“Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia acknowledged “constructive changes” in the U.S. position on the conflict. He told the council the resolution was “not an ideal one,” but “a starting point for future efforts towards peaceful settlement.””
By sending the Red Army to invade Ukraine, Putin had crossed a red line. The rest of the world noticed.
Some played possum. ‘Let’s stay out of it. And maybe, maybe, get something for ourselves’. The majority said “No! This is too much.”
Russia does have veto-power in the UN Security Council. Hence the dead-lock.
The Biden led US and the EU had chosen to support Ukraine. And to sanction the Putin regime.
Every day, people are being killed. Soldiers on the front and civilians under aerial bombardment. Reasonable individuals want the fighting to stop.
Easier said than done. Putin might say: ‘My bad!’ and tell his soldiers to go home. Ukraine might agree, on its own volition, with enough of Putin’s demands. And, hopefully, get at least a respite. Or those helping Ukraine might say: ‘We had enough. From now on, you’re on your own.’
Putin is not yet ready to back off. Ukraine is not yet ready to cave in. ‘Somebody’ is getting ready to act as a mediator.
What are the immediate consequences?
Putin is back. No longer an outcast!
Is the rest of the world ready? For it to go back? Back to what was going on before WWI but on a far wider scale?
On the other hand… letting go, emotionally speaking, may not be as beneficial as advertised. We might lose some bitterness but we might become more liable to ‘repeat the experience’
As in …
Forgive but don’t forget is a lot easier to be said than done, you know…
All set goals which go ‘against the grain’ incur costly consequences. Which are detrimental to survival! Of the leading trespasser, of those in the following or of those hapless enough to be too close to that particular goal being pursued. Remember Marx? Nothing unpleasant had happened to him. Not as a consequence of his attempts to change the world! But to others… Which is equally valid for all other ‘world changers’. Along with all ‘world preservers’ who run along ideologically drawn paths.
Then what should we strive for? Simply ‘follow the heart’ to achieve ‘peace of mind’?!? Would that be enough?
‘Now, that you’ve reached your personal pinnacle, which do you think is more important? Setting the right goal for yourself or reaching it by keeping on the ‘straight and narrow’?’
Well, staying on the straight and narrow is a goal in itself… The way you put it, you’re asking me to determine which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Neither. Evolution came first. At some point reached the ‘chicken and egg’ stage then went forward to giving birth to living offspring.
Same thing here. Life is opportunistic. Setting goals and following rules is OK, as long as you keep an open mind about things. Keep your eyes wide open yet fully aware that nothing is exactly as it looks like.
The only legitimate long term goal is ‘sustainable survival’. The rest are nothing but ‘staging posts’. In order to be able to do something – anything – you need to be alive. And kicking! In order to stay alive, you need to make as little damage as you go along. To yourself – as a living organism – and to the environment in which you live. To the natural environment each living organism depends on and to the social environment which allows us, human beings, to maintain and develop our human-ness. Our capacity to generate meaning by making successive decisions.
How to achieve this meta-goal? By following the common sense rules which become apparent as we go forward in time. Which become evident as long as we keep our eyes open….
All people, men and women alike, are born, nursed and initially educated by their mothers. By their mothers, inexorably women!
Some of the feminists, mostly women, act as if they want to exact revenge over their former ‘masters’. Over men. Whom they perceive as oppressors. Most of the feminists, from both genders, believe that women should be equal to men. That they are not yet so and that this is the most important problem which has to be solved in order for mankind (?!?) to go forward.
Being raised under communist rule – where women had been put to work, hence granted a lot of ‘equal rights’ – by a very ‘progressive’ pair of women – mom and grandmother – I grew up having the impression that men and women considered themselves partners. That being how my father and mother treated each-other.
I used scare-marks around progressive because neither my mother nor my maternal grand-mother considered themselves as such. Only behaved in that manner. Which I grew up considering to be normal.
Illusions, like always, end up being shredded. Very soon I learned that not all people had been born equal.
And that I had been dealt ‘the better hand’… So I didn’t waste any more time/energy to consider the matter! For 40 or so years…
This is not the good moment to delve into details. Enough for me to say that my quest – to understand as many as possible of the consequences ‘inflicted’ by the limited nature of our consciousness – led me to feminism. To ‘feminism’ seen as a social phenomenon.
Already convinced – since early childhood, conviction beefed up by the relation built in concert with my wife, that men and women are equal partners in the adventure called life, I was confronted by a huge dilemma:
Why on Earth so many women raise their children – both future men and future women – in the conviction that men are entitled to be served and women are meant to indulge their wishes?!?
Is it an attitude imposed by the overbearing men? Hence easy to unlearn?
Or is it an evolutionary thing? Hence harder to leave behind…
I continue to be under the impression that my most important break-trough to-date is that each individual conscience is primordially concerned with its own survival. Not as much with its ‘physical’ survival as with the conservation of the good impression it has about itself. With maintaining its self-esteem! For instance, this is the reason for so many of us having such a hard time when trying to ditch a bad habit! Because we have to admit first, before ourselves, that we’ve been wrong for so long! That we’ve been acting foolishly since adopting that habit.
Coming back to the main subject, who would like to be? The proud mother of a highly successful man or the mother of a below average Joe? Small wonder then that in the current cultural environment we continue to raise highly assertive men. And, sometimes, women. On the other hand, if you’ve been a submissive woman all your life, how do you feel in the presence of assertive women? Uncomfortably? Even more so if the assertive woman happens to be your daughter?
So, could it be possible that we are stuck in the present situation because we’ve conditioned ourselves to over-value the glitzy part of what we call ‘success’? And because we’ve not yet learned to forgive ourselves for past mistakes?
Ernst Mayr, an evolutionist, put it this way: ‘Evolution is no way about the survival of the fittest. “Fittest” to what ?!? since evolution is about being able to cope with change… In reality, evolution is about the demise of the unfit!’
Same here.
We can fight ourselves into the ground, chasing ‘success’.
Or we can thrive together. As equal partners, complementing each = other.
Happiness is an illusion. A figment of our own imagination. Hence we shouldn’t waste our time thinking about it. Various sources all over the internet.
Here’s my take on this subject. The more imaginary a thing is, the easier it is to make it happen. IF you do it your own way! According to your needs and wishes…
Now that I’ve put behind the easy part… Like many other natural things, happiness is a gift. You get a healthy dose of endorphins after a workout, an orgasm after having sex and a moment of happiness after doing something right. IF you put your heart in it! In any of the above…
But there’s more to it. While you can work-out anytime you wish, you need a partner in order to build an orgasm. Did I hear a chuckle? Thinking about working out a single handed orgasm? Can you do it without using your imagination? Really?!? Not only that you need a partner – at least an imaginary one, the intensity and quality of the orgasm vastly depend on the interaction between you and your partner. And on your mind set before, during and after the ‘close encounter’. Happiness, whatever moments of happiness we’re blessed with from time to time, is the result of a far more complex interaction. To experience it, you have to be in sync with the universe. Not with yourself or with your partner. With as much of your patch of the universe as possible.
When working, out or in any other way, you’re basically alone. The quality of your involvement depends basically on you. Irrespective of you working alone or you being part of a team, you ‘come first’. When making love, you and your partner become one. For a while, your two me-s get close enough to experience synchronicity. Getting in sync with the universe – doing the right thing, is like making love ‘on steroids’.
There are a couple of catches though.
You need to conserve your me. Your inner self. Not your identity. That, your I, is only the exterior shape of yourself. Constantly rebuilt to match your exterior. What you need to preserve is the inner spectator. The entity constantly watching over your identity. The entity which maintains the coherence of your identity during its constant reshaping. Your inner spine, if you will. And you must refrain from hunting it. From hunting happiness.
You can build up muscles through training. Hard. If you do it right, you get endorphins. Because you’ve done it right, not hard. If you do it only hard, you get torn muscles, not endorphins. Or you could build up muscles by swallowing chemicals. And end up with a ruined liver. While experiencing absolutely no endorphin rush. Because you fucked up. You chased ‘muscles’ and forgot about yourself. About the self ‘inside’ yourself.
You can get ‘relief’ by wanking. But that’s no orgasm… You’d prefer ‘masturbate’ instead? Would that make any real difference? Bring the experience any nearer to an orgasm?!?
Same thing with happiness. If your goal is to be happy, you’re too focused. On your ‘identity’.
Your inner self bestows too much attention on its ‘skin’. On your identity. And not enough on what’s happening farther away. That being the reason for you not being able to get in sync with the rest of the world around you. Not being able to do the right thing.
‘Six packs’, orgasms and happiness must come naturally. As a consequence of things well done. Otherwise neither are genuine.
I’ve ended my previous post by saying that we, humans, are tempted to see almost everything as a potential tool.
And the present one by asking myself ‘to what avail?’.
What are we trying to accomplish?
I kept telling you that we, humans, haven’t invented much. That everything we do has already been experimented by our predecessors. Plants and animals…
Well, one of the things that we did invent was ‘intent’. As in ‘premeditation’.
We don’t know whether plants are driven by anything else except their ‘vital spirit’.
Same thing is valid for ‘inferior animals’ (those which don’t have brains) while the superior (a.k.a. brained) ones seem to be driven by what we call emotion.
Including us!
No matter how much we pride ourselves about our ability to reason, we’re still driven by emotion.
Actually, we’re not even close to being rational!
At best, we rationalize our emotional impulses. Before or even after we put them into practice. Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, among others, have already settled this point.
Then why am I talking about ‘premeditation’?!?
And who said ‘premeditation’ is necessarily rational?
It is planned, OK, but …
You see, the real difference between us and the rest of most other animals is our ability to ‘watch ourselves watching the world‘. As if something inside each of ourselves is able to send a probe somewhere ‘outside’ and then examine its own individuality as an outside observer. I didn’t say an impartial observer, just an outsider. However biased.
I won’t elaborate on how we got here, Maturana had already done that. Brilliantly. I’m far more interested in the consequences of each of us being able to observe their own selves ‘from outside’, keeping in mind that our rationality is heavily bounded – Simon Herbert and others, and that we’re mainly driven by emotions.
The very first thing that each of us observes about their-selves is the overwhelming fragility which defines us.
And this is why we search solace in religion. In no matter which one of them, atheism included. There is ‘safety in numbers’, you know…
Our goal, professed or not, is to find inner peace.
No matter whether you call it salvation, redemption, nirvana, self acceptance or whatever else, what you crave is peace.
The sentiment (illusion?) that you are safe.
At least for a moment.
How long is that moment going to last?
Well, that depends on how you got there!
And who accompanies you…
nicichiarasa 