The Non-Negotiable Minimum

 The present moment should be clear. There is a ceasefire signed by Israel and Hamas, that says not only that Israel will gradually withdraw from Gaza, but also Hamas will disarm, its terror capabilities will be dismantled and they will not rule Gaza anymore. Why isn’t the World, the leaders, the press, the people in the street, demanding that not only Israel, but mainly Hamas, uphold what they signed?

Wouldn’t it be the best for everybody? Since when being ruled by masked men who can kill whoever they want is a good thing? But the World seems to be too resented for that. Resented with Israel for the simple fact that they went to war, and there was pain and suffering. This is war, although in the present the Western World feels too safe from it, to need to really look at the complexity of conflicts.

There is a long-held common notion, through History, that a country has a right and a duty to defend itself, and war is sometimes unfortunately necessary. Now people don’t want to see any war – although they are focused on this one more than any other, God knows why – even if they don’t offer any other solution for Terrorism.

But till recently in the History of mankind, nobody would have any shadow of a doubt that something like oct 7^th was reason enough to go to war against the source of that attack, of that danger.  

Of course, mankind must always evolve in the direction of seeing more and more the value of the life of everybody, but unfortunately it doesn’t change the reason why some wars are considered justifiable in first place. A justified war is a war against something that destroys the peace of the innocent without cause.

Some people want to bring up a complex past between Israel and Palestine to deny that peace was broken there, but there was no open war In October 7^th, Israel was not striking Gaza before more than a thousand Israelis were indiscriminately and intentionally slaughtered by surprise.

Of course a war must always be the last resource. They should we waged only when there is no other way to ensure the minimal decent safety of your people. It is not reasonable to let a massacre go unresponded. It increases exponentially the chance of happening again, and in the near future.

When someone stabs someone to death in the street to steal her, we know that if these things pass unresponded, this criminal will do it again, and more people will do it too. We don’t say, “oh, you are speculating, nobody knows the future, maybe he won’t”.

Of course nothing excuses a country of defending itself with ethic. And Israelis do take risks for themselves, for instance, when they make war on the ground instead of just by air, or when they give up the element of surprise to warn Gazan civilians of where the strikes will be.

But taking risks is one thing. Doing nothing against the source of danger is another. You can’t expect a country to give up their own people’s defense against imminent danger.

And when this “doing nothing” ceases to be simply a risk and becomes forsaking? Precisely after the killing already started, as it did on October 7^th. From that moment on, every decision carries the weight, the weight of responsibility, of avoiding a future where you would look back and know you have forsaken your own people to death and horror.

This modern way of seeing things, of trying to care for everybody, is good, but can it make the act of abandoning your own people to their own fates a good thing? Should we conclude that?

I know it’s hard, painful, and I thought a lot about it. Think with me. Isn’t the notion of caring for your people, your own children, too basic, too essential, for such a trade-off to ever be righteous in this World? I think this can’t ever be what will bring us good.

And if you think straight about how the World works, it’s obvious that it won’t bring good. As I’ve said before, obviously that dilemma was proposed by Evil, evil groups, real groups and with real intentions and plans. So, with leaving horror unresponded, at the cost of your people’s minimal safety, what good is guaranteed for the World?

Evil exist, and it is not under control. There is no level of prediction at all about what murderous groups can do. You give freedom to violence, and it will take lives. There is an Ideology of death growing in the Middle East and in parts of Africa for a long time.

This same people you think you would be protecting by not fighting terror, can be turned against themselves. With this terror groups in positions of power, fighting for even more power, there is always the tendency for more blood.

Civil wars, like the Syrian civil war, that killed 300 thousand, the Yemeni Civl war, that killed 375 thousand, among other examples. You never know how far it can go. The Second Congo War killed 3 million.

This is not speculation. There is no gravitational center of peace in this World, where things left on their own “naturally fall back to”. Letting massacres of your own people go without strong answer would be for no good in mid and long term.

This is not abstract thinking. It is a sad truth rooted in reality, the same sad truth that made the strikes by the Allies in World War II justified.

It is the sad reality of a war that someone else provoked. You never aim at civilians, and try to mitigate civilian harm as much as possible. But you can’t totally avoid civilian tragedy, especially when your enemy doesn’t care at all for the safety of their own people and use them as shields.

Why the World doesn’t scream against using people as human shields? They think that Hamas represents the Palestinians, which are a “poor people”, so the Hamas is the “poor side”, so they don’t have to have the minimum of integrity? 

So, an enemy like that makes the work of mitigating collateral harm especially hard. Unless you are willing to give up on doing anything at all to avoid the worst for your own people. But if you do give up, you are not helping to bring a World of peace. On the contrary. You are just giving freedom to a monster that is trying to eat the whole World.

Let’s hope for peace. Real peace. But the ground is been shaking for a while, and peace doesn’t always come as naturally as we would like it to. I think this might be the best moment we had so far, for the World to defeat Terrorism. Terrorism, which is the worst thing not only for Jews, but for Muslins and for everybody.

No, nobody should ever be demanded to throw all their strength away in times of terrible danger, and then be hoping, against all odds, that it wasn’t totally in vain.

Waves of Hatred

We can see clearly, at this point, that antisemitic incidents and mentality are at a peak. You can look in the news for the incidents, you can check the numbers that show it rising after Israel went into a war provoked by a massacre they suffered.

It is very preoccupying, to say the least, to see how leaders everywhere are dealing, or not dealing, with the situation. They disguise the problem of rising antisemitism by speaking against “all forms of prejudice”. Yes, we must fight all forms of prejudice, but when you refuse to name one specific problem that deserves to be highlighted at this precise moment, you are neglecting to give a group of people the attention they deserve, when some things are pointed specifically to them. No other form of prejudice, I think, had a rising to steep in these recent times.

It seems that the leaders are desperately avoiding any real conflict with the latest “righteous” trend to place all the blame in Israel for the suffering that began with October 7^th. But by allowing a  group to be harassed, to be cut from working in the Art world, in the literary World, lose professional opportunities, even suffer violence – there were murders – that was aimed specifically at their identity, you are weakening one of the main pillars that sustain what we call civilization – that hatred between groups must not be allowed to grow, to generate violence and banishment.

Of course a lot of people will say it is not antisemitism – just “antizionism”. But the Jews that support Israel as a Nation – not speaking about specific governments – are an overwhelming majority of Jews. The connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel is thousands years World, even if only in prayer. “Zionism” was the belief that they should aim to return to their ancestral land – they had no other place to call their own. Now, in the present, “Zionism”  simply represents the belief that Jews have the right to live in Israel and defend it. If half of the World was saying that France should not exist, they would need a “Francism”, too.

The Jews that support Israel deserve protection because they are not committing any crime. They are not preaching violence, definitely not preaching any theory of supremacy, they just disagree with a noisy group of people when it comes to foreign events. They have a right to not believe the “suspiciously biased” news people have been receiving. They have a different version of the facts, and have a right to democratically speak about it. They don’t defend “genocide”, they just think – like I think – that this is simply not what is happening. They believe this war is one of the wars that unfortunately need to be fought.

Think about the meaning of the expression “war crime”. There is a reason why there is a thing called “war crime”. If a war can have “war crimes” or not, it means that “war” itself is not necessarily a crime. Civilians tragically die in all wars, and that’s one of the main reasons why war must always be the last resource, after other ways of solving the problem have all been tried and you have no option but fight for your safety.

It is hard for many people to accept that, because people don’t want war, and they shouldn’t. But sometimes someone else starts a war, and if you don’t fight, you can die. As I always say, nowadays people agree that Nazi Germany should be defeated, and that was needed to be fought. In the case of Israel, they were horribly attacked at home. How could they not want to eliminate that source of horror?

I’ll simplify this with an illustration: you are at your backyard with your family and someone from the other side of your back wall throws a grenade where you are. You run to it and scream: “Hey, I’m gonna throw it back”. Another grenade comes from back there, and you don’t know what’s happening next. You grab both and scream: “I am throwing it back now!”. And you throw it. You can’t be considered a criminal for what happened on the other side.

Now, of course someone could use this kind of reasoning to justify some wrong deed. That’s why, even if some wars are justified, you need to show clearly it was not you who provoked it, you must act under the International Law and remain accountable. Israel did all this. They didn’t ignore when the International Court of Justice opened a case for genocide. They went there to defend themselves. And they won.

There is a talk that the Court found genocide “plausible”. That was before the judgement. “Plausible” means just that a case is valid enough for a trial to even start. Like, it’s “plausible” that that man stole a car, so let’s bring it to the court. Then we will say if he did it or not. The final verdict matters far more than the initial “plausibility”. It’s like the International Court said, “the complaints have a right to be listened”. But the final word was “no”. No genocide. And nobody who saw the performances in UN can say the international organizations are biased “in favor” of Israel.

It's hard for us, from far, to understand the world the Israelis live in. The Middle East is a land that is trembling. Dictators rise, dictator fall, replace by other dictators, terrorist groups with no allegiance to any universal moral limits grow and dominate regions.

There are dark colors in the landscape. People live under the rule of groups that preach nothing but violence as solution for all the problems. It’s not a desirable life at all, I think. Under oppressive “religious” regimes, anyone can be denounced for not following the “religious” law. You can also be denounced for not being loyal to the regime. These are arbitrary regimes, so they are not under a constitution, which means the punishment can be arbitrary and cruel.

I still didn’t forget what happened when the US withdrew from Afghanistan. People were so afraid that Taliban would take over – which they did. People desperately tried to be taken with the US military to somewhere else. A teenage boy, who dreamed of being a soccer player, died tried to travel in the wheel compartment of a plane. Soon, Taliban was in power, and life became dark again. People living extremely frustrating lives.

And these groups do the best to canalize the frustration that they themselves created in their favor, to take advantage that people are deeply frustrated to make them place the blame in someone else – the Jews, the Americans, the West – and become radicalized. And a lot of people do become extremely radical.

It’s not a good land for dreams. Men walk around with guns and with their faces hidden by black masks, having the power to kill, to torture. That’s the scenario. A kind of dark heat growing in much of the Middle East. And the favorite target of hatred is of course the Jew. This is the atmosphere around Israel.

And on October 7^th the ground under Israel has shaken violently. Something happened that people didn’t think was possible. A massacre so horrible that it is impossible to describe the cruelty. And that was the first event in this sequence that unfolded. And the future was uncertain. And Israel went to war, to destroy the group that perpetrated that horror. The ground would not stop shaking any other way.

The academic people say they see humanity in hurt Gazan individuals – they say they care for every single life lost – that would be not wrong, but when they talk about hurt Israelis, Israelis that were brutally murdered, women violated, they instead focus on the perpetrator and their “sociological” motivations, they focus on excusing the perpetrator “sociologically”, never on the victim. No Israeli victim was seen by them as individuals.

They claim there is an “apartheid” there, as if securing your borders and trying to keep track of terrorist organizations was the same as discriminating your own citizens based on race, which Israel doesn’t do. After October 7^th, instead of realizing that Israelis were right to be cautious – look what happened – a lot of people inverted the logic, saying that the horrific attack was a logic consequence of Israeli “exaggerated” security measures.

Of course Israel is not perfect, as no country or no Society is, but should the World condemn Israel to accept all horror that befalls them, for not being perfect?

And most of the news – not to mention the “random” social media – just offered snapshots of the war. Israel striking and the side effects. They didn’t seem to care that Hamas, who started it, was still attacking, and they could stop it all anytime, by returning the hostages and surrendering their destruction machine.

They don’t say that all peace proposals Israel made to their main enemies – there were many – were always rejected. They don’t tell an almost 80 years History where Israel only continues to exist because they fought back when needed. One of the things that Israel accomplished during this war was to seriously damage Iran’s nuclear program. Iran finances Hamas and was – it’s been proven – one step from making a nuclear bomb.

People prefer to choose the easiest version, the version that says Israel could have “just stopped”. It’s easier for them to pacify their conscience, not having to deal with hard questions. Not having to think on all the work that needs to be done to bring peace to the Middle East, and to the World.

So they ask Israel to leave their people in danger of new horrors, while the World offers no solution. For Israel or for Gaza, for that matter.

Then the hate speech against Israel and Jews goes more and more to the extreme. A lot of people seem to think it is not the time, right now, to condemn the neo-Nazis that crawled out of their caves recently to hitchhike on the wave of “criticism”. Some think that this time they might not be so wrong. Some are starting to think that maybe they were never completely wrong. Oh, Lord.

This is what you get for looking so fast for the easier answer, instead of facing the facts and demanding that the World fixes the real problem. Why was it always so hard to simply include Hamas’ surrender in the demands?

Oct 7 proved that the danger was bigger than anyone thought, and nobody could be too certain about the future. Especially with Iran and Qatar funding all the terror and so much of the World turning blind to the suffering and the danger in the only democracy of the Middle East. If Israel didn’t focus on the dismantling of Hamas, it is obvious that the cycle would go on indefinitely.

Now, because we think the World with no war that we live in is easy to achieve anywhere, and we blame Israel for the fact this World with no war still simply does not exist in the Middle East, antisemitism then comes back. Why it always does? There are more deadly conflicts in other parts of the World… Why every time History seems to be at a crossroads, the Jews are on the line? I surely don’t have the ultimate answers for the causes of Antisemitism, but I have been thinking on some aspects of it.

Think, there is difference between someone who wants to influence people in a positive way, enrich their lives, help them grow and be more independent, and someone who wants to use people for his own selfish agenda. And if you are interesting of growing this kind of selfish influence, what is more profitable? To try to destroy old prejudices or to ride them? To fight old fears or take advantage of them?

When you surf hatred, you can gain followers, by being perceived as “the one that had courage to say what nobody else is saying about that people” – even if there are a million idiots saying the exact same thing. It brings concrete political gain if you are a politician, or if you are someone in the media, it gives you audience, that can be converted to political influence.

When you surf fear, you can push conspiracy theories, and generate distrust in Civilization. You make people believe that there is no solution “inside the system”, that institutions are worth nothing and we must abandon the hope of using the institutions in our favor. Then people are ready to welcome and cheer new “saviors”.

Corruption exists, but the institutions also represent a common wealth of values of humanity, they can be improved, of course, but a total distrust in everything, a total disbelief in any common ground, have very bad consequences for society, and very greedy politicians know that, but they do it anyway.

This is happening in the Western World, and a harder and more extreme version of it is been long growing in the Middle East. In a lot of places, all possibility of trust in anything that relates to a “modern” Civilization – and they call almost everything “modern” – has been replaced by hopes of a Paradise that they will find in the next corner of History, when they finally defeat the enemies, the infidels. Which mainly means Jews, but not only.

All this, of course, ends up working against the very people the extremists pretend to be defending. Because the “cause” is infinitely more important than the lives of people, they have an excuse to harass, to beat, to kill. Hamas rules Gaza through terror, and recently they have been very active in silencing – including with executions – dissents that emerged during the time of war, when Hamas didn’t care for nobody except themselves, even being caught in video stealing aid from the people.

Now, let’s see what we have in the present, this very moment. A ceasefire deal was signed, and it says not only that Israel will gradually withdraw from Gaza, but also that Hamas will give away their weapons and not be governing Gaza anymore.

Will the World demand, that not Israel, but also Hamas, uphold it? Or is it politically incorrect to demand the surrender of a terrorist organization?

The attitude of most of the World toward this present ceasefire situation shows once again that Israelis have a reason to be worried with their future, with their safety. The difficulty so many people, including political leaders, have shown to demand the dismantling of Hamas military power – as the deal determines – show that Israel can’t take the World’s good sense for granted. It shows the uncertainty Israel lives in.

Israelis live surrounded by a region that is not in the 21^st century, in terms of mentality. We live in a World where we can say big wars are part of the past – and I hope they continue to be, but that is not where they live. And they are not magically protected from the brutal past that lives around them.

Israel didn’t make the ground on Middle East shake, but that’s the world they live in. And the World have the opportunity now to show it really condemns terrorism – not with vague statements, but in a concrete way.

It is time to choose if we will endorse fake theories, used to relativize the pure evil perpetrated by terrorists – like a fake theory of stolen land, that keeps people stuck in the heat of hatred – or we will do something for real peace.

When so many people, who claim to be so worried about human beings around the Globe, seem unable to condemn fascistic dictators who oppress their own people, for me it is clear that their focus is hatred – hatred for Israel, hatred for America – not really solidarity with the poor.

If it wasn’t by hatred, and the fear that some people have to lose business opportunities abroad – the World would be able to see clearly the two paths we have ahead of us, to choose.

Will we take the path of saying that the only democracy in the Middle East is always the villain, and terror organizations are not so wrong, which allows a domino effect that ends up making a country like America hate some of their most honest citizens? And, of course, just allows Hamas to rearm and increase the cost of their defeat again.

Or will we take the path that really is more likely to bring us a safer world, for everybody – the path of opposing tyrants and fighting terrorism, knowing that waves of hatred never stop on their own, and you never know how far they will go…?

You don't do good for humanity fearing to place the responsibility on people who couldn't care less for it. You just allow evil people to turn everything upside-down.

Try No Terror

 I was hearing in my mind academic voices saying things like “You pro-Israel people are denying the Historic Processes of Oppression and their endurance, you deny that, if not fought back somehow, these things persist in time, because of the System.”

Then I realized: they are the ones who are saying that a people that has been persecuted through centuries until 6 million were finally thrown into gas chambers, became the contrary in last than one hundred years. They seem to be saying that those “Historic Structures of Oppression” are very easily changed very quickly, right?

But wait, aren’t the Muslin Arabs historically oppressed? Where? Let’s take Palestine then, for instance. When they were historically oppressed there? In the centuries they lived under the caliphs or the five hundred years they lived under the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, or the 28 years under Britain?

It was Muslins living under the rule of Muslins.

Unless you consider the Sultans part of the oppressed. And the sheiks. But don’t you realize you will be calling men who smoke fancy cigars and have collections of luxury cars, and rivers of petroleum, an oppressed group? Don’t you see how crazy this is?

This is the story of a people who were outcast and persecuted everywhere, and another people who, if oppressed, were being oppressed by their own leaders. Then finally the Ottoman Empire was over, and less than one percent of the Middle East was given to the Jews after the genocide they suffered. That less than one percent was in their Holy Land, the place they prayed to return to, generation after generation.

In that map redefinition, Jews had to flee Arab countries in a hurry not to be killed, Jews had to leave Europe, some after their family had just been exterminated, and a group of Arabs had to flee the part of Palestine that was given to the Jews. The number of displaced Jews in the Middle East is at least as big as the Arabs.

A lot of sad aspects to it, but still a deal that was fair enough, and the Jews were right to accept. They were right to not step back when the Arabs said “no, we want to rule one hundred percent of the Middle East, not ninety-nine and something”. Those Jews didn’t want to be forever without a land of their own, and they had very good reasons for that. In their tradition, and in their past and recent History.

They then had to fight for it, because Arab countries attacked, seven nations against one, and the Jews miraculously won. And they were attacked again, and again. After some time, the modus operandi of their enemies was not so much open war anymore, but the funding of Terror Groups, so these groups can attack and Israel supposedly can’t fight back, because these group “are not” the countries, even when they rule a region like Gaza or a piece of Lebanon.

Of course some people think, why armies? Why soldiers? Why guns? I wish things were so simple that anytime you “spoke with someone with open heart” you could completely avoid violence. But if that was the case, we wouldn’t have so much violence all over the World. All over the World countries need police, countries need armies.

Doesn’t the existence of this ideology that says “Death to Israel” – in their own words, read the Hamas charter, listen to the interviews of their leaders – doesn’t the existence of this ideology change the reality? Doesn’t it make us think, well, Israel needs to take precautions, there were thousands of Terror attacks, they need security measures, they need to arrest people that throw stones – stones can kill, and that’s the intention of the throwing. They need to check people who cross borders.

Isn’t it insane to be complaining about that instead of thinking of how could the Palestinian people move away from this ideology?

How can anyone say Israel doesn’t want peace if their enemies didn’t try peace yet even once?

Couldn’t they ever have tried nothing different? Didn’t money get in there somehow? How much do a maze of large tunnels under cities cost? Could it have been spent on something else?

Now, after the horrible massacre of October 7^th, Israel had to go to war. Imagine if the rulers of your neighbor country commanded October 7^th in your country. Imagine it happened closed to your home. Wouldn’t you want to go after that group of people? Wouldn’t you have to?

Now don’t use numbers to invert the logic. All that happened later was war, and wars are not beautiful. Israel proves it don’t target civilians. Israel offered peace many times through decades. The images from Gaza, that’s what wars look like.

There is an evil campaign against Israel everywhere, but the question we should be asking is simple: who should ask for the end of this war?

Television showed people from Gaza say they don’t want bombings. Of course. I wish, and I am being sincere, that people in Gaza would say, “We don’t want any war with Israel, now or ever”. 

Isn’t it a good first step for the changes people say they want, for the better of Palestinian people? They can’t say that because of that ideology. Because of Hamas.

It’s time for the World to show we don’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing a Terror Group gone.

Television is mostly believing Hamas claims that they didn’t break the ceasefire when Israel strikes, even when Israel shows videos of Hamas violating the deal, but most journalist are “forgetting” to remind people that Hamas agreed to put down their weapons. Isn’t this crucial for peace?

So many people spent this entire time saying they “differentiate the people of Gaza from Hamas”. Yes, let’s do this differentiation, this separation, but not only in our little hearts, but in reality. Free the people of Gaza from Hamas. What better opportunity than now?

This war is not what I wanted for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza. But as I said, we need to get the people of Gaza to say, “We want peace. Now and in the future. Gaza just wants to mind its business”.

 

Choices

 

People that fight for values X People who distort values to look good

( this is kind of a reminder to myself, for whenever I fail to recognize the masks that Evil uses, and start to give importance to things that are not worth nothing to the good people of the World )

Rivers of Power

I spoke, in an earlier essay, about the power I believe the Academic World has. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t go for those kind of weird theories that say someone have some Godly power, by which they control all the events in the World like a perfect chess game, I just think that there are groups and institutions that fight for influence.

I’m also not saying all the teachers in the World are the same, obviously, or that we don’t need schools – we need – but if there is one completely dominant line of thought, then the growth of the Academy and the growth of this ideology will mean exactly the same.

It is natural that groups fight to gain more influence, but Academy should be the arena, a battlefield for different lines of thought to compete, not the headquarters of one.

The way we have things now makes it extremely easy for ideological groups that have influence, to completely obliterate other people, to point to an opinion that someone has, deem it evil, deem the person evil, then justify the complete shutting of all the doors to that person, to the point of making impossible for someone to keep earning a living in their field of work, even having committed no crime that can be proven. This is a big power.

Of course, when we speak about power of the Academy, it may sound contradictory to the vision many people have, that it is capitalism that rules the World, and if the Academy says they are against Capitalism, then Academy must to be the rebels, not part of the system, right?

Yes, money has a big power in the World, huge power. Harvard, for instance, have been receiving a billion dollars in donations every year, recently. Things are not so simple, so bidimensional, as some think.

Follow me here: If the system of capitalism is so closed and controlling everything, and the mainstream Academy is so rebellious and dangerous to it, why this “omnipotent” system allowed the Academy to be there, and be so prestigious? Why didn’t they built another Academy, more aligned with their thought, with all the money and power they have?

The Academy still benefits from the prestige they received due to the many advances that the Scientific Thinking brought to the World, the advances that physics brought to engineering, and chemistry and biology brought to medicine, and more. Why wouldn’t the powerful super rich want in on their side? Why wouldn’t they do anything to get that legitimacy to their side?

At some point in my life, I couldn’t help but start thinking that maybe the mainstream Academical thought is not so bad for the money World, or at least to a big part of it. International commerce is a huge thing, and I think a lot of people don’t want to see this business being affected by considerations about the level of democracy of countries, or even respects for human rights. There is a lot of people that deal with big money, that don’t want to displease leaders of rich authoritarian countries in the Middle East, for instance.

Our mainstream intellectuals don’t challenge these people. On the contrary, they somehow made it wrong to say too much bad things about someone who is “not white”, even if it is a bloodthirsty dictator, he can’t be the real big villain. The Marxists have their explanations for why you can’t really place blame on those people.

When you have a “logic” system of thought, with intellectual credentials printed on it, that says that a group of super rich dictators can’t be the real bad guys, a lot of greedy people will be happy with it.

Let’s think about all this logic, once again. The prestige of the Academic World, the success it showed in many areas, came from simplifying the situations to a few variables, which allows us to make predictions using plain mathematics. This works fine for phenomena of the physical World, but some thinkers hitchhiked on this success of Science to propose simplistic schemes of how Society works as a whole.

Karl Marx simplified all the process through which people produce things to very few elements, to say that a person can’t be a profiting business owner without stealing his employees. He reasoned that, if someone buys a set of things, then sells a transformed version of those things for a higher price, it means he paid less than the value of something when he bought. Then he said it can’t be the technology or the raw material, so it’s got to be the work of the employee that was underpaid  - that’s a simplified version, but the reasoning is basically this.

He didn’t say employees should be paid better, but that wherever there was profit, there was stealth, as if Civilization itself had not started and grown precisely because of the fact that the Earth can give to man more than he puts in it, and creativity has the power of multiplying things.

To be honest, the left wing economists evolved, in their language and mathematical approach, from that ultra simplistic vision Marx had of Economy, but that simplistic original Marxist thought planted a seed that is still defining the general view these people have of the Universe. The idea of a very limited World where everything that is gained creates a vacuum somewhere else, and peace cannot be built without a total rebellion.

In the Marxist World, people still see any kind of success or comfort that someone may have in Society as something gained necessarily at expense of someone else. The algorithm in the head of most people in the Academic World who say they are concerned with social causes is still very simplistic, and the main focus, that once was about workers and bosses now is about race, and a concept of race hiper simplified by the tone of color of the skin.

They take abominable facts of the past, like slavery, which is real and must not be forgotten, and say it is still the base of all that we have in the present. The past does have consequences in the present, we can’t deny, but there are always factors that they downplay, when it comes to explain the stagnation of some sectors of our society, like the pervasiveness of mass culture, and drugs, and so on. They also often disregard the many aspects in which our society already evolved in human terms, so they create a World View that justifies rebellion against absolutely anything, even violence, to no gain at all.

All this to keep the Marxist view that Society won’t evolve, won’t fix the problems that are still there without big mass movements as the main – or sometimes only – possibility of redemption. And in the end, of course, instead of giving people the tools they need as individuals to grow and do better for their families and communities, they create a World where all that matters is politics. Yes, in the end, they make political and ideological leaders our only saviors.

And they extend their view to the Global situation, oversimplifying the very complex History and present of the World to that same tone-of-color scheme. For instance, they are always kind of blind to the fact that Arabian countries are not “poor victims” of History, that those countries we always very smart players. They made huge fortunes in the time of land trade of spices and other things the Europeans wanted from the East, when they controlled the land routes and intermediated everything.

They lost their protagonism in that matter when Europe braved the sea routes, but kept making money, including with slavery. Yes, they made money with slavery of black people, and not just a little. Research it. Then, of course, when petroleum became a super powerful thing and they found they were sit on the biggest reserve of it, they gained protagonism again. And they have an interesting partnership with Russia, which has very big reserves of a lot of natural resources.

All this don’t fit the simplistic view of the World that mainstream intellectuals want us to swallow, where tone of color defines oppressed and oppressors. That’s the problem with start reducing the complex History of Humanity more and more to simple equations.

To be fair, much of the capitalist world also subscribes to a simplistic logic. Adam Smith simplified all the processes through which people trade things to very few elements, to say that the fact that, in the world of trade, each person seeks his own benefit, will bring a mathematical equilibrium that automatically will lead us always to a better place, as if the constant difference of urgency that a particular transaction has for each part didn’t require that men keep consulting the old richness of wisdom and morals that humanity gained through centuries, and is still our biggest treasure.

Of course, more and more people in the world of work and production are realizing that supply and demand don’t give us all we need for people to have satisfaction in their lives. More and more people are bringing human values to the world of work.

Think about “meritocracy”. I don’t believe in it in a Darwinist way, like, “let the non-adapted perish”, there’s no reason why not to lend a hand for people who haven’t reach their full potential yet, but in the simple sense of rewarding people who maximized their creative contribution, yes, it is necessary. But more and more people are coming to see that just saying “no to Stalin” and “yes to profit” is not enough to bring real meritocracy, there are a lot of human tendencies to cheapness that need to be overcome, and we always have more to learn about ethics. And I hope more people are realizing that the same applies to “Fair Competition”.

But the people who deal with huge scale international commerce, still seem to be guided solely by immediate numbers. It seems that these people, generally speaking, won’t do nothing to raise awareness about how some of the biggest players in International Commerce disregard democracy and even human rights.

All this may be good for “business as usual” but if we don’t make clear that we don’t approve dictators that disrespect basic freedom, and if we don’t denounce – and some of us even support – ideologies that teach people to place all the blame for all their problems on someone else, some other people, then we are encouraging the growth of armed hate groups. Terror groups, that can be used by wicked political leaders to destabilize regions and bring fear to the World, always with some pretext for refusing peace when it is offered to them.

We should be doing all our efforts to urge the Middle East countries that want to be seen as peaceful to condemn all murderous ideologies that propose the extermination of someone else as the solution. But sometimes we do the exact opposite, giving wicked leaders, that don’t care for their own people, not to mention about the other people, special sits in our “Conventions”.

So, this is how Academy can grow in power, because they are not a natural enemy of all the greedy, they are just a group that learned an algorithm, that they can increase their influence with a simplistic ideology that allows them to pose as rebels while not really setting anybody free.

I definitely don’t know the future, and sometimes it seems that these Rivers of Power have a mind of their own. I hope they don’t take us to a World where money flows freely but thought is more and more controlled. It can create a World where anyone can be banned – which feels like death – at any time, arbitrarily. It won’t do any good for our human relations, it will take us in the opposite direction of happiness.

People should realize that “big quantity” capitalism is not always opposed to social control, the “all in name of the people” kind, as you can see in China. I hope we are not going in a direction where, instead of, little by little, bringing more democracy to authoritarian countries, we end up flattening down the whole planet. Some people may not care, but people who know the meaning of joy and personal freedom have the right to be against that.

I do have faith, faith that people can make different lines of thought visible again, and to learn that things are not so black and white. That money can coexist with moral and moral can’t be replaced with the latest ideological trend.

I believe that in the future we can have a World where a person has a right to relate to a peoplehood, but also the individual has all the opportunity to grow in freedom.

I believe in the power of though. Not only logic, which requires a reduction of language, and is so many times necessary, but also the broader Reason, that dwells in all the richness of human language and sometimes even beyond.

Some people, for their immediate convenience, pretend not to see what doesn’t fit their narrative, even when it risks leading us all to a worst place. But as I always say, almost nobody wants to look in the mirror and say “I’m bad”. People like to think of themselves as good.

Let’s expand on it.

A very strange kind of dilemma

 

2 Years

It's not like I told them what's happening here. They told me.