How did they dare

How did they dare

when did they first breath a word of it

what on earth did they have in mind;

why pierce the sleeping breast of man

with that beating, pulsating thing of a heart,

that seething storm of passion:

to walk alone, unaided

upon a world, in a universe

within an unspeakable creation

-coordinates unknown.

Individuality and the Collective

INDIVIDUALITY AND THE COLLECTIVE

An age-old debate: the primacy of the individual vs. the collective power of the community.

"There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal".

-George Santayana, The Life of Reason

The individual is the only reality. Everything else is a by product of that fact. The truth also contains the fact that we are born and live in a symbiotic relationship to others. We are not born without our mothers and cannot survive and flourish without a family and community that allow us to learn and gain maturity to stand on our two feet. I am not criticizing the reality of the collective life as it is a reality and necessity for human existence. What we do have to face is the pervasive and almost unconscious influence that collective reality creates which ultimately decides how effectively the individual embedded within it's web is allowed to become a truly autonomous individual with the ability to think freely against collective wisdom, to grow and change in ways not envisioned by the group and the ultimate gift of being allowed to express the particular and individual gift we have inside us that needs an opening to manifest. All real change, discovery, genius and exploration comes from the individual fighting to breakdown barriers and expand the frontiers of human endeavour. The role of society is to develop and perpetuate a structure that allows human life to survive in a hostile environment: safety and stability are it's watchword. These are not bad qualities. We would not be here without them. But to move forward we have to struggle against the fences of social constraint to meet the challenges that surround us. We need to recognize that most of the problems that confront us through history are reflections of the exaggerated effects of collective action: tribalism, nationalism, violence, fear, prejudice, stereotyping and a practiced ability to refuse to see the truth beyond our own small domain. The danger of the future is the jarring collision of tribal parochialism and cultural pride butting up against a world that is quickly intermingling but causing ripples of paranoia as this blending of peoples accelerates. It is interesting that at a time of rapid and improved communication around the world we are simultaneously confronting a kneejerk reactionary movement which denies the reality of what is happening and would rather blind us with nativism and terror. We are reaching a fork in the road where we need to be able to leave the old ways of survival behind that functioned well in a sparsely populated and scattered humanity. We absolutely need to understand the particular familial, educational, national and cultural conditioning upon which we continue to rely for dealing with a world that has moved far beyond it. It is knocking on the door and we need to know how to answer the call and take the steps that will lead us to a better future without damaging and possibly destroying that growth before it has a chance to be born.

The Characterless Future

I am citing a National Post article of Sept. 5, 2009 based on a Der Spiegel article by Reinhard Mohr:

" We have the infamous 'be Berlin/sei Berlin' city marketing campaign that wants to transform the lively process of change that Berlin has undergone over the last twenty years into a moneymaker, like a good that can be made pretty, packaged up and exported to all corners of the globe. But what the people behind the campaign don't realise is that, over the long term, this kind of sales pitch undermines the mystique of decay and excitement that made Berlin such an attractive commodity all over the world in the first place. It's like the process of sucking out all the aesthetic marrow that has happened to beautiful and picturesque places all over the world...Places give up their flair in return for long, ant-like lines of tourists - and the money they bring."

This is so emblematic of the commoditisation and uniformity that has gripped our modern world.

We want to transplant a bland sameness, regularity and security to everywhere on the globe. I thought the point of travel was to experience the amazing variety and diversity that should characterise any venture into cultural exploration. Instead we want to avoid the differences that might confuse or disturb us, or that might challenge our core understanding of how life is lived on this planet. This is symptomatic of our approach to life in general, at home or abroad. We seem to be systematically weeding out difference, character, eccentricity, and exploration into the dazzling variance of human life that has flourished upon this earth for eons in our seperate but brave attempts to cope with the diverse challenges that have forged our cultural identies. We need to be unified in celebrating and learning from our differences rather than mowing them down in the name of peace. We will only find peace in moving beyond our differences not by eliminating or pretending they don't exist. We are all as human beings trying to struggle with our ever increasingly confusing place in this world. As our technology continues to make us confront each other we must be both tolerant of difference and at the same time realise that if we don't move beyond the barriers of our historical limits we will put ourselves in a peril that could easily spin out of control.

We are creating an increasingly sterilised society that has been scrubbed clean in the name of safety and a conflict-free world that I don't believe represents the way we want our future to evolve. Again we are hurtling into a future we haven't adequately thought about or reflected upon. If we don't wake up we will be so anaesthetized that we will be impotent to make all the proper decisions that we so desperatedly need to consider. We all need to take responsiblity for the direction our world is taking. We are creating an antiseptic cocoon that is too clean, too perfect, with no risk, no rough edges, no random chance, no life. Due to our obsession to protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of life we are wrapping ourselves in a straightjacket that will stifle our freedom and creativity until our evolutionary growth will grind to a stifled halt. Contingency is a fact of life and our attempt to eradicate it will eradicate the essence of life itself.

Reflections on an Economic Crisis

Now that we appear to be emerging on the other side of the great worldwide economic upheaval of the past year it is time to begin the process of studying, analyzing and defining how we got ourselves into this mess that came so close to a real financial meltdown with probable catastrophic consequences for the world economy. If we don't understand and resolve the conditions that contributed to that calamity we will be back in it's grip a few years from now. This effort will need the collective will, courage and honesty of all parties involved including each one of us who were cheering on from the sidelines for so long. Otherwise we cannot get to the crux of the problem and understand where the responsibility lies. We know that greed, self-interest and power were major contibutors to the events that created this near disaster. This exercise might be about assigning blame but not about punishment or retribution; instead about a process that will teach us all a lesson we so sorely need to understand. The need for sacrifice and the creation of a uniform and worldwide system built on trust is an imperative which will be difficult to attain.

The issue of bonuses for executives and financial wizards is an obvious example. The commonsense argument is that when successful the agents that created that success should be compensated handsomely as a reward for allowing all of us to profit from a stellar economic climate. But the other side of the arguement says that when failure, risk and incompetence create a serious downturn and a huge loss of investment worldwide then those responsible for the calamity should pay the price similar to what the rest of us face in our daily work lives: loss of job, income and reputation. The present system has an adequate response to success but none to failure. The spoils of success go disproportionately to the few but failure is spread evenly. The people who run and operate our financial system need to appreciate that they have a responsibility to all of us and that means that they take the loss if they gamble and risk our hard-earned money. Right now they win no matter how the game is played. They need to have the same risk we take so they will learn to be more cautious and prudent in their decisions.

We need to clean the proverbial Augean stables with the bright light of honesty and fairness. We need to get back to a system that rewards success but has consequences for irrational and venal behaviour. Then we will need to take a hard look at ourselves and realise how material gratification and greed play too central a part in our daily lives. We all enabled the problem to get out of control. We were eager and complicit partners in crime.

This could be one of those teaching moments.

Questions

QUESTIONS

The right question could save the world.

You might say that answers are more important but it is the question that is the crux of the matter. In the question, is the answer. We are so quick today to look for the easy answers to anything that we do not realise that it is the question that is crucial. How can we go about properly solving a problem if we don't take the time and interest to fully research and understand it so we can adequately articulate how to formulate the right question to ask. I believe if we do, we will come to more satisfactory conclusions that actually deal with the issue instead of framing the questions so as to get a politically correct or culturally accepted response. Problem solving is about getting to the truth, the crux of the matter honestly and cleary; and then finding the right, not the expedient or popular or easy resolution of the problem. To raise questions is to disturb ourselves, force ourselves to look at the reality of the situation with open, unbiased eyes and let it fully penetrate our psyches so we can understand it's true context and our role and responsibility in the problem. And guess what; we are always culpable, involved and responsible as individual human beings. It is not someone else's problem; we can't rationalize or evade and we have to seriously realize we are all in on the problemand we are all needed for the solution. The beauty of this method when fully implemented is that it leaves the answers open and fresh rather than using the usual method of presupposing the solution in advance to relieve our anxiety. As it is said: you are either part of the problem or part of the solution, and we are the problem. So we had better recognize that fact and get on with it and become the solution. We need to create a book of questions, a compendium of all the queries that define our lives, an atlas of riddles that need to be mapped and revealed.