The case of mistaken identity

We need to get a couple of things straight.

In the world in which I live there are religious, not-so-religious, and non-religious people. There are those who abhor the label "religious" and prefer to refer to themselves as "spiritual", which I accept, and there are also non-spiritual people as well. In the world in which I live, there are capitalists, free-market advocates (if not, devotees), socialists, anarchists, humanists, and just about every other kind of "-ist" you can imagine. Some people are fervent in what they believe and advocate and others are lukewarm. Hell, I even know quite a few individuals who could give a care one way or the other about anything. There is, in other words, a merry, colorful patchwork of thoughts, ideas, ideologies, views, Weltanschauungen, feelings and desires that make up the world in which I live. And I would have it no other way.

Having said that, I am, above all else, prior to anything else, deep down inside, at heart, a human being who loves my fellow human beings, all of us as imperfect as we are. My most fundamental belief (which I believe, with a little bit of effort, I could "prove") is that all of us human beings have much more in common that what makes us different. At least that which we have in common, makes us human. Everything else is, well, irrelevant details.

It is against this backdrop that I look out into the world and react to whatever comes my way. These days, there are so many different "things" that people believe and hold to be true that I have trouble following them. What is more, I am (literally, and honestly) shocked at how much how many people are willing to invest in what they "believe". (I put that last word in quotation marks intentionally. There is very little in this world that we actually know, but there is one helluva lot in it that we believe.)

There are so many people who believe that what they believe is right. That's fine as far as it goes, but in that moment when you encounter another who may not, who most likely does not, believe (and "know") what you believe, well, you have to decide whether you are willing to engage this person or not. I say, let's explore; let's exchange ideas, thoughts, notions, beliefs; let's talk about, discuss and, if necessary, debate, those things; let's understand why you believe the world is one way and I believe it's another. Why? For the simple reason that my experience has shown me that given half a chance, I can learn something that I didn't know before, that I can grow in some way that I had never even imagined, that I might become, given the right set of circumstances, a better person -- and we might even (hopefully) agree on what "better" means in this context.

But, I will be honest, I'm having trouble finding anyone who is willing to engage.

What I -- and so many others, I am sure -- am left with is a whole bunch of know-it-alls, people who think they know what's what. Unfortunately, they don't. They only think they know, but they are damn sure about it nevertheless. Too bad. There's a world of difference between knowing and believing and those yacking the loudest don't know there's a difference at all.

The case of the unchecked clerk

Some things simply boggle my simple mind. OK, I spend more time on Facebook than I should, but it's like driving past a nasty road accident: you know you shouldn't look, you might even have to throw up, but you just can't turn away. Yeah. I know. _mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa_.

But ... lately I've seen so many things, especially comments, that almost leave me speechless. The most vitriolic, nonsensical, uninformed, hateful, spiteful, vociferous, and, well, ignorant ones have had to do with the county clerk down in ol' Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because it violated her religious beliefs.

Now, for those of you who have lost your watches or calendar, we're writing the 2015. You'd think we might have learned a thing or two by now, but apparently not. It just so happens that the Supreme Court of the United States, of all institutions, recently ruled that same-sex marriages are allowable and that laws forbidding them are unconstitutional. That's their job, which -- I'll be the first to admit -- they don't often do very well, but that's what they decided. When they say you can't forbid something, that's all it is: what you did wasn't right so it doesn't count. That's not legislating, that's judging, and that's what why they are there whether we like it or not. What's more, it's a completely secular institution, as are the legislative and executive branches of government, not just in the United States but pretty much worldwide these days.

Our not-so-friendly county clerk refused to issue the licenses by arguing that it violated her personal, religious beliefs. Now, in case you didn't know, I'm a big fan of personal, religious beliefs, even if they are bothersome, and even though some folks are favored in theirs over others. (That's a topic for another time, so forgive me if that's all I have to say about that here.) However, However, she is (apparently) an elected public servant and she gives personal reasons for not being able to do her job. After all the back-and-forth, a judge, who had directed her to fulfill the public responsibilities associated with her job, finally decided that since she still refused, she had to go to jail. That is, as far as I can tell, the so-called "facts of the case" (described, I hope as neutrally as possible).

So, here's my question: why is this such a hot-button issue? We don't have more important things to concern ourselves with (anybody happen to see the picture of the lifeless, Syrian three-year-old on a European beach)?

I know it is difficult for people with strong religious beliefs to realize that not everyone is as religious as they are. I know it is difficult for some people to realize that with us here in the West, there is some kind of separation between "church and state", or more properly the religious and the secular. I know it is hard for a lot of people to come to terms with the fact that standards and values and even what we consider to be moral -- as a society -- changes over time. I know that we humans are fallible and don't always make the best decisions when it comes to legality and morality (e.g., slavery, Jews in Nazi Germany, blacks in America prior to the civil-rights accomplishments). And, I know that it takes courage, fortitude and dignity to accept that we have to deal with what we have, not with what we would like to have as a society.

Still, that's the least we can expect of you as a citizen of today's world in this day and age. And that's why we expect it. Grow up.

The case of the classified data

Recently, and not for the first time, conservative heads were exploding because emails from/to Hillary Clinton were discovered that contained classified information. Some things simply make me chuckle.

First, a disclaimer: I could care less that Hillary Clinton is involved. I'm not convinced she's presidential material (her husband proved he wasn't) and she hasn't really ever accomplished anything that makes me think she could handle the job in a respectful and humanly decent manner. (The last US President who managed that was Jimmy Carter, but we all know how his administration has been spun. End of digression.) So, this isn't about her, it's all about the accusation, and I don't care who's making it.

At the beginning of my working career, I ended up being an intelligence analyst at the edge of the Free World (5 km as the crow flies from the Iron Curtain) at the height of the Cold War. I wore civilian clothes and was primarily charged with gathering intelligence from any and all sources, even exploiting my contacts, whenever and wherever possible. In a sense, I was the "spy who was out in the cold". An important part of my "job" was conducting "liaison" with local national agencies in order to gather, what I was told was highly sensitive information that was vital for the national security of the US of A. Fair enough.

At least once a week, my partner and I would travel out to the railroad crossing point between East and West to get the word on what was slipping over and across the border. The border police were great guys: friendly, helpful, always positive, appreciative of the fact that we could speak the local language, and they were generous. They went through every train that came out of the Eastern Zone and gathered up all the newspapers, for example, that the travellers left behind (litter-leavers know have no national allegiance). We dutifully took these back to our office, where the miraculous happened.

Our "product", so to speak, were "intelligence reports": the more you submitted, the higher you were rated, and we were no slackers, I can assure you. Out came the "form" (everything in the military has a form), the key data was filled in (in triplicate, of course), and the newspapers were simply attached. Everything, however, that left our office was, by policy, classified SECRET. And so, the form was stamped SECRET at the top and bottom of every page, and each and every page of the attachments (i.e., the newspapers) were stamped SECRET as well. This was all bundled together into a double-enveloped package, stamped appropriately, then paper-taped across every edge of tape and on every seam before being taken up to the mailroom for sending to our "customer", the translation detachment at our next-higher echelon of authority. There, once received, droves of translators translated every single headline and word and stamped every page they produced with SECRET on top and bottom of the page. And the translations were reworked as well into "reports" all of which were classified at least SECRET, though those reports in which the analysts believed to see something "important" were classified at higher levels. It would take a total of about 40 years for our newspapers to eventually be unclassified, but in the interim, the national security of the USA would not be compromised.

Yeah, I love it when journalists play the "classified" card. They have no idea what it means. I have some idea and I can tell you that most of what I saw classified were things anybody anywhere with even the slightest amount of interest could have collected for themselves.

But they didn't. Why? Because the "secrets" weren't worth the paper they were written on.

Good Book, bad behavior

The Good Book tells us that the span of our lives is but "threescore years and ten" and, if we're lucky, another 10 on top of that (cf. Ps 90:10). That's not a lot of time. Now, we could be foolish enough to take the statement literally and then point out all the cases above and beyond and go on about how wrong the Bible is, but that would be missing the point. This statement was made a couple of thousand years ago and given that the current overall life expectancy for the US is just under 80 years (#36 worldwide), it's still valid enough.

To the Ancients, you should know, numbers had more significance than as mere placeholders, as they are to us today. Different times, different ways of thinking. Seven was the number of knowledge, both secular and spiritual. Any number to the first power (that is, times 10) was a spiritualization of that number's meaning, so 70, in a sense would be something akin to deep insight, perhaps wisdom. Eight was the number of material satisfaction, hence 80 would mean something like having come to terms with the world. No, there are no extra-deep, esoteric secrets here, rather a simple, at the time, perhaps, generally accepted principle of life: we're not here for long at all, it might not be such a bad idea to make the best of it, not just materially but spiritually (or intellectually or psychologically, if you prefer) as well.

To me, however, the real point to keep in mind is 70 or 80 years is really no time at all in relation to the world as a whole or the entire cosmos. And here, it really doesn't matter if the world is 6,000 or 15,000,000,000 years old (whereby the latter number really hammers the point home): our participation in the Grand Scheme of Things is orders of magnitude less than the total; at best it is more or less a bit-part, walk-on role in the Greater Cosmic Drama. No reason to take ourselves too seriously, on the one hand, but on the other, we should never forget that we really don't have much chance to get a handle on that bigger picture anyway. For as smart as we allegedly are as a species, we have to overcome a significantly small window of opportunity on what's going on, and most of us don't ever even try.

There's another passage in that Good Book that's always been one of my personal favorites: "To every thing there is a time, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecc 3:1, of which, by the way, the Byrds did an awesome cover, "Turn, Turn, Turn"). Not only is there really "nothing new under the sun" (Ecc 1:9), it keeps repeating itself. We go over the same territory, through the same experiences, have the same learning experiences over and over again, and nothing seems to change. As I've said before, as a species, we're slow learners. In this case, too, we could conclude that there's nothing we can, nor need bother to do, because it's all going to come back around anyway. But, as above, that would be a terrible misreading of what we're being told.

There are a couple of reasons why things happen over and over again. Take the seasons, for example, they go through the same rhythm and sequence year after year. The same is true for the months of the year and days of the week. We need to sow when the time is right and reap when the fruit is ripe. Whole civilizations were built upon this very simple principle (e.g., Ancient Egypt), but there are other things, very human things that could be different, that don't have to be repeated, if we would put our minds to it.

In both cases, we end up with the same result: we start thinking there's nothing we can do about anything, it's just the way things are. And while it often looks that way, the real secret lies in being able to determine what you can and what you can't change.

The myth of freedom

As promised last time, I'm going to turn to the other half of Ben Franklin's equation: liberty, or freedom, as we most commonly call it. No, I'm not going to go into a discussion of the details of differentiation between the two. We all have a general understanding of the word, and we all profess with certainty that we are, in fact, free, but just short of an outright, apparent dictatorship, we couldn't be more wrong.

Another wise man, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once remarked that "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." I would maintain that this statement applies to some degree to just about all of us, but it hits the proverbial nail on the head as far as Americans are concerned. Going back even further, no one less than Aristotle noted, that whoever prefers security to freedom is rightfully a slave. That pretty much describe post-9/11 America.

You can't voluntarily gut your own Bill of Rights, limiting or suspending your rights to freedom of expression, speech, and assembly, eliminating of the right of habeus corpus, allowing yourself to be arrested on mere suspicion of terrorism only to be potentially turned over to the military and suspension of all legal rights, gutting the 4th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, allowing your elected representatives to gerrymander you out of the value of your vote, standing by while certain segments of the population are denied even their right to vote, and introducing so much money into politics that only those who have have a say and think you are living in a free country. You can't see one video (since you don't often see it on the news) of the dispersal of an Occupy demonstration or almost any demonstration for that matter and think that you live in a free country. And, especially if you are a person of color, you cannot begin to imagine how tenuous your own existence is should the State decide to clamp down on you, as was the case in the wake of the Ferguson demonstrations, for example.

None of that, my dear friends and readers, speaks of freedom. None of it. Each and every one of these is evidence of how severely your rights, and hence your freedoms, have been restricted. The worst of it all, of course, is that Americans, at any rate, demanded that it be done to them. They voluntarily gave these rights and freedoms up, in the name of -- quite ironically -- national security. Mr. Franklin was right all the way around.

One important point to keep in mind, however, is that none of these rights is ever coming back. Oh, we were all told that these were temporary steps necessary to get the situation under control, but I'm going to let you in on a little secret: power never relents; once you give up anything, especially your rights and your freedom, you never, ever get it back. Mr. Franklin said you don't deserve them anyway, and I happen to think he is right.

Enter Mr. Goethe. Yes, those who took all that away from you have not tired since telling you, impressing upon you, suggesting to you, convincing you that nothing has really changed. But it has. Those who took all that away from you lied to get it, just like they lied to start the wars that would increase your fear which would demand more action and more restriction and more control. Enter good old Aristotle: keep me safe and I'll do your bidding.

Americans, for the most part, have never really been all that free, but they are less free now than they have ever been. Depending on where you live, you know which sports teams to root for, which church to attend (and you'd better attend one of them), which religion to believe in, which party to vote for, and whom to associate with. Peer pressure has never been writ larger than in America, and, I have to admit, America is really good at it. But whether you're pressured by your peers or by the police or by the legal system, it doesn't really matter. In the end, you adjust, adapt, and submit. You like to think you're free. You love to tell yourself you are, but in reality, you're just grist for the mill.

The myth of security

Since I left off with Ben Franklin last time, it seems fitting to, in a way, pick up where I left off, with Ben again. Among the many other notable things he said, he pointed out that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Let's just deal with the latter of these notions; I'll come back to the other one next time.

What Franklin described as "safety" in his day is what we call "security" nowadays. A little less than a decade-and-a-half ago, my fellow Americans fell for this one in a big way. The events of 9/11 drove the stake of fear into their isolationist hearts and they were confronted with a dose of reality that made them more than willing victims. Total data collection, unwarranted wiretapping and evesdropping, computer-analysis of all email communication, the rise of unchecked police power, the suppression of rights unseen since the founding of the country, and for what?

Nothing, really. Oh sure, go to the airport and you'll be inconvenienced, but are we safer? Are we more secure? Are we better protected? Not in the least.

In spite of all the invasions of privacy, the intrusions into our personal lives, the repression in public spaces, and other inconveniences we've been made to suffer, not a single terrorist act, in the US or anywhere else in the world, including the most recent attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was prevented. We've even toppled governments (elsewhere of course), carried out physical assassinations (e.g., Bin Laden) or have murdered countless innocent civilians (the drone program), and we've still got an Islamic State and Boko Haram and a vast number of wannabe organizations that are threatening all of us in ways that we couldn't imagine not all that long ago.

Of course, it's not only national security that is at issue. Though the rates of violent crimes is declining throughout the Western world, America in its gun fanaticism is seeing an increase in the number of accidental homicides. The more guns, the more people are going to be killed. Anyone can be shot, given the flimsy nature of house construction or the thinness of the walls in apartment dwellings. Without a system of health insurance, anyone and everyone is exposed to health dangers that can't be addressed, and the recent outbreaks of previously eliminated contagious diseases are cause for concern. And then we have the lack of labeling of food products, the machinations of the processed food industry, the secrecy surrounding fracking company chemicals, the multitude of accidental poisonous spills, the decline of environmental protection worker health and safety regulations and, well, you've got the perfect combination for a high probability of death by just about anything other than old age.

Americans, for sure, but increasingly we in Europe, are facing a noticeable lack of both safety and security, both generally and in Mr. Franklin's sense of the word. The world has always been something of a dangerous place, but the illusion of safety and security we have created for ourselves is probably the greatest danger of all. Our surest thing is a blatant false sense of security.

The myth of unity

You can think what you want about America's Founding Fathers. I have -- I'll be honest -- more than just mixed feelings. Yes, yes, yes, they might have been products of their times, but history is replete with great thinkers and doers who looked beyond and were not just victims of their own particular time and place of birth. That's part of my dilemma, I suppose: if these guys were such great visionaries (as is so often claimed) why couldn't they see beyond their own cultural context, why couldn't they envision something more universal, why were they tripping over their own feet to set a standard for the world to come?

To me, the most enigmatic of all the Founding Fathers is Benjamin Franklin. I'll admit it: he has been ever since I was forced to read his autobiography in 11th grade. Granted, I didn't always do what I was told, but I waded through that one. I was taken aback by the contradictions and enthralled by the moments of genius. I couldn't believe any text could be that boring, but found such inspiration for life, that I live quoting the man.

It was Uncle Ben (not he of rice fame) who inspired me for this post. Ben, when arguing before the Continental Congress on what the colonies should do in regard to the Crown, let loose a most impressive statement: "Either we hang together, or we hang separately." What wise words.

Right here at the beginning of American history, at a time when the idea of the individual was concreticizing in the Enlightenment mind, Mr. Franklin quipped out a truth that would stand the test of time. He knew, and the circumstances dictated, just as they do today, that it was in togetherness, in overcoming petty differences, in seeing the bigger picture, in cooperation in the face of adversity, in solidarity that something new could be achieved. The world recognizes the French Revolution, which transpired 13 years later, as the irruption into modernity, but it was Mr. Franklin's simple statement that made that other revolution possible. Yes, in the Enlightenment, in the Age of the Individual, in the transition from collectivism to individualism, Uncle Ben reminded us that we are only strong and capable of survival when we band together, when we collectively react, when we cooperate, not when we compete.

Since then, as history as patently demonstrated, the individualists have done what they could to gain the upper hand. Our own current, post-modern attitude is that the individual is supreme, but Ben knew, and we know deep inside, that the individual is nothing without the collective to support him (or her, as the case may be).

The antithesis of the Roman adage to divide and conquer is Mr. Franklin's admonishment to pull together. Not quite 100 years later, one Charles Darwin would generalize this idea into his theory of evolution. It's as obvious as the noses on our faces, but there is a significant number of individuals these days who would like the rest of us to think otherwise. And they are doing a damn fine job of it, I hate to admit.

We -- America, any modern, Western country, any significant political organization or grouping -- praise the individual, raise him to almost godly status, but we know, and have known for quite a long time, that real strength lies in coming together. That's why our ideal of unity is a mere myth. It does not and cannot exist. We mouth the words, but we live our actions: me first, everyone else second; as long as I have mine, you're free to try and get yours; it's every person for themselves.

No, Ben was right. if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately. It really is that simple.

The myth of justice for all

If you don't have shared values; if you erroneously believe that you can do everything yourself; if you refuse to recognize that where and when we are born has a lot to say about what's even possible in our lives; if the notion of personal responsibility is perverted into a justification that it's your own fault if things are better for you; and if you believe that only the individual is capable of anything positive; it is, well, simply beyond my ability to imagine, let alone comprehend, how you can think that we're all treated equally in the eyes of the law.

In the United States, money is free speech, though there's no hint of that in the First Amendment. In the Western World in general, there is the legal precedent that social standing, background or history, may not be considered in assessing your standing in society. For anyone who wants to see -- and I realize that means "damn few" -- it is clear that different measures are applied to different individuals in our everyday reality.

To me, the most emblematic, the most telling, the strongest statement of the negation of the notion of "justice for all" is the notion of "affluenza". Don't get me wrong, I'm quite a fan of linguistic dynamics, of the ability of a language to change and adapt to the world around it, of neologisms, and more, but "affluenza" ... well, that one, I must admit, stopped me in my tracks.

It was, I believe, a judge in Texas (otherwise not known for its forward-thinking decisions) who declared that a young man who was drugged and drunk and who drove into a crowd of people, killing several of them, was, in fact, innocent (and sentenced accordingly) because he suffered from "affluenza": he came from such a rich family, that he was no longer able to determine the difference between wrong and right. It wasn't an isolated incident; the defense has been successfully invoked since then. How, in the name of all that's holy, does that make any sense at all? How can money absolve you from moral responsibility? Well, in a "society" in which the only real value is money, money talks, and the guilty walk.

There was no outrage. There were no demonstrations against the injustice. There was no outcry, no anguish, no speechlessness, unless you take the silence that thundered across the land as speechlessness. It was just another day in paradise, just more business as usual, another instance of "nothing to see here". It passed as good as unnoticed. And all of us, whether you like it or not and whether you want to admit it or not, had our hands stained with blood that day. Some community service, a few hours doing something for others so that maybe, just maybe, it starts to dawn on you that there are other people on this planet other than yourself ... that was it.

On the same day, not a small number of people of color were frisked, searched, pulled over from traffic, arrested, incarcerated, sent to prison, and executed for alleged crimes that they may or may not have committed. (When you have an error rate of 5-10% of innocent people being executed, you can't really claim anything for the "system" other than it doesn't work.) And there was no outrage, no demonstrations, no outcry, no anguish, no speechlessness, just business as usual.

You're a person of color in America, you're an immigrant, most likely Muslim, here in Europe. You're different in that you are not what we aspire to be. Too many want to suffer from affluenza. They dream of it. They long for it. Justice should be blind, but only so long as she doesn't see me.

The myth of shared values

When I was a very young child, I fell in love with the image of painting oneself into a corner. The picture in my mind was more than rich enough, and there were -- don't ask me why -- enough comic strips and cartoons that materialized that image before my very eyes. I always wondered how that was possible? How can you paint yourself into a corner? How little can you know about what's going on around you to end up in a situation like that? And then I grew up.

We like to think that we're a free and open, a tolerant and forward-looking society, but all we've really done is paint ourselves into a corner. We have those flag-waving patriots who still believe in "my country, right or wrong" even though the world has recognized America for what it is: the latest version of Empire which acts not based on values but on violence. We have those free-market libertarians who think that money is the answer to all problems and the more they have themselves the more the problems are solved. We have those gun-crazy tea-baggers who think that the government is out to get them when all it's really concerned about is seeing to it that those that have get more and those that have less get less. Then we have all those hopelessly exposed racists who can't bring themselves to admit that the United States simply hasn't overcome its genocidal history. And, of course, there are my favorites, the über-Christians who want God to save America from the satanic machinations of a crypto-Muslim dictator, who can't take enough away from those who need it most, who deny science -- publicly and without shame or contradiction -- and who don't hesitate a second to decry, condemn, pursue, and persecute anyone who even thinks of straying from their own perverted view of Christianity.

How, in the name of all that's reasonable, can we even start to think that we have anything even approaching shared values? Which values might these be? It's obvious from recent legislation, attempts at legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and other public phenomena that there are so many splintered, specific, interest groups which are patently unable, and unwilling, to even think of speaking with any other group that the mere thought of "shared values" is not only chimerical, it's downright absurd. Who is speaking for whom? And when? And how? And why?

No, dear reader, we have achieved the complete and utter disintegration of all that we once held in common. We have a society -- if one may even use that term -- of fragmented, dispersed, alienated, isolated, and unreconcilable pseudo-groups, which are, in turn, plagued by self-centered, self-absorption, and egoistical individuals who all trying the best they can to get what they can for themselves, and to hell with everyone else. Where is the basis here for shared values? Please excuse me if I don't see it.

The real losers in this scenario, of course, are those who can't get beyond themselves to see that the entire evolution of humankind (... and no, I have not forgotten that the majority of Americans no longer accept the theory of evolution ...) has been possible because of one, single trait that has set us apart from all others: our ability to cooperate, to work together for the benefit of all.

Now, I don't want anybody thinking I'm just picking on Americans. They may be closer to me than other nationalities, but they are not unique. Every single Western culture is suffering from the same malady. As is so often the case, though, the Americans have taken this misery to a heretofore, unseen level of sophistication. All of us in the West suffer from the disease. The Americans are simply better at it than the rest of us.

And that is the corner into which we have painted ourselves: the inability to recognize, to acknowledge, to accept, to engage, and to deal seriously with an other (or, Lord forbid several other) point(s) of view.

The myth of self-sufficiency

If we follow the line of thinking that's been forming over the past few posts, we have to ask ourselves just what are the consequences of the thoughts. There are lots of folks, particularly in the West, who like to think that they are somehow self-sufficient individuals who are untouched by the situation of others. These are the biggest fools of all.

The debunking of the myth of the individual pointed out that our set of values are determined to the largest extent by the circumstances and timing of our birth. The debunking of the myth of personal responsibility made clear that the choices we have to make in life are largely determined by factors outside ourselves. The debunking of the myth of equal opportunity showed us that external circumstances limit and determine what kinds of choices can even be made. In sum, it would seem that there is little about what we do or can do that is solely determined by ourselves. But, there is more.

Who amongst us builds their own shelter, digs their own wells, grows their own food, weaves their own cloth and sews their own clothes? Who amongst us is completely self-taught and self-educated? Who amongst us has and needs absolutely no social or other interaction with other human beings? I can't think of anybody. Can you? I didn't think so. The answers to these questions determine what it would mean to be self-sufficient. We can't be. We aren't made that way. Human beings are social creatures and we have evolved to cooperate with and depend on others for our well-being and survival. I don't know what's wrong with that. I don't know why that's the indication of some sort of weakness. I don't know why this fact should be so vigorously denied, unless ...

You have been conditioned to believe that it is a sign of weakness. This is the fact, actually, only in the West. Other cultures across the globe are very other-oriented. The Japanese are well-known for being a collective culture. The role of the family in Mexico and South America is also widely known. Only in the West, particularly in America, we have this crazy idea that the problem with life and the world are others. This wasn't always the case, and there are still pockets of resistance in rural areas for the most part. I started off in life in a multi-generational household. There are still areas where the aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents are close enough to visit, at least weekly, if not daily. What is more, school, sports team fanship, church or other organizations promote dealing with others. Truth be told, we are engaged with and want to be engaged with others most of the time. And as long as it's fun and everybody's getting along, we're all for it. The moment things get sticky, a bit problematic, or challenging, we think for some reason that we have to withdraw to the impenetrable fortress of self-sufficiency. If you take a moment to step back and look at the big picture, you quickly see how silly it is.

No, dear reader, we are all in this together, and I mean all of us, every single, last one of us. It may be the family, the people in the neighborhood, the community, the state or nation ... it really doesn't matter. All of these "levels of otherness" make quite clear that none of us -- regardless of how much we might like to be (for whatever distorted reasons) -- is an island unto him or herself. What make us individual and unique is our own set of talents and strengths, our own frailties and weaknesses, and these are complemented and compensated by the talents and strengths, frailties and weakness of others.

For the like of me, I can't figure out why that's a problem of any kind, but the myth of self-sufficiency drives us apart. We need to pull together.

The myth of equal opportunity

It should be clear by now that every one of us is faced with different circumstances, different timings and different contexts within which we make our personal decisions and choices. I would be the last person to maintain that one's environment, one's social standing, one's economic situation is to blame, or is responsible for who or what one is or becomes in life. What I am saying, however, is that we can't completely ignore these factors either. The overall context in which we find ourselves always shapes and influences which choices we are presented with. I can't imagine that I will ever be in the situation to decide whether to buy the Bentley or the Rolls. A lot of things would have to change in my life for that choice to even become a possibility. I have also never been in the situation in which I had to decide whether I buy shoes or food, but there are many people on this planet who are. Are there right or wrong choices to made in either of these situations? I don't think so. It all depends on what got you to where you are and where you think you are heading after the decision. To blame the outcome merely on the decision is more than short-sighted.

It is quite obvious, at least for anyone who has even a minimal understanding of what the world is like, that different people in different contexts have different opportunities. Rich people in America are faced with much different choices that poor people there. Poor people in America are faced with much different choices than poor people in Iraq. Which choices one can make are determined to a great extent by the circumstances in which one finds oneself. When things are good, you certainly have better chances of making good decisions. When things are bad, the chances of making bad ones increases as well.

To assume, or worse, allege, that everyone has the same opportunities is simply ignorant. Rich people may be able to decide between Harvard or Yale for a college degree, but a poor person in rural Mississippi may have to decide between finishing high school or day-laboring to feed his mom. The opportunities of the two individuals are anything but equal. The notion of equal opportunity is a myth for the simple reason that it is an abstraction at such a level as to be theoretically admirable but impossible in practice. In other words, it's a nice thing to say in order to extract yourself from the awkward situation of having to admit that some people have it much better than others, and those with more don't have it because of anything they've done themselves, nor are those with less necessarily responsible for their shortcomings. In other words, it gives us all a convenient excuse not to have to deal with the fact and reality of any given situation, rather we can retreat into an unreal, abstract sphere where we may remain untouched by anything as dirty as reality.

The myth of equal opportunity is just like the myth of personal responsibility or the myth of the individual. They are merely excuses to not to have to think very deeply at all about things that affect everybody, those near to us and those far away. If you believe in the myths, then you also believe that you can absolve yourself of any responsibility for anyone else. And that, dear reader, is the wellspring of inhumanity. In invoking the myths we remove ourselves from the lives of others. Whatever befalls the others is their own doing, and I can wash my hands of any and all responsibility. What a cold, lonely world that must be.

The myth of personal responsibility

As we saw last time, where and when you are born has a massive impact on who you become. But, I know there are many of you who believe that it is up to each of us individually to make decisions in our life that affect its outcome. To a certain extent, that's true, but it's not an absolute truth. We in the West, in the so-called advanced, industrialized world, like to think that everything that happens after our birth is simply a matter of the choices we make in life. Make the wrong ones, you have a bad life; make the right ones and life is good. This is, of course, pure and utter nonsense, because it ignores everything we talked about last time. The choices one makes cannot be seen in isolation from when and where you were born to begin with. Let me explain.

We can take me as an example. I don't mind. I was born and raised in a humble but secure environment. There was a feeling of excitement and optimism for the future. My family, the church, and the school all impressed upon me the hope for a better future. All I had to do was stay in line, obey authority, look out for myself, and work hard and I would have a good life, mostly likely a better life than my parents.

But let's say, just for contrast, that I was born in Sub-Saharan Africa instead. Now I find myself in an impoverished and hostile environment. There's a feeling of desperation and the future is as far away as the next meal. I'm surrounded by family, my tribe perhaps, but there's no school, a traditional religious establishment to impress anything on me, for everybody's doing everything they can to stay alive. I have little choice but to stay in line, adhere to the established hierarchy, and looking after myself means struggling day and night to survive; there is no harder work. And what is going to change? Very little, if anything, and whatever change happens will be slow in coming.

Do you really think that these two me's will be making the same life decisions? If you do, you are in serious need of a reality check. My circumstance of birth, where and when I live growing up, all impact to a large extent which choices I can make, which decisions I'm even confronted with. I don't think this should be all that hard to understand, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, it apparently is, for when I hear acquaintances, friends, strangers on the street or talking heads on the TV, they can't have taken this simple fact into consideration. They spout their platitudes of self as if they were universal principles of life. They're not.

This is not to say that there are individuals who do manage to escape their environment and themselves. I have the greatest respect for them. But to assume that if one person can do it then anybody can do it is simply foolish and naive. One person wins an Olympic gold medal, then anyone can win one, but not everyone can. In this case, not only your own physical disposition plays an important role, but so does your opportunities for training, access to the right people and contexts, and sponsors of all kinds. It's not just the desire of the individual; there are a wide range of factors and decisions and, yes, downright luck that go into it. For every single gold medalist, we should remember, there are 1,000 ruined existences of those who tried and did not succeed. Their failure cannot be attributed only to their individual decisions. Too many people and too many circumstances were involved to justify such a simplistic view of reality.

The circumstances of your birth and your environment may not be to blame for who you end up becoming, but to act and believe as if they had no influence at all is disingenuous.

The myth of the individual

Even though it's now pretty clear that I keep repeating myself, let me slide down that slippery slope again. There is a modern myth, a misunderstanding really, that life is just up to us, that life is simply what we make of it, that the individual is the final arbiter of his or her fate. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is exceedingly difficult to distance ourselves from ourselves, but that's what I'm asking you to do: to take a step back from yourself, a step far enough to take an objective view of yourself as a person, and to take a closer look at what you see. I'm going to pose a few questions to help clarify that picture.

• Where were you born? (I, for example, was born into a run-of-the-mill, working-class family, in Western Pennsylvania.)
• When were you born? (Again, for me, it was near the beginning of a very strong economic upswing, though the country in which I was born was still at war in the Far East.)
• What was life like when and where you were born? (Things were relatively simple, straightforward, everybody knew how they fit in (or didn't fit in) to the community; we went to church regularly; parents, older people, teachers, police and other professionals were treated with deference, if not respect.)
• How did you come to be born where and when you were born? (And for this one, personally, the only answer I can find that makes any kind of sense to me is that I ended up there by pure chance.)

That's right, pure chance, a mere accident of fate, if you will. One day I woke up and there I was in small-town America, surrounded by a way of life that I was taught to accept and respect, that was full of unspoken rules and customs, ways of doing things, accepted topics of conversation, attitudes, and more, none of which I had any idea about before I got there and merely accepted because, well, that was all I knew. In other words, much of who you are today was established in that context in which you were born and that context has to do with the timing of your birth and the circumstances of your environment. That, if anything, is just the way things are, and there is nothing that you can do to change that.

The early years of life are the most formative years. Any child or developmental psychologist will tell you that, so let's try a small thought experiment: try to imagine that you were born somewhere else. Try being born in a ghetto where you are forced to live because "your kind" suffers heavily from discrimination. Try being born into utter poverty, in the middle of nowhere. Or, try imagine you were born in another country, say, Poland, or Nigeria, or Bolivia, or India. (This last experiment will be all the more difficult the less you know about anything outside your home country.)

Now, I ask you: who do you think you would be if the timing and placement of your birth were different? Do you really think you would think, believe, and act just like you do now? If you do, I have to question whether you really seriously tried the thought experiment.

If you were born poorer or richer, all your surroundings change. If you are born in another country, you grow up loving that country, not your current one. If you are born in an economic crisis, things develop quite differently than if you were born in a period of economic growth and stability. In other words, the cards a shuffled anew, and you are a completely different person than the one you are now. And that's why the "individual" is for the most part a myth. We are who we are largely by virtue of the accident of our birth. No more, and no less.

Do you want to see it?

This is fun, so indulge me, please, for another thought or two about property. I told you I loved words: they're plentiful, bountiful, exotic, surprising, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour to the palette, but they can, when treated properly, also be an inexhaustible source of (mental) nourishment.

Here's another quote I read recently that really caught my eye. It is from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a 19th century, French social critic:

Property is theft!

Isn't that wild? I particularly love the exclamation point, even though I'm more than hesitant to use them myself. Talk about to-the-point, in-your-face, get-your-attention. So what are we to make of that? Well, before you just tune out and turn away, we should play a game ... one of my favorites, in fact ... one that I like to call "Think It Through". In other words, instead of just rejecting an assertion out of hand, let's think it through just to see how far we can get. Here's my try:

I (almost) own a house (see my posting from two days ago) which is sitting on a corner lot on a given street. I "bought" the house, but the property was "thrown in". Who owned it? Well, the people who sold it to me. And where did they get it? From the people before them. But at some point, wasn't it the city that "owned" it and said houses could be built there? Where did they get it? (And now I'm going to take bigger steps back in time:) From the State, which got it from the colony that it was before the State, because the King said it was his. But where did he get it? Well, he beat up another country that said it was theirs (why we don't know ... but war isn't theft, is it?), but we can ask where they got it. They of course, "came into possession of it because some guy in a boat or after a long walk stuck a flag in it and said "This is mine (actually, the king's because I'm acting in his name), but wasn't someone there before? I think you get the picture.

What this little exercise shows us, though, is that at some point, someone who never saw it before decided that since he didn't know who it might in fact belong to simply "claimed" it, it was now his (or his boss', depending on how you look at it). In other words, even though it really wasn't his, he took it and said it was. Isn't that theft? I mean, if you were asked to say in 25 words or less what "theft" is, you'd probably come up with something very similar.

Maybe M. Proudhon was onto something. Maybe ...

Who's blind?

We've got a bit of dilemma again. We'd like to think we live in a just society, but we don't. Justice should be blind, but she isn't. One of the cornerstone values of what we moderns hold sacred and extremely high value is little more than an illusion. How did we get here?

There could be a lot of reasons, and I don't know if any one of them is t-h-e reason, but one of them is certainly: we're confused. Most of us just don't know what to believe anymore, so we start grasping wildly at straws, mostly to no avail. Some find their solace in science, others turn to religion, but both are full of uncertainties and contradictions that make others suspicious of their one-size-fits-all answers. Besides, who really takes the time anymore to look into a subject such as this one and try to think it through? Right. That's what I thought. Yes, it's lonely out here. Nevertheless ...

To see if I can't get a synapse or two firing, let me share with you a quote I read recently. It's from John Locke. Many will have heard the name, few will be able to place just where. Locke was one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is considered by some as a threshold treatise on the Western conception of self, of the individual. He was a big hit with the Founding Fathers and many of his ideas found their way into the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and more.

But, Locke, as many writers and thinkers of his day, presents us with a problem. Even though we love some of the things they say and call upon them as witnesses for our our positions when possible, they also said, wrote, and believed things that we might have trouble with today. But, in keeping with the notion of justice raised in my last blog post, I couldn't resist this quote:

Where there is no property there is no injustice.

Sort of flies in the face of that whole American Way of Life, doesn't it? It appears to imply, at least, that where there is property, there is (most likely) injustice. Considering the materialistic bent of that American Way of Life, it would seem that he managed to put his finger directly in the wound with this one. What to do? What to do?

Public trust

As is so often the case in modern life, we seem to be faced with something of a predicament, if not a dilemma. How much government do we need? What kind of government should we have? How free may we allow markets to be? Which has priority: the common or private good? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are easy, far from it. What I am saying is that I don't think we think enough, nor seriously enough about the answers. Many appear to have ready answers on their lips, but does what they have to say reduce or increase the difficulties with the predicament.

We're back to where we have been many times before: Do we live in an economy based on sound social principles? Do we live in a society based on sound economic principles? Or, perhaps just a little more bluntly: do we live in a society or an economy? I realize that the industrialized West, in the USA, first and foremost, society has been traded in for just an economy, and a relatively poor one at that. Privatization, de-regulation, reduction of social spending, and unrestrained markets is what the people clamor for ... or have I only been able to hear part of the yelling. I suppose so. Being as far away as I am, I can really only hear who is shouting the loudest and that's what I'm hearing. Here in Europe, the most recent elections -- in France, Greece, and two of the Länder in Germany have made clear statements that the people want more of their society back. Granted, it's not all as simple as that, but it's really not all that complicated either.

We -- and by that I mean all of us, every single one of us -- must decide what is important to us. We have to decide whether we want to have a society or not? If we decide we want one, we then need to decide what kind: tyrannical, authoritarian, democratic, free, social ... should it be a community or just a collection of individuals, every person for him or herself. These are very, very fundamental questions, but they are questions that each of us is called upon to have an answer to. And, oh, by the way, it isn't that you just have an answer, you need to know why your answer is your answer, you have to be able to justify to others the advantages of your own view. In case you are wondering how far this need go, that, too, is simple: you should be able to make clear to anyone that how you think is how absolutely every human being on the planet should think. If it's good enough for you, it has to be good enough for anybody. If it isn't, it's just another lousy -- and I do mean lousy -- opinion.

And, yes, I believe everyone is entitled to their opinions, regardless of how lousy they are. But no one should expect that I honor or have much respect for the lousy ones. If you aren't willing to put any effort into having it, why should I put any effort into dealing with it, let alone respect it?

Brighter tomorrows

Yes, yes, yes ... there has been a good deal of frustration in the last couple of posts. I'll be the first one to admit that. After all, there's a lot to be frustrated about. If you stop to be honest with yourself, there are a lot of things not working these days. A lot is broken. Some things are on their last legs, and if some changes aren't made soon, I'm afraid a lot of people are going to get hurt. I'm not exaggerating. Dying of starvation, being thrown into poverty, losing everything you have, contracting a fatal disease ... those are all very painful, and it is precisely these things that are not occurring less often. All of them are on the rise.

I can't be the only one who see this. I can't be the only one who can figure out that the trajectory we have put ourselves on is not going to end happily without some changes. And, I can't be the only one who has figured out that some of those changes aren't going to be to my liking, but that doesn't make them any less necessary. So here's the deal:

Decide what it is that you want to give up. Everybody has to give up something. Every change starts with ourselves. We don't get more ... we have to give more, so you have to decide what it is that you want to give. It's not about you. It's never been about you. It's about your friends, your family, your children, your grandchildren. It's about people you never met and people you never will meet.

Oh, and before you get carried away, it's not about your political involvement, how you vote, or what shows you watch or what news you listen to. It's about you deciding what you can do to make the world a better place. Not better for you, but better for someone else. If you're not making the world better for someone else, you're not making it better at all.

Holy moley

When you are considered by some to be a cynically optimistic curmudgeon, my last post really isn't all that bad. At least it's not out of character. Which came first, the character or the cynicism will have to remain a chicken-and-egg question. I don't think it much matters.

I know, I know, there are lots of you out there who still have hope for the world, and I can assure you that I'm glad you're there. I doubt you're going to have much effect, bar some unforeseen world-altering event, but as the Germans like to say, hope dies last. What nevertheless amazes me most, I think, is the degree of denial that we humans are capable of.

Think about it for a moment: When you have to pump almost $30 trillion into an economic system just to keep it afloat, just how robust can it be? When you have almost 10 million people dying of starvation alone every year, how effective can business be? When three people own more than 48 countries combined, how fair is that? When it is obvious that we've got huge environmental problems but we insist on business as usual, how smart is that? When we give up freedom after freedom in the name of false security, how do we explain that to our children? When everybody is wrong, how can anyone be right? Yes, these are big-ticket issues and for every one of them there are literally millions of people who deny that any one of them, let alone all of them, is true. And I'm supposed to have hope in a brighter future?

Sorry, no can do. Sorry, my sleep-walking friends, but it's time to wake up. The first step, says Lao Tzu, is the hardest, but it's one everybody can take: drop your opinions. Stop talking, start listening. How hard can that be?

The whole hole

If one opinion is as good as any other, then none of them has any value. Things without value cannot serve as the basis for Values. And so, here we are in a valueless world. How great is that?

In a desperate attempt to salvage something from it all, we've reverted to "worth" as a replacement. After all, the words are very similar in meaning, so the transition hasn't been all that difficult. Unfortunately, the words only appear to be similar in meaning. But what else can we do?

Not much. We are not allowed to have values anymore because the opponents of my values decry them as mere opinions. And everyone who doesn't share my values, well, they're just not worth talking to. (And if you stop for just a second to look at how "values" and "worth" were used in that last sentence, you'd realize how little the two words have to do with one another.) And that's precisely what happens. We no longer talk to ... we only talk at.

Political debate has become nothing more than the repeating of positions until the other either agrees or stops listening. Religious debate has become nothing more than the repeating of tenants of faith until the other agrees or stops listening. Educational debate has become nothing more than repeating of alleged principles until the other agrees or stops listening. In the end, what they share is the fact that there is nothing more than opinion being spouted, and no one is listening.

Perhaps the most effective marketer of all time, Josef Goebbels, is well known for his adage: if you repeat the lie often enough, the people will believe it. And that's where we are, whether we like it or not, and whether we want to admit it or not. Everybody's bought into the same lie: opinions matter.

Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, and all we have to offer the world are opinions: economies are better than societies; my god is bigger than your god; my students are smarter than yours; my team is better than your team; my clique is cooler than your clique; my ... well, you can fill in the blank.

Almost 2,000,000 years of human history (or roughly 6,000 for you fundamentalists) and that's all we have to show for ourselves. Don't we have reason to be proud?

Deeper in the hole

Opinions are not restricted to just the political sphere. That's where we encounter them quite often, and it is there that it's most apparent that we're dealing with opinions, but, truth be told, they're everywhere ... in every major sphere of life.

Let's take economics. We love to talk about that, don't we? Like I've said so often, we traded in our society for an economy, so all we ever talk about anymore is how much stuff costs? Who's going to pay for that? Why do I have to pay so many taxes? And it's all based on what? Right – opinions. Free markets: opinion. They don't exist; never have. Add one cent of government subsidies to anything and that market is no longer free. Which aspect of our economy is unaffected? None. Who are the biggest advocates of free-market economics? Those who receive the biggest subsidies: banks, defense contractors, private equity speculators ... and more and more the broad masses of people without much of anything, for they've bought into the opinion that if it's free, I have a chance too.

Or, what about religion? We've got at least two related religions running around claiming sole access to the truth: Christianity and Islam. In both cases, however, it is just one variety of the religion that dominates the discussion, namely the fundamentalists. What gets me is that they both claim the same source for their rightness: the Big Guy Himself. What are the claims then really based on: opinion, what one has chosen to believe.

Or, education? We don't even teach facts anymore. No one learns to write, to express thoughts, to think critically, to debate ... why? Because it's all politically incorrect. Since when has political anything been the determiner of what we need to learn in order to be conscientious citizens? Oh, I almost forgot: citizens are members of a society, and we don't have a society anymore, just an economy, and how educated do you have to be in order to consume? Consumers shouldn't be too smart, they might not buy my stuff.

We're a lot farther down the hole than we like to admit, aren't we?