“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
How do you react to adversity? Do you adopt a “victim mentality“, and withdraw to your cave, simmer in self-pity and fight the envy that spills out of your soul and eats away your self-respect? Or do you swallow your ego, pride, preserving your self-image as a worthwhile person living a worthwhile existence – no matter what that existence is?
The United States is currently going through a massive but very uneven recession. In the same way that some jobs, industries, and cultural corners have hardly noticed the economic slump as they power on to pinnacle after pinnacle, some cities, states and regions have not reflected deleterious effects from the recession. But for the cities and regions that are most affected, the recession impacts every avenue of social life. How do people in those cities react? Do they take to the streets in protest? Do they ransack the upmarket sections of town, looting and pillaging those who seem to be prospering in amongst the pain of the many? One of them does not. Enter Grand Rapids, a city in West Michigan. It featured as number 10 of a Newsweek article on America’s dying cities.
How do the people of Grand Rapids react? Do they wallow in self-pity, and ask for handouts and financial support? At least a few thousand folk in Grand Rapids thought their city was better than that. They thought Grand Rapids had a brighter, happier side on offer to its residents. The local Realtors even updated their website to suggest 57 reasons why Grand Rapids is not a story of a city in decline. You can read them here…
Best of all is that 3,000 people got together to participate in a single-shot lip-sync of the song “American Pie”. Components of the clip are a little amateurish, parts don’t flow quite as well as an edited version would, and overall it can seem a bit of a waste. But thousands of locals happily and actively participating in a single celebratory event is a good sign that things may not be as bad as the Newsweek article was suggesting.
Cheesy but a great way to push back at the trevails of despair.
Flag of the European Union - "United in Diversity"... but is it?
If there were a school-yard gang that offered you membership status on the prerequisite you wore their tee-shirt, and if wearing that tee-shirt provided you with benefits that enhanced your school experience then it could reasonably be said that membership is a good thing, so long as entry was left open to all, and non-tee-shirt children were not bullied in the process. In reality, this gang of like-minded children should be seen as a team.
But what happens when a child wants to wear a different tee-shirt, yet still expects to remain in the team? Might the manner in which a group deals with dissension be a strong indicator of whether that group is actually a team or if it is, in reality, just another gang?
European Union
The European Union is a team idea, based on a grand old vision of a unified Europe, a vision borne out of revulsion to the internecine conflicts of Europe’s past. Free flow of citizens across borders, shared ideals and, for 17 of the 27 EU members, a shared currency. It’s a grand plan to form a team that can hit higher and further than its individual players, and allow a greater voice in global trade and relations.
European Disunion
But what if a couple of team members cannot keep their gang colours clean or want to wear different tee-shirts? What if they play in the sandpit and climb trees until their tee-shirts are dirtied and torn? Should they be kicked off the team? And if their parents are too poor or incapable or unwilling to manage the upkeep of those tee-shirts, should these children be forced to leave the team or should they be forced to better maintain the team tee-shirts?
The European Union has various rules and agreements and treaties that set out minimum standards of conduct for members. The rules that have rocked global economics in 2010/11 are those that deal with debt. Member states are supposed to run their budgets prudently, and ensure that overall debts are below thresholds. Simply put, these thresholds have been pretty much ignored by most members. The unfolding dramas of the Global Financial Crisis highlight how susceptible the individual members of the EU are to any deviation from the capitalist aim of continuous growth, and now the question arises of how to deal with the countries in the worst position.
The position to date has been for the stronger members of the team to start dictating terms for their continued support of the players in trouble. Greece and Italy have lost their rights to a democracy, and have been taken under the wing of EU book-keepers. The economies will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the golden ratios marked out as magnificent and righteous by the powers-that-be.
But is this the most appropriate way of dealing with such issues?
“Union” is a globally misunderstood term
The media-heads surrounding the first Iraq War understood this concept – they labelled their war a “coalition of the willing” (even if it was a politically cynical nomenclature for a triad invasion). Surely a union of minds and bodies works best if the members of that union are willing participants?
Human history is a torrid read, replete with massacres, genocide, brutality and suppression – most often in the name of “unification” under one leader or group or religion or idea. You would think when 502 million people elect their best and brightest to lead and govern, that such a group of Very Clever People would act prudently and think carefully about actions and outcomes – but you’d be wrong. It seems pride, vanity, envy and superiority are just as endemic in the hallowed halls of power as they are in the streets and slums that are home to the great unwashed and spectacularly less news-worthy, components of humanity.
If a country is straddled with high debt, and is having trouble working through that process then wouldn’t it make sense to go back to the idea of working as a team rather than acting like a gang?
Rather than take away sovereignty or implementing punitive measures from on-high, why not put in some real team effort to improve everyone’s position? Why not do everything possible to keep the team strong, and allow the less-fit players a bit of “time on the bench”?
The economics of a country are not set in stone, no matter how much effort is put in by Very Clever People. Sometimes the conditions available simply do not lend themselves to perfect answers and golden ratio outcomes. Real teams understand that basic fact, and they allow for it in their rules and constitutions and guidelines. More importantly, they act in a way that shows that the rules actually mean something. Here’s a little mind exercise…
Germany is wracked by a massive series of earthquakes, resulting in enormous damage to the country’s infrastructure. The resultant clean-up and rebuilding effort requires huge levels of capital, and quickly. Germany uses its global financial clout to borrow funds from global markets and rapidly brings its export-driven economy back on-line. In doing so, its budget deficit triples EU limits, while its national debt greatly exceeds EU maximums.
With these golden ratios exceeded – should the German government be sacked, and Brussells book-keepers be appointed to bring Germany back into line?
The more obvious response to this mind exercise is to ridicule it as being completely different to the situation of Greece, Italy (Ireland, Portugal and Spain), as these countries voluntarily failed to meet standards, and failed to implement measures to bring their economies back into line. In this reasoning, it is unfair to use an externally imposed condition as the basis of comparison with a self-created condition. Perhaps. And yet, perhaps not. Isn’t there room for just a wee tad of compassion in both circumstances? Isn’t that showing just a little bit of higher thinking than setting up a medieval set of stocks for those who breach golden ratios?
Leaving is just as important as joining
The EU sets out minimum standards that must be attained for a period of time before a nation can sit on the benches, awaiting eventual appointment to the EU team. High ideals and objectives can inspire hard work, creativity and good governance, so it makes sense to set limits for membership of any team. Punitive actions however, are ripe ground for sowing the seeds of envy, anger, prejudice and dissension, and their provisions should be thought through very, very carefully before being mandated or enforced.
And yet the major members of the Euro currency (Germany and France) have bullied the remaining members into agreeing on punitive action for enforcing golden ratios, while at the same time actively refusing to take steps that would strengthen the Euro. These school-yard bullies have further attempted to impose rules and sanctions from their Euro team onto the wider European Union team, whose members are not even part of the Euro team.
There would be many ways of working on long term answers to the European Union’s short term woes, and these could be supportive of the ailing countries rather than punitive. If the EU really were a team, the team managers would be working on game plans for the ailing states – putting in place long term management plans for long term injuries and ailments, while doing all they could to bolster the confidence, morale and willingness of the ailing team members to continue to be part of the team. How many people have watched the unfolding dramas in Europe, and felt that they were watching a cohesive and enthusiastic team doing their all for every player on the team?
It ends in war or authoritarian government
Europe’s history is such that you’d expect its leaders to be careful of triggering old rivalries or attempting to enforce regimes on unwilling populations. And you’d be wrong in your expectations.
It IS possible to have an authoritarian regime under the guise of a democracy. The examples in history are many and bloody and harsh. It seems that very little has been learned from the lessons of history. As a by-the-by, the EU motto is “United in Diversity”. Truly.
What do i say about me? Where do i fit into all of this, and are we understanding me at all?
This note is all about the me that we are. Not the me that we think we are or the me that we are told we should or could be. Just the me that sits behind the i and helps delineate you from everyone else.
Descartes suggested that the process of thinking helps confirm that i exist, that i am not simply dreaming, and that i am not the pawn of an evil power. Of course, it is quite possible that thinking is something that i do in a dream, and that my thinking dream is controlled by an evil power. Except Descartes pondered that possibility, too- and the shortfalls in his logic have occupied budding philosophy students ever since.
Who is the me behind the i? Grammatically, we should be identifying these labels to more accurately reflect who is thinking or stating what. Only that is not how our minds ponder such things, is it? Our mind considers i and me to be one and the same. If that is the case, which one is watching me when i think? Is it just an accident of language that me doesn’t watch i think?
Who am i? – Educating you about me
It’s not quite as quirky as it sounds. You should know about me – in fact, you should be intimately familiar with the workings of me. Naturally, i am talking about your me and not my me. My me is enough of a mystery already, so it makes little sense to add a foreign investigation to your own efforts to Know Thyself.
Only that simple little task is not so easy either, is it? The me that is i has a habit of misrepresenting the world that is relayed to i, to the extent that me must wonder exactly how much of the perceptions i sees me acknowledging are actually a reflection of reality, and how much is a reality that i arranges to keep me happy. In an ideal world, me, i and we would all agree to disregard such skeptical thinking as the cynicism of ignorance. But this is not an ideal world, and even if it turns out that it is, my version of that ideal world may be hiding those dainty shades of perfection.
Can we really Know Thyself?
In her book “A Mind Of Its Own”, The author Cordelia Fine compulsively grinds readers through the workings of their ineffectual selves with gleeful precision, somehow managing to sound chirpy as she dismantles the last vestiges of self assurance, self confidence and self understanding available to the average human being. The book’s subtitle clarifies the aim… “How your brain distorts and deceives”.
Wouldn't it have been so much better if we could have simply appended a copy of the publishing page to each essay back in university?
You can see from the chapter headings that there is not a lot of me left untouched by this interrogation. It seems that an entity referred to as “my brain”, is responsible for altering pretty much everything i experience to reflect whichever makes me feel most comfortable. The i or me that is the brain distorts my world-view input so we will continue to think that life is worthwhile, and that i am worthwhile, too. Of course, we all can – and should – argue that these tests and studies and anecdotes are a terrific reflection of the flawed state of society and the bulk of the population but they do not really apply to i. This is the well known “the bulk of people rank themselves as above average” effect, something in full view when mainstream media decries this or that act of horror, and the lack of activity by those who could have done something to stop it. Media editors write the articles to elicit the “i would have done something!” response, and it’s good for business when the ranks of indignant feel driven to comment and talk about how they would have acted if faced with similar circumstances. Again, this is something tackled in the book. The key point is not to praise or denigrate the book – but to point to the large pool of research that suggests our world-view is based on truth and clarity only when we assign relative values to those terms.
Surely we can change – or ‘recalibrate’ our world-view?
Maybe. My first coherent outcome from all these ponderings is to propose that Knowing Thyself should be something taught right through school. If these internal failings in our digestion of reality exist then we should do everything in our power to fix the lens that causes this distortion. There is no benefit to be had in leaving this until the later, adult, years as only a fraction of the population will ever embark on a study journey of self awareness without being lured by the power of a financial gain or some driving theological/spiritual imperative, and these particular baubles will cause their own distortion.
But we are then confronted with an awful term that has been passed on by the proponents of post-modernism. There is a concept referred to as the simulacra. It’s not a ocean-edge shellfish, nor is it a battery powered massage device. ‘Simulacra’ refers to a representation of reality that is a copy but a copy shorn of the meaning of the original. Jean Baudrillard is most readily identified with the concept. It’s well worth reading and thinking about but be warned, once identified as a concept, the expressions of simulacra become more and more visible. Fortunately, you, i and we can take comfort in the thought that this is really just academic navel-gazing, and degrees in Arts aren’t really worth the paper they are printed on. Truly, this is an important harbour of safety to cultivate, and the time will come when you will need it. You will need it because this idea of a rehashed concept being raised and praised, while being devoid of contact with its original meaning, has somehow become enmeshed into the societies of the developed world. Here’s why this frustratingly bland concept creates an issue when trying to recalibrate a world-view…
Let’s say we introduce “Know Thyself” into all levels of the education system. Let’s blithely dismiss the concerns and objections of those groups who are not really happy about such activities. Groups such as religious fraternities (my Bible is better than your Bible, we don’t need to understand ourselves – we just need to accept the light of Jesus/Mohammed/______ into our hearts) and the Pragmatically Practical People, who are focussed on driving the three “R’s” into every child, along with the best tools to help them make money, win friends and learn to influence people without wasting time on Liberal academic hokus-pokus! Let’s assume that these folk put aside their doubts, and support the initiative whole-heartedly. Our day-dream continues as we see a time where all children leave the education system with a coherent view of the fallibility of their world-view receptors. But is anything different in this brave new world? Will we simply have a generation of people who can see that the world is not what it seems but because of that they choose to take less of it as holding validity? Do we end up with a cynical population that doubt everything or a population that pursues their own interests selfishly, set adrift in a sea of relativity where everything is ok, so long as i want it to be?
How much is there to know about me?
Quite a lot. How much do you know about your physical self? Do you know why you eat what you eat, why you dress the way that you do, and the extent to which your thought processes are a reflection of where you were born and the environment in which you live as opposed to next-step advances from fight-or-flight reactions?
The full scope of all that is me can arguably be said to be greater than my ability to comprehend, and so we humans have developed a tendency to deflect to ‘higher authority’. Post Enlightenment, that higher authority may not be this or that religious text but the fact that we are acknowledging a lack of knowledge provides an opportunity for stepping aside from any requirement to know thyself. Why should i learn how my body or mind functions, when that is the job of a whole range of specialists, whose combined knowledge is much greater than anything i could accumulate in a single lifetime? While it is logical to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding – in fact, it could be seen as a sign of higher understanding to be able to clearly delineate the boundary between ‘i think’ and ‘i know’, there must surely be a level to which we should ascend to take advantage of a few millenia of societal history and development?
Would you be any better off knowing more about me?
Would greater self-awareness and self-understanding simply result in an introverted outlook on life? Wouldn’t a higher level of introspection blunt some of the wonder and excitement, passion, love and lust for life that we get from ‘just doing’? We are all born or develop into different primary character traits.Some people can read if they have to but proudly boast that the last time they read a book was 10 years ago. Some individuals are driven to excel or persevere in a single chosen field, and have no time nor resource to devote to something as oblique and opaque as “know thyself”.
It can be a perilous journey, the road to self. When you ponder the full scope of the objective, it becomes more understandable that some would choose to pack 3 months worth of sandwiches, and climb up to perch on a pole. Those who do so are often locked in a battle with the spiritual world-view, seeking to gain a greater grasp of where square pegs really belong in a universe full of round holes. Yet this can be seen as side-stepping or maybe even pole-vaulting around and over the day-to-day minutiae of knowing thyself. In the search for the over-riding answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, we can remove ourselves too far from the art of simply living. Yet isn’t that what a call to know thyself is? Isn’t it also just an excuse to focus on the past or the unknowable to the exclusion of being better at the difficult job of making it to our individual expiry dates having lived a full and worthwhile life?
Imagine a world free of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, acedia, wrath, envy, pride and vainglory. Sounds rather dull, doesn’t it? Would a search to know thyself be a blueprint for attaining perfection? If we know ourselves utterly, can that assist us each to become all that we could be, and help free us of the shackles mandated by those 7 sins? Wouldn’t a clear vision of the strings-from-the-sky hegemonic fields of power and control simply lead us into despair or apathy – triggering number 5 – acedia? If we return to the work of Cordelia Fine, we find on page 23 a marvellous highlighting of this exact point…
“…There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.”
This could be taken to mean that self-knowledge is another avenue to disillusion. This does not appear to be a logical outcome, nor a necessary result. Rather, it would suggest that there is a need to ensure that emotional supports are put in place whenever a pillar of self-worth is identified as little more than a crutch of delusion. Attacking a lifetime of warped world-views without seeking to understand the resulting potential for chaos and apathy would be the height of rascaldom.
For all the difficulties, there should be value in increasing the number of people who pay attention to the little characters perched on each shoulder, and to the one or more gatekeepers, commentators and directors who operate inside our conscious and subconscious minds. The 7 deadly sins will always find a way of asserting themselves, even if only in the form of ‘envy’, as some become irked at the ability of others to investigate, understand or communicate with and about their inner selves. A quest for perfection is riotously funny in its lack of self-awareness but the aim to do, and be, better should have some value?
Forget sin, how about virtue?
Knowing Thyself should help us to step away from the negative reflections of character and better achieve the more positive aspects of humanity. Few thoughts are new, and the Roman Philosopher King Marcus Arelius (clearly, this title is a tip ‘o the ‘at to the dialogue of the movie Gladiator) set out a number of virtues to aim for. Marcus Arelius is included at this point predominantly because his much-loved classic, “Meditations“, was originally titled “To Myself“. Prudence, moderation, justice and courage were high in his list of virtues, although there are more as you would expect, and fortunately ‘humour’ gets a look-in. How sad would be a world of perfection, virtue and truth, were it to be devoid of humour?
Leadership
Looking at Marcus Arelius as a model, can a human know themselves completely, and retain the strength of will to fill a leadership role? Not a question to be scraped through in this post – but one that has some validity if we step into the world of mainstream today and ponder those who set themselves up for leadership roles – think Mr Putin in Russia, and the candidates for the Presidency of the United States. Now there’s a thought that’ll entail some thinking…
What role of mainstream media in society? How do we as individuals allow the Fourth Estate to impact our thinking? (Image : Cox & Forkum -click for link)
The latest post attempted to provide a framework for assessing the role of mainstream media in setting the world-view of the individual. It also provided a vague example by looking at the standard reporting of events relating to the unravelling European “Debt Crisis”. However, the world we inhabit is not the full-stop at the end of history’s sentence. Hence within 24 hours we are provided with an example of how mainstream media falls short of the role for which its proponents argue.
Interpreting “news”
On the 28th November, Australian folk woke to a rapidly rising sharemarket and the “news” that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was going to give Italy a loan of 600 billion euros at well below market interest rates. This would ensure that Italy did not need to approach those rascally bond markets and ask professional investors to lend them money.
Sharemarkets were enthused that such a big move would finally help reduce the fear of European banking falling into a deep, dark hole. Bank shares rose, and mining shares lifted (presumably on the assumption that Europe would avoid a recession and that would help China avoid some awfully physical thing referred to as a “hard landing”.
The “news” was dutifully repeated ad-nauseam across the world’s major news networks. Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Google can always be relied upon to quickly gather the extent of a particular issue…
Is it news when a rumour is simply circulated as if it were fact?
Why is this important?
To start with, any financial news outlet worth its salt would have very quickly realised that this particular item had very little possibility of being true.
There are many, many reasons for this but the most laughable is that the IMF is funded by its shareholder nations – which means that the EU would have had to stump up around a quarter of this money, and the United States would have been up for around $150 billion (+/- a fraction of a trillion or so… money becomes such a drag when you have to deal with all those zero’s). What thinking person would look at the financial debacle that is the United States, and happily accept that the powers that cannot agree on the country meeting its own debts, would simply dip into their pockets for one hundred and fifty big’uns to give Italy a free ride for the next 12 months or so?
Your correspondent had a great time yesterday morning, looking for source notes on such articles, and finding that the roundabout led to an Italian news outlet, La Stampa. Amazingly, few of the larger news outlets even hinted that the possibility of the article being a mere rumour. There were a few organisations that managed to clarify the issue but the point is that many did not.
And so we return to the need for the individual to ponder just how they receive their “news” and which filters (if any) are going to be used to separate the useful and valuable information from the simple transmission of rumour, innuendo and fluff.
Money and Power
Money is power, and hegemonic power fields are being fought over as capitalism and democracy vie for supremacy. So far, capitalism is winning. If that isn’t news then what is?
Italy and Greece are now governed by bank-appointed receivers. Mainstream media has yet to catch on to this. In financial markets, most commentators made a note of the loss of democracy then moved on to the day’s business. They see it as a logical progression, and no big deal.
In the United States, losses from the Global Financial Crisis that should have been booked to those taking the risks were instead reimbursed in full by taxpayers, who found their representatives borrowing a smooth trillion or so from global markets to meet those losses. The powers that be then approved making huge commission payments to those exact same businesses that had just been bailed out, as yet more money was force-fed into the banking system. In the United States, unemployment is seen as being fixable by simply sending more and more money into the banking system. Mainstream news has been quite up-to-date on this one, so a small ‘yay!’ for the team.
Thought Control
If anyone has a doubt about the power of mainstream media, and its capacity to distort and deceive, how about working your way through this little article, which points to the Communist Party vision of mainstream media’s role in China. Here’s are two quotes taken from the article, in which a representative of SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) puts the party line view of mainstream media…
“Radio and television are important mouthpieces of the (Communist) Party and the people and are important battlefields in publicity and ideology”… and
“They bear important responsibilities in the public cultural service system, they must fully play up their advantages and earnestly perform their duties”…
The point was that the Party decided to cancel advertisements during some programs, to ensure viewers were being correctly programmed (my interpretation but read it and see if yours differs).
If that doesn’t make an individual pause and reconsider just how much they allow such tripe to influence their world-view then lets fall back on the comforting pillow that is despair, and pull out a copy of The Road, just to assure ourselves that things could actually be worse.
OK. Let’s agree in advance that this is going to be a non-linear dissertation on our world-view as it is influenced by mainstream media. If you persist to the end, please add your comment, even if only to assist me in coalescing this ramble into a coherent thought.
If mainstream media is a reflection of the society that generates it, what does that say about my/your/our particular society?
How does mainstream media affect your world-view?
From the perspective of a disinterested observer, even a cursory deviation into mainstream puts paid to any thought that we are an enlightened or even an advanced society. There are pockets of study and thinking and hope but they are marginalised side-thoughts of the mainstream mass. Almost an anachronism, and treated as such.
thought exercise…
what society would we each have, were mainstream media to suddenly and completely, cease to exist?
Read this paragraph then close your eyes, and spend a moment to ponder your own current worldview. Think through an average day, sans any media content. You can keep technology but no social-media, no “news”, radio, television, newspaper. Now ponder a year of your life under those conditions. What holes agape in your altered world-view? What impact on your relationships and your interactions with others?
A counter thought would be to suggest that mainstream media is an integral part of society, so enmeshed in our reality that pondering the ‘modern’ world without it is an action of glib revisionism. Under that logic, mainstream media is modern society. Mayhaps, and yet this sidesteps the issue at hand. To conceptualise the impact of mainstream media within a society, it is reasonable to assess what society looks like when that slice is removed. IF we are not overly impressed by the remaining cake then we are not impressed at the state of our human evolution.
And here we have the nub of this post. If our modern construct is to be considered the pinnacle of all that has gone before, are we impressed by what we see?
In the immortal words of the fellow at the back of the crowd, “I’m not”.
It’s not as though transcontinental video calls are not impressive because they quite definitely are. It’s not under-appreciation of GPS, trans-ocean cables and Google, which allow those who were once uninformed to access vast repositories of data and knowledge. These and many other technologically magical powers have transformed communications and possibilities… but has access to this technology materially improved the societies that possess them? More importantly, is access to these technologies the most appropriate benchmarks with which to measure the evolution of our society?
Again, we need to consider what changes to existence have occurred as a result of these and other components of society. If we return to the issue of mainstream media then we can acknowledge that there are new ways of receiving and filtering the vast array of available data, information and entertainment but again, to what end benefit?
What is the benefit of mainstream media?
So my thinking leads me back to the existence of the individual. What impact does mainstream media have on the individual? It can be dangerous to spend too long analysing just what that may be, as it is highly likely to lead to despair. In my subjective eyes, the bulk of mainstream media is neither valuable nor useful.
If we concede the benefit of the doubt, then there is an entertainment component that we could argue for. We could consider the entertainment component ‘art’, and fall back on Warhol‘s circular proposition that art at its best is pointless. Therefore, the entertainment aspect of mainstream media is aptly fulfilled. If we hold that the bulk of mainstream media is entertainment then my proposition on the value of mainstream media is invalid, and my despair is merely misplaced gloom.
There is a sports component of mainstream media that has clear purpose and value. There are individual benefits from being part of something larger, and societal benefits from competition and the promotion of good health. However, sports today is not too far removed from the factional sports of bygone eras, and calling it progressive or an advance of society is a bit of a stretch. Fans screaming for their team while wearing the colours of the Lakers, Liverpool, Real Madrid or the Pittsburgh Steelers don’t differ materially from Alexandria’s Red, white Green and Blue chariot teams or the Blues and Greens of Byzantium. Modern sport riots may fall short of the benchmark set by the Nika riots but all-in-all, team sport has not really evolved to any great degree.
How about documentaries? They are possibly the one shining star continuing the work of the enlightenment. However, they would not really be considered mainstream. Even if we again adopt the benefit-of-the-doubt, to what extent can we say the the existence or absence of documentaries constitutes an advance of society?
There is a ‘news‘ component that we could argue for on the assumption that we are better off knowing this material, and that it is both valuable and useful. This proposition is harder to justify, no matter which sound bite we apply, for what is it that constitutes news, and in what way does it benefit us?
When news is not news, what is it?
Deviating into the present for just a moment (after all, how else could you?), we can look at very specific examples to illustrate how a cursory look at mainstream media can lead to feelings of despair. This is a long example but is indicative of the lapse of “news” into little more than rapid re-transmission of data packets.
Look at any news report currently and you will see articles covering this or that event related to the slowly unravelling debt crisis playing itself out in European politics. We are informed of the level of debt of this country or that, the latest changes in political positions and the reactions of non-European Union countries through their various spokespeople. And yet arguably the greatest ‘news’ in amongst all of this is completely omitted from discussion.
There are many overviews available. A quick Google search under “European Crisis” will uncover a large number of articles – 23,700 currently. And yet out of all these articles, you will only find 256 under “European loss of soveriegnty”. ‘So what’ you may say. ‘So a lot’, would i reply.
Not so long ago, the Greek Prime Minister was called upon to impose more of what has become a never ending series of quaintly labelled ‘austerity measures’. These cuts to services and benefits are on top of earlier attempts to balance the books of the government and would be implemented on a country already staggering under a large drop in output. These austerity measures will guarantee that the country remains in recession, and have a high probability of leaving Greece in an untenable position for many years to come. Given that he was about to sign the country into perpetual bondage under an EU (read : German) yoke, the Greek Prime Minister raised the idea of putting that to a vote of the people. Within a week or so, he was out – replaced by a more compliant Prime Minister. Whether it was a political stunt or an attempt to actually get input from the constituency is not really relevant.
The Italian Prime Minister was also forced to step down, and Italy is now governed by a group of technocrats and a banker. Not one of these people have been voted into power.
We are observers of momentous events here. Not the day-to-day comings and goings of individuals but what can only be called “backdoor takeovers” of entire countries. This is not a good outcome, and brings about the potential for extreme reactions.
Many would argue that the Greeks and the Italians deserve it, somehow. Quite so, quite so. Under this argument, ineffective or corrupt governments and bureaucracies and profligate expenditure combine to make everything acceptable. If these countries cannot run their economies properly then someone should force them to do so. Again, you can justify this attitude incredibly fluently but it does not make it right.
The Greek and Italian people are having their sovereignty taken away from them for the sake of money. They should be allowed a say in that.
Of course, the full picture is even worse. The European Union is a grouping of a large number of countries, with clear benefits to trade and movement of people throughout the continent. Those of these countries that participate in the common currency, the Euro, are tied in a much more intricate manner and it is here that the biggest problems lay.
Money is not democratic. Capitalism and democracy march to a completely different tune.
The financial world does not care who runs Italy or Greece or Spain or Ireland, so long as they do so within specific financial benchmarks.
If news is the reporting of that which is important then mainstream news right now is failing miserably. If it is simply the transmission of individual events then it is doing fine. Your call.
Building your own reality
What actions do you take to build your own reality? How dedicated are you to making your world what you want it to be? Have you considered how your world will be if you actually achieve exactly what you want? These are some of the questions that come to mind while trawling mainstream ‘news’. ‘News’ that is delivered in a context completely lacking self-awareness, while the choice of content and the content itself, can quickly lead to despair.
News, like history, can only ever be the detritus left over after sifting the entirety of possibilities with your filter of choice. And i am making the assumption that you have elected to make a choice in which version of news you allow yourself to be exposed to, rather than blithely laying your current and future thought processes on the lap of mainstream and its Media Moguls. How do you source your news? How do you assess the validity of the interpretations of fact that you find? How do you know where your interpretation fits into alternative versions, and can you create your own Rashomon style analysis of events? [http://www.amazon.com/Rashomon-Seventeen-Stories-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039849]. Can you look back at an event for a moment and consider it from all points of view or are you - like the Samurai, the robber and the wife - limited by your personal outlook?
Is it possible to think independently?
The “strings from the sky” are not usually visible. By definition a hegemonic process can be neither seen nor perceived. If it were to be identifiable then you would be free to choose, and that is the whole point of hegemony – you don’t see it and you aren’t free to choose. And not all manipulators are operated via strings from the sky. Our perceptions of the world, our personal filters, attitudes, reactions and expectations are not optional. They are built in. You act the way that you do because that is who you are. Most of us will react a particular way, and when confronted on our stance, will forcefully and (we think) honestly argue for the position being taken. The author Shankar Vendantam uses a term “The Hidden Brain” to describe this automatic, non-conscious process that we are so quick to consider such an integral part of ‘us’. His book is a science journalist dissertation on what guides our actions, and well worth the read.
Yet our society does not encourage self-awareness. If anything, mainstream Western society does not see self-analysis as being valuable. We may try to ‘discover ourselves’ or ‘find out who we are’ and be completely unaware that in the process we are following a well-worn pathway, often walking in the precise footsteps of the hordes of emotionally disatisfied that preceded us. What of it, you ask? Surely each person must find their own pathway? True. And yet we can do so with full knowledge of what we are doing and with a more open mind on just why we are doing this.
How many times have you wondered whether a person talking to you is actually ‘listening to what they are saying’? Anger, frustration, excitement or urgency can lead us all to say things that are directly sourced from the internal ‘us’. This can be dangerous, as we are rarely in control of that particular animal.
Even when the words are carefully considered, they will always be melded and formed by our internal ‘subconscious selves’, and yet we are not taught to be aware of this.
As usual, the great English Bard has pondered the issue and offers us this little tidbit of advice…
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
What if we close our eyes for a while and ponder our world – not us, just our world. The local environment, our home, our family, our friends. Think about the workplace, the books we read and the media we interact with. Consider all of that as a play, and try to allocate roles and scenes from plots and stories that you know. Is ‘this person’ the typical joker, ‘that person’ the self-engrossed narcisist? Where do you fit in? How do you think people would perceive you from their view of the world? Where you think you are saying ‘red’, is it likely that people are hearing ‘green’? Are you the romantic sop, the nerdy bore or the flighty socialite? No-one likes being labelled but trying to identify a character that we resemble can be a humbling experience – and our world would benefit from a lot more humility.
Building a personal interpretation of the world you inhabit
Can you truly build your own reality without inadvertently creating your own blinkered bubble or a version so distorted that it is devoid of anything close to an objective reality? If we all try to do this, aren’t more people going to end up like Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik or US murderers Jared Lee Loughner, Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski? In building our own reality, don’t we just narrow our field of view to the point where we lose the ability to make objective assessments?
Maybe it is time to reconsider the ancient concept of “know thyself”…?
Given that we know so little about internal selves, isn’t it time that we pay more attention to what we let into our world,and the data sets that we allow access to shape our world-view?
There are a few people who ponder this issue – and some of these people go so far as to make the study of “self” a lifetime project. Not their own ‘self’ but the components which we humans use to assemble into our own ‘self’. In many cases, the studies help to highlight areas in which we pointedly fail to know ourselves. Discussion, understanding and building a teaching of these processes into education would go a long way to helping individuals gain some perception of the strings from the sky and the societal strings that bind each of us.
Here’s a snip from an old movie “Network”. It’s rather apt, and has not aged a day over all these years. The words are so good, i’ve included the text below.
Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Quote sourced from : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes
Solidarity brother! (image from mymilktoof.blogspot.com)
The title for this post posits a prime example of the recurrent gap between expectations and outcomes throughout the historical record of the human race. Even with the distraction of a flippant dalliance with alliteration, what we have here is clearly a tangled barrel of ideas prime for those who are Still Thinking.
Let’s step off the high-and-mighty horse of Disinterested Observer (DO) for just a little while, and consider the practical rough-and-tumble involved in bringing expectations into outcomes – because this is a gaping chasm that emerges whenever broadly held ideas and concepts attempt to enmesh themselves into existing hegemony. Various movements have a greater or lesser understanding of this stumbling block to success, yet those who achieve their ends have not always solved the riddle of implementation – so is it really just one big roulette wheel of possibilities – or is it the case that it actually IS possible to chart and navigate the pathway to a desired outcome?
As a long-term DO of the dynamic interplay between Equality and her Shiva-Brother, Inequality, the current strength of fringe political groups would suggest an environment fertile for budding germs of change thinking.
From Japan to Slovakia and Australia to the United States, the greater populations are being forced to lend a more compliant ear to marginal opinions than has been the case for many a year. In this environment, single-issue pressure groups and minority players have a much greater say, owing to their ability to be “the vote that counts” on issues for which the society is evenly divided. This is the world in which a group such as the “Tea Party” in the United States can guide national directions – even if these are in conflict with logic or the best likely outcomes for the majority. In Greece, we have a government (by the time this reaches the virtual world, there may be a ‘new’ government) that rules with a majority of 2. All over the planet, governments are being driven by the dictates of the marginal players. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as fringe thinking can help by being a catalyst for change, and the removal of entrenched cronyism. “Can” being the operative word in this sentence.
Although this site is more interested in persistent human issues than transient current events, there is an idea that has taken hold and for which many feel some empathy – even if they do not quite know what they are agreeing to. The idea is the one of inequality, and that there exists a group of “elites” for whom there has simply been too much support from the public purse – at the cost of the “many”. The vaguely defined “movement” has been given or has adopted the name “Occupy Wall Street”.
Occupywallstreet.org (#1 in “further reading” below) postulates this clever reason d’être on it’s website…
Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.
Why is this clever or even appealing?
Look more for what it is NOT saying than what is IS actually saying.
“A leaderless resistance movement”. Great phraseology. No leaders, hence no figureheads to discredit the “group” objectives. As soon as you have leaders, attention is focussed on their full scope of ideas. Suddenly you have room for disagreement of association with existing groups that may have their own specific imperatives. You also reduce the chances of fundamentally flawed characters of the Strauss-Kahn (#1.1 in “further reading” below) ilk from wreaking havoc on your movement.
“resistance movement”. Great phrase that one. “We resist”. No mention of what is being resisted, just a push “against”. All of a sudden, there is no need to identify the “other”. We simply resist. And there is something appealing to the common mind in the concept of the individual pushing against an entrenched “something”. All the better to NOT identify just what the something is, as that would create a need to justify your position. So long as you are resisting something, you can join our little group.
“many colors,genders and political persuasions”. For an Australian this creates an immediate issue, in that we need to support the illiterate. “Colors” isn’t spelled (spelt?) that way in Australia. The word has a “u” and is spelt “colours”. It’s rather funny, don’t you think, how we set out to be all-inclusive, yet simply cannot extricate ourselves from our environment? Hence, an Australian perspective is that this is a United States movement – because they spell differently “over there”. Still, there is no doubt that this is a call for inclusion. The United States homeground point is made all the more obvious by the reference to “Wall Street”.There is no Wall Street or “heart of the financial district” in Australia. Sydney has competed with Melbourne, while the nation’s capital – Canberra – has a lot of influence but no practical dimension. Australian stock exchanges are generally electronic, so there is no “trading floor” where fops parade around in flashy suits, yelling their buy or sell orders. There ain’t a lot of areas to focus a disenfranchised rage against Downunder…
“We are the 99%”. This is my personal favourite. 99% is one hell of a majority. What single issue would exist that you would find 99% agreement on…? What single downtrodden group would you find that makes up 99% of any single population? My wild stab-in-the-dark is that you won’t find a 99% majority on any issue, anywhere. There must be more than 1% that are “undecided”, “disinterested” or “unaligned” on just about any point you want to highlight. That’s clearly a subjective statement – but i’m comfy with the odds that it holds more validity than an opposing position. Here’s a simple version of that little idea.
The US population is currently
US population as at October 2011
1% is therefore going to amount to 3,124,329 people.And here is where it all becomes a bit of a tangled mess…Does this mean that there are 3,124,329 “greedy and corrupt” people?
Just how many of the greedy and corrupt work on Wall Street? If we agree with wallstreetrun.com (#2 below) then as of August 2011 the figure is 168,300. mmmm… that’s way too short of our required 3,124,329 people. The much maligned but ever reliable Wikipedia (#3 below) suggests that 1% of the US population is in prison and the figure is boosted to 3.1% if we include those on parole or probation. That makes the cut but we aren’t marching to the local penitentiary, are we? We’re marching to Rupert Murdoch’s home or the homeground for JP Morgan. How about taking the position that my rebuff of this figure is unfair denigration of people who simply want to identify a broader community malaise?
mmm… ok. If we refer to US IRS statistics (#4 below) then we can see that the top 10% of individuals (314,600 people) submitting tax returns have an average income of $113,799. To get to our 3,124,329 greedy and corrupt individuals figure, we are clearly going to have to cast our net far wider than the top 10% of taxpayers or the characters inhabiting Wall Street to get to our 1% of the population figure.
“We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring (#4 below) tactic to achieve our ends”. Tricky, that particular piece. Which particular version of Arab Spring are we referring to? The Libyan version, which relied on enthusiastic French, background US and a grudging German operation for military support of its political aspirations? Maybe the Syrian version, which has seen thousands of casualties as the ruling power elite enforce their position? How about the Egyptian Arab Spring, which has seen a popular rising coalesce into something rather unsure and unknown? Now i am lining myself up for a jolly good bollocking at this point, as the Arab Spring has clearly entered the vernacular as the nom de plume for a ground-roots popular rising against an entrenched power… but one must always be wary of the fallacy of association (don’t look it up, i made it up). A call to authority based on an external role-model is no basis for acceptance of a statement of position. At least, not if you really want some sort of support for the proposition.
“…and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximise the safety of all participants”. That particular point is a very good idea. There are are many folk around the world who are quite happy to piggy-back on the latest trends to further their own violent or anti-society ends. Anarchists, Jihadists, right-wing, left-wing and unaligned extremists are all keen to bring their own version of violence and wanton destruction to any disruptive operation. It is handy to state your opposition to these groups, so that you can decrie their evil intentions when you are bemoaning the extra publicity and attention that their wanton tactics bring to your group. Take it as a given that i am completely aware of the impossibility of my position on this point. If a group decries violence then what else can they do other than make a bold statement against it? Surely they are in a “no-win” position in this regard – invalidating my belittling of the official position? Maybe and maybe not. If you are going to make a broad call to action then there are going to be those who will bring their own version of action to the table. If you aren’t aware of that then you aren’t really prepared to run a high profile, high impact campaign. My real point is that this is dangerous ground. Allowing the dispossessed and disoriented equal access to your cause is the equivalent of inciting dissention, and that just brings about heartache for all involved.
Income (In)Equality
Let’s start here.Income inequality is always a favourite of the crowd. When the sonorous sea of sweaty, screaming sycophants follow their latest sound-bite, it is most often the effects of income inequality that they are giving voice to. It’s just that they do not know it. The problem they face is that such a poorly delineated Magna Carta of demands can never achieve the Great Seal of even the most ineffective and incompetent King John.
As discussed in a previous post, http://www.stillthinking.org/the-anarchists-handbook/the-absurdity-of-representational-government/, achieving consensus between any more than two humans will, by definition, bring about a win-lose situation. Change Managers, managerial consultants and analysts may think up new ways of portraying consensus as a win-win but that is just wrapping a pretty package around the word “compromise”.The starting point for this problem is that income inequality is a great calling card but there are high levels of differentiation in meaning for this phrase. When you are suggesting that there is something wrong but cannot clearly state what that “something” is then there is room for others to define your problems away. It’s a little like the issue of poverty and poverty line. Redefine the poverty line and you redefine poverty. All of a sudden, you can show that there aren’t as many people living below the poverty level and thereby reduce the momentum for change.
You could also look at the relativity of income disparity, and choose which data set you include or do not include – again reducing the disparity and momentum for change. This can cut both ways, of course. Here’s the German online media group Spiegel’s graphic of income disparity comparisons between the USA and Germany (# 6 in further reading below).
Spiegel International's graphic on income disparity
You can see that income disparity is not just a USA phenomenon. Hence the global popularity of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
He’s the standup guy that said we shouldn’t talk about the earth as though it needs help or needs us… he suggested that the Earth will do fine – if it needs a few million years and a global ice age to get rid of these pesky humans then it’ll get by… i love the concept whereby our own inflamed valuation of our worth suggests that the earth needs us… i know it is a tortured thread of thinking because you can just as easily suggest that the earth needs us to stop us from being us… but the idea doesn’t really change much for all of that…
All of this thinking was triggered by this amazing photo of an underground volcano continuing to do its thing, while we humans shuffle the deckchairs…
The Earth continues to do its thing... click on picture to go to Spiegel International article
Aside from being a beautiful picture, it’s kind of scary, isn’t it?
And for those who aren’t familiar with George Carlin, here’s the YouTube video that came to mind when looking at this picture. For those with an environmental bent, it might be a bit hard to watch – but it really is worthwhile persisting, as there is a more philosophical message underlying the talk than is immediately obvious.
Diversity of thought can be a wonderful theme. As a by-the-by, this is clearly a sidethought in the Still Thinking world, and hence we have the little wordplay in the title.
Is there any point arguing while the house is burning down?
The United States political arena is often held up as a shining example of robust, passionate debate about issues that count. A living example of how a country should be and how active involvement ensures that the ‘will of the people’ is enforced.
Robust democratic debate or just soapbox virtiol?
The more commentary i read on even the most inane political articles, the less i hold this idea to be true. The vast bulk of discussions descend into shouting matches. Where folk aren’t shouting, they’re leaning back in their rocking chairs, using the particular article to babble on about issues only vaguely related to the core points under discussion. They try to steer the debate solely through relevance to their particular soapbox issue, no matter how convoluted and tenuous that relevance is. This is theoretically, still a display of robust debate. The fact that a good deal of it is misinformed or ad hominem or vitriolic seems to be irrelevant. The more heated, the more abusive, misinformed and fallacy ridden, the more that debate is seen to have fulfilled the accepted litmus test for participative debate.
Trawling through commentary has become my favoured past-time. It is sometimes illuminating, as the extreme views help to clarify the more poignant issues and perspectives but more often than not, the bulk is little more than calls to de-elect a President or elect a far superior Republican/Democrat or the rancid calls to authority that this article highlights.
History is a record of lives lived, while the history we are taught is a litany of the larger mistakes or accidents identified as important and subsequently recorded by the 1% who are quite happy to ignore 99% of the living that occurs on this planet (please feel free to interpret this as a call to globalisation or environmental impact inclusion or whatever other soapbox you may sleep on but it’s really just pointing out that the names named in history books don’t add up to a large chunk of the relevant population). Hence calls to authority based on historical figures or events are inevitably doomed to fail any validity test, and will most likely achieve little more than add to the pile of ignorance already surrounding any given issue.
Wouldn’t it be great if politicians focussed on their policies and how they will help the country and where they might hurt within the country, and allow their constituents the opportunity to make informed decisions…? Unfortunately, as this article points out, in a world bloated with infobesity, populated by an ever more frequently updated but significantly less informed populace, such ideals aren’t worthwhile objectives – they’re just boring.
