

September 4, 2014 //
1

And this is precisely what makes us human!

What? No mention about us being the only species that is able to make rational choices?

Nope.
First of all we are not the only ones, chimps and computers – among others – are also able to ‘reason’, in variable degrees.
Secondly, and way more important, reason is nothing but a tool. And tools are very, very important but not essential. Just as our hands and feet, they are extremely useful but being able to use them isn’t enough to make us human.

I was led to this understanding by the rapid succession of three events. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the book lists mania that has currently engulfed FB and the eulogy read by Barak Barfi for his friend Steven Sotloff.

The Ice Bucket Challenge shows that we care, the fact that we post lists of books on FB so that complete strangers can gouge our personalities (real, pretended or a little bit of both) means that we are aware (of our public image) and Steven Sotloff loosing his life to a bunch of criminals while doing his best “to give a voice to people in war-torn lands” demonstrates that humans dare to do what they feel is right even when confronted with mortal dangers.

Still unconvinced?

Can you spell Stephen Hawking? And do you think that being able to spell proves you are human? Are you sure… chimps can do that too, you know? (Well, to a degree and using a computer, but still! http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chimps.htm)
Now, have you ever heard of the ‘obedience experiment’ carried out by Stanley Milgram? Although aware of the potentially dangerous  consequences of their actions only about 33% of the participants dared to contradict the ‘authoritative figure’ that was apparently in charge of the whole thing. And even more interesting is the fact that nowadays experiments like these would be considered illegal/unethical preciselly because of their effects on the participants. Check the first one.
Let’s go back to Stephen Hawking. He is the owner/operator of one of the finest minds ever endowed to a man. His reason is as precise as that of a computer while his imagination goes way beyond the limits of the Universe and way down into the realm of the invisible. And yet, what did he do when he found out he’ll soon loose the use of his limbs and will eventually need a machine to help him breathe? When he slowly became aware that those horrible things were actually happening to him?
Did he allow his beautiful mind to go berserk in self pity – the pinnacle of ‘caring for his own self’, the self preservation mania that is aggressively conquering more and more ground?

Or did he dare to continue with what he thought it was right for him to do?

You’ll rightly tell me that he couldn’t have survived if he wasn’t immensely lucky. That he was born in an era when technology was advanced enough, that he had already proven himself so material resources needed for his survival weren’t a problem, and that he had met the right people. True. But he did more than merely survive. He continued to create. To bring new ideas and understanding into the world.

– ‘OK’, jumps another one of you, ‘but what’s the difference between him an Hitler, lets say, or any other dictatorial sociopath that uses immense resources and top technologies to impose his understanding of the world on the rest of the people’?

Well, another excellent question!
A long time ago I had read something to the tune of: ‘Had Hitler been born in Britain he would have ended up in a loony bin, not running the show into the ground’. (I’m awfully ashamed for not being able to remember who said/wrote this nor internet savvy enough to identify the author.) The idea is that for a dictatorship to take hold you need way more than a guy, no matter how intelligent, powerful and devious. You also need a considerable number of people who dare not express dissent whenever they dislike/disagree with anything.

The point is that all three members of the triad that makes my title are equally important.
Being aware of the needs and caring for those around makes for a very good and obedient slave in the absence of daring while being a self conscious and uncaring dare-devil is meeting the first two requirements for becoming a dictator.
What happens with someone who dares and cares (mainly about himself, but not exclusively) while he is only marginally aware of the wider repercussions of his actions? Does the notion of ‘mad scientist’ ring any bells? Or ‘executioner’?

In fact if all three legs of the triad were equal the individual described by that triad would behave in a considerate and respectful manner towards all people, irrespective of social status, wealth or even age. In political terms that person would actively, persistently and politely reject any form of authoritarianism while in economic terms it would be a staunch defender of the free market. 

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

Partisan politics

August 5, 2014 //
0

Theoretically parties exist to coagulate as many diverse ‘interests’ and initiatives as possible and represent them on the political stage.

At some point all this has morphed into what we have now, when parties fight one another as if they were enemies, not interdependent limbs of the same social organism, “the people”.

This is ‘a fine example’ of the end-result:

“Committee Democrats have spent more than five years working on a report about the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration, which employed brutal interrogation methods like waterboarding. Parts of that report, which concluded that the techniques yielded little valuable information and that C.I.A. officials consistently misled the White House and Congress about the efficacy of the techniques, are expected to be made public some time this month. Committee Republicans withdrew from the investigation, saying that it was a partisan smear and without credibility because it was based solely on documents and that there were no plans to interview C.I.A. officers who ran the program.”
(In fact it’s not the entire CIA that spied on the Senate, just a few concerned individuals who were embroiled in the mess. Why did they accept/performed their roles in the first place … that’s another question… And why does the media present this situation as if the entire CIA is to be blamed is another… Afterall ‘waterboarding’ was a political decision that has to be assumed as such. Puting the whole blame on the shoulders of the ‘people in the field’ is pure cowardry. They might not be angels but…)

Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel

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Categories politics, Respect Mutual.
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