Foundations And Tools

            Believing in Democracy is not the same as believing that the majority will always be right. It’s to give a chance for people to try to convince others. Just like capitalism, in the good sense, in the sense of buying and selling things: it will not automatically lead us to a better world. Free commerce is just a framework that is better than the others, for us to try to, using our morals, do good things. (Believing that buy and sell will automaticallly lead us to a better world is what I call capitalism in the bad sense).

            So, Democracy, in the sense of choosing representants and even making referendums on important subjects, will not automatically lead us to a better world. But is an opportunity. People have places to make their voices heard and try to convince others.

            This thing about convincing others is very important. That is to say, there is not a magical property in societies that makes the majorities right. If you see History, you see a lot of times and places where the majority was tragically wrong.

            Here it is important to see the difference between “consensus” and “common sense”.  “Consensus” is when people agree on something. It can happen in a small or large group. It changes a lot with time. “Common sense” is a wealth of basic ideas that are shared by a large group of people for a long time. You can say that common sense is the sum of the consensus that survived the test of time.

            We need common sense. How would you convince someone that it is wrong to drink and drive if he tells you he see no problem in running a car over some people? We need to agree on something to start discussing.

             Because of the unfair things that existed in our history and still exist in our society, there are people that say that common sense will just reflect the wishes of the oppressors. I see it differently.

            The very very ancient past was very very oppressive. Humanity have been trying to walk away from that ever since. At least the ones who want to be free. Anyway, History. The first big ones were the Mighty Hunters, they were stronger, they could bring more meat and they could kick your ass, so they ruled, and we obeyed.

            So, how did we ever get better ideas, how did better ideas sustain, if they were not necessarily the best for this big hunters? Well, we have basic concepts of “happiness”, and “peace”, and “justice”. But where do they come from? Back to the example of the guy who doesn’t think running a car over people is bad. Suppose you try to convince him, and for everything you say, he keeps asking you “why”, “why”, like a child? At some point, let’s admit it, you will have to say “just because”.

            So I think the most basic agreements, like “peace”, “happiness”, must have had origin in something people jus felt in their souls. Like, suppose there was a happy family. The only happy family in that town of angry – and hungry – hunters. People would look at that and suddenly they would not just want to fill their bellies with meat anymore – they would want a happy family too. Because it shined in their eyes.

            Some changed their ways and started treating their families better, some just pretended, to look like they too had that, but the “thing” spreaded. And somehow, combining these very basic things that speak directly to the spitirt with some basic knowledge of causes and consequences, we’ve come to ideas like “justice must be the same for everybody”, which is the basis of the good things that happened in our civilization. Because there are good things, if you didn’t notice.

            Of course, there is always people who want power. After a certain point, they couldn’t speak directly against basic concepts like “justice” and “generosity”, so they have to distort things. Like, to contour the idea of justice being the same for everybody, you say that someone was previously owing something, so for justice to be the same it must be “not exactly the same”. Or the idea of a happy neighbourhood. You say that someone’s simple presence will be an impediment for happiness, so to have a happy neighbourhood you must push someone out.

            It’s an ongoing war. Some people distort things with bad intentions, some people just want to have advantages whatever the game is, some people don’t really want to be on the bad side but can’t make the connections to make the right choices. And some people have a more clear vision of what they really love, and are able to find some ways to see through the distortions.

            To distort things, you must make bad reasoning feel like good reasoning, and you do that by appealing to people’s emotions in a way that don’t let them get the big picture.

            Of course it is easier to convince people who, deep inside, don’t really care for thins all that much. In this case, all you have to do is to say “everybody that is cool is doing this”. Really, like in the sixth grade.

            If you don’t believe that grownups can be like that, think of the people who, after their party win an election, mock the adversary. If they were adults, they would be most likely having a kind of “first day in job” butterfly in the stomach. Like, now is when the test begins. But instead, they mock, because they are in the sixth grade.

            Of course, now internet is the big vehicle to make people think that “everybody that is cool is going this way”. Really, when you see a joke that randomly appears on your feed, you don’t think “the guy who made this thinks this is funny”. Your brain thinks, “a lot of people thinks this is funny, otherwise it wouldn’t be on my feed”. And it’s the same with opinions. Our brain tends to think that what we see there is a valid sample of the World, like it is data enough to form an idea of how “people are thinking”.

            So there is a war going on there. In years of election, we know that a lot of people are engaged in flooding the internet with some idea. But what these workers do in the other years? The same thing, I guess, for various reasons, one of them is because politicians themselves are always in a war, not only in election years.

            And of course they don’t aim only at people who don’t give a damn – for these, making them believe that “the hot kids are all laughing at those losers” is pratically enough – but they also aim at people who really want to feel they are in the good side.

            For instance, you can take one photograph. A photograph of a tragedy in a war. One photograph is enough to know that a tragedy is a tragedy, but to point responsabilities you need a larger picture. Like a picture of a World that is in constant war, and you need to know which values each side is defending, and how much each side, through History, tried to reach peace. You can start to see what options each side actually had, so you can start differentiate between offense and defense. And the hard truths we will have to acknowledge to work for real peace.

            Also, you can be shown a photograph of people in need in a poor country, and people enjoying some prosperity in a rich country. It is not wrong to believe that rich countries should be nicer to poorer ones, but if you don’t also show how corrupt the government of the poor country is, and the struggles the normal people in the rich country deal with, you are just creating a black and white enemity that won’t take us nowhere.

            Or a picture of a poor black community, side by side with a picture of a white boy getting a prize. You could hate the white boy, but why? Getting a prize don’t make you a good person, but neither does it make you a bad one. It doesn’t mean you are taking it “from someone”, and it also don’t mean you are going to leave everybody behind. Anyway, if you are sure that everybody who grows in the work game will leave everybody else behind, how can you be sure that not everybody who grow in the political game will leave everybody behind?

            But internet can give you that feeling that “everybody who is looking at this pictures is coming to this conclusion”, so you should feel bad with yourself for not taking the same route. Then it shows you a picture of a beautiful woman very angry in the street, carrying a poster. Sometimes your brain don’t even care for what is writen in the poster, it just wants to be on the side of that woman, she is beautiful, she is angry, she must be right.

            Everybody gets angry sometimes, but what is writen in the poster matters. You must use your reason to read it. Because everything else can be arranged, can be imitated. You can even make people feel that an ideology that is, in fact, totally embraced by the biggest television of a country, known to be corrupt, is a “rebel ideology”.

            So, there are a lot of currents pushing people to different sides. And there is no such thing as “people know all the answer, just give power to them.” People are divided.

            Makes me think of the communist manifesto, that starts with “Proletarians of the World, unite!” Yes, poor people like a brotherhood to fight the evil. Is it easy to make poor people behave like brothers? Where is the button to make this happen? I’ll push it right now, people can build a paradise without having to attack any rich man.

            The answers are not ready, like a potential power stored in the majority of people, just waiting for a “change in structures” to be released. Whatever the challenges we will face, it will take creativity, it will take new answers for new forms of distortion.

            It will take creative individuals. Yes, individuals, sometimes with individual insights, sometimes working together. Trying to convince each other, in this arena of opportunity that only democracies allow, to find ways for peace and happiness.

            To create better consensus, it will take reason, and a connection to that old wealth of human ideals, the ones that showed to be worthy. Because it is either that, or having no ground under our feet, just being pushed around by forces controlled by money and power.

 

Who is Pushing Life to the Edge?

 

     Things happened in History that shaped the Map of the Earth as it is now. People were persecuted and moved, people got poor and moved, people moved to some naturally rich place to exploit it, people were persecuted and pleaded for the half of a small poor strip of a big rich kindgdom because it was the only place their family ever had a country.

      A lot things happened. But in the Sciences called “Humanities”, it seems that a lot of people developed a penchant to think like generals, to look at History and Geography with punitive eyes and say what people shouldn’t be where they are, what borders should be in a different place, what country shouldn’t exist. For what?

      I think it's time we look at a Globe, imagine all the little people living in all the little countries and say this words: “Nobody is going anywhere, asshole. Let’s deal with it.”

      Obviously not all transactions of the past were righteous, but we should see the opportunities we have now to make things better.

I mean, we will have to do this at some point if we say we want peace. If we believe that the last victory of Good can’t be an explosion, we will have to say “nobody is going anywhere” someday. Why not now? Why not yesterday? If we had said this ten years ago, maybe things could be a little better now.

Because, after a war erupts, is it right to say we are anti-war if we spent the last years telling all the World what better frontiers we had in mind?

One thing is to strive for better relations, other is to call for the elimination of someone. Or for displacement. Or for an attempt of displacement that, after it doesn’t work – “that people” didn’t go anywhere – leaves us with the only solution of elimination. What is gained?

Can’t we see what kind of people we are aligning with when we say someone “shouldn’t be there”? Yes, there was always people who had to point to a neighbouring house and say, “as long as this house is there, you can never be happy”. Because those guys, who say that, are not willing to help people, giving anything they need to be happy.

Even if we don’t agree with everything about the past, can’t we at least see all that is lost when we say “those people shouldn’t be there”? In a practical and realistic way?

Think about ethics. There should be things we agree about right and wrong conducts. Like, the same rules that apply to me apply to you. But that is lost if someone “shouldn’t be here”. There is no way we can think of any universal ethics.

In the end, there may be no limits to the evil someone can do in anger. And there is nothing the person who “shouldn’t be there” can ever legitimally plea.

You are not helping someone if you tell him there is no limit for what he can do in anger. He may become a monster, and he will face the consequences. It’s like the man who supported a suicidal attack: who exactly should thank him?

We can get to a point where there are no rules for anything. I remember learning that when someone provoked a war, you would expect the defendant to act in the most ethical way he could, but the final bill of the destruction would basically be on the account of the provoker. This is lost when someone “shouldn’t be here”.

It’s hurtful to talk about the ethics of war, what is possible and what is not possible to avoid, because we wish there was no war. I believe in peace, that it will come someday, or better, that it is slowly coming somehow, but we are not in a peaceful World yet.

If you agree that “nobody is going anywhere”, you will have to agree that even people you don’t like have a right to defend their homes when attacked. But if they “shouldn’t be there” nothing can even be considered an attack, no matter how horrible.

But how are we ever going to have peace if we make sudden attacks excusable and defensive wars unexcusable? Isn’t this an algorithm that lead us exactly to the other extreme?

Think of the opportunities this ideologies make us lose. Suppose there are problems in a country, and in this country there is a lot of people asking for a chance to make things better, to try to work towards peace, but you have told them to shut up, that they never should be there in the first place. Then, is it right to pose as a defender of total peace after everything explodes?

To be a defendant of peace is not just about protesting after something horrible happens in a distant place and a war starts. Is to think in which direction are we going at each move.

If you are the “these people shouldn’t be here” kind of guy, think of the companions you have. I mean, there are powerful rich leaders who say this all the time.

Guys that say that there was a deed in the past that was so wrong that it can’t be fixed by negotiating, by talking, by trying to build better relations, it can only be mended by “moving them out”. And if they don’t go, well, kill them.

Beware. Some guys don’t have any limits, if you didn’t notice already. Like the guys who can start a war and say they didn’t, because there are only these “groups” that make “bad things” and, of course, these groups are not related to anything.

But there are things these guys won’t do. They won’t build. They won’t use creativity to help “their people”.

It reminds me of when I saw a marxist guy call out someone who had praised old studious guys of the past for helping in our “progress”. The marxist said, “Progress? Where to? To whom is this progress?”

It made me think. And I must admit that I now prefer the word “development” than “progress”. “Progress” indeed brings to our mind the idea of a straight line, and a quantitative measure of the World. Like, the more, the better, all we got to do is go forward fast and everything will be better. I am not against you if you use the word with a different meaning, I am just using those terms to explain the way I see two concepts at odds here. For the lack of a better way.

So. To me, “Development” brings more the idea of something growing with quality, like a healthy tree that doesn’t have a goal of reach this or that height specifically.

Think of a business, a commercial business. “Progress” would have more to do with how many branches the business has, and “development” would have more to do with the inner culture of the firm, how happy people are, how are the relations between people. There is no point in having the first if the second is not good.

It seems that in the old times, little things that could make a small community happier, being it inventions that could make life easier, small institutions to help people, an ethical idea that could help people to have healthier relationships, were seen as what the world needs. That’s before it became so easy to anyone to become a little general.

Obviously, evil leaders will not help people to see how they can grow something good in their own garden. It is easier, as safer for their own power, to point to someone, find an enemy and say “he must go and everything will be fine”.

No development. These leaders can take the right of speech from people, forbid them to use internet if necessary, forbid women to go to school. Dry the garden.

Sometimes I think we learned the wrong lesson with Nazifascism. Maybe the opposite lesson of what we should have learned. It seems that we believed their lie, when they told us that they were doing what they were doing for love of their own people. It was a lie, they fed their kids with nothing but misery and hatred, to throw them to a bloody fight for nothing. They didn’t love their kids.

They lost, but maybe they succeeded into fooling us. Maybe we have come to believe that people who love their family too much will end up hating the rest of mankind, and maybe even, by consequence, people who don’t value the lives of their kids too much are defending values that are important to mankind, maybe because they think “broader”.

So we condemn someone who says “you can live here as long as you don’t attack my kids” and defend someone who says “I don’t care if all my kids die, all I want is you out of here”.

When we see the news, or hear about History, we think that people who are trying to protect their kids are obviously lying, and people who are willing to sacrifice their kids are telling the true, right?

But how did we come to this paradoxal idea about love? If love is good for the soul, then how, loving more inside your house would lead you to hate more in the street? How being indiferent to your own family make you the most reliable person to speak about Justice?

I think that people who really love their kids will end up satisfied when they have what they need, but people who hate their children hate themselves, they will never be happy and they will push their “need” forward forever.

But nobody is going anywhere...

Different Visions of Debt

The notion that the one who has a better life owe some kind of help to the ones who don’t is very important to a lot of people. It was not invented by a social scientist, it’s in the old religious books, and I believe in it. But it brings some complexities if you really look at it with honesty.

Suppose I live in a country where a lot of people are oppressed by some economical and political tyrant. I have managed to escape the worst aspects of this oppression, I have some good freedom and live happily. But I have a neighbour who is deep under that oppression. At principle, I owe him some help.

But it can get complicated. Some people find easier to play the game as it is, some people don’t believe freedom, or just can’t see it. My neighbour may think that the best thing for him is to get the favour of the tyrant or his men, so he may try to drag me back to oppression. We all know that not everybody that is oppressed really believe a dream of freedom, really wants to fight for it.

But still there is this idea that I should give some retribution for the luck I had. Now, how do I solve this paradox? There are two important notions that I believe can help with this equation. First, you don’t have control over the destiny of other individuals. So instead of seeing yourself in an obligation of giving to a certain individual what he wants, you should think of a way, your best way, to retribute to humanity, to the World, in a more general way.

The second thing is that in order to define the best way to retribute your luck to the World, you must define what wealth really means to you. If we believe it’s all about money, we might end up feeling obligated to give a lot of money to people who want to buy drugs and guns, because they are poor.

I believe the most precious thing is freedom. I think that what humanity really has been searching is to work without losing serenity, to have a work and peace of mind at the same time, and not to ever be condemned without doing evil.

I think this dream was there with the people that started fleeing from the giant tyrants of the ancient past, and I believe this dream was also with some humanists of the Renaissance, for instance, that dreamed that Science would make the work easier, and Philosophy a more ethical World.

I also believe that this ancient dream of freedom and the humanist dream of making a better Wold through thinking clearer - although the righteous path of good seeds may be hard to observe among imitations and distortions - was there when some people started to seing, in the plurality that became America, the opportunity for a dream of beauty.

People that knew that America has had slaves, and that some used the idea of the promised land to exploit people, but no matter what, under that umbrella were now all kinds of people, and there were words of freedom in the country’s mind. There was possibilities to peacefully fight for better conditions. And small “accidents” like a black man and a white woman falling in love, could set a spark that maybe wouldn’t die. And I believe it didn’t die. I believe the good side of the American dream has positively influenced the World.

I think that through the Ages, countless people wanted to overcome oppression, but their disbelief in violence and stealing made them swallow things they wouldn’t like, and forced them to work in very small steps. But now there is an opportunity they would love, to be free to speak and discuss, and fight for a better World without destruction.

And I think that if this is the luck I’ve been enjoying, this is the wealth I should want to share. I should not want to help my neighbour to walk in any direction that is not at least a small step towards freedom. Because, what would be the point?

So there is not point for me in wanting that a Nation have more regional power if the leaders oppress people, or to support a political project that don’t believe in peaceful coexistence with the neighbours.

If I love so much the fact that I can listen to the music I want, I should oppose any leadership that forbiddens people of doing so. I would never want to impose on someone that they change their religion, or their clothes or what they eat, but I would hate to live under a government that create certain prohibitions, so I would never support certain kind of government.

Now, someone might say that my vision is too biased, that my ideals only have value inside my culture, and they don’t reflect the wishes of others, with other backgrounds. But they are so important to my happiness, why would I want to share anything else? Why would I support someone going in a direction, that deep inside I believe is the opposite of happiness?

Some might say that the Humanistic ideas owe too much to the nobles of their time, because those thinkers sometimes lived under their umbrella. But they lived a humble life of service, and planted some seeds that I believe to have brought good things.

Some people seem to think that the misdeeds of the Nations in the past make unworthy all the values and ideas that flourished within their borders. It’s like saying that the economic wars of past and present take away all the value of ideals. Like, all we need is material reparation. Then what? The material distribution will be enough to guarantee that not all good ideas are lost?

I still think there must be some ideas we can agree. If we agree that wellbeing and justice are what people want, we must be able to agree, at least on some basic level, about what worked more in that direction through History.

And I think it isn’t so hard to find agreements if we are honest, so I will propose a question: Suppose you see in your television a woman in the street, a woman that lives under an ultra-authoritarian religious government, and she is protesting fiercely, risking her life to defy their “supreme leader”. Which side you are: the Woman’s or the Leader’s?

If you are on the Leader’s side, then what is the point of any fight for you, if you seem to agree with every oppressive civilization of the ancient past? I suppose you are on the side of the woman. We all are, right?

So shouldn’t we be extremely preocupied if this Leader is treated with super extra kindness and love by International Organizations? Shouldn’t we anger against it? Or should we support this Leader’s fight against the countries where women can come and go?

Or should we say to that woman protesting that her Leader is no worst than any other because in more free countries the richest people are too greedy? Don’t you think she would tell you that the richest people there are greedy too, and still she would love to have more freedom? Would you tell her that, because there is racism in other countries, her government is not reason to worry?

If that was her last cry, then after she is finnaly silenced will you say that her people never really wanted any part of “our kind of freedom” because of their cultural background?

And then maybe you will feel free to see all the enemies of her Leader as your enemies too. But in this case, shouldn’t you go back to that question of which side you are and answer differently?

In those countries now dominated by religious tirannies there has always been people that seeked freedom, that wanted to think for themselves, and separate the good from the bad in their own countries and in the World. Secular thinkers, and even moderate religious people, are in serious danger now. Maybe they are a lot like us. Shouldn’t we be on their side somehow, shouldn’t we support them? Try to strenghten them?

Shouldn’t we be crying, shouldn’t we be protesting when we see childdren being clearly turned into cannon fodder? Or should we pretend we don’t see it, until the storm finnaly unleashes, then we can count bodies and play the self righteous game, a game that we can only play because we are – until now – safe from the destruction brought by this mind control?

And finnaly, shouldn’t we be using our voices, that sometimes can be so loud, to avoid the next wars, by calling out the “supreme leaders” of the Earth?

 

I, too, wish there was peace

 continuing:

 

 p.s: just kidding. Petroil is a social construct.

War in Tik Tok Times

 This meme is a sequel to the previous:

Oh, thank you!

Chérie