No home means ‘no sleep’. No place secure enough for you to let you guard down – no matter how shortly, and relax. Survival becomes problematic and occupies all your time. And brain power….
An uncomfortable home means ‘no dreams’. Every waken moment is occupied by ‘how do I get a bigger home’ and whatever sleep you might muster is fitful. You cannot rest properly so you cannot do much during your active hours. You’ll never reach your full potential so you’ll never be as useful/productive as you could possibly be.
Too big a home means ‘nightmare’. Difficult to maintain – for your means, impossible to ‘explore’/’exploit’, always afraid somebody would try to steal it from you. And, above all, too big a home means ‘insulation’ from the real world. You’re so far away from what’s really happening out there that you’re no longer able of proper decision making. Nightmare.
I wish you a string of very good nights and some pleasant dreams.
“How absurd to imagine that something we can make could actually deliver us from problems we could not free ourselves from!” Dr. Allen Ross, Dead Idols or the Living God
According to Abraham Maslow, people’s lives are ‘staged’. During the first four, each individual ‘must’ – ‘inside’ whatever circumstances Mother Luck had granted them, provide for their ‘needs’. Only after they had reached the fifth stage, individuals have the opportunity – but no ‘obligation’ other than that each of them impose upon themselves, to ‘reinvent’ their own personae. Maslow had used ‘self-actualization’ to describe the process.
In religious terms, the whole thing is known as ‘coming to peace with oneself’.
No more ‘absurdity’ here! There’s so much each of us can do in order to move ‘forward’…
‘And where is this famous ‘forward’?!? How are we, individually and/or collectively, to determine which is the ‘good’ direction?!?’
Is our ‘imagination’ good enough to come up with a solution for the “problems we could not free ourselves from”?
Is ‘induction’ a comprehensive enough solution? Or ‘too much of a good thing’ will never fail to become ‘bad for you’?
Confused?
Let me put it another way.
‘One size fits all’. How many times have you been really satisfied by such a ‘solution’? Do you really think an ‘idol’ fashioned by a carpenter – by the most talented carpenter, even, will ever satisfy the needs of at least one blacksmith?
‘But how about the idols fashioned by Plato’s king-priests?’
To answer this question – this excellent question, if I may say so myself, we must turn back to Dr. Allen Ross’ Dead Idols. To the difference between the Dead Idols and the Living God, to be more precise.
‘Criterion for what?’
If you pay close enough attention to what’s written above, you’ll notice that not passing the falsifiability test doesn’t mean than an assertion is false! Far from it, actually! Not passing the falsifiability test – ‘if a claim is compatible with all and any states of affairs’, only means that that claim is both ‘true’ and unscientific! Simultaneously true and not scientific!
‘And what has any of these to do with God?!? With the Living God or with any of the Dead Idols humankind has built for itself? And later discarded?’
I’m afraid you’ll have to come back for the answers. Or, to put it differently, I’ll gladly welcome you back!
One way to interpret Maslow’s pyramid of needs is to consider that an individual might become a full fledged human only after having climbed to the ‘fifth floor’.
The key word here being “might”!
Because nothing mandates that all those who have overcome the material constraints of this world and have successfully integrated themselves in the social milieu will ever become a ‘better version of themselves’.
Need examples? Have you ever heard about people like Bernie Madoff, Martin Shkreli or Myron Scholes?
‘But the last guy, Myron Scholes, was recognized by the Nobel committee as a world class economist!’ Exactly! What more could a person want? Money, fame, worldwide recognition… he was on the fast track to becoming whoever he wanted… Yet he had chosen to associate himself with one of the deepest financial black-hole ever… Knowingly, unknowingly… doesn’t matter!
‘But what does it mean to become a full fledged human?’
To be free. To consider them-self a free person and to be recognized as such by their peers.
‘Scholes wasn’t a free person?!? Shkreli?!? Madoff?!?’
Nope. Neither was free from greed! Greed for money, power, public recognition… or any combination thereof.
‘But “greed is good”!!! Isn’t this the current mantra? Aren’t we all driven by this sentiment?!?’
First of all, greed is not good. Read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment. But yes, we are bombarded from all sides with this notion. That ‘greed is good. That greed is the engine of capitalism, which capitalism has brought us here. Where it is good.’
Yes, here it is indeed good. Only for fewer and fewer of us. It used to be better but since ‘greed has become good’ every ‘bump’ we encounter along the ‘free market’ road has proven to be quite a challenge. An insurmountable challenge for more and more of us. An unsustainable arrangement. For us, as a community. And yes, capitalism is the best economic paradigm to date. Only, as all paradigms, it has to be put in practice. By us, the people. In the right way. In the free market way. Only we are no longer free! Those who cannot escape their sentiment may not consider themselves free. And too many of us have been enslaved by their greed!
‘But greed is written in our DNA!’
Indeed! So is the urge to have sex! Only we’ve managed to teach ourselves, community wise, that while sex is good, rape is bad! Not so long ago, rape was more or less condoned. ‘She must have enticed him’. ‘What was she doing there at that hour?’ And so on… Nowadays, rape is shunned. By most of us.
Only we still live surrounded by rape culture. Seeped in greed.
Will we ever learn? Will we, as a community, ‘actualize’ ourselves?
During lock-down I had more time for my research regarding conscience. Or, in Maturana’s terms, ‘self-awareness‘.
At first glance, evolutionary speaking, conscience – our ability to observe ourselves ‘in the act’, is about increasing the survivability of the individual having said ability. Hence increasing the survivability of the species to which said individual belongs.
Now, since humankind is divided in cultural ‘subspecies’ – and, according to Maturana, conscience is an ability which has been developed in social context, cultures have different chances of survival. Depending on subtle differences imposed upon the individual consciences during the ‘coming of age’. Only there’s something which contradicts Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According to the classical version, individuals cannot adapt themselves. Individuals can only survive – and transmit their genes, or – if said genes are not good enough for the circumstances, expire and make way for other individuals/species. According to Darwin, only species can evolve.
The notable difference being what we call ‘free will’. Not as free as some believe it to be, not as bounded as other think it to be, free will does exist. And allows us to evolve on an individual basis. During the life span of the current generation.
Only there’s a small problem here. Cognitive dissonance. No matter how conscient – aka aware of our own misgivings, each of us might be, our first tendency when confronted with arguments contradicting our previously held convictions is to rationalize away those arguments. Change convictions according to the newly acquired knowledge? Maybe later… Don’t believe me? How much time elapsed between learning that smoking is bad for you and actually quitting? See what I mean?
Hence my ‘impression’ that ‘conscience’ is more concerned about maintaining its own consistency than with the fate of the biological organism which actually supports it.
Want some more arguments?
Northern Italy. France. Spain. Bad Corona-virus outbreaks, followed by intense lock-downs. Currently the situations are, basically, under control. Suggesting that people do learn, fast, when confronted by really dire circumstances. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore… reacted immediately, had relatively few problems. Suggesting that people are able to learn from past experiences. The ‘original’ SARS, you know… Germany had a less ‘dramatic’ trajectory. Suggesting people may, under certain circumstances, learn from others. US and Brazil. The rest of the US, actually. The NE having experienced the North Italian scenario. Too many people concerned more with remaining consistent with their previous selves than with adapting to the new challenge. ‘Government tries to subdue us’ and ‘masks are an infringement to personal liberty’.
What about China and Russia? I’ll let you be the judge of that. Only you need to remember that ‘free will’ is of a totally different nature there than it is here. In the rest of the world.
Same in India. With a twist. While in China/Russia free will is stifled from above, in India – and in too many other developing nations, free will is ‘conscripted’ by poverty. It is very hard to think about the day after tomorrow if you don’t know whether you’ll be able to eat tomorrow. Even less so if you are hungry right now.
For subjects to become free, they must first remain alive. As soon as individuals die, whatever freedom they might have enjoyed vanishes.
Individual liberty is a matter of degree. No matter what any of us might do, none of us – well, almost, will ever escape gravity. We are all pulled towards the center of the Earth and this is how things should be. Otherwise… can you really imagine us drifting freely through the Universe and still being alive? There are some constraints we might escape for a while. While gravity stays with us forever, we need to breathe only once every second or so. If needed, some of us can go without air for almost five minutes. Most of us can go without water for days and without food for a couple of weeks. Without friends… is more complicated. My real point being that individuals will start considering freedom, in earnest, only after reaching Maslow’s self-actualization stage. Until then we remain subjects. Subjected to our needs.
Liberty, as a function, is a social matter. According to Berger and Luckmann, ‘reality’ is a social construct. Going one step further, we realize that freedom – like money, is also a social construct. Something we all contribute to. Help building it. Or tear it apart by negligence/carelessness. Help building it by encouraging others to become free. As in helping them to lead a decent enough life. For freedom to happen, the society – as a whole, must remain functional enough for each of its members to have the opportunity to reach the self-actualization stage.
We must constantly remember that each time somebody puts our lives in danger that somebody attempts to hurt our freedom. Every action which ultimately reduces the opportunities for each of us to reach the self-actualization stage – or to remain there, is hurting the liberty of our entire society.
Weapons are nothing but repurposed tools. Sometimes ‘enhanced’ to fit the new goal.
Clubs had started as fruit harvesting utensils, then used for hunting purposes and eventually for bashing in the heads of those who had slept with the missus when the wielders weren’t looking. And so on…
As a tool, an implement is used to ‘put things together’. As a weapon, the same (kind of) implement is used to ‘set things apart’. An axe can be used to split wood in order to build a fire or to ‘split’ furniture during a fit of rage. Generally speaking, a tool is used towards the ultimate goal of adding to/fine tuning a structure while a weapon is used to destroy/disable something which is meant to remain so.
Our ability to communicate was ‘the’ tool which actually transformed us into what we are today. Humans. At least according to Humberto Maturana. His theory maintains that we’ve become self-aware social individuals through what he calls languaging. In a nut-shell, he says that we’ve become humans – self conscious apes, by continuously expressing our thoughts towards the other members of the community. Hence simultaneously building an ‘agora’ and ‘walling in’ individual private spaces.
Yet the same ability to communicate can be used also as a weapon. Instead of being used by individuals to mutually groom themselves, and ultimately adding to the overall resilience of the community, ‘weaponized’ communication is used to ‘downgrade’ susceptible individuals. To lower the ability of certain individuals to contribute to the community to which they belong, to lower the ability of entire communities to hold together… or both at the same time.
History suggests that, in the longer run, democracy – as a manner of decision making, increases the survivability of the communities which use it. Simply by pooling the decision making resources of the entire community instead of relying on the mental prowess – and good will, of a single authoritarian leader. Only for democracy to be fully functional, the individual members of the community have to be able to share, in earnest, their thoughts. This is why Freedom of Speech has been enshrined in the First Amendment. That’s why whenever the public discourse becomes increasingly dominated by ‘fake-news’ things start to go south.
That is why whenever people allow themselves to be split into warring parties – with no real communication between the sides except for the misinformation hurled across the divide, both sides eventually end up wondering at the destruction they had allowed the ‘communication warriors’ to inflict upon them.
This Covid thing is an excellent opportunity. For us to reconsider.
Everything. Our past. Our meaning/role in this world… our future… We have the time, some of us also have the means.
The means to socially distance ourselves from the fray. Hence increasing our likelihood to survive. Increasing our confidence that tomorrow will actually happen. Increasing the need to ‘actualize’ ourselves. To be able to cope with what tomorrow might bring.
This whole thing reminds me of the fact that Maslow’s Pyramid is nothing but a succession of steps which might be climbed. Might be climbed…. There’s no one there forcing us to step up once we’ve ‘fulfilled’ the one we’re standing on. And no one to tell us what to do once we’ve ‘upgraded’ ourselves.
And another thing. Covid also taught us, the hard way, that our planet is limited. That it’s hard to live apart and that everything which happens anywhere eventually influences all of us.
Thank you for reading this.
Later Edit Some use ‘physical distancing’ instead of ‘social distancing’. The rationale being that the distance is only physical and not social. The way I see it, ‘social distancing’ makes a lot more sense.
‘I keep my distance because I care about you, not because I fear I might catch something from you. We are together in this!’
We’ve arrived at a very interesting point in our evolution as a cultural species.
Having more or less solved our existential problems – food, shelter, companionship, we’re hard at work towards building ‘self esteem’.
Putting it in Abraham Maslow’s terms, a good portion of the humankind – most of those active on the internet, the netizens, have reached the ‘self-actualization’ stage.
The problem being that we’re so preoccupied with ‘expressing our true selves’ that almost nobody listens anymore. Truly listens…
The kind of listening needed when we try to learn something. To understand what’s going on.
As opposed to the listening used when educating somebody.
When attempting to learn, we listen opening our minds. We let information in and structure it afterwards. When educating people, our listening is focused. We take information in with the sole goal of detecting dissent – in order to stifle it, and openings to exploit in our quest to implant our opinion about the world in the minds of our ‘targets’.
Take a breath. And exhale carefully not to inflate another bubble. There are already a lot of them waiting to burst.
Everything which has a temporal dimension – movement, transformation or both, incurs costs and produces consequences.
From a rock sliding down a slope to me writing this.
The difference between these two being the simple fact that no rock has ever had any goal.
You see, the rock looses some energy and mass while sliding down. It accelerates at first but since no rock has ever slidden for ever. Only rocks never do anything on their own. Something has to happen to them first. They do bear the costs – they wear down, break, etc., yet they don’t mind. For they are not, at all, aware of what’s going on. And, anyway, completely unable to do anything about it. Hence not at all ‘responsible’ about any of the consequences produced by whatever they had been involved in. Happened to them, actually.
Fast forward to me. I’m not only alive – hence reactive to whatever happens to me, but also aware. Aware of my own awareness even. I notice the costs I have to pay. Hence I try to minimize them.
And here’s the gist of the matter. My awareness drives me to minimize the costs I incur during my life AND to be very careful about the consequences of my endeavors.
Humberto Maturana teaches us that human consciousness can be understood as our ability to ‘observe ourselves observing‘. In other words, consciousness might be reduced to self-awareness.
I’m afraid it’s not enough. While no individual can be described as conscious if not commanding a certain degree of self-awareness, being able to observe their own observations doesn’t elevate an observer to fully conscious status.
How many of us have ‘enjoyed’ messing up ants or other insects just for the fun of it? When we were teenagers, of course. OK, we continue to squish the cockroaches we happen to see and to spray our gardens against mosquitoes and other pests. Only we no longer do it for fun. We employ a ‘healthy’ rationale to justify our actions – cockroaches/mosquitoes are ‘bad for us’. And we try to do it in a reasonable manner. We don’t soak the entire garden with the most potent insecticide available. Simply because we’ve understood, the hard way, that bees are also important for us.
Otherwise put, it’s not enough for us to be able to keep tabs on what we do, we must also take responsibility for our actions.
After all, we’ve been able to notice that bison ‘engineer’ their own environment.
“Herds of bison milling through Yellowstone National Park may seem aimless to the average visitor, but a new study reveals the animals are hard at work engineering their ecosystem. By rigorously mowing and fertilizing their own patches of grassland, the big herbivores essentially delay spring until late summer.”
Maybe the time is ripe for us to understand that we, humans, have done the very same thing for quite a while now. The world we live in is, to a certain – but rapidly growing – extent, the consequence of our own decision making.
The faster we learn to accept that, the higher the chances we won’t repeat past mistakes.
nicichiarasa 