The low point came when my liver stopped working completely three weeks ago. I was given just days to live at that stage. In fact, I was asked by my doctor to write my testament 'immediately'. I was at that moment classed as too weak for any more treatment.
Happily, my liver started working again with the aid of cortisone and I survived that ordeal against all expectations. I also gained enough physical strength to start chemotherapy.

However, I don't know yet if chemo works for me as it has just started and it takes some time to see any real results.
I got my first three days of treatment last week. The side-effects of this rather heavy stuff are now kicking in. At the moment I am still too weak at mornings to fetch the morning-papers from the post-box. However, luckily I can well sit on my laptop and meet the world through it.

I have had much time to think at my hands. I already see that thinking about things that are larger than my own sorry life has kept me going through this ordeal.
The more so, as I quite paradoxically feel that I have been liberated from many of the normal constrains by my situation. I really feel free now to explore new angles and new ideas.
In the current situation, I seem to have at least months left. If I can regain some physical stability, I am sure that I will soon be able to produce new stuff for this blog also.

All in all, this new situation has already liberated me from the constrains of daily toil in the newspaper, in which I have worked for over 20 years. My current sickness is incurable, and it seems that I will never return to work.
There are always two sides to every coin. I feel that this liberation will give me an all new kind of opportunity to think and write. Of course, the overall price for this freedom is rather steep.

However, I feel that I have finally a real chance for finding my true limits as a thinker and writer. I must admit that I am already secretly hoping that time that I have left could be extended to a year or two with the aid of ongoing chemotherapy, but now it still too early to say.
I simply was not pleased with my work as an economics editor anymore. I have for a long time already longed to be able to express my own ideas. I was simply tired of just repeating to readers what others think as journalists commonly do.

If I get at least some of my physical stamina back, I hope that I can write at least in half-hour -long stretches before resting. Hopefully this will be enough to create all-new content also.
All in all I feel that I have already reached the next level in intellectual development. I feel that even if my body fails my mind is sharper than ever.
This feeling could naturally be, of course, because of the heavy medication. Only time will tell. You, my dear readers, will of course be the judges for that.

I have received a strongly-worded complaint about the grammatical quality of this blog. Happily I can hereby announce that I have already taken steps to rectify the situation.
Of course, I could first defend myself by saying in my defense that I am a bloody Finnish foreigner. I have never lived for a single day in English-speaking country. In fact, I have learned English mainly by just reading a mass of books in that language in my adult age

However, I have bought same paid help. I have used the Grammarly-service at http://grammarly.com. I have marked the pieces that I have corrected and stylized with the text "This piece was completely refurbished on xx of xx at 2001X"
I started this grammar-checking in August 30th of last year. For some reason I started from postings of March 2011 towards present. All this time I have tried to go through one piece a day.
I have gone through nearly one hundred of my little essays or my 'secular sermons' during this period. As I have written nearly 400 entries to this blog during the last few years, there is still a lot to be done.

All this time I have tried to proof-read one of the old pieces in this blog a day. I just think that there already are many ideas worth preserving and presenting in a readable way, even if I say so myself.
Keeping up this proof-reading has naturally helped me to keep my spirits up during a deal during the long weeks of waiting. I first waited for nearly a month to get see a specialist who would find the culprit, then I waited two weeks my surgery. Then there was a month-long wait for the stomach to cure so much that the chemotherapy could be started and this time did not all go to waste with the proof.reading going on.

I did also use the same proof-reading service to my other main blog or A Little Book for Humanity at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi. In this blog there are at the moment 147 great quotes by secular, humanist and free-thinking philosophers, scientist and writers.
The difference with normal quote-collections is that every published quote has really given me something new as a person. However, the biggest difference to normal quote-collections is that I have included the ideas that every particular quote has raised in my mind.

(This piece was Grammarly-checked on 23th of January, 2012)

Elsewhere in this blog about this subject:

What’s so special about death, after all?

http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2008/01/07/what_s_so_special_about_death~3543260/

Why death is nothing to us?

http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2011/06/04/why-death-is-nothing-to-us-11265808/

Comments

Of course, the birth of an idea of a single indivisible ‘mind’ is caused by the fact that there is always the conscious 'me' on the very topmost level. This conscious 'me' processes the finished end-product of all of the incredible activity that going on under the hood in a human brain all the time.
Between the conscious or the ‘me’-part of the brain and the immensely diverse and highly active subconscious part, there is a web of complex gate-keepers. They keep out from the conscious part the multitude of continous routine-processes that are always going on beneath in the subconscious part of the brain. (See http://eagleman.com/eagleman-blog/135-the-mystery-of-expertise-full)

Without all this gate-keeping that is going on without a single pause for the duration of our life, the conscious part of the brain would be overwhelmed in seconds. Millions of years of human evolution have decided which is the right level of information that we need in the conscious level, and which information can be left to the subconscious part of the brain to deal with. This naturally varies incredibly at different situations.
Some of these processes keep our body alive. They do it by detecting when our body needs things like oxygen, water or food. Some of the follow our mental state. Some of them follow what happens around us. These are things that the brains of all living creatures share, as they are necessary base to stay alive if you are a mollusk or a human.

On the other hand, comparing the human brain to a simple computer is also utter reductionism in the other direction. We have not been able to produce computers that could even challenge the immense complexity and most of all immense flexibility of the human brain.

A human brain is not a computer, but one can say that it consists of hundreds or thousands of immensely effective parallel processors. They are constantly activated and de-activated on ad-hoc -basis to solve the current problems and tasks.
All these processors have unlimited parallel access to nearly endless amounts of working memory and nearly as endless amount the storage space for their results.

According to recent figures human brain has also around 100 billion neurons. The real secret of the brain is that all of these neurons are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons and creating continually new networks.
In the end, it was the subconscious part of my brain that did come up with the idea that I should write this little essay. I did not control this original though-process on a conscious level. However, I did finally analyze the idea on the conscious level and decided to write it out here.

It is easy to understand how the early people could not understand the workings of this subconscious part of the brain at all. It is also easy to see how they could have seen as these ideas and thoughts as they would be coming from somewhere outside themselves.
In fact, many of them clearly thought that their ideas were coming from some kind of 'deity' or 'spirit'. If you look at oldest literature armed with this idea, you very soon see what I mean.

The same phenomena do explain also the amazingly common ideas among believers that they are constantly in touch with their chosen deity, and this ‘divine voice’ also guides their lives in many ways.
However, I’m afraid that instead of any divine voice, they are listening to the subconscious part of their own brain. As it does process things in its own pace and answers can surface even quite unexpectedly.

Again; the idea of a ‘mind’ was invented to simplify handling of a phenomena that was all too complex for the early people to comprehend at all.
They just could not even imagine how there could be a vast number of parallel processes going on in every living brain in every single second. All they knew of and understood was the final output that reaches the conscious part of the brain, which can be even extremely restricted at times.

We have inherited from tens of thousands of generations of our ancestors a vast number of reflexes, models of behavior and trains of thought that affect our life every single second we live. There is also a extremely complex collection of social brain-processes that fire up in the brain when we mix with our fellow humans. There is always a biological base for these things also, but these processes are also changed by evolution of the human culture.
However, we are not normally aware of their presence on a conscious level. They just inevitably change the way we see our environment and most of how we see all different social situations.

On top of all this we slowly build an individual psyche. It is always different from that of anybody else who has ever lived. This psyche is a molded by all good, bad and irrelevant things that happen to us.
Of course, this individuality rests on a very strong base of inherited traits and features. However, our individual life-experiences will always produce a different end-result for every single human. Let me repeat: explaining all this with a concept of ‘mind’ is simply reductionism at its worst.
There are also inherited traits and brain-processes that different cultures have learned to use to reach new ends. For example, the brain functions that handle speech have according to some theories been developed further by development of music, which still touches the raw emotion-systems in the brain through this channel.

Language itself was developed to use these brain-processes when one species of the great apes learned to use sounds in dramatically new functions. The fact that several people can with the use of language share the contents of their brain with other people is unique to humans.
As far as we currently know, the human species is the only one that has developed a complex enough language to convey even the most abstract contents of their brain to other members of their species.

The invention of language did also change the way how humans themselves think that they use their brain. They normally see just the end-result which is formulated as language. The very basic processing of raw information happens as it happens in other animals, also without language. We just are not aware of these underlying processes, because they now feed their results in the form of language to the conscious part of the brain.

Subconscious part of the mind does not work independent of you, as it IS you. It holds all of your experiences, hopes, dreams and ideas. Subconsciousness stores our life and uses it as a tool to inspect and analyze all of new things that we encounter. The results of this process are then processed in the conscious mind.
The conscious part of our mind, however, makes all the decisions. On the other hand, in very fast situations we must rely on the gut-reaction or the results of only pre-processed information that has not been checked in the conscious part of the mind. This is one of the reasons why fast decisions are so often faulty.

The slow conscious processing of data on a conscious level does give better results in many cases. The The subconscious part moves more on the level of emotions, feelings and using old examples for new action. Conscious part of the mind adds reasoning and rational analysis to the picture. The development of language-using machinery into our mind has given us the possibility for logic and rational reasoning.
These qualities are of course also the things that made possible all human inventions. This development of a language-based conscious mind is the very basic thing that separated humans from other animals. It also gave humans this tremendous advantage over all other animals that we now enjoy.

Human brain was already a very complex organ at the time when we parted ways with the other great apes. However, mainly the development of language has created an incredible explosion in the complexity in the ways of how human brain can work.
No other species has undergone such a transformation as the birth of language did cause in human species. However, under all this complexity there is still the third species of chimpanzee. They just try to control also their natural impulses and emotions with this newly perfected brain of theirs.
The human brain started really diverging from the brain of a dog or a cat with the birth of language. It becomes possible nearly immortalize some contents of the brain with the invention of writing.

Only the birth of language made it possible also to develop abstract ideas like the ‘mind'. The development of the human brain has been a process that has taken an incredibly long time. The development of the first nerve cell was naturally the very first step that was followed by the development of the nervous system and finally the first precursors of brain.
An extremely hard question is at which point of evolution did animals become fully conscious of themselves. Most of all it is hard define at which point of human evolution did humans develop something that can be called a 'mind’ as this idea is commonly now understood. Even amoeba knows where it ends and other amoeba starts.
There still is no definite answer to this question, as the whole thing depends on how you define ‘mind’ and many traditionalists are prone to claim that only humans can have a ‘mind’.

Lions make conscious decisions when they choose a suitable prey from a flock of antelopes. A lion looks for certain signals that may make some of the prey easier targets than other. Then it makes a conscious decision that is based on the information it has obtained, just like humans do. The difference is that this decision is made without expressing it in language in lions.
The big step that humans did take was not development of a ‘mind’, but just the new ability to express its existence through the use of language.

It has been established without doubt that all mammals do share a very similar basic brain-structure with humans. It is quite certain that they all also have a very similar vast collections of brain-processes that is called ‘mind’ in humans for reasons of simplicity and tradition. The only real difference is that other mammals just can’t express themselves in a language that we could at least yet interpret.

On a little lighter note, I personally believe in ‘minds’ that exist outside the brain. I have hundreds and hundreds of them stacked on shelves of my book-case. The invention of writing made it possible to preserve some of the contents of a human brain permanently.
Every book is a little window to the contents of the brain of its writer. Some of course tell very little of the true thought of the writer, but some great books can act as true gates to another human mind.
When I press these little buttons to produce symbols on this screen to be transported over the vast oceans to my friends in Philippines or America, I am, in fact, extending my brain to reach other people. Boggles the mind, sometimes.

The study of how the human brain works has seen a fantastic rise in knowledge. We know immensely more of every single facet and function of the brain than we did 50 or even ten years ago.
Neurobiology, neurology and all other fields of research of the brain and mind have advanced in bounds and leaps. We have seen an amazing rise in understanding how our brain works in a very few years with the coming of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other techniques.

Added 31.1.2012; Julian Baggini must have been reading this blog......

Similar rise in understanding is sadly lacking in philosophy. It femains all too often often stuck in the old trenches that were dug ages ago. So, if you want to know and understand more how human brain or ‘mind’ works, you nowadays won't find help in philosophy at all, but in science.
One of the main reasons for this apparent lack of development is the strange ancient belief in immortality of some kind of 'soul' or 'mind'. This idea has made also many philosophers supportive to ideas that would make it possible to retain this ancient belief.

This belief is, of course, an old one. According to some anthropologists it is based on the fact that the memory of a dead person persists in our mind as if he would be still alive in our minds. On the other hand, the written word has made it possible to preserve the contents of the human mind and make it 'immortal'.
On the other hand, if you believe in a thing like immortal soul, you need to first renounce evolution. If you believe that a 'soul' is a purely human property, you need to believe that humans have existed always just as they are, or you end up in trouble.

The very first mammals were rat-sized four-legged creatures. Did they have a 'soul' that was reborn in other little mammals? If you resolve that hurdle, in the end you need to go all the way and to decide if also the first one-cell creatures also had a 'soul', or was just the idea of a ‘soul’ developed with the birth of the spoken language?
The answer is inevitably the latter. The idea of a ‘soul’ is a similar attempt to simplify a complex issue as the idea of a ‘mind’ is.

One thought still; the idea of reincarnation was quite natural one in the times when there was no idea of genes and genetics. Suddenly there just was this spitting image of the demised uncle as the new nephew.
Nobody knew how different features pass differently and can jump over generations and so on. The idea of reincarnation was just an easy way out of a problem. The sorry fact is that the less you know about biology, the easier it is to retain these ancient beliefs, and the more you know, the more difficult it becomes.

However, in fields like biology and scientific research of the brain and human cognition there are things that we can be even extremely certain of. Of course, we learn more all the time. This new knowledge will inevitably always change also the existing ideas that are stored in the brain.
During the whole recent explosion in our knowledge of how the human mind works, there has never been presented new scientific ideas or findings that would in any way support the alleged separateness of the ‘mind’ and brain.

On the contrary, it has become possible to explain processes and features that were quite in-explainable a few decades ago. In fact, we start to understand now how all of the main function of the brain like emotions, thoughts, reflexes are created and handled in the brain.
There still are these old belief-systems whose followers want so dearly to believe that an invisible part of a human does not die at the death of his body. They are ready desperately to grab any idea that would allow them to retain their belief in that mind is somehow separate from the brain.
However, no reliable evidence of any such thing has ever been presented. When the brain dies permanently, your brain and your ‘mind’ do cease to function and in practice cease to exist, even if your body is kept going artificially.

PS. This little essay is based largely on work done by Steven Pinker. However, there are also dozens of lectures, articles and books by many other people working in the field of studying of the human mind that have had an influence.

(This piece was extended and totally refurbished at 22th of January, 2012)

Comments

However, religions and political ideologies are not the only ones to develop dogmatic systems of thought that can change the whole way people see the world around them. Ideas like feminism and ecology have spawned movements, whose followers have sometimes even extremely dogmatic views of the world that is based on this single idea.
I am not saying at all that humans should not have ideologies and ideas. On the contrary, it is impossible to think that any human society would survive for a longer period if we would not have higher visions of how things should be.

For me, the big question is, however, how dogmatically these visions are held. I think that trouble is always brewing when any belief or idea is held in such esteem that it is impossible to make any compromises and adjust oneself to the ideas that other humans will inevitably have different ideas. The ultimate level in dogmatism is reached when people are unable to make even compromises that would further the reaching of their own goal.
For me a vegan who is not fighting to get good and acceptable living conditions for all farm animals, because it would make meat-eating more easy to accept, is acting on a dogmatic belief. In this kind of thinking, the well-being of animals is, in fact, not a motive at all, but a dogmatic belief in the badness of eating animals is the real motive.

There is also the problem of ideologies and ideas that have already reached their major goals, but who still have a lot of steam and energy left in them. Feminism is a typical example of this.
Here in Scandinavia at least, there is not a single unresolved legal issue that would hinder the full equality of the sexes. All barriers for full equality of the sexes have been removed from the work-place also. It is simply impossible to think what could still increase equality in these fields.

Of course, there are matters like that women are underrepresented in the highest leadership positions in corporate world. However, this is also changing fast, when women become more career-oriented and they do consider advancement in the workplace as an option for themselves more often than before.
The hard fact is that here in Scandinavia at least it is difficult to imagine how the real equality of the sexes could still be increased, when according to many studies also the homework is split quite evenly between sexes in the younger generations.

However, there is still a major ideological movement that was born to drive through these necessary and important changes in society and which we can thank for all of this advancement in equality.
The problem is that some more extreme parts are still fuming on the patriarchy that they see still as sucking the air out of their lungs. These people have often learned the central dogmas of their ideology decades ago and feminism is for them like the air that they breath.

However, when the major goals have all been reached one by one, where can one direct all this steam and energy that is still bubbling in the most extreme parts of the movement? I fear that there is already a loud even if smallish faction in feminism that think that all the ideas that men can have are inferior, because they are thought by men and for whom the way men do things are automatically inferior, only because it is the way in which men do things.
This is of course not equality at all, but chauvinism at its worst. The idea that ‘women are better’ is not equality, but just a call for a different kind in sex-based inequality.

All this would not matter, as it is a very small group of people who are guilty of this feminist chauvinism. However, they are often the loudest, most visible and most eager discussionists in the society, they can have an influence that goes far beyond the real following of the chauvinist feminists.
A very real problem namely is that in the atmosphere of consensus that has been reached in Scandinavia. Any kind of rising ones voice against any aspect of ultra-feminism requires an unbelievable degree of courage.

Any kind of dissident voices will be received with vicious personal attacks and charges of male chauvinism and paternalistic attitudes. One who has once experienced this thinks twice before trying again. Life is just so much easier if one remains silent.
The ultra-feminist movement has, in fact, succeeded in what Islamists have failed. They have succeeded in largely silencing the opposition to their ideas or at least branding their opponents as opponents of equality and as male chauvinists.

All this would not matter, if there would not be also serious real-world consequences. The influence of ultra-feminist activism can be seen in that all forms of male sexuality have become suspect. The last decade has seen an incredible rush of new laws that control all forms of male sexuality.
In Victorian times, it was thought that having sex can be a worse fate than death. It is strange how this kind of thinking is creeping back into a society that is markedly different in all aspects from the Victorian one.

However, this development becomes much more understandable, when one understands that there is a very influential activist group in our society that has the goal of branding of all forms of male sexuality as something evil and destructive.
If one would be into conspiracy theories, one could even think that when the idea of male sexuality as something inherently bad is widely accepted, it would be much easier to accept the idea that ‘women are better’.

I would like to add that I think that women are just as good as men. I think that many women are, in fact, far better humans than many men. I am a fiery believer in all forms of human equality. I believe that all barriers standing between full equality must be removed as soon as they are spotted.
Most of all the Islamic world and in the developing world in general there is still incredible amount of work to be done in the field of equality of the sexes also.
However, I believe in full and complete equality of the sexes and that means that even the finest qualities of either sex cannot be seen as the only good ones.

Comments

However, it is fantastic always to see how any person could fall for this kind of trickery, but there really are people who fall for this.
It is just pure and utter idiocy to claim that in slumping economy all the people who are currently unemployed would find jobs if they just would want. There just not are such jobs anywhere. However, it seems for many too hard to get this simple fact.

Turning the issue of unemployment upside down, to something that is wholly caused by the people who do not want jobs, is just utter idiocy. Of course, there are also many lazy people. However the great majority of people who get laid off in all economic downturns cannot simply be made of lazy people, as they get employed again when things get better and there are job-openings again.

There are qualities in the human mind which do make this black magic possible. We have a tendency to think about individual issues through real-world examples. As the human mind is restricted in its capacity we also tend to see issues though just one kind of example at a time.
When a social conservative tells us about all of lazy people who do not just want to work, we can easily create a mental image of neighbors lazy nephew why just lives in a sofa watching tv and playing video-games.
When it is fed with enough vigor, this mental image can push all other possible images concerning the same issue from our minds. We are not given the opportunity to replace it, for example, with the image of hard-working welder who was laid off after 25 years in the job, because his job was transferred to China, which just could be much more typical case.

However, the most difficult part here is the secret envy. A big part of working people are employed in jobs that give them no real satisfaction, just money. Its extremely natural that they envy people who don’t have to follow time-schedules that hang on as a heavy burden on them.
On the other hand, when people are taught from day one of their lives that work is the only valuable thing in life, they often cannot admit the burden that work places on them even for themselves. This kind of ambivalence can then find an outlet in the hatred of those who do not currently have work at all and who are also free of this burden.

The most fantastic thing is how some people seem to live in a completely history-less environment, where there is no past or future; just the present. They judge people only on the basis of what they are just now.
They just don’t realize that, for example, the majority of the nine percent of the work force of the United States who are just now unemployed are not unemployed because they would not want to work, but because nobody wants to employ them.
If somebody needs to be punished, would we rather not want to punish the employers who will rather hire people in China and India than in their home country?

If unemployment rises because people do not want to work, how could one explain that it always goes down when new jobs are created in the economy? Why in earth people would be lazy only in the economic downturns.
Western societies have sailed through unscathed the last 70 years, when they have supported their more unfortunate members when they have gone through a bit tougher times. Times will so often get better and most of all so many people can and will eventually change.

It is amazing to hear time after time from social conservatives how people are what they are and we should never hope for the better. In western nations millions of people deemed to be unsocial scum have changed their lives. They have married have kids and jobs, even if they have gone through tough spots at some point of their lives.
Leaving people in trouble without the possibility to survive without retorting to crime at rough times would be just plain idiocy and extremely bad policy for society.

PS.

“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”

- right-wing US presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.

Dear reader, how does this sound to you? In fact, when read literally, it would mean that losing your job could become a death sentence, as you die if you are not given any food. Do you think that it would be just fair to kill off all lazy people? One is lead to think also what kind of panels would do the judging? It would of course be interesting to know, how long would you need to be without work before you would be left to die without food?

Comments

One just rarely meets a book that can fulfill all of your reading-needs at the same time. This book by Steven Pinker is one of them.
I love books that can give brand new insights even to the things that I already know. This book is choke full of brand new insights into very familiar things.
I love information and facts and this book is filled to the brim with new information and facts.
I love writers who have close personal relationship with the information that they do present. Steve Pinker has a very passionate relationship with his data.
I love books that contain Big History, or books that look at the big and to the naked eye often quite invisible big trends that really change our societies and this book is Big History at its best.
I also love writers who use language to convey ideas and not to show off their craftsmanship or knowledge of tall words. Steven Pinker is one of those writers who just wants his reader to understand what he is writing. I just love this rare trait when I meet it in writers.

This is book with its 800 pages is without doubt Steven Pinker’s opus magnum. (Thus far, at least...) It draws together many threads from his earlier works. It happens to an extent that a recent reading of his other works makes some parts seem even too familiar.
However, they are necessary parts of the whole, as this book forms a single argument and this argument is for many difficult to accept as it runs against all conventional wisdom. We are bombarded by the media hour after hour, day after day, year after year with images of violence and destruction. Steven Pinker really needs to march all available forces of science to counter this immense trend.

Steve Pinker argues basically for 800 pages that violence in the world has been diminishing for a long time. He uses dozens and dozens of well-documented and well-researched studies to prove his point. If fact, this book is a wonderful tour to the literature that covers all aspects of human aggression.
This book is truly cross-scientific. The boundaries of scientific disciplines are not of importance for Steven Pinker when he is in search for truth. Neurology, psychology, social psychology, sociology are all covered.

Steven Pinker does not limit himself to retelling of the findings of others, but he has the courage to interpret them against a bigger picture. All good science starts with a strong hypothesis. Steve Pinker does show without any doubt that his hypothesis of overall diminishing of violence is not just speculation, but is based on extremely wide and solid set of scientific facts.
I heartily agree with his thesis that an effective and fair rule of law is one of the central factors in diminishing violence. The medieval societies with their honor culture and highly ineffective systems of feudal government just were not at all as safe places for humans as modern democracies, even if their they meted out cruel and brutal punishments indiscriminately.

The main point of course is that the rule of law must be universally accepted in a society and it must be fair and just for it to have an effect on the level of violence. Even the harshest and cruel police-states have failed miserably in achieving similar stages of security as such societies where most members of the society agree on general outlines of government and have the ability to change governments when they fail.

I really think that his central ideas and findings are quite to point, but I beg to differ with him in certain individual findings. For example, I don’t just buy it, when he claims that the counter-culture with the overt disrespect for authority and disdain of self-control would have been even the main reason for the rise in violence in the USA from the 60’s to 80’s.
I think that here the correlations just could go the wrong way, as maybe the rise of a new kind of drug-culture brought about the changes in culture. I think that the very same drug-culture drove millions of people beyond the boundaries of law, where personal violence is all too often the only way to survive.
The turf-wars, drive-by-shootings or random killings were perhaps caused by the physical drug-culture and not the popular culture, which could just have followed the changes in reality a few steps behind.

Overall, Steven Pinker gives much credence to a Civilizing Effect that starts from good table-manners and spreads from the upper classes downwards. I must say that I don’t really think that even here the causality could at least partly go the other way round. A rise in living standards just could make people imitate the behavior of the upper classes.
However, what is important, he also very strongly appreciates also the role of humanism that has in my mind been the decisive factor in the process.

I think he forgets to mention how already the early Greek humanists influenced Christians. They in turn had a new kind of attitude towards violence and shedding blood for fun, that was a common pastime in the Roman Empire.
Of course, the Christian totalitarianism did later on lead to burning of witches and heretics. Extremely cruel and bloody criminal punishments were widely used in Christian societies. Hangings were a popular form of public entertainment even in the most pious states.

The philosophers, writers and scientists of the Age Of Enlightenment were carriers of a new kind of humanistic thinking that saw value in every human life. This kind of concepts had been quite foreign before their time.
For me, it is quite odd that Steve Pinker does not use the concept of zeitgeist or the spirit of the time in this marvelous book, even if the changes he is describing in many different phases are just changes in zeitgeist: the way the world was seen was changing.
Another failing in my eyes is his inability to accept the basic fact the thermonuclear weapons themselves in their absolute destructiveness were the reason why we did not have the third world. I think that he tries to tip-toe his way around this problem in a very round-about way.
Of course, accepting that men can develop so fearsome weapons that men cannot use them anymore can sound like accepting these monstrous weapons, but I think that a scientist should be able to face the facts, even if he does not like them.

Humanism was naturally not the only force a plays here. Also the spread of humanistic thinking was aided incredibly by the invention of the printing press and cheap books.
The ensuing rise in the general level of knowledge had its effect, but Steven Pinker believes that the simple ability to be able to look at the minds of other people through novels did much to spread the levels of empathy and sympathy up in a society.
It is of course impossible to give even a rough outline of a book with 800 pages of densely packed information. I can only suggest that you read by yourself. The time used in this book will be well spent, as the reader will have a much clearer picture of very many human developments.

Comments

The latest example of this hideous group of people is of course Moammar Qaddafi, who was given ample opportunities to retire to foreign shores to spend the rest of his life in exile. However, he declined and in the end caused the needless destruction of large areas of his home country and also of his own home town, Sirte.
I don’t know why many people have trouble in recognizing the extremely plain evilness of not giving up of an armed combat in those cases when it has been clearly already lost.

The answer is of course part of the perverse logic of the war, where most of the normal values that humans hold dear in everyday life are reversed.
In matters concerning war foolhardiness is praised, stupid, unneeded deaths in the act of bravado are hold in high esteem, and all too often even acts of stubbornly seeking the death in pointless and unneeded last stands are admired as acts of great courage.
This thinking is so deeply embedded in our society that I think that many of the people reading this have trouble understanding that there would be anything wrong with it.

However, the military or political leaders who refuse to give up a clearly lost cause do all too often immense damage to their own home countries and cause immense suffering and pain to their fellow countrymen, even if also needless blood is spilled on the other side too.
Hitler is, of course, an all too easily picked candidate to this group, but the Japanese leadership which let the American firebomb all of their major cities to ashes without blinking an eye, is of course a major war criminal in this respect. If we go further in the history of the human race, for example the horrid and utter destruction of large areas of Central Europe in 30 Years War was a direct result of either side being unable to accept defeat and accept any kind of compromise.

A much harder thing to accept for many is that the real reason why the Vietnamese people had to live through over 15 years of horrid, continious warfare that did cost the lives of between one or three million people was because the Communist leaders of North Vietnam saw any kind of loss of life as acceptable, if they just could reach their political goals.
A group of leaders who will lead several million of their fellow countrymen to their deaths just to gain more political power and reach a Utopian economic goal just cannot be seen to have done anything praiseworthy.
Admiring the stubbornness of the Vietnamese leaders is like admiring a father who lets his family starve to death over a long fight over grazing rights, just to show that he was right.

In a similar vein, it is a fact of life that Afghanistan has never been really subdued by an another state, but admiring the Afghan leaders for their unwillingness to ever to seek peace or any kind of compromise with their adversaries is extremely odd thing to do.
It has been even said that in the recent wars in Afghanistan the Afghans have been somehow 'morally superior'. However, I think that the stubbornness and inability of their leaders to seek peace on any reasonable terms does not make them morally superior in any way.
It just tells about the inability of these leaders to make compromises because of an ideology that they have adopted.

In fact, a moral view of the Afghan conflict would be to say that to inflict tens of years of continuous war on one of the poorest nation on earth is a highly immoral act to do.
Of course, this poverty is also one of the central reasons why this war has been going on for so long. If the Afghan society would have been more economically developed, the disruption that is caused by a war would have made its continuation very difficult after a certain point,

However, in a poor agrarian society all new possibilities for living on war and the money lavishly given by foreign donors and gotten from the drug trade did offset the immense hardships that were inevitably brought about by war.
The Afghan nation as a whole has not benefited and will never benefit in any way from these wars, even if the religious and tribal leaders have grown their power and stature even immensely.

At the same time, there is a whole generation now who does see that the normal way to earn a mans living is to trade in drugs and blow other people up. It is terrifying even toimagine in what kind of moral void the tens of thousands young men do live, who have never seen anything other than war in their whole lives.
They have all too often nothing else but their misogynist, repressive and morally corrupt local Jihadist version of Islam to turn to. If someone claims that this ideology is morally more advanced than, in fact, any other religion-based moral system humans have invented, he does simply not know what he is talking about.

In the end, nations do not win wars because they are somehow morally more advanced than others or most of all because they would be carriers of a truer ideology. Nations who start wars want to subdue other nations to their will in some respect or they simple want to have something that the other nation is not willing to give them voluntarily.
A feeling of moral superiority can of course help the war effort even greatly, and at modern times the party that has been attacked often has a definite edge over the attacker in this respect.

However, in the end all wars are won by the nations which are more capable or enduring in the battlefield. Short wars seem to be won by parties who can muster more powerful or technically advanced forces to the battlefield.
On the other hand, long wars seem to be won by those or who can make their followers endure longest the hardships and suffering that are inevitably brought about by the war. If we put it more bluntly, they are won by the party who does care less for the true well-being of their own countrymen.

PS. This piece was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker and his fine book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes" that I am currently reading.

Comments

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

E. M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, which ought to have ruled, plays the pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy — they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

E. M. Forster in "Aspects of the Novel"(1927)

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E. M. Forsterin "A Book That Influenced Me" in "Two Cheers for Democracy" (1951)

Most of us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament. The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful."

Aspects of the Novel (1927)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster
"Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". His best known works are; Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924."

Comments

The worst form of lying is the telling of just one side of a complex story. This is at its worst in fiction, when a successful novel can transform the view of a whole generation on an issue.
The writer does not need to lie consciously, he or she just needs to omit mention even the possibility that there are other very different ways to see the issue at hand. In such a case, the writer is not lying, but the result can be a complete distortion of reality.
I know that I am not saying anything very original here, as anybody can see this thing happening all around them all the time. However, it is strange how rarely this issue comes up in public discussions.

I think that there is an subconscious process going on. The danger could be that this would work both ways; also those works of art that support my own pet ideas and ideologies would be scrutinized if looking at the factual trustworthiness of works of art would be more common. I suspect that this is one of the hidden reasons why there is so little talk about this area.
Is it also so that the 'freedom of artist' creates so strong protective cover around their works that people do not dare dispute the one-sidenedness of so many works in the fear of stepping on the artistic freedom of other people?

I think that first and foremost we need to preserve the freedom for all people to write or paint or film just whatever they would ever want. However, I also think it should be balanced with the strong will to point out the factual falsehoods and one-sidenedness also in the fields like literature, cinema or theatre.
I must again and again stress that all artists must always have the freedom to create whatever they want. I don’t want to mess with that very basic right at all. I just want to remind that all works of art are always subjective windows to the world.
The more different windows one does take the pain to look out to the world, the more complete our view of the world will be. We just need to remember that we can see only a small slice of the world out of a single window.

Admittedly, great art is rarely born out of 'on the other hand and on the other hand' -thinking. It is just too bad that reality is built in that way and all great art will inevitably distort reality; the more forceful and more poignant art is, the greater also the distortion can be.
I think that this eternal problem will never be solved. In fact, it does not need to be ‘solved’, as in practice people just need to be aware that art is not life, but all to often just life with its true complexity and vagueness taken away.

Art imitates life. However, to make interesting (and most of all sellable) art you so often need make life more interesting, more straightforward and more uniform than it really is. The very simple act of following the conventions of an art-form will very often distort the view of reality that is in the end presented, even if you real aim could be just telling your story as faithfully as you can.
For me personally, however, the real problem are the artists who have a hidden agenda, that they will never admit aloud. It pains to see stories whose real purpose can be seen from page one, but the writer never admits it.
I have no trouble with art that has a real purpose and an agenda, when the purpose and agenda of a work are clearly to be seen, the problem for me are just the stealthy ones.
For me at least, best art is born out of a wish to change people or society in some way, or just to drive an important point home. This need and will just need to be visible, as the distortion of reality that is involved then also becomes more clear.

There is still one more danger. There is the danger that a great artist is seen to have powers and wisdom that he or she does not and, in fact, cannot ever have. A vague enough and multi-layered enough way of saying things can make people believe that you have found answers also to questions for which, in reality, you just cannot have any kind of real answers.
The very skillful use of language can hide away the fact that the answers are just opinions, guesses and shots in the dark. An artist can have exceptionally good opinions and he can make wonderful guesses, but it is too easy to foreget that they are still just opinions and guesses, even when they are extremely skillfully expressed.
People love certainty and the danger is that a great artist can offer certainty also in areas where none can ever exist. I know that many people find this comforting, but there is the danger of making the reality conform to these imagined answers.

The Stochastic Motivational Analysis that I have spoken before in this blog may help even in analyzing the works of art that we meet. Basically you just need to try answer these questions:

1. What kind of personal ideological connections the artist has to the issues at hand?
2. Why is an artist interested in just in the one idea he or she is presenting?
3. Why does the artist want us have just that piece of information, but not some others?
4. Do the institutions or country that the artist identifies with have some kind of special relationship with the issue? Can this relationship affect his or her ideas on it?
5. Can financial considerations be a reason why an artist is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
6. Is the artist just following some current, popular trend?

Comments

The central ideas of humanism have already changed the zeitgeist or “the spirit of times” dramatically. Thanks to quite universal spreading of humanistic ideas of the common human value of all human beings, things like feudal rule over serfs or slavery are not publicly accepted in any form anymore, anywhere.
However, humanism is never something that is paraded victoriously on the streets to the sounds of the trumpets. It is something that is learned by reading a wise book for a moment before going to sleep.

Humanism really is not a conquering ideology, but it is just an attitude and a way of thinking that can change people for the better. It will not transform people in a flash of light, but it can change peoples attitudes towards other people a little bit by a little bit during many, many years of learning.
There will never be a world that would be ruled by humanism, but we can slowly and tediously crawl towards accepting and respecting people who are different from us.

However, humanism is not a fixed ideology like a religion. It will always live and change when our societies and their needs do change. Humanism is for me personally also about striking the right balance between the need of the society and the needs of an individual; even if this is not included in the normal definition of it.
Where this delicate right balance is to be found depends on the current state of the society and the status of individuals. No universal answer can really exist.

The important thing is that one must be able to base ones ideas on a solid foundation and for me humanism offers this foundation. However, humanism will never be a vehicle for achieving personal power and glory for its followers.
As far as I can gather, humanist parties have never won elections on a purely humanistic platform. I highly suspect that such a thing will never happen.

The greatest single thing about humanism is that it can make all other ideas and ideologies softer and more human. Every ideology can be softened and pacified by a dose of humanism.
A hundred years ago capitalism was saved from itself by western socialism that was dosed in the ideas of humanism. By making the capitalists share the dividends of capitalism even a bit more evenly, these movements created the new mass-markets that the capitalism needed to expand and also the already lurking dark social crisis was averted.

To solve the current crisis of capitalism, the new rise of humanism just could be the medicine again. Moving the zeitgeist from the current glorifying of open greed to sharing, taking care and being members of communities just could make a world of difference in the long run.
As always is the case with humanism, there will not be a revolution, but just the slow evolution of zeitgeist towards a more healthy direction if all goes well.

ps. Here is my guide for stepping away from reality in 10 easy steps

1 step away :
Actual industrial production.
2 steps away:
Retail and wholesale of actual products.
3 steps away:
Actually financing the industry and trade.
4 steps away:
Marketing of actual products.
5 steps away:
Creating international brands
6 steps away:
Selling and buying of industries to form international conglomerates.
7 steps away:
Creating financial tools to facilitate takeovers and selling and buying of industries.
8 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess corporate profits.
9 steps away:
Creating financial markets for excess capital that is not needed in actual economy or in other words tools for just betting on the performance of actual economy.
10 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess capital that has been created from winning bets by the extensive betting on the real economy. There is just is so excessive amounts of unneeded capital that soon one needs to place bets on the bets that are placed on the bets.

ps. This little essay was originally inspired by a Facebook-chat with Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who is an Iraqi humanist currently living in Malyasia. He is also the admin of Facebook-page for Global Secular Humanist Movement at http://www.facebook.com/GSHMP

Comments

The central ideas of humanism have already changed the zeitgeist or “the spirit of times” dramatically. Thanks to quite universal spreading of humanistic ideas of the common human value of all human beings, things like feudal rule over serfs or slavery are not publicly accepted in any form anymore, anywhere.
However, humanism is never something that is paraded victoriously on the streets to the sounds of the trumpets. It is something that is learned by reading a wise book for a moment before going to sleep.

Humanism really is not a conquering ideology, but it is just an attitude and a way of thinking that can change people for the better. It will not transform people in a flash of light, but it can change peoples attitudes towards other people a little bit by a little bit during many, many years of learning.
There will never be a world that would be ruled by humanism, but we can slowly and tediously crawl towards accepting and respecting people who are different from us.

However, humanism is not a fixed ideology like a religion. It will always live and change when our societies and their needs do change. Humanism is for me personally also about striking the right balance between the need of the society and the needs of an individual; even if this is not included in the normal definition of it.
Where this delicate right balance is to be found depends on the current state of the society and the status of individuals. No universal answer can really exist.

The important thing is that one must be able to base ones ideas on a solid foundation and for me humanism offers this foundation. However, humanism will never be a vehicle for achieving personal power and glory for its followers.
As far as I can gather, humanist parties have never won elections on a purely humanistic platform. I highly suspect that such a thing will never happen.

The greatest single thing about humanism is that it can make all other ideas and ideologies softer and more human. Every ideology can be softened and pacified by a dose of humanism.
A hundred years ago capitalism was saved from itself by western socialism that was dosed in the ideas of humanism. By making the capitalists share the dividends of capitalism even a bit more evenly, these movements created the new mass-markets that the capitalism needed to expand and also the already lurking dark social crisis was averted.

To solve the current crisis of capitalism, the new rise of humanism just could be the medicine again. Moving the zeitgeist from the current glorifying of open greed to sharing, taking care and being members of communities just could make a world of difference in the long run.
As always is the case with humanism, there will not be a revolution, but just the slow evolution of zeitgeist towards a more healthy direction if all goes well.

ps. Here is my guide for stepping away from reality in 10 easy steps

1 step away :
Actual industrial production.
2 steps away:
Retail and wholesale of actual products.
3 steps away:
Actually financing the industry and trade.
4 steps away:
Marketing of actual products.
5 steps away:
Creating international brands
6 steps away:
Selling and buying of industries to form international conglomerates.
7 steps away:
Creating financial tools to facilitate takeovers and selling and buying of industries.
8 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess corporate profits.
9 steps away:
Creating financial markets for excess capital that is not needed in actual economy or in other words tools for just betting on the performance of actual economy.
10 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess capital that has been created from winning bets by the extensive betting on the real economy. There is just is so excessive amounts of unneeded capital that soon one needs to place bets on the bets that are placed on the bets.

ps. This little essay was originally inspired by a Facebook-chat with Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who is an Iraqi humanist currently living in Malyasia. He is also the admin of Facebook-page for Global Secular Humanist Movement at http://www.facebook.com/GSHMP

Comments

"A fool tells you what he will do; a boaster what he has done. The wise man does it and says nothing."

A few ideas did immediately spring to my mind. My first thought was this:

"A fool will have a great career in politics, a boaster will do great in business and the wise man will be quite forgotten, as nobody will know what he has done."

My second thought went a bit further on the issue:

"If you want to be remembered as a truly wise man, just constantly give the smallest of hints of your infinite wisdom and you will never have to accomplish anything real."

(Paraphrasing Mark Twain here, of course.)

Then I did think more of the reality on the ground:

"The other available method to be remembered as a wise man is, of course, just to utter so complicated and mysterious things that nobody will never be the wiser of them. This is naturally the most commonly used road to stardom in the field of wisdom."

Then I realized how cynical I was being and I thought:

"Of course, you could want to be a really wise man also. About that I can say nothing, sorry."

Then I ultimately realized what I had already done:

"One way to achieve status in the field of wisdom is, of course, the road of pretended and overstretch modesty to make people believe that you just do not want to reveal your whole wisdom, even if you have none on offer, in the first place. See above."

PS. Sorry if I may always sound so serious, my dear readers but, in fact, I have my secret lighter side also after all...

Comments

Why is that? The simple answer is of course that the Christian Church which took over the Roman empire in the fourth century did like Aristotle and Plato, and it did dislike Epicurus and Anaxagoras.
Christians did strongly dislike also many other Greek philosophers, of whose works there often remains just small fragment or even just mentions in the works of those Greek philosophers that were sanctioned by the church in the worst cases.

Of course, much of this material would have been lost anyway. In those times the old books just needed regular new copying, when the old versions started to decay. One can well argue, that only the ones that would be of interest to somebody would have been preserved anyhow.
But here comes my point. If Christians would not have taken over the Roman Empire and they would not have thoroughly erased all other religions and philosophical schools from its realms, there would certainly have been a extraordinarily different situation concerning also many of the earliest documents which did contain the seeds of rational thinking.

This is of course just pure speculation, but if Epicurean communities would have been allowed to continue to exist even after the onslaught of Christian domination in the fourth century, they would undoubtedly have existed for much longer time.
In fact, nobody can honestly say if some of them would exist today. These communities would also have had an extremely strong interest in preserving the words of their master and other thinkers who supported a similar way of thinking.

The main reason why this did not happen was of course the total intolerance of the victorious Christians. In hundred years they totally eradicated the old Roman religion and dozens of other religions and philosophical schools.
They did it such with such force, that these ideas were not left lingering even in the remotest villages in the corners of the empire. All competing belief-systems were just annihilated from the Empire of Rome. This includes of course all of the earlier, rival versions of Christianity.

The victorious version of Christianity then promulgated their favorite Greek philosophers or Aristotle and Plato as ‘the great Greek philosophers’, while most of the others were hardly seen as worth a mention.
This idea was cemented during the following millennium of Christian rule in Europe. The idea of Aristotle and Plato as the special ‘great philosophers’ was funnily enough eagerly adopted even by the Muslims, who soon saw how the ideas of these philosophers could support their religious ideology, but the ideas of the most of the modern Greek philosophers did not fit in as neatly.

It was in the end the work of the Christian Church to promote Plato and Aristotle and belittle almost all other great Greek philosophers of the Greek Golden Age. As we have no access to the works of Epicurus and many others, we simply can not know how they would have outshone these favorites of the Church in the eyes of the modern man.
The other unfortunate consequence of all this is that the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies soon did become the things that all other ideas were compared with, even if they did contain same extremely flawed thinking.

In the end, they were promoted to the position of the official philosophers of the church. Of course, some of their more incompatible texts needed also to be hidden away.
Luckily for the Church they were among the extremely rare breed among the Greek philosophers. Their philosophies did namely include an idea of god in a way that was nearly compatible with the ideas of the Church, if and when one stretches things a bit. This kind of thinking was, in fact, quite rare among the first-rate Greek philosophers of the time.

All this did lead to a situation where this, in fact, quite rare way of thinking was seen as a norm also in the field of philosophy, even if the idea of an omnipotent god found favor among very few of the best minds of the Golden Age of Greece.
Of course we can just speculate how and where the history of philosophy would have turned, if the major works of some of the greatest Greek philosophers would have been preserved. However, one can safely assume that the role or Aristotle and Plato did play in the later development of philosophy would have been very, very different.

Comments

Economy is a typical area where all analysis are, in fact, stochastic. There just never is enough real and stable information to call any analysis of it as a final 'truth'. When one really thinks about it, almost all fields of life have similar open-ended properties.
Stochastic also means that the reliability of analysis does increase with every new bit of information we do receive, as we can use the new information as a basis of a new round of analysis to make the original analysis better.

In this way, the Stochastic Motivational Analysis could be a fully open-ended process. It will end only when our interest in the whole issue vanes. However, it can be rekindled again the moment when our interest is renewed. In this way, there are never final, unmoving results, but just the best possible results for every given moment of time.
The main thing is simply about looking as hard and objectively as possible at the motives of the creator or transferee of the information that we do receive.

The standard basic questions in a Stochastic Motivational Analysis could be something like this:

- The most basic and important question to be asked is always: what kind of prior personal ideological connections the speaker or the writer has to the issue at hand?
- Why is the speaker or writer interested in just of that piece of information in the first place?
- Why does he want us to read or hear just that piece of information, but not some others?
- Has the institution or country he represents some kind of special relationship with the issue and can it affect his ideas on it?
- Can financial considerations be a reason why he is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
- Can the public debate on the issue have had an effect on the speaker or writer? Is he just following the current trend?

A very basic Stochastic Motivational Analysis can of course just be a guess; a shot in the dark. However, the very process of even attempting an analysis can create unforeseen amount of new insight, when we, for example, can make ourselves think of the possible reasons why just this piece of information is presented to us, but not some others.
Of course, it my list just a basic check-list of questions that every savvy consumer of modern media should make every single time he listens or reads anything.

This process should, of course, be quite automatic. When we, for example, hear a foreign correspondent explaining an issue, we should quite automatically be able to think if he speaking because he or the media he represents does have ideological connections in the issue, or has the country of his origin or the country of the origin of the media some kind of special relationship with the issue.
Of course, some of this kind of analysis we do quite automatically already, but I’m sure that the more conscious effort is to put the issue, the better results can get. The results of a Stochastic Motivational Analysis are never really 'true' as such, as in such a complex issue as human motivation there simply cannot ever be a single ‘truth’.

In very many cases, even the actors themselves are not fully aware of their own true motivations, the more so as nothing is easier than to hide ones motivation from oneself and invent higher, nobler motivations to hide the true motivations from the view.
So, in Stochastic Motivational Analysis the right answer is mostly not arrived at by asking the person in question about his motivation, even if even this bit of information can help, but by analyzing the objective conditions.

Most of all it is arrived by analyzing the ideological and financial connections of the actors that did lead to the creation of just that bit of information and its public use. As the 'true' answers to questions like this are not to be completely ever known, the answers can only be of the stochastic nature.
The results are always tentative, but they can get better with every new bit of information that is received. Of course, the answers can be very entertaining too!

In the field of philosophy Stochastic Motivational Analysis could well be used to ask why a certain philosopher was or is interested in just certain issues and even also for analyzing why he has arrived just to the results that he did arrive.
What effect did his personal animosities or friendships with other philosophers have on the outcome? How did belonging to a certain school of philosophy affect his results? How did the then current popularity of certain ideas or ideologies affect the philosopher? Did he have financial, political and most of all ideological considerations to think of when writing? Why did he write of this, but not of that?
I think that especially interesting results could be had by analyzing the true personal motives of the most revered ancient philosophers, when one would concentrate on the ‘why questions’ on a more personal level more than is done today.

I well know that many people see philosophy as something impersonal; for some people philosophy is just battle of pure ideas. At best, this is of course true at times, but I'm afraid that a lot work in this field also is done in defence of pet ideologies and because of the will to oppose some other ideas or ideologies with all possible means.
In fact, come to think of it, Stochastic Motivational Analysis could well be applied people like the writers of the Bible too. One could see things in a new light, when one really thinks through the personal motivations that make people do different things.

Of course, nothing of the things that I am suggesting here is new as such, as the motives of writers or philosophers or historical figures have always been of interest to many. However, I am suggesting a systematic method where the whole basis of study would be the study of motives.
Stochastic Motivational Analysis can never be the only avenue for study, but I think that sometimes really concentrating solely on the analysis of motivational forces that make the subjects of analysis tick could produce interesting and even entertaining additions to our current knowledge.

Comments

However, the real big thing here could,in fact, be the creation and maintaining of groups that can create the need to act according to what is seen as appropriate by members of this group. In fact, it can be of quite secondary importance what exactly is the ideology of this group, as long as the need to belong to it can cause a pressure to behave in a generally approved way.
So, the main function of, for example, Christianity in this respect could, in fact, to be a tool in the creation of strongly binding groups in which people really want to belong. The need to be accepted by this group could be the real force that does keep people on the narrow road.

However, a similar drive for group cohesion can be created around any kind of ideology. This is the reason why belonging to an atheist, agnostic, deist or even Epicurean community can often have a similar effect in the behavior of people than belonging to a religious community can have.
In fact, the very act of identifying oneself with a group that is strongly disapproved by a majority can create an even stronger need to act in a righteous way.
Members of an minority can come to look at themselves as public representatives of this community. Because of this they can be at times extremely conscious of a need to act in an exemplary way. They just might not want to blemish the reputation of the community if they do feel a strong enough need to belong to it and protect the reputation of this community.

So, a person who is drifting in some kind of ideological void can benefit even enormously from identifying oneself with an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean community. So, even if many Christians seem to think that atheists are immoral, the simple act of strongly identifying oneself with an atheist community can, in fact, have even a strong effect. People can in such situations really become more conscious of how their actions will affect their surroundings.

On the other hand, when people take any kinds of conscious steps towards assuming a new worldview they normally do confront ideas that are not necessarily confronted headlong in everyday life. A person who is inching towards, for example, atheist or epicurean world-view normally reads and thinks about the big issues in life in a quite different way that people do in normal situations. Things like morality, responsibilities or ideas of why we love and hate can be processed in a quite new fashion.
Atheism, agnosticism, deism or epicureanism is not normally accepted in a way religion is so often accepted as part of the cultural package that is inherited from parents. A fact of life is that religion are often learned in a quite automated way, without people ever really thinking what it is all about at all.

So, the thing that really often differentiates an atheist from the big mass of religious believers is that he or she has very often devoted much personal time and thought to think about the ‘big issues’ in life. The big thing here is that the very process of thinking over these ‘big issues of life’ often does make a person more aware of their meaning and importance.
When a person is more aware of the importance of keeping up things like social cohesion, he or she is more prone to act according to these ideas in real life too.

So, choosing an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean world-view does not mean at all that a person would become immoral, but in fact, often it does mean that a person becomes much more sensitive to moral issues than before this transition. Of course, there are bad and immoral atheists also, just as there are bad and immoral Christians or Hindu’s.
However, I am just saying just the process of challenging of one’s worldview in any more adult stage of life can really make a person more responsible and caring or in other ways 'more moral'. In this situation, people are simply forced to think through some of the very basic questions in life, that can have remained unexplored and unanswered in the flow of everyday life before that.

Quite another thing is that accepting a rational world view often does make people take a hard look at things that are labeled moral or immoral by different religions. A rational person does not, for example, normally accept the ideas that using contraceptives or masturbation would be immoral.
Religious people can, of course, have great difficulty in understanding that many of the things that are taught in their religion to be highly immoral, are immoral only in their own religion. They can can have hard time in understanding that these things are not part of any kind of universal morality, but just culturally produced, even if often ancient ideas of how humans should behave themselves.

The prohibitions against stealing, killing people and lying are quite universal, as they really are needed to keep any society going. However, religions have often succeeded in making their followers believe that all of the sexual restrictions that these religions have marketed would be somehow be part some kind of a ‘universal morality’.
When an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean rejects the religions as a source of morality, they do not reject the importance of having a moral code in a society, but they just reject one source that does claim to be a source of such code.

However, it is, in fact, quite understandable that this rejection is interpreted by the religious people as a rejection of morality, as they have generally been taught all their lives that there cannot be morality without religion.
Before they can accept that people can be quite moral creatures without religions, they need first to understand that the need for having a moral code is a feature of all human societies that are quite independent of religions, even if religions are generally used to enforce this code.
Most of all they need to understand that most humans (excluding sociopaths and psychopaths) have an inbuilt moral grammar and all societies do provide the moral code that follows this grammar.

They need also to understand that in the field of sexual moral there are no such universal moral codes. The area of sexuality is, in fact, the field of human life that is most tightly tied with the culture and cultural ideas of ideal behavior.
The ideas that concern accepted forms of sexuality do differ wildly from society to society and even inside the same society from time to time. The hardest thing to understand maybe is, however, that rejecting the restrictive sexual moral ideas of a religion does not mean at all that a person could not have a strong moral code in all other fields of life.

Comments

Achieving this would not mean banning or even harassing religions at large, but the goal would be achieved just by making them to give up stubbornly implementing just single one of their most harmful dogmas.
Of course, the other way to achieve this goal would be by persuading more and more of the followers of these belief-systems to understand that they do not have to implement just these parts of the antiquated dogmas of their religion anymore.

Even if this all is admittedly just a pipe-dream, but that latter option is not just empty talk, as we have great practical examples of how this can happen.
In the Christian Protestant world and countries like Japan and Taiwan, this kind of change has already happened during the last century. People just stopped listening to their priests in these matters. Soon the priests also had to change their own dogmas not to lose their audience altogether.
The countries where this happened are now among the wealthiest in the world. It is amazing how rarely it is acknowledged that these nations have reached their unprecedented levels of welfare partly because they had as the first nations in the world that had their growth of population in check.

A fact of life is that when people have the physical means and most of all a true psychological and social liberty to decide by themselves if they want to take care of six or two children, they very often not very surprisingly choose the latter option.
Of course, massive resources needs to be simultaneously directed towards spreading dirt cheap or preferably free means of birth control to all of the poorest people of the world. This needs to happen in every single village, and with great fanfare and a upbeat marketing drive like those of Coca-Cola.
An equally strong effort would be needed for educating people on how it is in their own direct self-interest to have less children.

Then, when people would soon see in reality how their general standard of living starts to rise, when there are less people depleting the existing resources, the real change could be initiated in their minds and this change is what matters.
All that this requires is that the some of the most backward religions like Roman Catholicism, Hinduism and Islam would be required to keep just those of their ideas to themselves which do concern human reproduction, or that their followers would not listen to them just in these issues anymore.

Of course, because of this requirement, all that I have said is just a pipe-dream.
Any of this will never happen, as the religious zealots do prefer seeing small children and even whole nations starving to giving up any of their ancient dogma, that is accepted unquestioned and without even need for any kind explanations why some things are required from the believers.
Human life is so sacred to some of these people, that they prefer to let millions to die horrible, slow deaths when population outstrips all available agrarian resources in a growing number of countries before accepting any form of contraceptives.

This is bad, this is simply really very, very bad. However, as long as religions do have a special position in the public arena, very few politicians even dare even to notice the evil policies of some of the Catholic, Islamic and Hindu leaders.
This happens in spite of the fact that is easy to that some of these people just are interested in growing numbers of their followers, as they build their power and importance on these numbers.

The hardest part to swallow is that they do not even have to face the fact that they are choosing famine and starvation, but also the ensuing social instability. They think that they are just making their gods will come true. Sadly, just in this particular matter their gods will trumps the needs and very real suffering of humans in their minds, that are sadly twisted by the needs of a religion.
They simply just refuse even to think about any of the consequences of their actions. This is made easy by the people who not dare to bring the subject up out of fear of offending religious feelings.
Seemingly these people, in fact, do sleep with excellent conscience, when the so many of the unneeded, unwanted and unloved children, who are born only because of their policies, inch their way to early graves after a life spent in agony.

The hard fact remains that the religious attitudes towards the birth control are in the heart of solving this particular problem. The remaining explosive growth simply happens mostly among the followers of the most backward religions. If we would leave out the role of the religions, we would be simply lying and putting our heads into a bush.
In the heart of this issue is that the countries where the most old-fashioned religions do rule tend to be in the worst situation. It is very simple task to take a hard look at the statistics and find this out.

The Protestant Scandinavia and areas like northern Germany or the Benelux-countries and the Anglican areas of the world were the first to put an effective end to local population explosions. They have also achieved unparalleled levels of wealth since.
They were aided more than little by the simple fact that they have not had a more conservative religion on their back. The process was helped byt the fact that modern state-church-Protestantism did adapt itself to the requirements of the new world quite early.
Even later the same pattern is to be seen everywhere. In Asia there was little religious dogma in these matters that would have been preventing the use of contraceptives. After the problem was identified and its graveness realized, the problem could be handled with resolute action and education in countries like Japan, Thailand or Taiwan.

In stark contrast, in the Muslim world and much of the sub-Saharan Africa the conservative religions have prevented progress in population control and results are extremely dim.
Latin America is a special case, as there the Catholic Church prevented all progress in these matters quite like Islam for a very long time.
In fact, the area seemed to be destined to drown in population explosion. However, during the last few decades Catholic Church has lost its true grip in many areas of Latin America and there is again hope, at least in more advanced parts of Latin America.

In fact, the situation is in many areas of Latin America more and more like the current situation in Spain, France or Italy. In these countries contraceptives are used in a similar manner than anywhere else in the western world, but lip-service is still paid to the Only True Faith on Sundays.
In the United States a statistical fact is that the followers of the religions that do prohibit the use of contraceptives are dramatically over-represented among the ranks of the poor.
The followers of old-fashioned religions tend come form big families that just so often can give much less individual support to its members than a small family.

However, the richer classes tend often to come from less restrictive religious backgrounds. They tend to have smaller families, that can give a lot more support to an individual child.
The religious differences are not the only thing here at all, of course, but its importance has clearly been downplayed on purpose for a long time, so not to hurt religious feelings.

Comments

It is simply impossible to think that a theologian could work in an official capacity, if he would reject the Bible and claim that the real source of wisdom is in the Koran.
In real science there simply cannot be such unmovable and unchangeable basic assumptions. In real science one must be able to test and also reject all claims that are being made, if the need does arise.

Of course, there is also scientific study of religions, but it normally is not made in the theology departments, but in a separate field of religious studies that are normally not connected to any kind of religious ideologies.
In the real scientific study of religions also the Bible can be studied as a historical document which does give light to the world where its writers did live and of their hopes and expectations.
On the other hand, in stark contrast to religious studies theology basically just tries to find suitable questions for answers that are already known, which is the exact opposite to how real science does work.

Scientific study of religions uses scientific methods to study all religions. It does also study Christianity, but Christian theology is looking for new justification for holding up this religious ideology and it also trains workers for the religious organizations.
If Christianity would have withered away some time ago, it is quite certain that theology would not be studied anymore in our universities, but the scientific study of religions would go on as it is now.

On the other hand, If a Marxist world-revolution would have taken place, we would quite probably have scientific study of Marxist dogmas in our universities. This field of study just could be extremely similar to the modern theology, even if we know now that Marxism is not science, but just an ideology.
Of course, people study and learn many things in the field of theology also that are quite scientific in their outlook, but the basic reason for the very existence of theology is always an ideological one, not scientific.
We have no other discipline of science that would have been founded to study and most of all support just one form of ideology, which happens to be a religion in this case.

Theology was born to train new workers for the religious organizations that are forwarding the Christian religious ideology. This fact is not changed by the fact that theology has adopted many of the scientific methods, as its ideological nature has not been changed, as these scientific methods are not used in an objecticve way that they are used in other disciplines of science.
Admittedly, there is a lot of real scientific study that is done in the theology-departments throughout the world, the more so, as the religious organizations also want real and reliable information of the impact of their work and how the world that surrounds them does develop.
However, deep down the whole discipline of theology does exist only to serve one religious ideology and its needs. Because of this fact theology is not real science as it stands now.

Comments

However, when you start moving the zoom forward and you start discerning more and more details. Things do also become more and more complex with every single new step of the zoom. During this process, the simple single solution that just a moment ago seemed so plausible just does become more and more implausible.
The level of complexity rises with every single step that we move the zoom closer and closer, and the individual objects start to be seen more clearly.

At every single new step of the zoom, we can see more. However, with our added knowledge we can also make better and better guesses of what goes on in the inside also in the things that have just become visible.
All visible thing do, in the end, hide away a mind-boggling complexity of a natural-born machinery that we did not know at first at all. However, often we must use our imagination to see how this machinery really is. We must often do it based on very small hints, the more so, as we often do not have methods for peering inside all new things that the rise into view when the level of zoom increases.

Best results are obtained when our imagination is fired by the singular glimpses of the delicate inner structure of matter that we do gain at times. Happily we can very often build our ideas on real observations. The best and strongest theories are made just in this way.
However, often only the imaginative powers of the human mind do allow us to peer outside also inside of the visible world. Nearly boundless human ability for reasoning with the aid of imagination does allow us to understand and create theories about the structure of these minuscule and and boundless worlds, parts of which can remain forever invisible for humans with their limited viewing capabilities.

The human mind that is using the scientific method can act like an auxiliary lens that helps us reveal more detail from each of the new levels of zoom we do reach when we improve our techniques for seeing things.
New and better lenses do help us to create new and better explanations. We can still find new ways to increase the level of the zoom that we have at our disposal. This explanation will never be final and complete, as it will develop and improve as long as humans put their minds into it.

However, the sad fact is that the highly evolved and extremely fine-tuned explanation still has to compete with the simplest possible explanation that was born in the days when we had no real knowledge of how our world is really built and how it really works.

Comments

I think that there are people who are quite unable to differentiate ideas and people at all. In the other extreme, however, there are people, who seem to forget that all human ideas are formed by quite ordinary men and women. Some people just have relentlessly trained their ability to see deeper and wider than others.
On the other hand, when a person does release a new idea to the wild, it will quite inevitably acquire a life of its own. In fact, the originator of the idea will often have extremely little influence on the future of the idea.

Of course, one can well ask if ideas can truly be valued wholly independent of their creators. Every idea is, in the end, deeply colored by the personal experiences of a writer or thinker, even if it in not always apparent. This personal level can also be hidden from view on purpose.
On the other hand, when enough people will evolve an idea further, the personal qualities of the originator of the original idea will become less and less important in the process.
This process of non-personification of ideas is extremely clearly visible in religions, where the central ideas often acquire a non-personal feeling, when they have been developed by many different people.

On the other hand, extremely often ideas are also valued according to just who has presented them. So, even some of the silliest ideas of, for example, Aristotle or Plato are often still seen as presenting some kind of deep insight. This does happen also when thse ideas are just personal opinions that are based on nothing else on the wish that it would be nice if things would be as they wished things to be.
In fact, the main reason why Plato and Aristotle were chosen to be specially revered from among the dozens of great philosophers of Greece was because they had some ideas that were to a degree compatible with those of the ruling Christian church and the needs of the extremely unjust feudal society.

For example, the 300 works of Epicurus were lost with only small fragments remaining, just because his ideas were not compatible with those of the all-mighty church. One cannot say that Plato and Aristotle would have been better thinkers than Epicurus, but their ideas just fitted better with the needs of the ruling elite for a long time.
Of course, there is not and cannot be objective criteria of how to value the thinkers of the past. Their value is simply determined mostly by how well their ideas do serve the later generations and also the needs of later ideologies.

The real beauty of the written word is, however, that ideas which are preserved in written form can resurface after centuries or even millennium of obscurity.
They can even come in handy, when the society has changed and these ideas do fit the needs of the society better than the ones that were so revered yesterday.

For example, Epicureanism was destroyed and erased by Christianity and Epicurus did become just a footnote in the history of the philosophy for many. However, in the current stage of development of our own society Epicurus just might be the thinker that would need enormously more attention just now, as he had clear recipes for some of the ills of our own society.

His ideas of finding happiness from the small and inexpensive joys in life instead of striving for more and more are alone an extremely good reason to bring his ideas back to limelight just now.
Of course, very similar ideas have been presented by many current thinkers also, but as stated, a long ago vanished thinker has had time to collect the aura of credibility and wisdom that a current living and breathing thinker never can.
The inevitable human failings of any current thinker will still be visible for all to see, but a thinker who has been dead for 2400 years will not carry similar disability. One is often much more able to see their ideas as themselves without distraction and also see the real value of these ideas.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728
http://www.facebook.com/groups/110827475672979/

Comments

Similarly, the new Jewish monotheistic god was an idealized mirror image of the new kings, when the Jewish nation was subdued into the power of single man on the top. This new god was all that these new leaders wanted to be; all-powerful, all-knowing and all-merciless.
This god was vengeful and sadistic, as were often the new kings too, when the absolute power perverted their mind as it will always pervert the minds of all absolute rulers. This god was the one who did give his blessings for the destruction of the cities of the enemies and the killing and enslaving of their people.

When a new and struggling sect emerged from the Jewish religion 2000 years ago, their god was again an extremely different creature, when this emerging new religion was at the very beginning the religion of the downtrodden and emerging classes.
Their god was a mirror image of them; it was helpful, supportive and merciful, as the people who were stuck in the lowest ladders of the Roman society where people who needed mercy, help and support to survive.

However, the new and emerging Christian god was a malleable beast, as when Christianity succeeded in gaining the upper hand in Roman society, the image of god did again change.
Their god regained some of more vicious properties of the Jewish god. Now the god namely needed to be the upholder of the existing social order and a protector of the holy borders of the Roman empire, which was soon forcibly totally Christianized.

So, the official god is always the mirror image of the ideas of the leaders of a religion. It does reflect their hopes and ideas, but this process does not stop here.
The lower ranking members will also quite inevitably give their own vision of their god their own properties. They will simply pick from the official party line only those parts that will support their idea of a god, which of course is an idealized mirror image of themselves.
So, a terrorist's god will be bloodthirsty and vengeful and the god of a peaceful peasant will be a very peaceful god.

God is after all just the person himself in an idealized form; the things he would like to be and achieve in life are the qualities that they give to their own version of gad.
As Salman Rushdie said about a writer; that when you start writing, you kind of dress up to be your better self. Your writing will often reflect the ideas of the noble and good person who you would like to be. Similarly, your idea of god is a reflection the idealized vision of what you would like yourself to be.

And yes, deep inside everybody who believes in any god has his own private version of this god in deep inside of his own mind, as long as humans differ from other humans.
Of course in some societies it is better just to keep mum about your own private ideas to simply stay alive in the midst of religious fanatics, who are all too often deluded to think that their own idea can be the only possible one.

In the level of an individual this kind idealized idea of human as a goal to strive for can be a valuable psychological tool, that can be used to forward one's success as a human being.
However, religion has always also another, often much more valuable tool as a source of social cohesion.
This task is, however, quite independent of the role of a religion as a tool for self-reflection and self-betterment. This role as a source of uniformity and blind obedience can even become a significant source of trouble in a world where uniformity and blind obedience are not things that would benefit the society anymore.

Comments

Also, if all people would behave exactly alike, there would be no need to classify any of them to 'good' or 'bad'. The utter complexity of human and social behavior is the reason why such ideas need to be created and maintained.
On the other hand, could there be such things as 'good' or 'bad' monkeys?
Of course, there are; the ones who do not disrupt the social cohesion are quite certainly seen as more 'good' than those who do by other monkeys, as are quite certainly also the more well-behaved donkeys or giraffes by other members their respective herds.

So, the idea of good and bad is not just a human idea, but an evolutionary necessity, as classing different forms of behavior 'good' of 'bad' for the good of the herd simply can greatly help the herd. In the end, this idea can help the whole species to survive and flourish.
However, the modern idea of some kind 'universal morality' is purely a human cultural invention that has been invented and used as an ideological tool mostly by religions.

A very basic sense of right of wrong or a rudimentary sense of justice is really inborn in almost all of us (not all, as one must exclude sociopaths and psychopaths, who often seem to have lost this very ability), but it is a quite different thing than morality.
Normally morality is, in fact, mostly about following the social rules. These rules can be in turn be classed as 'good' or 'bad' according to the results that do produce for individuals and the general flourishing of the society.
In fact, following of the current moral rules of the society has also always lead some people into major wrongdoing.

The instinct to follow the current rules of the herd is also an inborn instinct also in humans. We also generally want to please the ones we respect or on whom we are dependent on. At the same time, we are also guided by an inner sense of justice and fairness.
However, the exact things and actions that are seen as moral or immoral do vary immensely from society to society also inside the very same society at different times and stages of development.
I would dare to say that a man who takes part in a stoning of a woman who is suspected for committing adultery needs often to suppress his inner sense of right or wrong to be able to act according to the currently dominant form of morality in his society.

At this point, I want to stress that commonly agreed form of morality has a very important role in maintaining cohesion in all human societies. Declaring what things are seen as moral and which as immoral, makes it clear to everyone what is the desired mode of conduct in a society and knowing the exact boundaries of allowed behavior does make social life easier.
However, it is pure lunacy to claim that there would be an inborn sense of morality that would say that masturbation or looking at beautiful young women would always be immoral. These things are transmitted purely culturally and moral inhibitions associated with them are quite unknown in very many cultures.

There simply are many things that will disrupt the social peace in most societies and which are forbidden in almost all societies. The killing of other people without direct orders coming from the leaders of society is forbidden in all societies, as it simply is the most disruptive single act an individual can commit in any society.
The forceful taking away or stealing of other peoples property is another thing that is forbidden in almost all societies. It has of course less meaning in societies where resources are communally owned.
The disrupting of the existing bonds between a man and a woman is quite universally frowned upon.

However, all these things do stem from the quite universal needs of the human societies. This is real reason why they seem so universal, not that humans would have some kind of gene for a certain kind of morality.
We just really do have an inner sense of justice and fairness, as do mice and rats too, according to recent studies. These instincts are necessary for all species that do live in proximity of other members of their own species.

In all modern societies the needs of society and demands the society do make to individuals are codified in some kind of set of universal laws. These laws do not normally follow from any kind of inner inborn morality, but always from the current needs of the society or from the demands of some religions organizations.
However, their overall structure is very often influenced by our species-specific sense of justice, if it just is just allowed to play a role, which is sadly not always the case.
In modern western societies the needs of the society are more and more based on the needs and best interests of the individuals. Individuals have also a chance to start to intiate changes in them if they are seen as repressive or outdated, but again any of this does not follow from any kind idea of 'universal morality'.

PS. After saying all this I must also conclude that Immanuel Kant's famous 'Categorical Imperative' may be a valid logical construct. It may well be valid as an abstract idea, but on the other hand it has no bearing on how human morality and human social rules are constructed in practice.

Comments

If we worry so much about the ‘rights’ of a fetus, how about the rights of the child that would have been conceived, if a woman would not have said 'no' to a man?
If we really think that a woman should not have any right to control what happens in her body after any act of sexual intercourse, because the 'sacredness' of a fetus consisting of a few cells at first, how depraved must we see a women who refuses even the possibility of this new and 'sacred' life from ever emerging?
At which point does a woman lose her right to decide by herself of her own fate anymore? Does this happen on the moment of sperm and egg cells merging or when the first division of the cells, the second division of the cells or the third, or does it even happen at the moment of male ejaculation?

On the other hand, I think that biggest responsibility for unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions lies on the people who don’t want to give children sex-education and most of all who make the easy access to contraceptives difficult in countries like the United States.
However, the real blame falls on the people who continue stubbornly to make sex seem so dirty that many ordinary people just cannot talk about, for example, the use of contraceptives at all.

It seems that for many it is much easier to just act than speak about the things they are doing, when you have been scared stiff about even mentioning the thing for all of your life.
However, as humans just are what they are, some of them will always have sex out of wedlock. If they do not have the equipment and knowledge to prevent pregnancies, the unwanted, unneeded and decidedly extremely harmful pregnancies will inevitably happen. They will often harm the lives of all of the people involved a and most of all the life of the future, unexpected and unwanted child. On most cases the whole drama would have been quite easily avoided with the proper use of contraceptives in the first place.
However, if you have been taught all your life that sex is something disgusting and dirty, you will be at a definite disadvantage to people who can handle the thing in a rational way.

Of course, basically sex is just as natural for humans as eating and drinking. Because of this the control of the human sexuality to the degree that many modern cultures still try to do it, is one or the most difficult tasks a society can face. The sorry fact is that most of this trouble is gone into because of just because of some kind of cultural heritage and baggage.
All societies throughout the human history have controlled the sexual desires and impulses of their members to a certain degree. However, the exact nature of these limitations is decided by the nature and state of economic development in the society.
For example, a typical Polynesian society with a common source of resources simply has no similar sexual stigmas and limitations that the societies based on private ownership do have.

Most of these limitations for sexuality that we have now have to do with the rise of the agricultural society and its needs, but in a post-industrial society they are often just cultural remnants from an age when there were no modern tools for controlling the results of sexual activity.
On the other hand, very often the most staunch opponents of abortion are paradoxically the most staunch supporters of the death penalty and aggressive foreign policies and military actions. Still, one just has to ask them: how you think about killing in a war which justification you are not personally convinced at all?

The sorry fact is that very many opponents of abortion do not in reality care at all for people who would be born against the will of their parents if abortion would be made impossible. All too often they don’t want to give a single thought for the poverty and the environment already full of crime that many of these unwanted children would so often be thrown into.
No, they are blinded by dogma, which of course is mostly of a religious nature, that come from the time when contraceptives and abortion were not real options. A sorry fact is that people who are blinded by dogma cannot be argued with rationally.

However, I would still like to point out that here in Finland there are very many reasonable Christians, who see abortion or the use of contraceptives as a practical issue, as these things simply do help our society to remain a better place to live for all members of the society.
There just are less of the unwanted, uncared and unloved children who would be here without the use of contraceptives and in some cases, an early and medically safe abortion.

Comments

First and foremost humans could now retain gathered new knowledge in a large scale, which is just not possible before the invention of language. Homo sapiens as a species of the apes was an extremely social species. Our brains had already evolved to handle the extreme volume of information that living in big herd of extremely sensitive social animals does necessitate.
On the other hand, whales may have 'language' of sorts and also a social life, but they do not have hands with which to grab things and their language will be forever a social tool only.

Humans with both the language and capable hands could invent and most of all make new things. Most importantly they were soon the only species that could easily retain the exact knowledge of these inventions which would not be lost anymore when the inventor died.

So, the language is the big thing that separates humans from animals, but even it is just an evolutionary step forward of the sounds that all mammals use to warn and express sadness and joy.
Invention of language did lead, in fact, to all other things that humans are now better than other mammals. The better tools, the ability to laugh and have joy were perfected with the aid of speech.
Even the birth of music is accredited in recent research to birth of speech, as music uses the same brain functions as speech to create emotions in humans.

Language was, however, not just a force for good, as it did bring also in the seeds for future big trouble. Evolution had at first perfected the human sexuality as a way for keeping the species up and going.
It was soon doubly important, as the sexual selection was soon one of the only force that was keeping this extremely successful species still evolving. It had soon achieved such a secure position as a species in nature, that the natural selection soon did not have any real effect on the development of the species.

Unfortunately, humans have since completely messed up that system after the invention of speech and most of all invention of different permanent cultures and most of all after the invention of religions. In my mind the real, crucial event, however, was the invention of agriculture and most importantly the invention of inheritance of private land-property along blood-lines.
Only after that moment did it become extremely important to exactly know who had fathered whom, which is in my mind the root of all evil in human sexuality.

When people did live in hunter-gatherer-groups the name of the father was not really that important. Rearing of the children was a communal affair, as it was quite recently also in many Polynesian societies which also had extremely relaxed rules concerning sexuality.
The birth of landed property did in turn gave a reason, for example, for making women prisoners of their own dwellings, so they could not have sex with other males.

This development did give rise to a wild variety of other ways for restricting female sexuality. Unfortunately they are still in use even in many modern cultures, but are still commonly quite unknown in all societies where resources are owned communally.
Sexuality was soon seen as even the greatest threat to the stability of societies that were based on the then also quite newly invented private ownership of land.

This development did lead to absurd things like the endless no-no's in Judaism, where sexuality is squashed and strangled in countless ways. However, no real reason is ever given for doing this. Sexuality is just made to be something so evil that it cannot be even talked about.
One modern theory for the all of sexual restrictions in Judaism is that the new Judaic religious creed had at the beginning so small follower-base, that the leaders of the new cult wanted to make sure that every possible child is born to expand their narrow follower-base. So things like masturbation and having sex just for fun in those times when there would be no pregnancy to be expected had to be strongly forbidden.

Christianity sadly inherited many of the odd and strange ideas concerning sexuality from Judaism, but happily the secularization of the Christian world has made them dead letter all over the world.
However, in Islam this ancient and in modern societies quite needless sex- and woman-fearing (and hating) legacy still lives on.

Comments

Law of complexity in abstract ideas: If an abstract idea can get more complex, it will.

Second corollary: The time an abstract idea has been around correlates positively with its complexity

Third corollary: The less an abstract idea has contact points with reality, the more complex it can get.

Fourth corollary: The more public attention an purely abstract idea gets, the more complex it will eventually get.

Fifth corollary: An abstract idea that does not tickle the imagination will remain simple.

Sixth corollary: The more complex an abstract idea gets, the more easily it is accepted, as complexity aids to hide the problems in the original idea. (*see footnote)

Seventh corollary: Adding more complexity to an abstract idea will not normally increase its truth-value.

Eight corollary: The popularity of a purely abstract idea does not often depend on its truth-value, but on its utility-value.

Ninth corollary: A complex abstract idea will never get less complex with time.

Tenth corollary: The complexity of an idea protects it from criticism, as the more difficult an idea is to understand, the less people will even try to tackle it.

* Footnote to sixth corollary: Adding complexity to an abstract idea will evoke the "I should understand this, but I do not. I will pretend that I do"-effect." The complexity of an idea is often mistakenly seen as proof of its deepness and strength, even if it can be evidence of the opposite.

Comments

Creating a triangle between three separate independent objects is a thing that it easily and even automatically done by humans in their mind. The existence of measurable physical distance between these objects is, of course, a fact, but I do think that the idea that a straight line does somehow really exist between them is just a human convention.
I do understand that there is a terrible mental hurdle at play here. For example, the distance between Earth, Mars and Sun is always a physical, measurable fact. Of course, it is never the same, but for a millionth or trillionth part of second at a time it can be said to be such and such.
On the other hand, the idea that there would exist a straight line between these three objects does easily exist in the human mind, but this line does not ever exist in nature.

I do not mean at all that these theories that do produce squares, triangles and cubes would not be true and valid as tools for measuring, and also very accurately analysing and predicting things. I just do mean that even these things do exist as absolutes only in a theoretical universe, but in the real universe they can produce just good enough, great and even magnificent results, but not absolutes anymore.
The form of any object that is made of matter found in nature depends on the accuracy of the observation. As all matter is made out of atoms that do not form perfect, if we increase the accuracy of the measurement enough, its edges do becomes more and more bumpy.

Only a theoretical object can be absolutely uniform. If one does theorize and so, in fact, imagine a straight line between two objects, this line does really not exist in nature, even if we have trained our brains to treat even these highly theoretical objects as somehow real.
Many kinds of mathematical and geometrical theorems can be shown to be even absolute right and unchanging in theory. They can be repeated in endlessly and even independent of any observer. This fact does not mean that all the theoretical objects that were created with these theories would and should exist in the real world too.

If the we always start with the same premises, as is the case in mathematics and geometry, we will always inevitably get the same results and even any other species doing the same things will inevitable find the same universal laws and patterns that govern theoretical mathematics and geometry.
I’m just saying that when these rules are applied on real-world objects the results will always lose something from their absoluteness. They will for example always become relative to the person who is doing the measurement and level of measurement that is used in each case.

In the real world, the results of every measurement do gain an inevitable fuzziness that a pure theory has, in fact, often trouble to predict. We just need to know many particulars of the current thing that is measured and often also particulars about the tools that are being used.
My main point is that even if many mathematical or geometrical theories can safely be regarded as absolutes in theory, they do lose their full absoluteness the very moment when they are applied to any real world objects with all of their inherent fuzziness. On the other hand, they will certainly regain their full absoluteness again, when they are applied onto theoretical objects.

Of course, the theory in itself can still be true, even if the real-world results achieved using do become slightly fuzzy. It just does not produce absolute results in the real world, as it does when it is used in the world of ideas. In the real world, the results will always be just approximations and will depend, for example, on the method of measurement that is used.
Let me repeat; I still think that a perfect triangle, square or cube just does not exist in the wild.
They are just extremely vital theoretical tools. They are used as aids to measure, understand and interpret the reality in we do live in, and as such they are extremely useful and necessary.

The real world just lacks absolutes, as our universe really is a fuzzy and messy collection of many kinds of forces that do drive our universe into different directions simultaneously.
This, of course, is the thing that does make life interesting, even if it makes the existence of all absolutes uncomfortable in the real world.

Accepting the fact that even absolute ideas get always relative in the real world is the beginning of all science and in the it is just the thing that does differentiate it from religions, which are commonly based on some kinds of 'absolute truths'.
With the help of mathematics and geometry we can create a theoretical universe, which can help us assess and analyze the real universe. However, the things that do reside there need not to have real doubles in the real universe, as they are just vital and necessary tools, that are created to help us analyze this real universe.
The point is that even in the field of mathematics and geometry the real 'absolute truths' do reside only in this theoretical universe, but in real world we are always constrained by real, limiting things like energy, matter and time.
Understanding this does not make the mathematics or geometry or any other field of science false or suspect in any way, on the contrary.

(This piece was completely reworked at 20th of August, 2011, with changes in all of the central ideas, in fact)

PS. The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper did think along the lines that I present here. Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as 2 + 2 = 4, could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events.
Popper's solution was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true, in the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable. Concisely, the pure mathematics "2 + 2 = 4" is always true, but, when the formula is applied to real world apples, it is open to falsification.
So, in other words, Popper is saying that the theory of mathematics is a quite different thing, than is applying it to real world objects. (This PS was added on 23th of August)

Comments

Could it be that we have been carefully trained not to notice the lack of fairness in matters that do concern the economy anymore? Of course, there is also the undeniable fact that all more advanced human societies have always been and will always be fundamentally based on inequality,
All people just do not just have similar capabilities and human societies do also always need leaders, who have some power over others and are more equal than others, to paraphrase the famous sentence from George Orwell.
I have always hated the idea of ‘slippery slope’, but I do think that it can well be applied here. When we are forced to accept the inevitability of inequality in human societies, we can end up accepting even ultimate and cruel forms on inequality and extreme forms of unfairness, if we are not careful.

Of course, there is also the factor that makes the British aristocracy despise and hate all those who have not inherited their money, but who have earned it by themselves. They are, in fact, just making a virtue out of a vice.
Their example, however, does amply show how this strategy of just turning things upside down can work extremely well. There really are a lot of people, who really quite honestly do think that just inheriting wealth or a position because of the simple accident of birth can make some people more worthy than others.

A simple fact of life is that we have different scales for fairness for different situations. We will not tolerate a situation when our own peers get paid more than us for the same work. However, quite naturally we have often have very little problem in accepting that our superiors do get paid a lot more, as this is seen a quite natural way of how things do work.
As this is the case, we have in the end often only little more trouble in accepting the fact that our superiors do get paid twice as much as we and ultimately even 150 or 200 times more.

In a modern society, one factor is that the extremely well paid jobs are such that it is really difficult to even understand what these people do, and what are their real responsibilities. So the fact, that people who did cook up the housing bubble and the economic disaster following it were, in fact, rewarded handsomely for their troubles.
The people who really paid the cost of the downturn of the economy were the ordinary workers, who had nothing to do with creating the problems in the first place. We can easily see the unfairness of this situation, but we have been carefully trained to accept it just as an inevitable fact of life.

On the other hand, even if complete equality is impossible, I do believe that at least aiming for greater equality will always produce more equality than striving for greater inequality.
I do believe that the role of society in capitalism should be to alleviate the inequality that is always inevitably created by capitalism. I do not believe that it would be ever possible or even wise to stamp inequality completely out of a society. However, a realistic goal just could be to keep it on reasonable limits.

The fact that billionaire Warren Buffet can demand more taxes on the rich tells how a person can have the instinct for fairness intact, even if he makes billions. The sad fact, however, normally is that the idea of fairness is a thing that people with great incomes think they need to obliterate from their minds..
Great incomes just are generally not acquired with only pleasant means, but also by using other people to one’s own advantage or by acquiring inherited property that can have been originally acquired by somewhat unpleasant and even quite unfair means.

As the economist Nouriel Roubini has so eloquently shown, there is the distinct possibility that capitalism will die of self-inflicted wounds, when the extremely well-paid upper class spends their days finding ways to cut costs and to expand their profits endlessly.
Nowadays, all too often this will mean exporting the lower level of work to countries where work is less expensive. They just do not realize that by hiring less and less people in their own society, they will eventually erase their very own customer-base, as there will be less and less buying power in their own society, as there simply is less and less work on offer.

This is, of course, a very central problem in capitalism. When every single individual is aiming at maximizing their own profits in the short term, their common actions can eat up their own markets in the long term, but no single individual will bear responsibility for it.
Of course, the far-away countries where work is shipped will benefit from this shift and new markets will be created there. As the business is more and more global the extremely well paid upper class will never see any reason to worry about this trend, as in a globalized world they will simply earn their profits and bonuses from these new and emerging markets.

There is just one thing wrong here. They do themselves still live in the society that will be in decline because of their own actions. In this society there is an ever-increasing lack of fairness, when more and more people lose the ability to earn a decent living with the work of their hands.
Meanwhile, some people will earn more and more from running the ever-more globalized companies, for which the well-being and success of the society of their origins does mean less and less.

The saddest part is that even the last remnants of idea of fairness seems to have been obliterated among all too many of the really rich. One reason for this just might be that the zeitgeist of our time is just now so much in their favor, with the ideas like the of trickle-down effect making even outrageous levels of income acceptable.
The rich just seem to be less and less willing to pay taxes and share even small part of their good fortune with the less fortunate ones. I also suspect that one reason for this is that when their production was in their own home-country, the rich were willing to pay for education and health-service of their own future workers, but with the globalization even this incentive for ‘charity’ has vanished.
Of course, the really rich just have always had the need to develop a way of thinking that can make it possible for them to live with a complete peace of mind in luxury in a society, where some people are desperate and destitute. They just need to develop a way of seeing that poor are poor just because they are losers and rich are rich because they deserve it.

However, the real danger is, that when the rich take more and more of the production of goods to cheaper countries to maximize their own profits, the amount of people that are able to pay taxes will be diminishing rapidly.
If even the people who are growing rich because of this development are at the same less and less willing to take part in the upkeep of society, this will lead to big trouble indeed.

There will be more and more urban poor in the developing world, when the manual jobs they held previously are being transferred to cheaper countries, but at the same time the society has less and less ability to help them, when the income-base of the society keeps being eroded.
The recent riots in England have many kinds of causes, but the frustration in front of an extremely bleak economic future for the poor just may be one of the reasons why things flared up just now.

I do not believe in any kind of socialization of the economy, but I do believe in increasing the level of fairness in our society and even fostering solidarity between all members of it.
I believe that I do not need even to harbor any dogmas in this respect, The only thing that really is required from me personally is just the willingness to advocate the things that I understand to be able to increase the level of fairness in a society, and oppose the things that will in my own mind increase the level of unfairness.

Comments

"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

- Denis Diderot in “Essai sur le Mérite de la Vertu” (1745)

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice."

-Denis Diderot in “Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws” (1774)

"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid."

-Denis Diredot in "Refutation of Helvétius" (written 1773-76, published 1875)

"Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land."

- Denis Diderot in “The character Suzanne Simon”, in “La Religieuse” (1796)

"There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint."

-Denis Diderot as quoted in Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe : The Key to a Whole New World of Enlightenment and Enrichment (2006)

"To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”

- Denis Diderot, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966)

“The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.”

-Denis Diderot in “Pensées Philosophiques” (1746)

“One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.”

-Denis Diderot in “Pensées Philosophiques” (1746)

"A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone."

-Denis Diderot as quoted in “The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963)

“Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.”

-Denis Diderot in “Article on Political Authority”, L'Encyclopédie (1751 - 1766)

“In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.”

- Denis Diderot in “On the Interpretation of Nature” (1753)

"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."

- Denis Diderot in “On Dramatic Poetry” (1758)

“Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.”

-Denis Diderot in “Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws” (1774)

“Distance is a great promoter of admiration!”

- Denis Diderot as quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks”,

“The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.”

-Denis Diderot in “Elements of Physiology” (1875)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_diderot
"Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent persona during the Enlightenment and is best-known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. His articles included many topics of the Enlightenment."

Comments

It may sound quite paradoxical, but accepting the lack of final and unmovable answers does not, in fact, make a person more insecure, but it can make one’s life much more secure. Of course, one can not forget the sorry fact of life that humans are as species prone to seek absolute truths even in places where absolute truths cannot exist.
However, if I base my life-stance on any kind of prophesied or revealed 'absolute truths', my life will be quite inevitably badly shaken if I some day do find out that they are not in fact the absolutely truths.
On the other hand, a person who has from the beginning been expecting to find better and better answers as he or she goes along, as so typically happens in science, does not generally have to face such disappointments.

Even a very strong inner conviction about an ‘absolute truth’ needs not to have any truth-value at all, if it is based on some kind of prophecy or inner revelation and it does not get any better with time.
On the other hand just an educated guess that is formed by using the scientific method that is based on even partially known facts does just become the better, the more facts are to be known later on, even if a final and unmovable answer may probably often never be available.
So, a bit paradoxically one could even say that a life-view which is based on set of non-moving and absolute truths is on much shakier foundations than a life-view that is based on movable and changeable sets of ‘truths’ and ideas.

In the latter case, one can expect new truths to surpass even the most established old ones, if new knowledge really does require doing it. Facing the quite inevitable vast changes in the world and knowledge of it do not leave a person gasping for air, as is often the case if a thing that has been seen to be an ‘absolute truth’ is surpassed by new and better knowledge.
Of course, just learning a simple set of unmovable ‘truths’ and living trusting in them, no matter what, is always the easy way out, but the easiest and cheapest things are not necessarily the best ones here as they are not in the life in general.

However, there does exist a wide set of ‘good enough truths’ in science, which are on the surface as unmoving and stable as some of the ‘absolute truths’ that are offered by religions. For example, the theory of gravity or the theory of nature of light have not been changed for a very long time.
However, the real modern scientific method is very deep down based on the assumption that we can never know even these things for sure.

All facts and new ideas that are presented in the realm of science are always, in the end, just the best possible approximations and even educated guesses that we can make at any given moment. A real scientific guess is, however, always based on the best possible currently available evidence.
It is also always subject to change, if compelling and widely enough accepted new evidence does become available.
Of course, some of scientific theories have achieved such levels of accuracy, that there has not been any need to change them for a very long time. We can, in practice, even treat them very similar to ‘absolute truths’ in everyday life.
It is possible to base other theories on them in the full knowledge that there is currently no reason whatsoever to doubt them. That does not mean that there would not always also remain the possibility, that they need to be changed on a later date, and the theories that were derived from them need just to be adjusted as well.

This is, of course, the real big difference in science, when it is compared with religions. In them an awfully lot of things are commonly presented as unmovable truths, that need and can never to be questioned, as they just are assumed as given from the beginning.
However, if I put my trust in science, I do not, if fact, have to trust in any kind of unmoving model of ideas and universe, but in fact I put my trust in the idea that we can improve our knowledge of our universe constantly.

Of course, dogmatic beliefs can and have arisen also in the realm of science, as for example the Aristotelian ideas that held sway for centuries. However, when the basic ideas of change and improvement are accepted in the core of the system, change and improvement really do occur much more easily than in any truly dogmatic system of thought.

(the following ideas on absolutes are from my earlier posting in this blog, but I think I need to bring these ideas up here also)

In fact, come to think of it, most things in the world really do not have any definite, final answers; contrary to what many people would like to think. Of course, final-sounding answers are often very cozy and comforting.
As Bertrand Russell famously said, claiming to have certainty when there is, in fact, none available is a very common human vice, but it is still a vice.

Realizing this does not stop us from striving to have the best possible knowledge it is possible to acquire; in fact, just this realization can be the driving force that will constantly increase knowledge of humans, our societies and of the universe.
History already does amply show that the love of comfortable, unmovable truths can slow or even stop altogether human progress, if we just allow these unmoving truths to accumulate deep enough.

One of the deepest human emotions is the desire for security and certainty. Humans have after all lived for millions of years in unpredictable, often hostile environments, where danger can lurk anywhere and a sanctuary offered by any kind of certainty has always been welcome.
The feeling of knowing for certain where one really stands just is an extremely satisfying feeling for all humans. This is of course one of the main reasons why the religions have been so successful, as they do offer absolutes in areas where absolutes cannot exist.

This very desire for certainty could also be one of the reasons why it could be very hard for some to swallow the things that I want to say next. Namely the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that no unequivocally unchanging or in other words ‘absolute’ truths do exist in the real world in which we do exist.
I claim that absolute truths do exist only in the shadow world of theory and ideas, which is basically a mental reflection of the real world that the human mind can and will create.

In this world of ideas and theory things can be processed in a quite different way than in a real world and often quite independent of it. This world of ideas and theory is of course mostly based on the perceptions we have of the real world.
However, as it is not constrained by the limits imposed by the real world, the things that we do create in the world of ideas and theory do not need to have any connections with the real world in the end, as so often happens in religions.

On the other hand, especially in the world of science some kind of connection to the real world is always required even from the most far-fetched ideas and theories for them to be seen as part of science.
Science can reveal patterns and connections which are hidden from the naked eye and which do exist between many kinds of real world objects and phenomena, but in real science they are always derived from the properties of real-world objects and phenomena.

This idea is of course also a complete reversal of the Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which ordinary people see just the shadows of universal ideas that can be seen only by ‘philosophers’ or people with exceptional capabilities and the real-world objects we see are just imperfect copies of some kind of perfect, ideal models of things that do exist in some kind of higher level of existence.
Of course, Plato is just plain wrong and the reverse is true; humans can (and do) create perfect ideas of things that do all exist so imperfectly (and with great variations) in the real world.

The more I think of it the more I do become convinced that the things and phenomena that do seem to be held as absolutely true on the surface are that mostly just because of how we interpret and observe things as humans with a set of certain very restricted capabilities.
I do even think now that unequivocally absolute and unchanging truths can in practice exist only in an abstract universe, which is not bound by the laws of nature.

Of course, even this claim cannot be an absolute truth; it is true even for me only as far as I do not gain knowledge of any absolute truths that exist in the real world and which cannot ever be changed by anything.
At this point ,it is good to remember that even the sun will rise on Earth for over 5 billion more times, but one day the red giant that once was our sun will swallow the planet Earth and the sun will never rise again.

So, the fact that the sun always rises on Earth is not an absolute and unchanging truth. It is just an undisputed fact that has the value of a ‘absolute truth’ only for a limited duration of time.
The following idea may seem even outrageous for some people, but I do think that also logic can be absolutely true only when it is applied to things where also the premises used are always absolutely true and will never change.
As far as I know such things do exist only in the abstract world, not in the real world in which we do live in, as all the things that we deal in a real world can change with time. Only abstract ideas and abstract thoughts can remain unchanged forever.
Of course, logic can be an extremely valuable tool, even if it is not absolutely true, but just true enough to serve our practical purposes.

In the end logic just is only as true in our practical world as are the practical premises that are being used, even if in the world of theory an idea can sound and shine like an absolute truth.

So, a chain of logic can appear to be ‘absolutely true’ on the world of ideas, but it does normally become compromised the very moment when it is applied to any kind of real-world problem, as in the real world things do not always remain stable and unchanged.
Any fact or an idea that could be an extremely true and well established fact yesterday just may be false today or after five or five billion years.

In a similar vein, the vast field of metaphysics which just loves to deal with absolutes can producevery absolute-sounding ideas only because it deals with pure abstractions which do not exist in the real world.
In fact, most metaphysics cannot be applied to the real world in any meaningful way. A lot of metaphysics is ,in fact, just built to support some of the real world-ideas that we do already have.

There simply is no right or wrong metaphysics, but there is only currently popular or less popular metaphysics. In the end, there simply is no way of ever showing which of the ideas presented in metaphysics could be the right ones. A sure sign of this is that no major metaphysical idea that has ever been presented is not without its fans today.
So, an idea, which is presented as metaphysical preposition is already beyond any real evaluation when it is presented as metaphysics. This is of course a tactic that has been used extremely successfully by many kinds of religious apologists, but also by Marx and many of his followers.
The hardest thing to swallow for many could be that in my mind even mathematics is absolute only as long as it is used theoretically. It might be hard to accept that all mathematical equations that do not concern real world objects or their properties are theoretical in nature.

The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is just a mathematical theory of how things can be added up. Counting first two fungus and adding two fungus to it can produce a result of four fungus, but as in the real world it is often quite impossible to say where one fungus starts and a second stops, the result is always just ‘about four’ and not any kind of absolute.
As soon one starts to count a real objects with the 2 + 2 = 4 equation this equation becomes an approximation and the real result depends how one defines the things that are being counted.

So, even the equation of “2 + 2 = 4” is absolutely true only as long as it is not applied to the real world, and do not of what are the things that are to be counted. The moment we apply it to real world objects there is an element of sudden change and surprise that do make the exact result less than absolute.
There are of course other things that seem to be absolutes; for example the speed of light or many of the properties of sub-atomic particles.

However, they are absolutes only in our own version of the universe, but if any of the multiverse-theories does really hold water, the constants that we see as unmoving and final just could be one version of the thing and the same values could anything in a different parallel or even serial version of the universe.
Of course, we have no real way (at the moment at least) for finding out if the multiverse-theory is true, but as there is a real chance of it being true, even the most absolute-sounding things can be less than absolute.

All this does not mean that I would claim that there could not be any absolute truths. I am just saying that I do not know of things that would be always true without any kind of change making them possibly untrue some day.
The time-frames required for these changes can be of course be beyond the real capabilities of the human mind.
Of course, in practical terms there are very many things that can be treated as being ‘absolutely true’ in real life, even if we know that also they can change on some extremely distant day.

(The beginning of this piece was completely rewritten and the headline was changed at 14th of August)

Comments

Mr Russell had the wonderful ability of being able to look through and behind the things that make us follow all kinds of customs and traditions, often without giving them a second thought.
Of course, we need customs and traditions, but we need also people who can look at them critically at times and this is what Bertrand Russell did with gusto.
Bertrand Russell did use the powerful weapon of reason to look at things which are not basically often very rational at all. His results are not always applicable to the real world as such, but I do think that they can act as great starting points for future thought.

However, I do not believe that Bertrand Russell did find the absolute truth on anything, even if I do see him one of the freest minds of the past few centuries. In fact, he would have been gravely offended if somebody would have suggested such a thing, as he did not believe in absolute truths himself at all.
However, he had the ability to look at things from new angles. The most wonderful thing is that did this seemingly often quite free from all prejudice and bigotry.

Of course, he had his very own definite set of favorite ideas, which he saw as true and most of wise for humanity as the whole.
However, the more I read him the more I am surprised on his ability to free himself from the constraints of ideology and look at things at their face value.

Bertrand Russell was of course a child of his own times, as we all are. During his incredibly long writing career he did write some things that even he gravely regretted a few decades later. The most wonderful thing about him, however, was his ability to admit his errors. He did really change his views on some central ideas, when he received new compelling evidence on that he had been wrong.
Largely because of this ability to change he is also seen as spineless and unprincipled by some. There really are people who think that it is better to stick to your guns, even if you know that you are wrong.
A man of high principles sadly very often becomes a man with outdated ideas, when new information makes changing ones views necessary. Bertrand Russell was never such a man, but he always had his basic principles intact, there is no doubt about that.

Bertrand Russell was far from a dry scientist, but he was a very passionate man, who spoke and worked relentlessly on things that he saw as beneficial for the whole of human kind. Most of all peace was a central issue for him for all of his life, but issues concerning social justice for all levels were near his heart all his life.
He did much work in the field of finding a way to further a more human kind education also, but here his work was seemingly quite in vain.

For me at least the main legacy that he left behind, however, is the idea that all things that humans do can and must be analyzed also critically. The ability to free ones mind from the constraints of the moment and current society and look at very basic needs of human beings is a thing that I hope I could perhaps some day learn from this extraordinary figure.

Comments

This may sound a bit far-fetched at first, I freely admit, but let me explain a bit deeper before dismissing this idea. The immense diversity American in the religious field is a result of the policy of strict separation of state and religion. So the American churches have had to learn to fend for themselves and they have had to develop way s that can make people want to come there and also pay for the fun.
In the European state-churches with their rights of taxation such need has not emerged, and the net result is that the real religious fervor is a thing that is seen only in the independent Christian fringe-movements.

On the other hand in the Islamic world there is basically no separation of state and religion at all. In fact, Islam is all too often used as a very basic building block for the whole society. In many Islamic countries the whole direction of policies is on the surface at least decided solely on the basis of religion.
The important thing, however, is that in Islam (outside the mostly Iranian Shite faction) there is very little formal organization in the religion itself, even if there are great varieties even in this and is some Islamic countries state has a stronger hold on the running of religious life than in others.

However, in the end, in general every individual Iman is on just as a shaky footing as his American counterpart is. They compete for followers and money in the form of donations on a daily basis with other Imans and only the really successful ones are respected and get good crowds.
This development has brought about a situation where the “purity” of the message is one of the major tools used to bolster one’s own standing in this hard religious competition.

When any apparent lack of strong convictions can and will be used against a competitor, it is very difficult to succeed by running any kind of liberal ministry. In the hard competition, one just can not challenge any of the basic teachings of Islam, even if the preachers privately would well know how their suitability to the modern world is fast diminishing by the day.
A very similar process of unrelenting religious competition is going on in the United States also and has created a class of ultra-conservative preachers for whom the “purity” and even extremism of their message is one of their most important marketing tools.

Of course, there are immense varieties in the relationship of state and religion in the diverse Islamic world. There is a direct Islamic theocracy of Iran and the medieval feudal state of Saudi-Arabia where Islam is used to justify a cruel and feudal, even medieval system of monarchy.
On the other hand there are Islamic countries like Lebanon or Algeria, where religion is not at the forefront at all, but current governments are fighting the Islamic movements to the end. There in between are possible variations of the theme.

On the other hand, the degree of how the relationship between religion and state stands in Islamic societies could largely be a result of how big impact the short period of rule by the western colonial powers did have in them.
The Algerian or Lebanonian societies were influenced to a far greater degree than many others by the European ideas of equality of the sexes, independent, secular law-based legal system and many other humanistic European innovations.

The easily discernible differences in between Pakistan and Algeria are according to also Niall Ferguson in part because of the differences in the type of colonial rule that was used in them.
The French did have a mission of spreading their (often also quite modern and humanistic) ideas to their holdings. On the other hand the British were often quite content to rule by proxy and use the local elites to help them rule.
The British just were all too often happy to collect the taxes and sell their wares to locals. That is a reason why the effect of their colonial rule was in some indirectly ruled countries much smaller in everyday-life and most of all legislation than of the French.

However, Iran and Saudi-Arabia who did never lose their formal independence had no such direct humanistic influences, as they were never under the direct colonial rule.
On the other hand, the Shite version of Islam is often compared with Catholic Church, as it has differs vastly from the mainstream Sunni Islam even in this respect. The Shia Islam is based on a rigid and formal hierarchy that is quite unknown in most parts of Sunni Islam.
Niall Ferguson reminds in his book how Sunni world lost a long-standing central source of leadership, when the new republic of Turkey did put on and on the caliphate in 1924. The Osman caliphs had up this point been also the de facto religious leaders of the Sunni world.

The development of religion in Iran has always been quite separate from the developments in the Sunni world. This process was intensified after the Persian Shahs did for political and tactical reasons choose the Shia faith as their own state-religion.
Shia faith has really developed like the Catholic Church, when the Sunni world has developed more like the American Evangelical scene.
The end result has been strong conservatism in both cases, when the countries that were under the Protestant state churches have given birth to modern secular states.

The unchanging and day-by-day more old-fashioned nature of mainstream Islam just might be a bit paradoxically to a large degree be a result of lack of formal organization, as a tightly led centralize organization can be steered to new directions by just a few people with new ideas.
On the other hand, a disorganized system of thought that relies solely on the power of tradition and draws its whole legitimacy form ancient teachings can resist change much, much more effectively than any state-lead formal religious organization.

So, both the extreme openness and extreme closeness can lead to similar end results, when the development in Western Europe does show what can happen when a monolithic faith is splintered into national entities.
Most of what it does show can happen if these local churches are changed with time by the strong humanistic tendencies that took hold of these societies. In the meantime, the monolithic Catholic Church could fight these tendencies with far greater success, as on the other hand could the leaderless Sunni Islam too.

Comments

Also, if I provide links to the writings of the Norwegian madman, I will just make him a service in his quest for publicity, even if these idiotic ramblings will not of course never have any effect on sane people at all.
I know well that all normal people can handle also rubbish like these books and texts. However I think that spreading links to them is not wise in the long run, as the more people follow those links and read this utter bullshit, the more there is a possibility that somebody starts taking it seriously.

At this point, I must make it clear that in my mind refraining from actively spreading a text is not censorship. I do not spread a lot of other texts that I see as enjoyable and worthwhile, but nobody can say that I am censoring them by not spreading them.
I am here speaking about actively spreading things like 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' or ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, which are just blatant forgeries and propaganda from which no actual information of anything can ever be gleaned.

I do think that there are a few books that can quite universally be classed as evil: 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and 'The Malleus Maleficarum' are surely among them. On top of all, they both are well known to be just blatant forgeries.They have just one  aim: hurting a certain group of people. Besides they do not have any kind of literary merits either.
I can well understand and support the spreading of a good summary of the idiocy contained in these kinds of books, but why should anybody read a book that is simply evil and full of evil lies that try only to hurt other people?
Reading Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell or Darwin or Galileo will increase your knowledge on some front, but reading evil bullshit will not help you develop in any way. Reading evil bullshit can even affect your mind, as the most evil and most utter bullshit is normally carefully designed to have that effect.

I do not see how any sane person would not say that any of these books is not evil. Actively spreading the message of pure evil is not a thing that I do see as a thing a decent person would engage him- or herself, ever.
I am not saying at all that people who know what they are doing should not read and analyze also these things, but I'm against linking to the works themselves in public. I simply see that innocent-sounding linking to a thing can, in fact, be promoting this evil stuff in the real world.

I must repeat myself; I am speaking about even diminishing the online availability of even these utterly idiotic treatises at all, but just about actively promoting evil by marketing it with providing links to it. I just happen also to think that just morbid curiosity is not a compelling enough reason to delve into shit for any longer period of time, if you already know it is shit.
I see this as also a problem of the allocation of resources; If I spend my days studying how the evil in the world works, I will perhaps miss the good parts, as there are always both sides available and your view of the world will in the end be molded by the things that you spend your days with.

However, my main point remains this: it just is not wise to promote bullshit actively, when you well know yourself that a thing actually is bullshit. If you think that reading 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' or ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ is a excellent way to spend your evenings, that is of course your own problem. However, the thing I am speaking of here is if the people who do actively oppose ideas that are being presented in books like this should be spreading links to them and so also inevitably promote them.
This kind of decision does not depend on any outside sources saying what to promote and what not, but I think that one can get very far simply by using ones own intelligence in every single instance to decide what is worth of our attention and what is not.

I must stress that I am not suggesting suppressing or censoring anything, but just refraining from promoting utter bullshit, if you well know that it is bullshit.

Comments

This state of affairs is of course proof of how humans are able to alter their minds to an extraordinary degree; it is not any kind of proof of that there would exist different ‘realities’.
One can develop an endless amount of different alternative realities in one's mind or develop old, earlier made-up realities even further, but these creations do exist only in the mind of a person who believes in them.
They can feel even very real, if belief just is strong enough. However, the true reality is the one that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Of course, the reality of a bacteria is quite different to the reality of an ant and the reality of an ant is extremely different from ours. However, they do share the same basic reality, even if they can perceive it very differently.
Similarly the reality probably looks extremely different on the level of a quark or a galaxy, but they still do exist as parts of the same reality.

If the multiverse-theory is correct it is possible that there is an endless amount of other universes, but according to what we know now we just might never find out if these ideas are true or not. In any case they are part of the same reality in which we do live, they are only in different parts of it, and they can be formed differently.
The current theory goes that the multiple universes do not overlap. Pondering about their existence or nonexistence is in the end just a purely mental exercise for us, as the other possible universes have no practical way of affecting (or even to be observed in any way) from our own bubble of a universe.
However, if I claim that there is only one reality, nothing in this statement implies that I would claim to know any kind of final truth about its true nature or structure.

If we assume that there is an alternative reality, but it cannot be observed in any way in reality in which we do live in, how could we become truly convinced of its existence in the first place?
If this alternative reality cannot cause anything observable in the reality in which we do live in, what difference would its existence or nonexistence make to anybody?
If there would be any real-world effects caused by some kind of ‘alternative reality’, we should be able to verify their existence easily, and if there is none, there is no real reason to believe in their existence.

An alternative reality could, of course, be like the other universes in the multiverse theory - then their existence or nonexistence would not make any real difference to us, as we can probably never observe them and they do not affect our own reality in any way.
Of course we can well still think about all kinds of alternative realities endlessly and even imagine their existence in minute detail in theory. After all we have the ability to make up an endless amount of alternative realities in our minds, if we just have the will and enough spare time.

On the other hand, if there is no real evidence and if we base our belief in existence of an 'alternative reality" on writings of 'sages', hearsay and old stories, there is no real difference to the more formal kinds of religions, I'm afraid.
One should not forget that if there would be any even the tiniest observable fact, any single testable hypothesis the theories of 'alternative realities' would be instantly part of the mainstream science.

Alas, sadly that is not the case and all 'alternative realities' are still in the class of religious beliefs, where people do accept all kinds of ideas without any kind of real, hard evidence.
The existence of 'alternative reality' would soon be taught in every class and every university, if there just would be any kind of evidence of their existence to be had. One must just think about the glory and fame which such a revolutionary finding would bring to any scientist.
There is no real reason why scientists all over the world would not seek to prove the existence of alternative realities, but just the lack for any means of verifying the existence of things that do not exist.

Comments

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience? A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable."

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. “

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.”

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.”

Sigmund Freud in “A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)

“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”

Sigmund Freud in “A Philosophy of Life” (Lecture 35)

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

- Sigmund Freud in a letter to Ernest Jones (1933)

“The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.”

- Sigmund Freud in “Moses and Monotheism” (1938)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_freud
"Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst.
Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture."

Comments

I know that this is a problem that can perhaps ever be solved, but I see that at the core of the problem of these mass-shootings of mostly total strangers is the quest for fame that these acts can satisfy.
On the other hand, the shadier part of mass-media has become very much dependent on the interest they can gather for the things they publish and more ghastly things you do perpetrate, the more interesting you do become.

There is a ready-made spiral of bad going on. The media do spend tens of pages and hundreds of photos to tell everything humanly possible about the perpetrators of these hideous deeds.
It does not take much to realize that a normal person with no special skills or qualities can never achieve this level of instant, huge fame with normal means.

The model for action is there, even the price is extremely high. A person must just be really out of his or her mind to perpetrate a thing like this. For just an extremely unstable mind the instant fame could also at some point seem to be a valid option, if the other options are just things like a suicide.
I do not believe that we could really do anything about this problem, even if a general realization of the existence of this phenomena could of course help.

However, I fear that there just are too big economic interests at stake here for this to ever happen. Some media-outlets just do make incredible amounts of money from reporting about hideous crimes.
An all too sizable part of the media all over the world just does thrive on things like this. They make huge profits from telling the most sordid and grey details about the meaningless and all too often really hideously uninteresting details about the sorry lives of these people.

The media do dutifully fulfill all, even the highest wishes, of these people, who are after fame they well know they would never achieve with any other way. Their grey and meaningless lives do become suddenly extremely interesting, when they have done their horrible deed.
Maybe the problem is that normal life is just not hot enough for the media; we become crime-junkies, who just want our daily servings of ever more gory details, more desperation, more sorrow to feed our appetite for deep emotions.

At the heart of the problem just might be the same thing that makes some of us want harder and harder porn with time. Our emotions are just not stirred by the normal, real life anymore, when media combs through the lives of the seven billion people of the world and gathers the most sordid and sorry human incidents for us to marvel at every single day.

PS. I must add that I am saying all this as a journalist with over 20 years of active first line duty in media under my belt.

Comments

This very desire for certainty could also be one of the reasons why it could be very hard for some to swallow the things that I want to say next. Namely the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that no unequivocally unchanging or in other words ‘absolute’ truths do exist in the real world in which we do exist.
I claim that absolute truths do exist only in the shadow world of theory and ideas, which is basically a mental reflection of the real world that the human mind can and will create.

In this world of ideas and theory things can be processed in a quite different way than in a real world and often quite independent of it.
This world of ideas and theory is of course mostly based on the perceptions we have of the real world.
However, as it is not constrained by the limits imposed by the real world, the things that we do create in the world of ideas and theory need not to have any connections to real world in the end, as so often happens in religions.

On the other hand especially in the world of science some kind of a connection to the real world is always required even from the most far-fetched ideas and theories for them to be seen as part of science.
Science can reveal patterns and connections which are hidden from the naked eye and which do exist between many kinds of real world objects and phenomena, but in real science they are always derived from the properties of real-world objects and phenomena.

This idea is of course also a complete reversal of the Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which ordinary people see just the shadows of universal ideas that can be seen only by ‘philosophers’ or people with exceptional capabilities and the real-world objects we see are just imperfect copies of some kind of perfect, ideal models of things that do exist in some kind of higher level of existence.
Of course Plato is just plain wrong and the reverse is true; humans can (and do) create perfect ideas of things that do all exist so imperfectly with great variations in the real world.

The more I think of it the more I do become convinced that the things and phenomena that do seem to be held as absolutely true on the surface are that mostly just because of how we interpret and observe things as humans with a set of certain very restricted capabilities.
I do even think now that unequivocally absolute and unchanging truths can in practice exist only in an abstract universe, which is not bound by the laws of nature.

Of course even this claim cannot be an absolute truth; it is true even for me only as far as I do not gain knowledge of any absolute truths that exist in the real world and which cannot ever be changed by anything.

At this point it is good to remember that even the sun will rise on Earth for over 5 billion more times, but one day the red giant that once was our sun will swallow the planet Earth and the sun will never rise again.
And so the fact that sun always rises on Earth is not a absolute and unchanging truth. It is just a undisputed fact that has the value of a ‘absolute truth’ only for a limited duration of time.

The following idea may seem even outrageous for some people, but I do think that also logic can be absolutely true only when it is applied to things where also the premises used are always absolutely true and will never change.
As far as I know such things do exist only in the abstract world, not in the real world in which we do live in, as all the things that we deal in a real world can change with time. Only abstract ideas and abstract thoughts can remain unchanged forever.
Of course logic can be a extremely valuable tool, even if it is not absolutely true, but just true enough to serve our practical purposes.
In the end logic just is only as true in our practical world as are the practical premises that are being used, even if in the world of theory an idea can sound and shine like an absolute truth.

So, a chain of logic can appear to be ‘absolutely true’ on the world of ideas, but it does normally become compromised the very moment when it is applied to any kind of real-world problem, as in real world things do not always remain stable and unchanged.
Any fact or an idea that could be a extremely true and well established fact yesterday just may be false today or after five or five billion years.

In similar vein the vast field of metaphysics that just loves to deal with absolutes can produce absolute-sounding ideas only because it deals with pure abstractions which do not exist in the real world.
In fact most metaphysics cannot be applied to the real world in any meaningful way. A lot of metaphysics is in fact just built to support some of the the real world-ideas that we do already have.

There simply is no right or wrong metaphysics, but there is only currently popular or less popular metaphysics. In the end there simply is no way of ever showing which of the ideas presented in metaphysics could be the right ones.
A sure sign of this is that no major metaphysical idea that has ever been presented is not without its fans today.
So a idea which is presented as metaphysical preposition is already beyond any real evaluation when it is presented as metaphysics. This is of course a tactic that has been used extremely successfully by many kinds of religious apologists and also by Marx and many of his followers.

The hardest thing to swallow for many could be that in my mind even mathematics is absolute only as long as it is used theoretically. It might be hard to accept that all mathematical equations that do not concern real world objects or their properties are theoretical in nature.
The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is just a mathematical theory of how things can be added up. Counting first two fungus and adding two fungus to it can produce a result of four fungus, but as in real world it is often quite impossible to say where one fungus starts and a second stops, the result is always just ‘about four’ and not any kind of absolute.

As soon one starts to count real world objects with the 2 + 2 = 4 equation this equation becomes an approximation and the real result depends how one defines the things that are being counted.
So, even the equation of “2 + 2 = 4” is absolutely true only as long as it is not applied to the real world and is not aware of what is being counted. The moment we apply it to real world objects there is a element of sudden change and surprise that do make the exact result less than absolute.

There are of course other things that seem to be absolutes; for example the speed of light or many of the properties of sub-atomic particles.
However, they are absolutes only in our own version of universe, but if any of the multiverse-theories does hold water, the constants that we see as unmoving and final just could be one version of the thing and the same values could anything in a different parallel or even serial version of universe.

Of course we have no real way at the moment of finding out if this multiverse-theory is true, but as there is a real chance of it being true, even the most absolute-sounding things can be less than absolute.
All this does not mean that I would claim that there could not be any absolute truths. I am just saying that I do not know of things that would be always true without any kind of possible of change making them untrue some day. The time-frames required for these changes can be of course be beyond the real capabilities of the human mind.
Of course in practical terms there are very many things that can be treated as being ‘absolutely true’ in real life, even if we know that also they can change on some extremely distant day.

Comments

"Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years."

- Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies" (1997)

‎"Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives."

— Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (2005)

‎"Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

- Jared Diamond in "The Third Chimpanzee" (1991)

"Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world."

— Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

‎"History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

— Jared Diamond in "Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality"

"Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture."

— Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
"Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse. Diamond has been called a polymath."

Jared Diamond in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jared-Diamond/142643729175

Comments

"Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years."

- Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies" (1997)

‎"Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives."

— Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (2005)

‎"Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

- Jared Diamond in "The Third Chimpanzee" (1991)

"Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world."

— Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

‎"History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

— Jared Diamond in "Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality"

"Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture."

— Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
"Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse. Diamond has been called a polymath."

Jared Diamond in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jared-Diamond/142643729175

Comments

Many religious people like to say that if universe was not ‘created’ on purpose it need to have happened through accident. However, many people seem to be just confused in the use human ideas of "accident" and "purpose".
That Earth goes round the sun is not a accident but a result of a properties of large masses of matter, where masses draw other masses with a certain force.
Similarly the nature of our universe is not "accident", but follows form certain properties that are inherent in of the things that do make it up.

The fact that at the very moment if birth of our universe matter did take a certain form was a result of the properties of the how energy will behave in such a situation.
The very first forms of matter were extremely uniform and simple, but when things progressed, there was more and more diversity, as extremely small differences in local conditions did create the first extremely small local differences also in the matter.

When these a little different particles did interact with other particles in different ways, the complexity did steadily rise and the level of differences between different kinds of matter did also rise steadily.
Again, there needed to be any kind of planning, or hidden DNA, but the inevitable properties of particles and matter at prevailing conditions made things go to a certain direction that was quite inevitable, even if it was not planned.

The history of our universe in the story of rise in complexity and the more complex things do get, the more there are rules that define how things do progress. Again, these rules need not to planned or result of a mysterious matter-DNA, but a result of the rules that were simply derived from the rules that were present in the earlier incarnations of matter.
With the rise in in complexity, also the rules do steadily get more complex, as earlier simpler rules are combined when different layers of matter do interact with other layers.

There really needs not be any kind of planning when the relentless interactions between differentiating forms of matter do create new kinds of matter. The results are not accidents, but are always based on the different inherent properties of the parties that did take part in the interactions.
These interaction did create new and all time more complex forms of matter until level of complexity was reached where the first lifelike forms did see their birth.
Their structure and functionality are decided by the different forms of matter that did take part in the interactions that did create them and they are not any kind of random ‘accident’.

A human idea of accident includes very often also idea of intent, which is not at all present in nature. If a comet hits the planet Earth and wipes out all life, it is not a accident in a way accidents happen to people who are careless, but a result of universe being such as it is and of the fact that comets and planets do exist and from time to time they will collide. There is nothing accidental in this, but all follows from the nature of our universe.

We are of course lucky that no such incident has not razed life from earth and we do exist, but this is not because of planning, but because such incident just are very rare at this stage of maturity in our planetary system.
In the end we cannot know how many struggling life forms have been wiped out in different stages of their development all over the universe, just because they were not as lucky as we have been. Here the idea of accident has of course a role, but again not as a originator of complex processes, but a thing that does end them randomly.

The narrow and extremely restricted way of seeing all things from the perspective of human species, which is extremely prevalent among religious circles of course leads into curious way of thinking where things in nature do happen to please or cause consternation among humans.
The basic thing I am trying to say here is that the birth and the nature of our universe is no accident, if it follows from the basic properties of the matter that does build it up.

Accident is something that can happen or not happen by chance, but I do claim that our universe is as it because its building blocks have certain properties that did necessarily lead into its creation. It was no accident but an inevitability.
This just is a thing that is seemingly too hard to grasp for people who want to see human-like motivations and intentions also in nature.
Accidents do happen randomly, but inevitable things do not. How does a 'inevitable accident' sound to you?

Comments

Many religious people like to say that if universe was not ‘created’ on purpose it need to have happened through accident. However, many people seem to be just confused in the use human ideas of "accident" and "purpose".
That Earth goes round the sun is not a accident but a result of a properties of large masses of matter, where masses draw other masses with a certain force.
Similarly the nature of our universe is not "accident", but follows form certain properties that are inherent in of the things that do make it up.

The fact that at the very moment if birth of our universe matter did take a certain form was a result of the properties of the how energy will behave in such a situation.
The very first forms of matter were extremely uniform and simple, but when things progressed, there was more and more diversity, as extremely small differences in local conditions did create the first extremely small local differences also in the matter.

When these a little different particles did interact with other particles in different ways, the complexity did steadily rise and the level of differences between different kinds of matter did also rise steadily.
Again, there needed to be any kind of planning, or hidden DNA, but the inevitable properties of particles and matter at prevailing conditions made things go to a certain direction that was quite inevitable, even if it was not planned.

The history of our universe in the story of rise in complexity and the more complex things do get, the more there are rules that define how things do progress. Again, these rules need not to planned or result of a mysterious matter-DNA, but a result of the rules that were simply derived from the rules that were present in the earlier incarnations of matter.
With the rise in in complexity, also the rules do steadily get more complex, as earlier simpler rules are combined when different layers of matter do interact with other layers.

There really needs not be any kind of planning when the relentless interactions between differentiating forms of matter do create new kinds of matter. The results are not accidents, but are always based on the different inherent properties of the parties that did take part in the interactions.
These interaction did create new and all time more complex forms of matter until level of complexity was reached where the first lifelike forms did see their birth.
Their structure and functionality are decided by the different forms of matter that did take part in the interactions that did create them and they are not any kind of random ‘accident’.

A human idea of accident includes very often also idea of intent, which is not at all present in nature. If a comet hits the planet Earth and wipes out all life, it is not a accident in a way accidents happen to people who are careless, but a result of universe being such as it is and of the fact that comets and planets do exist and from time to time they will collide. There is nothing accidental in this, but all follows from the nature of our universe.

We are of course lucky that no such incident has not razed life from earth and we do exist, but this is not because of planning, but because such incident just are very rare at this stage of maturity in our planetary system.
In the end we cannot know how many struggling life forms have been wiped out in different stages of their development all over the universe, just because they were not as lucky as we have been. Here the idea of accident has of course a role, but again not as a originator of complex processes, but a thing that does end them randomly.

The narrow and extremely restricted way of seeing all things from the perspective of human species, which is extremely prevalent among religious circles of course leads into curious way of thinking where things in nature do happen to please or cause consternation among humans.
The basic thing I am trying to say here is that the birth and the nature of our universe is no accident, if it follows from the basic properties of the matter that does build it up.

Accident is something that can happen or not happen by chance, but I do claim that our universe is as it because its building blocks have certain properties that did necessarily lead into its creation. It was no accident but an inevitability.
This just is a thing that is seemingly too hard to grasp for people who want to see human-like motivations and intentions also in nature.
Accidents do happen randomly, but inevitable things do not. How does a 'inevitable accident' sound to you?

Comments

If one look very carefully the texts by Tacitus and Josephus, that are widely used as non-religious evidence of the existence of Jesus, one soon realizes that they are just repeating things that were believed and told among the followers of the new sect.
Either of these texts does not show that Tacitus or Josephus would have had any kind of personal knowledge of matters, but both of them do repeat things that they have heard from others. These texts just do show that at least some of the beliefs that were associated with the character of Jesus did already exist at the time of Tacitus and Josephus.

It is a very common mistake to see Josephus and Tacitus some kind of eye-witnesses. It is so common just because the followers of the Christian faith have been spreading this idea quite consciously. They have succeeded in making the true nature of these texts as information coming from third hand has been lost even for some scientists. This has mostly of course happened because people have very sorely wanted to have any kind of proof to support their beliefs.
In reality the only real fact that we have is that very early there was people who did believe in existence of a person called Jesus, who they did believe to have had many kinds of magical qualities.

The cold fact is there has never been real first-hand document or evidence of the existence of such a person outside the New Testament and the mentions in other sources are based on the stories which the followers of the new sect were spreading.
From the Gospels we can see that they were written by people who did not know what were the names of local Roman officials at the alleged time of the birth of Jesus, even if obtaining this information would perhaps been quite easy at the time of writing of these texts 70 to 120 years after the birth Jesus, when these texts were according to modern knowledge mostly written.

The texts in the New Testament were used as building blocks for a new religion, which was like all other religion a collection of ideas from older religions and the teachings of the then current philosophy.
These writers used the very common literary vehicle of putting their main character to utter these ideas as his own. By doing this they did create an exciting and deep-sounding character which was used for a good effect when this new faith was marketed to the masses.

On the other hand the existence or quite possible non-existence of character named Jesus has very little value when we are trying to determine if the stories in New Testament are true or not. There could well have existed on historical Jesus, but this fact would not make the stories that are recorded in the New Testament about his divine origin or his magical stunts any more true.
It is quite possible that there has been a preacher named Jesus besides the hundreds of similar preachers going around the Palestine during those centuries. He was just a regular preacher if that person was not born out of a virgin, was not a son of god and did not do many kinds of magical things and did not knowingly give his life to save yours.

The historical existence of a person called Jesus has in fact nothing to do with the truthfulness of fantastic stories that are told about such a figure in the New Testament, as they have always had a life of their own that is quite independent of the historical figure of Jesus. These stories were born from the needs of the newfangled religion.
The New Testament is full of stories where the writer outright claims to have been an eye-witnesses for the events he is describing, but we have no way of verifying these claims. In fact the modern scholars are quite in harmony in accepting the fact that there texts have been born a long time after the alleged lifespan of their main character and in fact it is a established scholarly view that these writers could not have had a personal relationship with the events they are describing in these texts.

The situation is quite similar to a situation where a person would want to find out if the book “All quiet in the Western Front” is a true story about true people after a thousand years from now.
The war and the battles that are described in the book are all quite real and there a lot of well known historical figures in the book. However, this book is still a work of fiction and all of its central characters are created by the writer Erich Maria Remarque, even if he could well have based his characters on real-life people to a certain degree.

In the end book is still a work of fiction and the events in the book could well have happened only in the imagination of the writer. He has just imagined how things could well have happened in given situations and the fact that they can sound very realistic does not make them any more true.
The writer has created a believable and realistic-sounding description of events that he has largely just imagined, but after a thousand years it is quite impossible to say which parts could be true and which are just works of imagination.

A illusory Biblical 'truth' has been around mainly because the theological 'study' of the Bible is commonly a direct opposite of science, as in real science the right answers are not known before the study does begin.
The real scientific study of religions outside theology is a quite different matter altogether, but this discipline of science does normally take any kind of stand in the truth-value of the New Testament, but it concentrates on studying the impact religions do have on societies and history of humanity. On the other hands theologians do very rarely venture into the field of true science, as applying the real scientific criteria on the Bible would just too be too dangerous.

The study of theology is in fact quite similar 'science' as was the 'study' of Marxism-Leninism in the now defunct Soviet Union, even if in many countries outside the soviet world also it was accepted as 'science'.
One can well use the vocabulary, methodology and way of speaking of the scientific world, even if in reality the 'study' is all about finding things that would support the ideology one is out to support.
Of course also a theologian can use the methods of for example sociology to study the workings of a religious hierarchy and organization, but in theological studies there is always the very basic fact that if your results do not support the ideology of the organization you can expect your career to be soon over, and there is very little alternative career options for theologians in existence.

Real science can never work in way that there would be some basic ideas that you could never challenge in any way. The whole progress of modern science has been based on the fact that in true science you just must be able to challenge any idea, notwithstanding its status among the scientific community.

Comments

‎"Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."

- Voltaire in "Examen important de milord Bolingbroke" (1736): Conclusion

‎"Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours."

Voltaire in a letter to Élie Bertrand (1759)

"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."

-Voltaire in Tolerance" (1764)

"Man is free at the instant he wants to be."

- Voltaire in "Brutus", act II, scene I (1730)

‎"Love truth, but pardon error."

- Voltaire in "Deuxième discours: de la liberté," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)

‎"To hold a pen is to be at war."

- Voltaire in letter to Jeanne-Grâce Bosc du Bouchet, comtesse d'Argental (1748)

"To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature."

- Voltaire in "Notebooks" (c.1735-c.1750)

‎"It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions."

- Voltaire in a letter to François-Louis-Henri Leriche (1770)

‎"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

-Voltaire in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (1767)

‎"Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

- Voltaire in "Treatise on Toleration" (1763)

‎"Ours is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world."

- Voltaire in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (1767)

‎"Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?"

- Voltaire in "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great”

"Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons."

- Voltaire in "Oracles" (1770)

"Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust."

-Voltaire in "Questions sur les miracles" (1765)

‎"All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence."

- Voltaire in "Equality" (1764)

‎"Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so."

Voltaire in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770-1774)

‎"Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors."

Voltaire in "Dictionnaire philosophique portatif" (1764)

‎"What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

Voltaire in ”Lettres philosophiques” (1733)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voltaire-the-best-one-liners/165736696801820

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
"François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire (pronounced: [vɔl.tɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his witand for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form including plays, poetry, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws and harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day.
Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émilie du Châtelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions."

Comments

I fear that even most people have lost this extremely natural ability to play and doing things for the fun of it through a very rigid training that aims to do just that.
The real, hidden agenda of modern education is all too often just to get people forget about the whole ideas of fun and enjoyment, as life and most of all work just are seen as an ordeal, that we must just bear to please our jealous peers and superiors.

However, I do think that this way of thinking is fast becoming an unnecessary and even very harmful remnant of the bad old industrial world. In this old bad industrial world many people needed to be automates, who were just supporting the automated production lines.
However, this model of production is fast vanishing form the west, but the model for thinking sadly remains.
In a modern world a person who does things just for the fun of it is still all too often suspect, as your goal just needs to be better than somebody else; be it playing the piano or running.

Of course the competitive instinct is one of the most basic emotions that humans have, but I do also think that not all people have it in a similar amount, as is the case with any other human emotion and ability too.
A human being can well develop even tremendously just by comparing his or her development to his or her own previous accomplishments. One does not need to squash the dreams and expectations of others in a open competition to feel good about him- or herself.

However, this need and requirement to endlessly compete with others is so deeply embedded in our society that most people don't even notice it, as they do really and honestly think that that is a thing that all people automatically want to do all the time.
Many people really do think that it is a part of nature to get enjoyment from the unhappiness of the losers, which is the inevitably the other side of any competition, as there cannot be winners, if there are no losers.

Could it be that this endless competition from the earliest childhood has a purpose? Could it be that it can make us insensitive the the unhappiness of others, when we learn daily that the only thing that matters is that we ourselves do well in all competitions?
Could it be that soon we learn not the think about the losers at all, even if inevitably we will be in their number most of the time? Could it be that this loss of ability to co-operate benefits the current economic system, even if it will hurt us as humans?

I do not have definite answers and I do not think that somebody does plans evil conspiracies to create systems like this. I just fear that the modern economic system does create an endless spiral of ever-tightening competition and an ever decreasing co-operation, when the idea of competition is ubiquitous in everything we do and most of all the media hammers the idea in every single day we are awake.
The net result of all this just might be that other humans beings are less and less seen as fellow-travelers going to the same direction, but more and more as just competitors to be beaten.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond.html

Comments

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society (1958)

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Age of Uncertainty” (1977)

“Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.”

John Kenneth Galbraith “The Age of Uncertainty” (1977)

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society (1958)”

“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Economics, Peace and Laughter” (1971)

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1989)

“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1989)

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1991)

“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1992)

“It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “A Journey Through Economic Time” (1994)

“When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster.”

John Kenneth Galbraith quoted in Ben Laurance and William Keegan, "Galbraith on crashes, Japan and Walking Sticks," The Observer (1998)

“I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Booknotes interview” (1994)

“Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Made to Last”(1964)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/John-Kenneth-Galbraith/89900217423

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
"John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006) was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century political liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s and he filled the role of public intellectual from the '50s to the 1970s on matters of economics.
Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at Harvard University for many years. Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy. Due to his prodigious literary output he was arguably the best known economist in the world during his lifetime and was one of a select few people to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice, in 1946 and 2000, for services to economics."

Comments

Oh, how wonderful they look, these silent monuments of age-old oppression, violence and mans unending cruelty towards other men.
I fear that I just have this condition that can be called "over-empathy", if you like. In history it makes me think of the condition and the real lives of the people who did build and pay these fantastic and beautiful historical monuments that we so admire today.
I just fear that we have a tendency to even fall into thinking that historical monuments do exist for our enjoyment only and the 'colorful' history just exists to make them more interesting in our eyes, even if they are results of very real suffering, very real pain and very real and often extremely meaningless violence.

I just must add that even the finest castles of the distant past were not generally designed to protect the poor, the weak and the defenseless, but to protect the the rich, the strong and the able from attacks of other members of the predatory elite in their endless turf wars over the right to tax the unarmed majority of population.

These castles are reminders of a deeply unjust society. We just tell ourselves these little sweet lies about the carefree existence of the people in the past, as we admire these aesthetically very pleasing structures. We perhaps could not admire them like we do now, if we would want to realize their true nature.
Of course most people see history only from the viewpoint of the absolute rulers and ruling elites, who ordered these structures to be built. I'm afraid that most people simply pass over the tedious details of who really did the extremely hard labor of hoisting and plastering those stones.

Most of all we want to forget what pleasures in life did the ordinary people give up to pay and build them, as the ordinary people did produce the taxes that was used to pay for these piles of rock that were of no real use for them.
Their main function was to protect the privileged ruling class from their competitors, who from time to time liked to try take away areas from neighboring despots.
Of course there were from time to time also the predators from the sea like Vikings, but by the time most of the medieval castles were built, they were built to be used in the endless and mindless turf-wars between the neighboring absolute rulers.

People of the past were quite similar to you and me; they did not build things just for the amusement of future generations, but because they did obey the whims of religious and earthy rulers. Castles did of course serve a different practical purpose. They were built just because other men could not kill you easily if you had one.

Their basic forms and shapes do not come from any kind of aesthetic considerations, but out of dire necessity to stay alive in a world were other neighboring members of the privileged elite tried to take away the tax-revenue you were collecting from the countryside around to keep up your lavish lifestyle.
There simple people did pay for the castles and they did build them with their hard labor for their absolute masters to live in relative safety.

We, the modern men can only thank our luck, that we have been born in a quite different day and age, when states to exist for the real benefit of the whole population and not just to collect revenue for the upkeep of the non-working, heavily armed hereditary elite.
The change in zeitgeist (or the spirit of the times) has been so immense that we maybe just can never understand at all how these medieval people fatalistically accepted this immense and utterly obvious wrong that was wrought on them, mostly just because it was ordered by their jealous and angry God.

Comments

"Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris."

Isaac Asimov in "By Jove!" in View from a Height (1963); often misquoted as "Jupiter plus debris".

"There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

Isaac Asimov in "The “Threat” of Creationism" in New York Times Magazine (14 June 1981)

"Happiness is doing it rotten your own way."

Isaac Asimov in "I, Asimov" (1994)

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Isaac Asimov in "Foundation", Astounding Science-Fiction (May 1942. It is derived from the famous phrase by Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be ... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking."

Isaac Asimov in "My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock.

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

Isaac Asimov in Free Inquiry (Spring 1982)

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
"Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

Isaac Asimov in "The Roving Mind" (1983)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov
"Isaac Asimov (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and over 9,000 letters and postcards.
His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (The sole exception being the 100s: philosophy and psychology, although he did write a foreword for The Humanist Way, which is published in the 100s)."

Comments

However, it seems that in economically strong societies there is chance to offer more liberty of choice for the individuals and in economically less successful societies these liberties are easily curtailed.
On the other hand it seems that the more elbow room individuals do have in a society, the more healthy the economics of a society seem to be.

This is a classical egg and hen -dilemma. Will liberty breed economic success or will economic success give more room for individual liberty to evolve?
Of course it just might be that they do together help to create a rising spiral that will create economically more robust and most of all more innovative societies.

Innovation just might be the key here, and creating an atmosphere (or at least an illusion) of liberty will help people to innovate in all possible ways In a closed society-centered societies innovation seem to be at a much lower level than in more individual-oriented societies with more elbow room for an individual.

There really are people who dream of a world without societies, but I do think that it would a fine place just for the strong, the well connected, the intelligent, the wealthy and the beautiful, but life would be all too often be nasty, brutish and short for the weak, the stupid, the lone, the poor and the ugly.
Admittedly the idea of a modern state was basically born out of mafia outfits that did extort protection money to pay for the easy living of the upper class.
However, things do evolve and the predatory nature of the state is a memory of the past, as when states have gone over a complete makeover by ideas coming from ideas like humanism, socialism and even feminism.

On the other hand the complexity of our societies evolved first tenfold, then hundredfold and then some more, the need to have some kind of a regulatory arm to watch over all this new activity has grown ten- and hundredfold from the past.

I fear that too many people live in a world without past or future, they have only "now" and they have read difficulty in grasping the possibility of drastic change and how things do not just exist, but they have often evolved dramatically in the past and will keep evolving in the future.
A classic case in point is just the idea of society and state. Even in the time of Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill a society was there to keep order and to keep other societies away to keep the all of collectable tax revenues for the rulers of one's own state. Society was a still thing that was basically mostly needed to keep the poor and outside predators at bay.

However, after their time things have changed dramatically. First the grand ideas embedded in humanism took over the western world with such a violent force that even the age-old and generally accepted institution of slavery was demolished and even the Christian Churches had to change their views over it 180 degrees because the zeitgeist or the spirit of the times just had evolved to demand it.
Then came the idea of socialism, that at first just challenged the existing order. Even that threat was eventually enough to make many rich people realize that to save their privileges in the long run they need to share some of their proceedings with others in the short term to curb the lure of socialism.

Then came the western version of democratic socialism that did change the whole structure of politics and most of all did change the zeitgeist in a similar way that humanism had done a century earlier.
As slaves were freed in the earlier case, now was the turn of the industrial workers to gain their fairer share.

After these two immense but extremely slow and even hard to spot revolutions in prevailing zeitgeist, the idea of state had been already completely transformed. It was not just and guardian of privilege and the bulwark of the rich against the poor anymore, but a arbitrator of interests of both, that was also used as a tool to create more even distribution of wealth.
This development of course kick-started the modern rise in living-standards as more even distribution of wealth did create the mass-market that new capitalism needed to really flourish,

Now, Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill were not speaking of the kind of society that we have now, when they did speak about the need to curb the influence and power that a society has. One should btw. also remember that Thomas Paine was a friend of the poor and he did propose a land tax to be paid by the rich land-owners to the poor.
Of course the conflict of interest of a individual and state is just the same as three thousand years ago. It is as difficult as then to find a level where both the rights of the individual would be secured, but also the state can function effectively to protect the same individuals from the ill effects of all kinds of bad decisions that are made by other individuals in the society.

The sad fact of life is that many us will remain weak, stupid, ugly and lone whatever we will we do by ourselves, as all people just don't have the same capabilities. It is a fact of life that most libertarians just like to forget, as they want to think that everybody can make out of their life whatever they want, which is simply a dirty lie. A beautiful person who is born into a wealthy family just does have a million times better chances than a ugly person who is born into a poor family and without in fact doing anything extraordinary by him- or herself; just by the simple accident of birth.

This fact does not change from the idea that it sometimes really possible to rise from poverty. It is possible, yes, but one needs extraordinary capabilities to it, which just are not so common that some libertarian do think.
To be able to rise from poverty one just need be so much more capable as a person than those who just try to keep their inherited riches. Most people just do not have these capabilities and this is the reason why society needs to support them.
It just might be that the wealthy, the beautiful and intelligent just do not need as much attention and support from the society than the poor, the ugly and the stupid.

Comments

"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there."

- Karl Popper in "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game."

- Karl Popper in Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section XI

"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."

— Karl Popper as quoted in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (2002)

"Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake."

- Karl Popper in "In Search of a Better World" (1994)

"Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you."

- Karl Popper in "Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976)

"Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves."

- Karl Popper in "On Freedom" (1958)

"It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it."

- Karl Popper in "On Freedom" (1958)

"We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure."

- Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945) Vol 2, Ch. 21 "An Evaluation of the Prophecy"

"It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ."

- Karl Popper in "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts."

- Karl Popper in "In Search of a Better World" (1994)

"There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory."

- Karl Popper in "The Importance of Critical Discussion"

"We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty."

- Karl Popper in "Utopia and Violence" (1947)


"What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole province of our knowledge, however far it may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without danger, the idea that truth is beyond human authority. And we must retain it. For without this idea there can be no objective standards of inquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge."

- Karl Popper on "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings."

- Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945)

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."

- Karl Popper, as quoted in "In Passing: Condolences and Complaints on Death, Dying, and Related Disappointments" (2005) by Jon Winokur, p. 144

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist / inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy" As well, he is known for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.

Comments

The basic reason why we do need these illusions is that our world and most of all our societies have become so complex that nobody really can master their all workings.
So, we desperately need an illusion of being on the top of it all, even if we are in fact quite clueless most of the time. Without this illusion we just might sink into desperation over the futility of keeping abreast of it all.

The great part of these self-created illusions is that they can also be self-fulfilling. When you get yourself into believing in the illusion that you can master a certain thing well, you will very often also learn to master it with due time, even if in the beginning you could just be flying without wings; we are often kept afloat just by an illusion. Losing these illusions could again easily lead into desperation and despair.

Richard Feynman famously said that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." This just might be the right thing in science, but I think that most of the time we just need to fool ourselves up to some point, as if we would really know the true limits of our understanding, expertise and knowledge, we would not dare do anything demanding.

Happily all the people live in the same kind of bubbles of illusion. We do live in a world of commonly build illusions, where we think that the other people do have the necessary understanding, expertise and knowledge that we deep down always will suspect that we are lacking ourselves. Similarly other people do trust us in a similar way, mainly because nobody ever reveals their real self-doubts to others.
One could say that it a really good thing that this true state of things is never revealed to us, as maintaining the common illusion of understanding, expertise and knowledge keeps us safe from despairing on the fact with how little true understanding, expertise and knowledge the world is really run on.

If we would really know how insecure, uncertain and nervous the leading figures of our society in all walks of life really are under that thick cloud of illusion of understanding, expertise and knowledge that we do keep up, we could easily really despair on our future.
Happily, this has been the way things have always been, just as long as humans have selected other people to lead them. The amazing thing is that our societies do still survive, as just this illusion is mostly good enough to keep the systems working.

There has been many very bad patches of course, but I do think that our world has become so complex that there really are no people who would really know how to steer it, and they would balk from really trying if they would completely realize the true complexity and utter unpredictability of our societies.

At this point I hear a multitude of voices crying out angrily that I am saying here that living in a lie would be a good thing. Basically, that is just my message here.
Of course I have been thundering against living in lies in this blog for several years now, but the lies I have been talking about are well-known and well-established untruths, collections of wishful thinking and outright inventions that can be called lies also, if one takes the impolite way.

However, I am now talking of a very different class very deep psychological processes here that do mostly reside in our own subconsciousness and are created and maintained there without any conscious effort on our part.
We do not mostly consciously decide to fool ourselves into believing that we can master certain things, even if we are unsure of it, but this is a very helpful and needed aid in learning new things in the best possible way; just by throwing oneself headlong into doing them.

I suspect that most people are faintly aware of this process, which has become the more important the more complex our societies and the systems we create do become.
People are becoming good on smaller and smaller fields of expertise and they need to delve deeper and deeper into smaller and smaller details.
in this process, there just remains more and more of things that we have just a faint idea, but we need to master and use also those less familiar things. Here the protective illusions come the rescue; we just need to protect our fragile minds from the idea of ignorance and failure.

I think that this process has one major downside; when we deep down at least realize that so many things that we need to rely on are just illusions, the threshold into accepting also other more serious kinds of comforting lies can be lowered.
I do suspect that many theists do wonder why non-religious people make such noises of just religious illusions, as deep down they know that their life is based on maintaining so many kinds of illusions.

However, I still do maintain that even in the world of benevolent illusions there is the limit after which it illusions do become just a form of fooling oneself.
I do think that being aware of the phenomena can only help in distinguishing the real stuff from imitation. Namely
it just might be that religions have learned to use this mechanism of positive self-illusion's for their own benefit instead of benefiting the individual, as the basic protective illusions I am speaking of here do.

Comments

For example, I just can't watch many of the things in the ‘funny videos’ in the YouTube or television, as I know that they are real things happening to real people, In many of the ‘funniest’ people are getting even incredibly hurt by falling, tripping over or being run over by something.
I do know that this condition is normally cured just by making oneself watch enough television and most of all Hollywood-films, as by doing this you will became so conditioned into seeing meaningless and even frivolous pain and suffering that given enough time and practice it does not cause any emotions in you at all.

You will be soon become also conditioned to think that pain or suffering are not to be noticed if they happen to people that you do not care of.
You become soon conditioned only to react to violence, suffering and pain that encounters a person that you have a personal relationship or who you are taught to be one of the 'good guys'.

However, personally I did a few years ago the fatal decision of not watching any television anymore and most of all no violent movies anymore. Consequently, my condition has worsened to a point that I cannot stomach any violent action at all anymore.
This has the very serious downside that I cannot watch a very large part of television programming at all and most of all the things that the movie industry does churn out endlessly is in practice out of bounds for me.

I'm acutely aware that I am different and at a tiniest of tiny minorities here. I’m also quite aware that I should condition myself into tolerating all kinds acts of violence, suffering and pain to be able to be part of the mainstream again.
At this point I want to make it very clear that this all is not sarcasm or irony at all, but this is a real concern for me. Violence has become so central part of culture that if you have trouble dealing with it, you are out in the cold.
I’m afraid there are very few people who could even understand what you are talking about, when you speak of role of violence in modern entertainment, as violence is so central to it that it is impossible for many to even think of entertainment without violence.

When I look back, I see quite clearly how I have always had to live with this deficiency. At the age of nine we were invited to a screening of the movie ‘Ben Hur’ by our school. It was the first real movie I had ever seen on the big screen. It was in fact also the very first time I did see moving pictures in colour, as our television was still quite black and white in Finland at those bygone days at the mid-sixties.
I was simply mentally crushed by the extreme violence in that movie; all the blood and hurting deliberately of other people. I did nearly become physically ill in that dark hall, when people all around me did not see anything unusual in the barbaric acts that were committed before their very eyes in the silver screen for their viewing pleasure.

Of course ‘Ben Hur’ was in fact a very Christian story about the sufferings of the early Christians and it was extremely lame stuff by today’s standards.
In the early 80’s I was dragged to a movie theater to see a disgusting little movie called ‘Caligula’ and I must admit that I had to leave the movie theatre mid-show, because my revulsion did become so over-powering.
A decade later I was again dragged to a movie theater by another lady to see a horror-movie from the Elm Street- series that I must admit that I lasted in there for a quarter of an hour.

By these examples you can see that I have a very real problem, as humans are just expected to control their feeling of empathy better than I am able to.
I just cannot help it, but I do feel bad for every single person that is killed, maimed or dismembered and when you do it, a very large part of modern entertainment does become unbearable to you.

No, no, It is not about the lack of empathy in other people that I am speaking in here, as the problem really is with me and my lack of ability to really control my feelings of empathy.
You are just expected to show empathy to just to your own next of kin, clansmen, fellow villagers and fellow citizens and turn it off like a light bulb in the first sighting of any kind of perceived enemy.

That just is the way the world works and if you are not able to do it, you must bare with the consequences. All great myths (also religious ones) in human history are full of violence and their one important role is to condition you into accepting the use of violence by the society.
These myths condition you into accepting violence when it is permitted and sanctioned by the society and to turn off your feelings of empathy when society uses violence to further its own goals.

Of course these goals can be worthy and admirable ones, but the real catch here is that in most religious traditions you are not allowed to evaluate the true quality of these goals by yourself. You just all too easily end up in the crowd with a stone in your hand ready to be thrown at the adulterer.
On the end of this long tradition are the Hollowood-blockbusters where bad men are killed by the truckloads to our endless delight, but we are expected to weep when our ‘hero’ encounters a personal tragedy of any kind. After a few decades of this conditioning the sight of real bombed out villages is nothing to us, as our empathy has been reserved to be used elsewhere.

Comments

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

- Statement (1959) by Richard Feynman as quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)

"Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers - because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

- Richard Feynman in "The Character of Physical Law". Cornell University Messenger Lectures (1964)

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing, that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

-Richard Feynman in "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, (1966)

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."

- Richard Feynman as quoted in "Superstrings : A Theory of Everything" (1988)

"Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question - to doubt - to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained."

- Richard Feynman in "The Value of Science," address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

- Richard Feynman in the lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964).

"The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday."

- Richard Feynman in "The Meaning of It All" (1999)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_feynman
"Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world."

Comments

A great quote is very similar to a great poem. A great poem encapsulates a large web of emotions in a few terse sentences. A good poem is just the visible tip of the iceberg and the reader is forced to imagine the rest of the mass that rests under the surface.
Similarly a good quote encapsulates a idea or a thought and clarifies that idea in a particularly enlightening way. A great quote just is quite similarly just a tip of the iceberg that gives the reader the liberty to imagine the real mass that lies under the surface below.

The sad fact is that many people are too impatient to read quotes, as reading great quotes requires much more than reading good long prose from the reader. A good quote requires the reader really to pause to contemplate the real meaning of the quote.
A really great quote works just as it is; one needs not to know even who has said it and when, as a really great thought reaches a true level of universality.

Of course some quotes do require the reader to be familiar with the subject matter and sometimes also with the writer of the quote beforehand to really get the meaning.
However, the really universal ones work similarly in Greece of 300 BCE or Finland of today, as they bore into the essence of being human, as underneath all this progress there always still is the unchanged basic and bare essence that makes up a human.

However, normally people want to know who has said a thing and when, as our perception on validity of any thought depends extremely heavily on the person and personality who has presented the idea.
This is quite natural, because we must have some standard or filter with which we can analyze all different ideas that we do come across. However, the dark side of this is that people all too often quite systematically reject all ideas that come from people on the “other side” without really bothering to examine them.

For example I did quote some ideas by C.S. Chesterton in some forum and I got angry responses from people who did not like me quoting things from a known theist, even if the ideas themselves had nothing to do with theism.
On the other hand on many forums the marvelous ideas of Bertrand Russell have been rejected by people taking part in the discussion on the grounds that Bertrand Russell’s private life was not exemplary, as if all his ideas would have been contaminated by the quarks in his private life.

However, I think that a truly great idea is a great idea notwithstanding who has presented it. The arch-conservative Winston Churchill has created several legendary quotes that I do love and respect, even if I am a strongly left-leaning liberal socialist myself.
Of course Winston Churchill was a drunkard also, but I do not think that this fact makes his ideas any worse.
Of course the really difficult part in creating new ideas is not creating new ideas, as it is the easy part, but making people listen to them and respect their value. If I put a idea into the mouth of Marcus Aurelius it just acquires a quite new meaning and value, even if the idea itself remains the same.
So, in fact we do inevitably value ideas by their presented more than by their real content. It just is a fact of life that one needs to learn to live with. There is a multitude of false quotes in circulation in the Internet and one should always be on guard for them.

In any case, I think that the really great quote is such that its reader does not need to know much about the of context where it was published, as really quote contains a idea in its entirety, even if just a small of it has been written on the paper, but the reader is forced to imagine the rest, just like is thew case with best of poetry too.

Collecting and appreciating great quotes is a quite different things than the quote-mining that is done by some unscrupulous debaters. Evil quote-miners search for little snippets of text that make the other side look bad in some ways, when the collectors of great quotes search for sentences that can condense an idea to a minimum amount of words.

A really great quote is really a prose poem that takes the essence of a idea and does present it in a way that often illuminates it in a way that anybody can understand.
The greatest quotes are hidden gems that lie the texts of the greatest of writers just waiting to be found. They are strikes of genius, where the writer has found a way to illuminate and enlighten an idea in a powerful or provocative way.

I am myself a great fan and collector of quotes, as readers of this blog have already noticed from the postings presenting small collections of the best ideas of some philosophers, thinkers, scientists, writers, poets and wise men. These are published without comments; just as they appeared and they are always cross-checked for authenticity.
However, I would like to remind that I have another blog that is totally dedicated to quotes. It is called “A Little Book for Humanity” and it is at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi
There is at the moment of writing 143 selected quotes from some of the best minds I know of. They are also always commented by me, even if the comments are mostly just thoughts that were inspired by the quote in question and they try not to be any kind of explanations for the quotes as such.

Comments

However, I do think that science is extremely rarely forwarded by fear, but its driving forces are curiosity and the need and will to know new things. Even medicine is in my mind not motivated by fear of illness, but by the joy of that comes from conquering it.
I do not think that any of the medical research would be left undone, even if people would not so needlessly fear aging or death, as so many do now. A person who does not want to face reality as it is, is always a problem, after all.

Anyway, it just might be good to get used with the idea that the removal of aging or death already envisioned by some firebrands will not happen during our own lifetime and just postponing a thing will not make it go away.
If we just could enjoy and make the most of the years on Earth we do have now, we just could improve our life much more than just by adding more boring and uninteresting years to it.

Kurt Vonnegut has written a wonderful novel about a world without death. It was a terrible dystopia, to be quite frank, as if nobody dies, no new people can be born after Earth has been filled to a certain point.
Such a society would very soon stagnate to a terrible degree when the same soon utterly bored people would be running things century after century.

A very important point in my mind is that evolution just cannot exist without death. Evolution is of course a completely blind force and it does not aim for good or bad, but there would not have been any evolution, no change and eventually also no progress, if the great force of survival of the best adapted would not have picked up the winners at very new stage of evolution.
The earth would be inhabited by at most by extremely primitive single-cell creatures without death always taking away first the less adapted and at the same time rewarding constantly the better adapted mutations with longer lifespans or more offspring reaching maturity.

Death is of course just a doorway to oblivion, and most sane people want to postpone it as much they can. However, at the same time death is a extremely central part of the grand machinery that has evolved through millions of years of trial and error to keep Earth livable and habitable.
The whole ecosystem on planet Earth is based on death and on creatures devouring the remains of dead creatures. In fact only this process of endless renewal of resources can keep life going on perpetually on this little blue planet.

I do think that humans are after just just one (in many ways special. of course) species of animals. We are still part of the nature, even if some people want to deny it for example for religious reasons, when they claim that this planet was created just for their own enjoyment.
I see this kind of thinking as extremely and utterly dangerous. Humanity is in fact just now already on the verge of committing a suicide just because we not see how we will always be an integral part of the ecosystem of this little blue planet.

Of course we seem to be the only species of animals that can consciously think of things like death, but that does not mean that the we should be exempted from the never-ending cycle that keeps life evolving on this planet, just because we can see its existence in a way that other creatures do probably not see.
Fear of aging and death cannot ever be cured by just making them happen later; postponing these things will just make the fear last longer. This process could even make these fears worse than ever, if false hopes are raised at some point.

Most of all I still think that Epicurus got it right when he wrote:

"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us." - Epicurus (341–270 EAA)

Comments

" Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Assignment in Eternity" (1953)

"Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Assignment in Eternity" (1953)

"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate.Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Revolt in 2100" (1953)

" The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed. "

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Revolt in 2100" (1953)

"Television leaves no external scars."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Have Space Suit —Will Travel" (1958)

"You're in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish. "

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Have Space Suit—Will Travel" (1958)

"Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Time Enough for Love" (1973)

"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."

- Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough for Love (1973)

"Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy"is the most amazing — with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place."

- Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough for Love (1973)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein
"Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction."

Comments

On the other hand errors of scale are extremely common in this field. People all too often for example use the properties of subatomic particles to describe whole universes.
I do personally think that there is no completely free will and no complete lack of it, but millions of different kinds of variations in between those extremes.

However, in philosophy there is the tendency to speak only of the extremes, maybe because otherwise one would not be able to formulate sweeping and all-including statements. Unfortunately our world is not mostly about things that are either just on or off, but there are endless variations in very many things and one just can't put the thing at ease with one grand formula.

Some things and phenomena just are more predetermined than others. I think that the more integrated part of a larger system a thing or phenomena is, the more of easy it is to predict its future
Similarly the less integrated to a larger system a thing or a phenomena is the more difficult it is to predict how it will behave; or one could even say that it has a higher degree of "free will".

The other big factor is the simplicity of the system. If there is a simple corollary to be made on the issue of free will it could be this: "The simpler a system is the more it appears to be deterministic and the more moving variables there are in a system, the more "free" it appears to be".

According to this corollary, the happenings on the level of sub-atomic particles can be quite determined by the extremely simple system they are part of.
On the other hand in a extremely complex system like ecosystem of Earth there countless variables at work all the time. They do also work at extremely different levels of causation and they do also lead to different outcomes. The impact of these forces do also vary constantly.
The subatomic particles of course exist in their predetermined existence all the time underneath all of this evolved complexity that does exist on a different layer of perception
.
The ecosystem of the planet Earth has developed to a such incredible level of complexity and inter-connectness, that it is often impossible to tell which forces do really cause which results.
In the end an actor in this ecosystem really can choose between many kinds of choices in many situations, which can be seen as using a "free will", even if the number of choices available for each actor in the system is always to a certain extent predetermined by the status and past development of the current environment.

The big thing is to know how integrated in larger systems a actor is to see how "free" it is; there just might not bee one sweeping single answer, like; "free will exists", or "free will does not exist", but just "it depends".
Or better still: "it depends on what particular properties of a thing or phenomena you are interested in particular time and what level of magnification you do use to look at the particular properties of that thing at that single occasion."

The same actor will have a higher degree of "free will" in some dimensions and at different point of time than in some others, as the same actor can be part of extremely deterministic system in one dimension, but have be a quite different liberty of action in some other dimension.
Also the level of magnification is extremely important, as in the level of galaxies things look quite different than at the level of the molecules.

The whole debate on free will has been of course started by religious people who have the direct need to keep the idea of a omnipotent god viable even if people seem to do whatever they like.
Of course even they forget that if humans are always constrained by many different kinds of human dependency-systems of which they are necessarily part of; family, friends, village, clan, associations, society, religions; all they diminish the range where the use of the "free will" is possible.

It is as if a person has even hundreds of threads tied to him and they all pull him to different directions, and the (perceived) thickness of those threads does decide in what direction a human moves, when he or she uses his "free will" to make choices in his or her life.
So he or she is in practice always "free" to make only certain choices and in some very repressive societies, the room for exercising of the "free will" can be very small indeed and in others much larger.
Also human physiology also of course sets very strict limits for what a human can do without dying. We must for example acquire a certain amount of oxygen, water and food to survive. We can’t go round this fact and so in the end the use of ‘free will’ is directly limited by our own physiology.

I have great respect for Dr. Sam Harris, but he is a human and humans do make mistakes. I think that his biggest mistake is failing to understand the real meaning of the scientific findings that when we move our hands the brain has started preparing for this thing before we do that decision on the conscious level.
In my eyes Sam Harris does think that this shows how deterministic everything is and how free will is just a illusion, but he fails to see that the decision making-process going on the mind is not predetermined, but it is your subconscious self that is at work here; it is you making decisions, even if you are not yet aware of it.

The subconscious mind is YOU, it is a multi-threaded processor with mind-boggling precessing capacity where all your experience, your knowledge and intuition is used to make decisions, but as this process is all too complex for the conscious mind that deals slowly and laboriously with words, it must remain in the lower level of our consciousness, where things are handled on level of sweeping abstractions, generalizations and intuition.

The life you live, the things you learn and the emotions you live through shape your subconscious mind and it is simply YOU, but every single human has different lives, different knowledge and emotions and they react differently in their subconscious mind to different phenomena too.
People are not "free" to do anything they like, because they are always part of multitude of larger systems that give a general direction to their lives, but they are free to make a multitude of choices on the limits offered by those larger systems that do make up their lives. So the answer the question in the headline must be: "It depends".

Comments

However, this old truth is still quite valid when one deals with phenomena that you cannot change by your own actions at all. The Epicureans did think that the best remedy for fear of death was to live a good, full and meaningful life.

A sad fact of life is that many religions have taken to one of their primary tasks keeping the fear of death alive, as just keeping this fear alive has always been a very central position in their whole strategy.
Considering this it is no surprise that every single Christian church and shrine does contain a image of a instrument for delivering one of the cruelest deaths imaginable. First building up a fear of death and then offering a religious remedy for it has always been a very central thing in just the marketing strategy of the Christian churches.

I must point out that the quote by Epicurus in the beginning of the piece has not been aimed at those who miss a dead friend or a relative, but it is about the relationship between a person and his or her ideas of death only.
However, I do think that also the feeling of personal loss can be alleviated by understanding how death is a necessary and important part of all life and not for example a punishment for any 'sins' that a person would have committed.

The Epicurean idea of accepting the naturalness of the idea of death does not in my mind mean at all that having the emotions of loss and sorrow would also not be as natural as death itself is.
I think that one should always also remember that no person disappears completely at the moment of his or her death, but his or her memory will live on in the minds of people who did know a person or his or her work. This memory of a person can live for a long time and it is decided by the quality of the life a person has lived.

A good person will just be remembered more fondly and more often than another kinds of people. Of course also the work that a person does produce during his or her lifetime can live on for centuries at best.

I did originally write this piece on the night of the day when I did receive the sad message of the quite unexpected passing away of a great humanist and a fellow freethinker Tapani Hietaniemi as a victim of a extremely sudden bout of illness.
He was a humanist of the old school, who's knowledge knew no bounds, but most of all whose sense of humor was something nobody who met him will never forget. http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapani_Hietaniemi

"It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death." - Epictetus (AD 55 – AD 135)

Comments

"If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman ... because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French."

- Charles de Montesquieu or Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)as quoted in "Pensées et Fragments Inédits de Montesquieu" (1899)

"I would as soon say that religion gives its professors a right to enslave those who dissent from it, in order to render its propagation more easy. This was the notion that encouraged the ravagers of America in their iniquity. Under the influence of this idea they founded their right of enslaving so many nations; for these robbers, who would absolutely be both robbers and Christians, were superlatively devout."

- Charles de Montesquieu or Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)in De l'Esprit des Lois (1748) (The Spirit of the Laws)

"The Pope will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread...and a thousand other things of the same kind. "

- Charles de Montesquieu in "Lettres Persanes"(1721) (Persian Letters)

"I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ."

- Charles de Montesquieu in Lettres Persanes (1721) (Persian Letters)

"Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance...the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason."

- Charles de Montesquieu in Lettres Persanes (1721) (Persian Letters)

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles."

- Charles de Montesquieu in De l'Esprit des Lois (1748) (The Spirit of the Laws)

"But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. "

- Charles de Montesquieu in De l'Esprit des Lois (1748) (The Spirit of the Laws)

"If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are."

- Charles de Montesquieu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montesquieu
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.

Comments

Doing something in a certain way just because things have been done in similar way for a long time can just seem to be a rather lame reason for doing things.
One of the traditions that does get continually and even viciously rationalized is the covering up of women in the Islamic world and most of all among the Muslims living among other cultures.

It has been also said that wearing burkhas is a quite similar thing as the fact that women in the west do wear bikinis. However, I do think that there is a slight difference when a woman decides that she wants to wear something and tradition (read: men) does order her to wear something.
The comparison would be correct if women in western world would be cajoled and mentally pressed into wearing bikinis, they would be threatened with physical violence and occasionally also severely beaten if they do not wear sexy enough outfits.

Of course a chorus of voices will say now that Muslim women just WANT to wear burkhas. I'm afraid that the real test for this claim would be if even a single one of them would be able to change her mind and freely wear bikinis instead.
That is just impossible even the most mainstream of Islamic communities; they just MUST want to wear Islamic headgear.

Humans being what they are, they very often rationalize things even for themselves. People do make very often themselves believe that they just could never, ever want anything else but the things that they are forced into doing by circumstances or the forces of tradition in any case.

At its core the whole thing is also about controlling of the sexual power of women. Muslim men just are taught to be so afraid of the power that sexuality can give to the women over men, that they are willing to do the utmost to take also that power from women.
A woman wearing a bikini can arouse a man, but here in the west at least the woman alone can decide how things do proceed from that and this does give woman real, tangible power over a man.
This power is diminished when women are covered and the power of sexual attraction is taken away from them. Also only then can men wield absolute power over women.

The other side of the coin is of course that women in the west do really wield sexual power over men. Women who wear sexy outfits to workplace do not normally do it because they are forced into it, but because they have noticed how much easier male co-workers and bosses could to handle when they are confused and driven by their often extremely subconscious sexual desires.
The feminine outfits do very often provoke such desires, even their existence just might often be denied on a more conscious level. I do think that playing with those desires really does give western women real power that they would not have otherwise.

The quite other thing of course is if this really is a problem, as women are often at a major disadvantage in the work-place to start with because of the needs for giving birth and subsequent caring for the offspring.
The extended sexual power of the women just also might be needed an equalizing force in western societies.

But back to the Muslim women; of course many Muslim women have convinced themselves that they do want nothing else than to obey the ‘holy orders’ of their religions, even if these religious orders do not diminish the liberty of men, but only of the women.
However, there is an already existing term for it: it is called the "internalized domination".
A person can accept even a quite unfair and unjust situation if he or she is schooled into accepting it from his or her earliest childhood and the injustice is laid out as the natural state of affairs for the whole of her lifetime.

Of course there are no really objective and universal criteria for human flourishing, even if I believe like Sam Harris that one can look objectively what kind of things do cause visible suffering and which do bring misery with them.
It is extremely hard to argue that stoning of a woman for adultery can increase happiness and human flourishing or that wearing a burkha at public places could objectively increase the happiness of the wearer.

Of course here the real motivation here is not the happiness of the wearer of the burkha herself, but the conceived threat to happiness of the men, if they would be forced into fighting with the sexual temptations that the seeing of women without protective gear would entail. Women are made to sacrifice their own comfort to save men from discomfort in the Islamic world.
Of course all this does not mean that there would not be women who sincerely do want to wear Islamic headgear, the more so, as it can be seen also a relief from the pressures that maintaining ones looks do bring women in societies where women are not hidden from view.

Still, wearing the Islamic headgear is of course also always a outward sign that women have accepted the male hegemony that is inherent in all of the mainstream versions of Islam, even if most women themselves do not want to see this idea.
If I would be one of them, quite probably neither would I want to admit the existence of this male dominance. However, this does not mean that it would not exist in all Islamic cultures.

I am not a supported of bans of burkhas, but I do think that we could ask that the Islamic women should be allowed NOT to wear the Islamic headgear at least in the cultures where it is not a local tradition at all, but a late import and just a strange foreign custom.
As long as Muslim women in real terms have not the chance to decide by themselves if they wear outfits that can be extremely uncomfortable and make them stand out in environment of western society like a sore thumb, it can never be seen as harmless tradition like the painting of eggs on Easter, as many Muslims do want to present it.

Comments

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

- Thomas Paine in "The Rights of Man" (1791)

"A long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

- Thomas Paine in "Common Sense" (1776)

"It is of the utmost danger to society to make religion a party in political disputes."

- Thomas Paine in "Common Sense" (1776)

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

- Thomas Paine in "Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1791)

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1793)

"When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal."

- Thomas Paine in "First Principles of Government" (1795)

"To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead."

- Thomas Paine

"Most shocking of all is alledging the sacred scriptures to favour this wicked practice. One would have thought none but infidel cavillers would endeavour to make them appear contrary to the plain dictates of natural light, and the conscience, in a matter of common Justice and Humanity; which they cannot be."

- Thomas Paine in "African Slavery In America" (1774)

"What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1794)

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."

- Thomas Paine in "Age of Reason" (1793)

"The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason, Part I (1793)

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. "

- Thomas Paine

"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason"

"The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion."

- Thomas Paine

"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason "(1794)

"The Christian Mythologists tell us, that Christ died for the sins of the world, and that he came on purpose to die. Would it not then have been the same if he had died of a fever or of the small-pox, of old age, or of anything else?"

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1793)

"The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up."

- Thomas Paine

"If Jesus Christ was the being which those Mythologists tell us he was, and that he came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of to die, the only real suffering he could have endured, would have been to live. His existence here was a state of exilement or transportation from Heaven, and the way back to his original country was to die. In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1795)

"Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity."

- Thomas Paine in the "Age of Reason" (1793)

"When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order."

- Thomas Paine

"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again".

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason"

"It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1793)

"Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing."

- Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" (1795)

"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property."

- Thomas Paine in "Agrarian Justice" (1795 - 1796)

"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

- Thomas Paine in "First Principles of Government" (1795)

"I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene. The sight of the misery, and the unpleasant sensations it suggests, which, though they may be suffocated cannot be extinguished, are a greater drawback upon the felicity of affluence than the proposed ten per cent upon property is worth. He that would not give the one to get rid of the other has no charity, even for himself. There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed."

-Thomas Paine in "Agrarian justice" (1795-96)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thomas-Paine/91127911235

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
"Thomas "Tom" Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States."

Comments

So, chancing the world through creating a brand new ideology is not impossible, but it can be a devilishly long and arduous process, that can take several generations to really bear fruit.
However, if one wants to really change the world around oneself so that one can in best of cases see the results in one's own lifetime, one should work inside an established ideology or organization.
The really big changes in how societies do work and behave do not happen through meetings and issuing of memorandums, even if they can also contribute, but through the change of the spirit of the time: the famous Zeitgeist.

I do think that the point we are just now has largely been through the change in the common psyche or the zeitgeist of our societies. Suddenly in the 19th century more and more people just did think that slavery must be stopped and suddenly in the 20th century almost everybody was suddenly convinced that women should be equal to men.
These are tremendous and unforeseen changes in human societies. They were initiated by a few dedicated followers of those ideas, but they were implemented in a stage when the abolishing of slavery was seen as a quite natural thing to do, even if just a few decades earlier it was seen as an extremely natural part of the existing world order.

In the meantime, there had happened a widespread movement in the zeitgeist and I do think that in the very background of both of these developments was the advancement of the humanist thinking.
Humanism is the great unsung hero of our times. It is unsung because it has always affected to the zeitgeist and it has always worked on the background in the big changes that our societies have undergone during the last 200 years.
There are no great humanist organizations and great humanist leaders dying for their cause, because humanism is just a life-stance, a way of seeing other humans and most of all the society that we do live in.

Humanism is basically just about taking all people into consideration in decision-making, and not seeing people just as a means, but seeing the maximizing of the well-being of all humans as an end in itself.
So, for example the communist rulers of the Soviet Russia were never really humanists, even if they did occasionally pay lip service to the humanist ideals.

A humanist attitude to life can manifest itself through any kind of ideology and there are humanists and humanistic ideas at work in all ideologies that do work in our societies.
However, a true humanist will never be among extremists in any ideology, as extremism if by definition a way of seeing things in a way where the needs of the ideology do come first and needs of humans are often far-away second.

I do think that every single act we do in our lives can affect the zeitgeist of our times and we really can change the world though our own daily actions when we live in this wildly interconnected world where for example blogs, discussion groups and open debates on news-sites do bring one's words to the eyes of the world.
Of course there remains the problem of making other people listen, but I do think that reasonable and well thought-out messages can always gain readers.

The great part in chancing the zeitgeist is of course that you can change it through even by changing the way one single person sees to world, as he just may be in the hub of ideas and can start a chain-reaction that affect thousands of people.
The downside of it of course is that you will never know if your own work has ever had any effect.

In my mind just now the greatest task facing humanity is lowering the artificial ideological barriers that do separate groups of humans from other often basically quite similar groups of humans.
I think that very many of the great advancements in human history have been achieved through chancing how people see the people who do not belong to their own ideologically created group.
The most common of these are of course those based on a common language or common history or based on accepting a common religious or other very strong group-forming ideology.

At this stage of human development I do think that the big task ahead of us is to lower the barriers that are created by all of these strong, group-forming ideologies.
This very often means working against the real-world power of these ideologies, as they do derive most of their power though their ability to make people see the followers of different forms of ideologies as threats and enemies.

This does not mean necessarily breaking or destroying these ideologies, but just taming them, as the slave-owners or the masculine heads of families were in their time tamed by a change in the zeitgeist, in the spirit of times.
We should just work for a world where seeing people of different religious or ideolocigal greed as enemies is definitely frowned upon.

Comments

I'm a firm believer of the free will, but I do think that the socially predetermined flow of life all too easily takes it over. It just is all too easy to go with the flow and not give it a second thought.
This predetermination of human life stems of course from the basic structures of our society, and not from 'fate' or the will of any kind of a 'higher being'.

In fact our life is all too often like a computer game; there seems to be vast expenses to range around, but when you wander too far, you stumble and hit your head into the limits of the playing field that were put there by the owners of the game.
However, the illusion of freedom is extremely important for the player, even if he is always aware of the summary whereabouts of the tracks that he must follow. As long as they are not clearly marked in the ground he can act as if they would not be there and retain the illusion of freedom.

Our society just is so complex and the interdependence of people has reached such heights that society needs to ensure that maximum number of players do aim for the same goal for the complex, never-ending game we call a western post-industrial society to be able to continue in the first place.
At the same time the illusion of freedom of choice needs to be maintained, as it is a very important ingredient in the mixture that can keep us sane under this constant, never-ending pressure to perform and achieve.

We must be able to think that we can jump off the wagon, if we really want, even if it is just an unreachable illusion for most of us. We can work harder than any slaves ever did when we just believe that it is what we want ourselves.
Slaves of the ancient times did what they were forced to do and idled away when nobody was watching, but we have all too often successfully programmed a whip-master to our own heads who does not let us go for a single moment.

Come to think of it, I do think that never in human history has so many people been simultaneously under similar mental pressure to work at the fringes of their capabilities every single working day of their lives.
For the worst cases the days off are there for just keeping themselves fit for the work and holidays are there just to 'recharge their batteries' for work, as if they would not have any worth as human beings, but just as maximal achievers.

The difficult part in this is not to make people want to do this, s it is easy to achieve with a suitable set of rewards and punishments, but it is not enough; the ultimate secret is that we must sincerely love it to be able really to do this day after day, year after year for the rest of our lives.

Comments

The more I think about it, the more I do come to one conclusion; that my worries can only become greater with every moment I spend worrying about them and not trying to solve them, if they are solvable.
If they are not solvable by me, the best method just might not be to dwell in them, but trying to diminish the effect that these worries are having in my life. This is naturally the essence of the Stoic philosophy.

Of course there are people who just could not live if they could not complain about the things that they see as wrong in their lives and around them and who get real relief from this activity.
However, I do think that they are a minority and most people just could get along better in their lives if they could let go for a moment and really live for the day and they could grab even some of the possibilities that life really can offer them, if they just could avert their minds out of their pains and sorrows even for a short moment every day.

Of course this idea a thing that is laughably easy to say and devilishly difficult to implement in practice, but as the one of the great Stoics, Marcus Aurelius said: "Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach."
Things that are seen as humanly possible in this quote need not to be writing a new symphony or throwing the javelin at a world record, it could just as well be just about gaining a real state of peace in one's mind. Others have managed to do it, why not me?

It is good to remember just at this point how Marcus Aurelius also wrote this little sentence in his great book "Meditations". He said simply this: "Very little is needed to make a happy life."
I do think that this little sentence carries a tremendous weight; for me it is like an iceberg that really must hit you before you can grasp its awesome immensity.

I must still point out that there are two quite distinctive categories in use here;
A ) the things that you can change
B ) the things that you cannot change
The view that Stoicism is all about the category B is a very common misinterpretation of the Stoic ideas, the more so as this the one that was used also by the early Christians and followers of other schools of philosophy to discredit Stoicism.
This idea will of course lead to determinism and fatalism, but I must again emphasize that the big thing in my mind is trying to change the things in category A first.

I just might of course be putting a much greater emphasis on this feature of chancing things that bother you than the Stoics of the Roman times did.
Our society just has perhaps evolved to be such that there are much, much more things that people can really at least try to change than was the case in the times when the original Stoics walked the street of Rome.

Of course the really hard part is trying to determine which things are such that we can change them and which are not. Sometimes it can be easy; but sometimes it is outright impossible.
No solution to any universal human problem can ever be absolutely true. Still I dare say that the less people keep dwelling on problems that they cannot really solve and the more they keep trying to solve the problems that they can really solve, the better is the median human condition.

PS. I must still stress that I do not mean at all that one should not try to find and most of all also solve the underlying processes that do cause worries in human life, as this the need is the real force that drives our societies forward; I am referring to worries on a more personal level here.
I do think that a person can still try to make our world a better place, even if a he or she tries not to worry too much about things in his or her own life that he or she one really cannot have an real effect on.

Comments

The hard fact is that none the core teachings of Jesus are followed in practice at all in Christianity anywhere. Nobody sells off all of their property and will give the money to the poor and nobody in practice does give his other shirt to poor. Nobody really turns the other cheek and nobody really loves their true enemies.

These are just high ideals that are set as an example, but everybody is in real world quite aware of the fact that these ideals are quite impossible to reach in real life.
Similarly the requirements that Epicurus does make are often already rather extreme in an affluent and democratic modern society. Epicurus says that one should abstain wholly from politics, one should not seek positions of power and most of all one should refrain from all forms of collecting possessions.

All these things will tie one down and diminish ones possibilities to find real peace and serenity and through them real, sustainable happiness.
These demands are rather taxing in a modern world where men of even modest means by the standards of Greece of Antiquity will have possessions that would be greater than a man at the time of Epicurus would have ever dreamed to be possible even for a king.

Few would be willing to give up their houses or laptops, as they are now similar basic necessities of life as a straw mattress in the time of Epicurus.
However, I see that this situation is dilemma only as long as one is able to realize that the ideals of Epicurus can be seen only as higher, but in fact quite unreachable ideals. They do set the ultimate goals one to strive for, even if one is quite aware of the fact that these goals can be just dreams in real life.

Why would then a person have ideals that he or she well knows to be unreachable? The main point for me is that just having a set of higher ideals can change the way people look at the world and how they respond to it even in a major way.
The ideals of Epicureanism combined with the more modern ideals of secular humanism can give in my mind a basis for a good life. It could be a life where one's life is not shaped only be securing maximal personal advancement on the expense of others, but there really are ideals that make a person see the world and fellow humans with new eyes.

We can strive for a little better tranquility and a bit better peace of mind also; we do not need to make the world go upside down to cause changes in our own minds, but also in the world around us.
I do think that when more people realize that striving for more and more possessions and more and more power over ones fellow humans is not the only way forward, also our world can become a better place bit by bit.

This change needs not to be universal or even widespread for it to have an effect in the zeitgeist or the spirit of the time. I do not strive for an Epicurean state or even majority, but a world where also Epicurean ideals can exist in peace, as a possible way of life for those whose lives will be made better by it.
I know that talk like this is very hard to understand for any kind of zealots of any modern ideology, as most ideologies are shaped so that they do quite automatically seek power and even majority positions. However, Epicureanism is not like that, as it is just about seeking personal peace and happiness by avoiding and withdrawing from situation which can cause conflicts with others.

However, I do really think that chancing even with a the tiniest little bit of the current zeitgeist of universal greed and personal advancement at all costs is a worthy goal, even if nobody would ever reach the Epicurean goal of reaching a state of ataraxia or a state of complete calmness and happiness.

Comments

I do think that that the good old Marx-fellow (the one with great beard, not the one with the big cigar) had a lot of things right at his time, but the world has just changed so incredibly much that his analysis is not valid at all anymore. Most of all his ideas for rectifying the wrongs of capitalism did in fact lead to more unneeded suffering in form of imposed state-capitalism in Soviet Union and it allies.
However, I do think that socialism as a movement did a lot of good. In fact I do think that it did save capitalism from the grave that the open greed of the time of Industrial Revolution would have lead it.

Most of all the fear of socialism was a major force that did lead to massive improvement in the conditions of the working majority of humans. This improvement also did create a new kind of mass market for the products that capitalists were producing more and more effectively with the advance of science.
I do claim that without this new mass market also the modern state of welfare would have been largely impossible to create.

Of course the socialist political movement was also important in bringing changes in very many societies, but I do claim that most of all the fear of the rising power of socialism did force capitalists to make compromises.
These compromises did make it possible to create the world of relative peace and prosperity in which we do live just now in areas like Europe and Northern America or Japan.
Quite similarly the green movement did not need to have power to change the environmental attitudes in the 80's and 90's in Europe, as just the fear of the rise of green power was enough for other parties to form new kinds of policies in environmental issues.

Of course the rising productivity did make it possible to pay better wages, but the other extremely important factor was the rising scarcity of labor that did drive the price of labor up, when the work-markets were practically local in nature.
This competition for labor rise did push the wages and with them the general level of prosperity upwards again. This rise did help also to create a better and better working state-apparatus with the strong rise in taxes collected from expanding economies.

The rising price of labor was of course also in the end a very important which drove the productivity up, as it just was more and more profitable to find ways to make things with less and less labor.
Happily for us the economies expanded with the ensuing rise of income that the rise in productivity did make possible. Even if more and more was produced with less and less work, all the time more things were produced and economies kept expanding and expanding economies could offer more job openings.

This was a win-win-situation for both labor and capitalists, that lasted until the prices of transporting of goods fell dramatically with the rise of container-transport. This now quite unglamorous thing did revolutionize the pricing, speed and safety of international trade in very short time.
Now it was possible to produce even the cheapest and most basic items on the other side of the globe and the constraints presented earlier by the local labor-markets were broken.
Now workers were not competing with people in roughly similar conditions, but they were competing with laborers from dirt-poor countries who were willing to work for pittance.

(btw. I have gone through many of these ideas in this blog before here: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2011/04/09/how-would-protecting-the-chinese-workers-help-you-10978584/)

Now capitalists could circumvent the whole apparatus of environmental regulations, work-safety laws, sick-pay and pension-systems that had been built up laboriously step by step during last the hundred years in developed countries.
It was back to the raw and merciless world of Industrial Revolution, where workers slaved away for pittance just to stay alive. Now this environment was just crated in China or India or Vietnam.

My personal answer to this new situation is 'solidarism' (It could also be 'global solidarism' or 'humanist solidarism', if you like, but short is good in these things, I think).
In my vision it is a ideology where decisions are based on how they best serve common interests of all humans as inhabitants of a common and most of all very finite planet.

Ecology and things like global curbing of emissions of certain gases would be high on the agenda of this movement, but most of all it would try to find local solutions to global problems.
A very basic problem is that there is no real counterpart and counterweight for the of the big international operators in international economy, as all their old opponents are all local, when they act globally themselves.
The global solidarism as a global truly boundary-free movement just could offer this kind of counterforce(in my daydreams, that is, of course).

In my vision the central theme of this movement would be solidarity of all humans, as we just live in a world where protecting the rights of the Chinese or Indian workers would be the best and most effective way to protect also the Finnish or German workers.
This idea of global human solidarity is basically of course a old humanistic ideal, but humanism is just a attitude and life-stance, but I do think that solidarism would need to go many steps further to address very concrete problems in our world.

The old-time socialist and labor-movements do still concentrate on local agendas and local issues, when we need new kinds of forces that could act on a global level.
Of course I cannot know if it would really ever be possible to create any kind of real-world movement around this kind of ideas, but luckily one if allowed to imagine new solutions to old problems also.

I am not a complete fool (I still hope!) and I well know that a idea of this magnitude that is presented in a obscure blog in remote Finland will never do anything real at all.
However, I do also think that any individual idea can well gain a life of its own. I can just hope that some of the ideas I present here can be in the future presented in much clearer form by someone of who I have never even heard of and who has never, ever heard of me.
Any individual idea just is a meme and when you release it to the wild, it can gain a life of its own and you can have very little control on its future.

Comments

This feeling of humans having somehow 'left' nature is of course a deeper philosophical question. Of course I can understand its roots; for some people all new and amazing things that humans can do just are not natural anymore, even if humans as animals are a quite similar product of nature as blades of grass or the birds.
I do think that way of seeing humans as something separate from 'nature' paradoxically also is a reason why some people think that nature is ours to use as we please.

This idea of humans as some kind of separate entity from nature can also lead to forgetting that humans are as dependent on the well-being of our little blue planet as they have always been.
Of course going to work at 8 o'clock every morning is not 'natural' at all, as natural instinct of any animal is to rest when it has food, shelter and sex, but I so think this is a different, cultural issue.

That humans are still part of the nature, as they have always been, does not of course mean that they could not damage this nature where they do also themselves live even violently. As well as big herds of grass-eaters can overeat their grazing areas and face at least local extinction, so also humans can and have damaged even severely their own living environments.
Of course humans can do the damage with greater viciousness that any other animal, as we have evolved special new abilities that no other species of animal do not possess. These abilities have been already used to cause extreme havoc and damage on all too many areas of our little blue planet.

Happily for the future of humans the human being is a very social animal and we have already built strong societies that can also control the environmentally suicidal tendencies that individual humans and greedy groups of humans do have, if there just is the will.
It is true that a individual human will only try to ensure his own survival and happiness, but the role of the society is to reign him in and save him from himself.
The damage that has been done has been largely local thus far and very few whole ecosystems have been completely destroyed. I am sure that there is still hope, and the road to betterment is still open.

I do think that the really big first priority just now should be population control and getting the population growth under definite control.
One of the biggest threats for the remaining rainforests does come from millions of migratory families desperately seeking better lands to farm and to graze, as all available good land is already taken in the populated areas of the earth.

A effective and working control of growth of population will help also in the fight against the global change of weather, but most of all in this issue I do put my trust on democracy.
I would be really scared if world would be run by governments like the one in Soviet Russia or by the Islamic or Christian fundamentalists. For them nature quite universally has no worth of its own, but nature was created simply to serve man.
However, in a working democracy there is always the possibility for error-correction, which is for me also is the real big thing that in the end differentiates democracy from all forms of dictatorship.

Most important of all a democratic system can admit its old failures and wrong decisions, as the easy change of leadership gives a chance to simply blame the old leaders for bad decisions and also change political course.
This is normally quite impossible in a dictatorship, where also deeper changes in policies are often quite impossible; for example a theocracy is much more deeply married to its basic ideology, when in democracy ideas can come and go, when the need arises. In environmental issues a ideological inflexibility is extremely dangerous, and in fact the places where these issues have been least taken care of are just dictatorships like Soviet Russia, China and Iran.

Of course there are very different kinds of democracies also. There are ones like the one where I do live here in Finland, where decision-making process is very often even surprisingly rational and one can at times really change things by force of rational reasoning.
Then there are of course countries like the US of A, where democratic process is badly skewed by extremely strong and powerful upper class, that can use media to drive the mood in the country where they want.

However, even United States is in the end still a democracy. I do think that big enough changes in the real world environment will have on effect on the decision-making even there eventually, but in dictatorial countries like China this process can be much slower and much more painful.
We saw in the 60's and 70's how a quite new kind of environmental awareness did really and deeply change the way how industrial wastes are treated and regulated in all democratic countries. In the end old-style open destruction of nature continued in Europe only in Soviet bloc in the 80's and 90's.
This is one of the reasons why I do still believe that it is quite possible that sanity will win in the quest for preserving of this planet, if only rational voices are allowed a fair hearing.

Comments

I believe the origins of subconsciousness lie in the fact that the maintaining and controlling an amazing amount of parallel processes that are needed just to keep up the a very basic level of functions in any animal cannot be done on the conscious level, but they do always happen 'under the hood' in a subconscious level.
In the process of evolution of a more and more complex living organism there has been a direct need to automate more and more processes that maintaining this living organism does require every single moment of its life.

The first processes that did slip into the realm of subconsciousness were probably very simple and basic things. With time more and more complex things could be slipped into there, as the processes controlling and maintaining subconsciousness developed until in humans even most of mental processes cab be maintained there.
This organism would be quite helpless heap of mass if its energies would be directed into just maintaining the inner life-keeping processes.

So, they have been highly automated and this process of automation has created the subconscious level in mind, where information is processed constantly, but it is not recognized on a conscious level.
Evolution has driven the subconscious mind to flash only the very top stories to the conscious mind, so it is not overburdened and can concentrate on tasks like observing its surroundings for prey or predators.
In fact mostly just warning signals cross normally the threshold, even if myriad of things are going on constantly underneath under the hood.

I do think that the human subconsciousness is not a serial-processing, but parallel-processing thing. A subconscious mind can jump freely from association to association, evaluate several associations at seeming same time and so it can create on illusion of jumping the gun, when one is used to the idea of serial-processing of things, when A follows B.
Different areas of brain are reserved for different practical tasks the body needs to keep track of and they do all work simultaneously, independent of other parts.

Quite similarly subconsciousness can be at work with tasks A and B and C and D at the same time, as they are just states of mind that inhabit different parts of the mind.
I think that language is the main reason why a very basic misunderstanding in so common here, as we think in language on a conscious level, but our subconsciousness is not limited by language. It can work on a higher level of abstraction, on the level of pure ideas and even mere rough outlines of ideas. Only the end results are processed at the level of language.

I think the real key here is to understand that a human mind in a not single-core CPU or central processing unit, but there just might be a vast number of independently working processor-cores, that just might be able process a lot of incoming data and even compare it with already stored information in several processes in parallel and simultaneously.

It can done with a extraordinary speed, also because this processing is not necessarily done in level of language, but on a higher, extremely abstract level where whole ideas are used as building blocks for new ideas and a fuzzy logic is applied on a very large scale.
The focus is sharpened just when the need arises, but mind can with enormous efficiency process very complex ideas, whole vistas and complicated issues in split second, as long as they are not brought up to the level of spoken language of the conscious mind, which will slow things down to a crawl.

It just might be that the conscious level should be seen as the printing services that collect the output that the subconscious mind does produce. Of course this latter metaphor can be a misleading also, as before creating the output happens there is the all-important process of selecting the best possible answers from the brain-storming going on in the subconscious mind and I do not really think that process is the thing that makes the mind better than the computer is so many tasks.
On this level the masses of information and processes going on constantly on subconscious mind are selected and presented to the conscious mind

However, I do think that the final conscious level of thought is always needed to finalize the process and to create an output that is comprehensible others. I think that most failed communication is a result of poorly formed output of the subconscious mind, where all seems so clear and well-formatted, but dressing the idea up into language can be all too difficult.
I do also think that the level of ‘enlightenment’ and opening of ones mind that is so sought after in many philosophical disciplines is really the ability to free ones subconscious mind more than usually from the limitations that the conscious part of the mind levies on it.

These constraints are of course a result of the fact that even the mental faculties are a limited resource and the needs of keeping the body alive and well are in the end the primary ones that even a human being has.
I think that a lot of mediation is just trying to free the subconscious from the constraints imposed by needs of the physical self, as there is the dire possibility of damage if its needs are neglected for a too long period of time.

Of course the ability to harness the power of subconscious mind does vary enormously, as do vary all other human abilities, but I do think that it can be trained like any other human ability.
I do think that by just doing a lot of any kind of creative work can teach one can learn to harness better the resources that do hide in the subconscious mind of every single human being, as the repeated process of intensive brain activity can teach one to rely more and more on the mind to produce the wanted results. It is a cliche, but it really is just about ‘freeing your mind’.

It is not about learning ready-made models of thought or repeating old (even fine) results of creativity of others, but about learning to trust your mind to produce results, even if you do not know beforehand what they could be.
I do think that the ability to really use the resources that are on offer in subconscious part of the mind is about trusting your instincts; you must trust that the results really can be worthwhile.

I think that self-confidence and trust in ones own abilities are the key components here.
I’m afraid these are things that really cannot be taught, but can be found only in practice; by creating new things time after time and by finding the results more and more pleasurable.

This is simply my ‘theory of the mind’. The ideas in it are not my invention of course, but it is a collection of bits and pieces from all over the place, but most of all the wonderful books of Steven Pinker, but also a dozens of lectures, articles and books by many other people working in the field of studying of the human mind.
This field has simply fascinated me for decades and I have consumed trough these decades a lot of very different material on the subject.
As this piece is a product of a free-roving subconscious mind and not a academic treatise, I cannot pinpoint who is the source of any given idea.

Comments

In the dawn of humanity the written word did carry many kinds of magical qualities with it. Only few, selected people were able to read and write and most of all writing was very expensive, as the materials that were used to preserve writing were very expensive at that days standards and writing was in fact a preserve of the ruling class only.
So, there were not many written texts around at the birth of written literature. Only the very important texts were written on more durable materials and all else has been lost.

On the other hand the birth of stable permanent agricultural societies did necessitate the creation of new kind of rules for social interaction. Their complexity soon rose to a new level, most of all when also the level and impact of commerce was on the rise.
A very serious problem with a feudal system is that even laws can be changed at will to suit the needs of the current ruler and ruling group. If there are no solid ground rules of how much laws can be changed there will be no limit on the things that the rulers can do.

In this situation there was a innovation being made. Religious texts had undoubtedly always had a special place, but these religious innovators had a marvelous idea.
If you claim that some religous texts are the exact words of a deity and not just stories about their lives, as religious texts had largely been up to that time, the basic ideas that were embedded in them could not be changed by whim anymore or just because of the needs of any temporary crisis.
This innovation did bring a new kind of stability to the society, as there were some unmovable ground rules that aided in maintaining social harmony.

On the other hand we normally have no difficulty in understanding that even the the wisest human can ever have it right in all issues, but a 'deity' can be claimed to be able to do even that.
I think this is a major reason why religious ideologies do quite universally claim that their ideas are not human inventions at all, but are derived from some kind of 'deity'.

When the written texts were originally seen to have magical qualities, their new role as the ‘word of god’ was just a evolutionary step forward and it was soon widely accepted.
There just is a very natural and direct need to have working ground rules in a complex society and a religion based on ‘divine revelation’ did offer them quite handily.

It was a the time really not a big problem that they were based on the whims and personal ideas of the few men who did really write them.
Firstly their creation was a group effort and many kinds of ideas were incorporated in them and secondly any kind of collection of similar rules would quite inevitably have been similar quite whimsical collections of popular ideas of that time.

Their claimed status as unadulterated word of god made these texts easier to accept, less easier to change and their now easy to spot randomness was not a problem in a society that was pretty much ruled on the feeling in the seat of the pants anyway, as were little hard data on the effects of different decisions was to be had.
However, problems do arise when these old moral rules are still applied to a dramatically different society, whose needs are often diametrically opposed to those of the undeveloped agricultural society in which they were born.

I have always said that morality is really born out of the needs of the society, as morality is the basic code of conduct that gives us ground rules for interactions between individuals on the other hand and individual and society on the other.
However, I do also think that the version of morality that is in use a particular society is always a compromise on the need to restrict the liberty of action of the individual and the drive to ensure some level of personal freedom of choice for the individuals.

All too often these two things are in direct collision and the end result is decided by how much weight is currently given to either of them. Restrictive societies quite universally have the society-level goals as their main motivations and permissive societies give bigger weight for the pursue of personal happiness.
These things do continue to fight for supremacy century after century in all societies. The level of economic progress seems also to be a very decisive factor here.

For example in the successful economy of Greece the quest for personal happiness was soon at the forefront, but in the backward Palestine where Judaism and Christianity were originally born people did live in much more dire straits and the rights of the individual were put to back seat. Also Islam was born in that time quite backward desert-economy of small-time farmers and herders.

Now, the Biblical ideas of morality were born in a society where the need to restrict the freedom of individuals was seen being of paramount importance, but they are now applied to societies where there is a direct need to give more and more room for individual creativity and accomplishment.
The well-being of our society is less and less dependant on the level of the individuals submitting their own will to the needs of the society and more and more dependant on the abilities of the individual in driving the economy and society forward.

I acknowledge that that the needs of the society will always necessitate some level of curbing of the freedoms of the individual, but there is the big million dollar question of on what level this must be done to ensure the flourishing of the society just now.
There is the direct risk that If we apply the repressive Biblical or Koranic morality on a society whose needs have already changed beyond recognition, there is the very real possibility that we are not aiding this society to prosper, but in fact hurting it.

Comments

What I am trying to say here is that the level of achievable objectivity does vary incredibly depending on our personal involvement on any particular issue.
If I am a member of a Christian denomination just because my family has always been that and I have no personal true relationship with this ideology, this membership does not necessarily influence how I see the world at all.
However, the moment when I start feeling passionately about the message of this religious ideology it is quite certain that it will affect the way I see very many other things, even if in the conscious level I am not even aware of this happening.

Objectivity is not a thing that would be on and off, but it is variable that stretches from nil to hundred according to the particular issue at hand and according to our personal life-experience.
I am also not saying that having passionate relationship with things would be a bad thing, on the contrary. I am just saying that people should be aware of this very possible bias, when they look at the work of people who have a passionate personal relationship with the things that they do speak or write of.

Many people have clearly difficulty in understanding that all religions really are ideologies. It is if course a common phenomena, as religions have worked hard to achieve a special separate status among human ideologies.
Most people cannot even grasp the fact that religions really are a group of human ideologies that just do commonly claim to have a 'divine' origin. There just is not separate 'religion' and 'religious ideology', but it is always a whole package.
Judaism may blur these definitions a bit, as it can be seen also just as a collection of traditions, as some more secular Jews do quite commonly do. However, the religious ideology lurks also there straight under the level of odd and exotic traditions.

The fact is that accepting any ideology makes it extremely hard to look at that ideology at a objective way. It is folly to expect a vegan to look at his ideology in a objective way, even if he can well look quite objective at millions of other ideas.
Similarly even if a Christian may have great difficulty in looking at the history of his own faith, he may be quite objective in things that does not have such ideological connection.
I am not saying that being a Christian would prohibit normal reasoning, but I am saying that a Christian will not normally be able to look fully objectively just at his OWN FAITH and its history.

I'm not saying that people should not have ideologies or agendas. I am only saying that when people are analyzing their OWN ideology, they just cannot be fully objective in practical life.
However, I am not saying at all that they would need not be allowed to write about the history of their faith, but just that the reader just needs to be aware of the very possible invisible bias lurking underneath.
I do fear that even most people living in Christian societies are even not aware that this kind of bias is possible, as they have trouble seeing the nature of Christianity as a ideology.

When a Mormon writes about the history of Mormonism or a active Buddhist about the history of Buddhism, their view on their subject matter is bound to be different than when Mormon in writing about the history of Buddhism or a Buddhist about the history of Mormonism.
We just often have difficulty in understanding that active belief in Christianity will have a similar effect when a Christian is writing about the history of Christianity, even if he can look quite objectively on many, many other things.

Comments

Of course the explanation why these personal religious experiences are felt through Christianity by some or through Hinduism or by Shintoism by some others is normally also purely a social and historical one.
However, it just seems to be so that when you have for any reason accepted some part of ideas of a religious ideology you tend quite universally to drift towards accepting more and more of ideas that are present in that religion until very often ultimately often the whole package is accepted.

Of course this happens also because these systems are carefully crafted to work this way; you are often just expected to accept the whole package, or you are left out cold.
Once you are in, your perception of the religious ideology in question will be changed. It is not just humanly possible to look at it objectively anymore. The ‘if you are not with us you are against us’ -mentality that is present in so many religions does intensify this process, as doubting any facet of the religion is just not accepted for a believer.

Thus, a very private personal mental experience can lead into accepting a very real public social phenomena and its real world actions that a person in some cases would even not approve of without his or her association with a certain religion.
This can lead to situation, where a person can be deeply caring and loving on a personal level, but defend even the most hate-filled actions that are committed in the name of this religion.

At the background is the idea that a believer always knows that his religion is the religion of love and peace. This core message is written in all of its holy books and this message of love and peace is present everywhere in all kinds of religious messages and ceremonies.
It is no wonder that a true believer cannot understand why other people might see as a threat his or her religion which this person clearly does see to be so full of love and understanding towards all humanity.
Here is the difficult part to understand for many; the religion that does operate on the personal level can be a quite different animal than the very same religion when it is used to justify actions of different kinds of religious organization on the level of a society.

The friendly local Catholic clergyman or the friendly local Mullah do normally represent the loving and caring side of the religion, (even of course there are exceptions to this rule) that does present the friendly, open and warm side of the religion to the public.
However, at the same time representatives and operatives of the same religion can be deeply involved in inducing open hatred towards all forms of deviation from the social norms or hatred towards those who do harbor wrong kinds of beliefs.

A religious organization inevitably gains a agenda of it own and on the top of that agenda is ensuring the position of that organization in society. A cruel fact of life is that the original message of love and caring and acceptance can be even quite forgotten in the practical policies of a religious organization, especially when it sees itself as being under a threat.
So, Catholic Church had no trouble in making the power-sharing deal with Nazis in 1933 or the famous Reichskonkordat, as the need to ensure the existence of the organization was much more important than possible threat to human rights and freedom that the rising Nazi Party did clearly present even at that point of time.

The double nature of the religion is the cause for a situation where a good and loving Catholic can condemn the horrible crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators and at the same time applaud the Pope for his political cunning in forging a good deal with them.
The end result was that the Catholic Church could operate through the whole Nazi era in perfect safety when it just in return blessed the weapons that were used to conquer new lands and did not rise to publicly oppose any of the hideous Nazi politics.

A official religion just always is at the same time a tool for social control at one level, even if can be a source of personal harmony and fulfillment at another level at the same time.
It could be even suggested that these personal religious experiences are misused to forward social and political agendas that would otherwise even be quite unpalatable for many of the believers as individuals.

Comments

A fact of life is that most of all the medieval scholars are still largely Christians of some sort or another, as others will only rarely spend their life studying this era that was dominated by religious beliefs in a way that perhaps no other era of human history has been.
This very easily leads to a situation where the quite unique absolute medieval mental dictatorship of the Catholic Church is described as something benign and life in medieval Europe as something quite normal.
Of course one can also describe life in the 1950's or 60's in Russia or Poland as quite normal, as most people did really live quite normal lives even there. Still their society was full of fear and oppression, but you would meet them only if you did rise against the system for any reason.

Quite similarly most people did lead quite normal lives in medieval Europe, the more so as they were quite similarly kept completely ignorant of the fact that there would even exist any other ways to organize human life on earth.
In all dictatorships most people do in the end always live quite normal, quiet lives just minding their own business. The rare outbursts of witch-burning or going to religious crusades were exceptions to the general rule even in medieval Europe also.

I fear that many people might even think that it can be possible that the work of Christian historian is not affected by his beliefs, which is of course a quite impossible feat for any human if you think really it through.
Of course the level of attachment to a religious ideology can vary to extraordinary degree especially in modern societies. So the effect that the religious ideology can have on the work of an historian can vary immensely.

Of course it is theoretically possible to be a believing Christian and write about the past deeds of that ideology in a quite objective way, but I would suspect that it is a very rare and extraordinarily difficult task.
The core problem in my mind is that Christianity is not just often all too seen as a ideology in a way all other ideologies are. I fear that many people just do not understand that having any ideology can affect your perception of the past of that ideology even strongly.

On this background it is easier to understand that when medieval history is largely a history of the Catholic Church, this means that the Christian ideology of a person who writes about it can have even a decisive effect on this work, even if the writer himself is not necessarily aware of it.
Quite similarly a Communist historian writing of history of Soviet Union is hardly to be expected to create objective work. The writer himself may, however, think that he is 100 per cent objective.
It is funny how the Christian ideology of a writer is quite commonly not seen as a similar source of possible distortion.

At this point I must make it clear that I do not think that there is no Christian conspiracy in the field of history at all. Let me explain. In Soviet Union all history books did tell the history in a quite similar way, as historians writing there histories did believe that they were writing the true and objective history, as they did believe that their ideology was objective and true and things that were not seen through it were simply not true.
For centuries the historians who were living in Christian societies just had basic common ideology that made them see things in the past through the distorting lens of that ideology, even if quite certainly they and also their readers sincerely believed that they were being quite objective.

There is also the bias of perception that is inevitably produced by any strong ideology that a person really believes is. He just does not see as interesting the things do not fit in well with his or her ideology, even if this is needs to be done in purpose at all.
For centuries on end history has simply been written by people who did believe in a ideology that had also been an actor in things that they did study.
In such a situation there lurks an inevitable bias that can make one to look only at things that do favor this ideology and not be interested in things that are somehow awkward for this ideology.

A recent, quite different phenomena are the Christian warriors who set out to protect the past of their beloved ideology. They are of course normally quite easy to spot, if one understands the need to do so.
So, the problem is not conspiracy to forge history of the past, but unconscious interpreting of in it in constant way so that it can support ones ideology. This problem would of course not exist if Christianity would have died out at some point.

Of course just challenging the old Christian version of history will not create a new absolutely objective version of history, but it will help in creating a more balanced view on it.
I am not saying that we would need a all new kind of atheist history, or that Christian should not be allowed to write history. I am just suggesting that we should be more aware of the danger of being a follower of a ideology can create. When we are aware of the existence of the phenomena we can enjoy also the works of the Christian scholars with new insight.

The act of not doing something is also an act, here it is the act of leaving the existing bias as it is.
I am just basically saying here that followers of a certain ideology just can have had all too unhealthy part in writing and forming our model for the history of that same ideology.

The basic problem here for many is of course that they do not really cannot see Christian faith as a ideology, of course because it has been the default position in their own society for centuries on end.
Many people just they cannot see the connection between the nature of writing of Christian historians and their ideology, as it one of those things that does really become visible only when one is aware of it.

A classical case of the invisibility of the bias is just the recent rewriting of the medieval history that has been going on in last decades. You just might find a surprising lot of believing Christians among those writers who have found out that medieval Europe was full of human flourishing, if you start to look at their background a bit more closely.
Surprisingly few have done so and this Christian apoplectic view of history has really crept into the academia also.

Medieval Europe was after all the time when Christianity did rule unchallenged in Europe and these people would just hate to admit that it was not a good time for humans.
The centuries when a ruling emperor would stand barefooted in the snow to be admitted to see the Pope (as really happened in Canossa) just have to be good times for some people and they will write history to suit their needs.

After you see the bias you soon start for example understand why for example the persecution of non-Christians int 4th and 5th centuries and the wholesale and complete destruction of other religions in Roman empire is normally not even mentioned or passed over with a few vague sentences.
The Christian tradition in history just lets it be understood that people just gave up their national millennium-old traditions because the new religion just felt so very good.
The Christian tradition of writing history also quite forgets to ask why the German and Slavic feudal overlords were so extremely willing to come over to Christianity and force their own people to follow this strange new foreign tradition.

It is easy to forget that for centuries most of history was basically written just to embellish the past so that Christianity would look good.
We have of course passed this phase a very long time ago; I do think that it died out already in the 19th century, but its legacy does linger on.
Of course we have still have The Christian Warriors waging the wars of the past from their high horses, but commonly they do not thankfully get the limelight outside the Christian education system, where they on the other hand occupy the dominating positions.

The story of inevitable rise and victory of Christianity has become the default position. So, things like the wheeling's and dealings that were going in The First Council of Nicea in the year 325 to create a new religion out Christianity that would fit an aggressive empire, are just brought up.
Some historians just might notice that the Roman emperor was personally supervising the proceedings in Nicea. The questions of how his influence did change the religion are normally not even raised.

I do think that there is also a universal failure to see how incredibly the source material that is based solely on Christian sources can affect our views on especially the medieval times. From the deep medieval times there is simply anything else on offer than texts written by devout Christians, as there just was nobody else that would have even known to read and write.

One other thing to remember here is that study of history is still the realm of theists in a way that no other field of science with the possible exception of theology is.
I do well understand how one normally does not seem to have reason the default 'historical truth' that is maintained by often quite heavily Christian institutions, as the Christian agenda in not really visible anywhere and the ideological status of these academics is mostly never even brought up.

But if these ideological connections are there, it can well have consequences, even if they are not result of any kind of conspiracy, but just a result of the cozy togetherness that is boiling under the surface.
I have read a good lot of quite recent otherwise great books of history where the issues that are inconvenient for the Christian are just tiptoed around.

A good example of this is the book 'Attila the Hun' by Christopher Kelly that does really present the Christian claims of miracles as part of history without taking any stand on their possible truthfulness and the book is from the year 2008, for heaven's sake!
Another good example is the otherwise great "The Fall of Roman Empire" by Peter Heather, which avoids ever mentioning religion at all, even if Roman empire was greatly changed by the rise to power of Christianity that was going on at the time of its decay and fall.

I don't think that it is not about overt self-censorship as such, but about the taking the road of lesser friction. When one just avoids the issues that would rise the eyebrows of the theist in the neighboring room, life is just so much easier.

Comments

"Everybody is entitled to believe. Churches have exactly the same right to exist as a football club, a trade union or a political party. But if you and I set up the Church of the Fairies of the Garden, then I don't think we should automatically be meeting the queen, be entitled to seats in the House of Lords or get public money for our fairy schools."

- A.C. Grayling In a interview at der Spiegel (2010)

"I would like conservatives and fundamentalists in all religions to accept the principles of pluralism and secularism - by the latter meaning a situation in which religious observance is a private affair wholly separated from the public and political domains. If this were to happen, a great amount of conflict would vanish from the world.”

- A. C. Grayling in "Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life." (2010)

‎"Our newspapers are full of conflict and war and murder, but in every city, all around the world, every day of the week there are millions of acts of kindness, compassion, affection, mutuality. And this shows that, as social animals, we’ve got a great deal of responsiveness toward one an­other. We have to work quite hard to put people into an out-group so that we can hate them and demonise them and bomb them. I think that’s true of humanity in general."

- A. C. Grayling (2009)

"The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears."

— A.C. Grayling in "Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God" (2009)

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."

— A.C. Grayling "The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century" (2009)

"Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it."

— A.C. Grayling "The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century" (2009)

"To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries."

— A.C. Grayling

"Our earliest science took the form of belief in supernatural agencies, powerful and invisible, whose tread was heard in the clouds' thunder, and whose anger at the breaking of taboos expressed itself in earthquakes and plagues. Hence arose our earliest technology: sacrifice, prayer, fearful adherence to traditions of dress and diet thought to please the powers lurking beyond man's comprehension."

- A.C. Grayling(2005)

"How can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."

A.C. Grayling in an interview in The Guardian (2011)

"Anthony Clifford Grayling, FRSA, FRSL (born 3 April 1949) is a British philosopher and author. He is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.
His principal interests in technical philosophy lie at the intersection of theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical logic, through which he attempts to define the relationship between mind and world, thereby challenging philosophical scepticism. Grayling uses philosophical logic to counter the arguments of the sceptic in order to try to shed light on the traditional ideas of the realism debate and developing associated views on truth and meaning.
He is also interested in both practical and theoretical questions of human rights and related ethical problems, and has been a significant contributor to philosophical pedagogy and scholarship through writing and editing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling

Comments

Of course science would then be quite just useless as a tool and we could forget about it. Then the only thing worth studying would be the 'mind' of the ‘nature’ that 'lets' things happen and we could not really predict anything, as the 'mind of nature' would able to do whatever it likes and 'let' or 'not let' all kind of things to happen or not.
On the other hand could it just be that ‘nature’ does not 'let' anything happen as we understand 'letting', but things are as they are just because of the nature of the nature.

The other difficult concept to grasp for many is that there really are no immutable 'laws' in nature, as human do normally understand laws.
There are just quite unchangeable properties of various things and processes that do exist in our universe and which take always a certain shape because of the original basic quite unchanging and extremely stable properties of the parties involved in these processes and phenomena.

The 'laws’ that are so commonly used in natural sciences are in the end just always human descriptions and approximations of the basic qualities and properties of our universe and of the phenomena that are caused by these basic qualities.
They are always based on the current level of knowledge in given phenomena. In some things these 'laws' have been very stable for a long time, but in others they are in state of constant flux, if our knowledge still does expand in these fields.
In the end all of the ‘laws’ in science are just humans attempts in trying to describe the things that do occur in our universe because of the existing basic qualities and properties of the said universe.

Of course there is always the big 'why' question. Why then the qualities and properties of our universe are the way they are?
This I can answer very easily; I do not know the answer and I do really think that neither does anybody else. There is of course the really, really easy way out: the "god did it" -guess, which of course does not explain a single bit.

There are better and worse guesses on this matter, but I do not believe that during my lifetime there will be a any kind of universally accepted answer to the 'why' question and it just might be that there never will, but we just must choose the guess that most pleases us.
For many it is a religious guess and I do not blame them, as they are commonly very smooth and pleasing and one can even take them to bed to give comfort at night.

However, I can also present my own guess here of why our universe is as it is right now;
I, for my part do see that nature and matter that it made of as most of all information, as most of all matter does necessarily contain the information that does decide its properties. So, all matter is basically a vehicle for preserving and transferring of of information.
However, I do not think that It has been designed or planned to be such, but its role as carrier of information is a result of its very basic nature. Matter is is one form of energy and all matter which if of course shown by the fact that all matter can be transformed back to energy in nuclear reactions.

The energy that was transformed into matter in the beginning of the current universe did have certain properties that can also be interpreted also as a form of code.
This original source code that was build by the properties of the energy that was transformed into matter does cause that fact that all matter do have certain common properties, even if such code as such does not exist as a separate entity in the way we see code in real life, but it is an embedded property of the matter itself.

As the complexity in the matter rose when our universe did mature, the codes that are always embedded in matter did became more and more complex on the all new rounds of transformation of matter into more and more complex substances all the way to carbon and other ingredients needed for the birth of life.
The way how matter evolved was, however, all the time directed by the few basic properties of the original source code that did guide also the transformation-processes, as this very basic source code, or information is still inherent in all matter, even if incredibly more complex layers are built on it. This basic information that will guide all matter in all its future even more complex transformations also.

These basic codes are universal, as the energy that did make the transformation into matter was quite uniform. So, the very basic information or source code of all matter that was born out of this uniform field o energy is necessarily quite similar in the totality of the universe.
However, all of the tiny disturbances and minute differences in the space did from the very beginning cause matter to have different qualities. These at first extremely minute differences started forming from the moment formation of matter.
After that moment the uniformity of original mass of energy was lost and the growth of complexity could commence form a extremely uniform beginning.

The first particles were the simplest possible, but random interactions and fluctuations in space did cause random mutations in some of them that led to formation of little bit more complex particles.
At the moment when there was more than two types of particles the real birth of complexity as we now know it could commence, as more and more complex combinations of particles did slowly become possible after the birth of every new class of particles. There was ultimately even the birth of solid matter when the complexity has reached a sufficient level.

I do think that the 13,7 billions years of history of our current universe can be seen just as a history of rise in complexity. As the complexity in the matter rose when our universe did mature, also the codes embedded in all matter did became more and more complex.
All the all new rounds of transformation of matter did slowly create more and more complex variations of matter. Ultimately there were also carbon and other even more complex ingredients that were needed for the birth of life, but still the very nature of universe is decided by the original source code, that is still embedded in every particle of it.

So, even if the all rounds of transformation of matter in the furnaces of the stars have added new layers of complexity to the original code, the source code is still there and affect the way how matter will behave as long as it does exist in its endless journey from one form to another.
I do think that in the same way that all living things do share common DNA, all matter has a common ancestry and a common source code.
On this background the pantheistic idea Spinoza or Einstein on the unity of all universe is something not to be scorned, eves there is nothing supernatural in it in my mind.

PS. I know that the ideas I present here do rise objections that are based on most of all on the ideas of heat death and the famous second law of thermodynamics.

However, I do not think that we need to think of the heat death at all here, as we need look to only at what has happened to this point. It is quite easy to see that things have really been getting steadily more complex. Of course that a thing has happened up to now does not mean that it will continue forever.
I think that this rise in complexity is very similar to evolution and evolution could in fact be seen as just a subset of this general trend in the universe.

One needs to remember that not all living things have evolved in similar way at all and evolution has also been quite uneven. There are life forms that have not evolved a single bit for millions and millions of years, when others are gone through an astonishing development at the same time.
Similarly it just could be that some kinds of matter are by their basic nature more prone to develop more complexity than others after they have been differentiated from other matter by freak accidents or 'mutations'.

The second law of thermodynamics is applicable only to isolated physical systems, but systems that do constantly interact with other systems are not prone to equilibrate in a way this 'law' states, but are instead prone to respond to interactions.
One byproduct of the endless amount of interactions among the billions of open subsystems of our universe just can be new more complex systems and sub-systems.

It is all too easy to forget that our universe is made up of billions of of open and interacting sub-systems and only the totality of our universe can be seen as is a isolated system itself.
So, the second 'law' of thermodynamics as a force that would have a real effect on the general outlook and development of the whole system is applicable on the level of whole universe only, even if it can have on effect on local isolated systems on a quite different level.

On the level of whole universe it is quite meaningless, as the time-frame needed to make it have an discernible effect on a level of the whole incredibly vast universe is just stupendous.
So the second law of thermodynamics can in practice be forgotten as a force that would be needed to be take into account when we look at the short-term (on a level of billions of years, at least) development of our own universe.
Instead we do see a constant rise of complexity that are a result of stupendous amount of all kinds of interactions between the billions of interconnected subsystems of the universe.

Comments

There is a reason we have the Mothers Day or a Fathers Day. A special day does put a new kind of focus on a idea momentarily, even if also mothers are mothers every single day of the year. So why not celebrate the International Day of Reason in the May 5th of the year 2011 and on the first Thursday of May in every coming year!

The International Day of Reason is a truly international event for celebrating rationality. There are no fixed or formal events, concerts or receptions anywhere. You can of course arrange one yourself, if you want to have a good reason to throw a party!

However, one easy way to celebrate the day is to use Facebook. We all can publish a great rational idea in our Facebook-status lines in honur of the Day of Reason. "Today is the international Day of Reason" would be a good to add there also.

Internet is chock full of excellent quotations and some of them are even quite rational; see for example In the Little Book of Humanity at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi/ or http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/rational or http://www.brainyquote/.

The local US event or The National Day of Reason was originally born as an response to the National Day of Prayer in the US of A alone. The International Day of Reason tries to promote the idea of a day that is celebrated internationally, but it is done simultaneously on the first Thursday of May as is the US National Day of Reason.

We can naturally celebrate this day by being the reasonable beings we always are, as rationality is never a thing reserved for special occasions. It is something we need every single day of our lives.
Of course we as fallible humans will never be fully rational beings, but at least aiming for greater rationality will always benefit us, our society and in the end, the whole of the human kind.

If you are in Facebook, you can subscribe to the event for this year at:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124293347646438

The permanent Facebook fan-page for International Day of Reason is at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-International-Day-of-Reason/119025068123138

There is also a permanent blog-page for the event in

http://dayofreason.blogs.fi/

As the US National Day of Prayer is set to be the first Thursday of May and the National Day of Reason is set to the same day and the International Day of Reason is set to follow suit the exact day for International Day of Reason will vary from year to year.

The National Day of Reason in the web:
http://www.nationaldayofreason.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Reason
http://www.religioustolerance.org/day_reas.htm

Comments

"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will."
- Mark Twain in "Consistency" (1887).

"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
- Mark Twain in "Mark Twain's Autobiography" (1924)

"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." - Mark Twain in "What Is Man?" (1906)

"Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size."
- Mark Twain in "Which was the Dream? "(1898)

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
- Mark Twain in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889)

"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God."
- Mark Twain in "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1925)

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
- Mark Twain in a marginal note in "Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology"

"Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden."
- Mark Twain in "The Gorky Incident" (1906) ed. Bernard DeVoto

"The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it -- they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization."
- Mark Twain "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901)

"The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at."
- Mark Twain in "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It", in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays" (1900)

"All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason."
- Mark Twain in "On the Book of Mormon, Roughing It" (1872)

‎"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself."
- Mark Twain in "Is Shakespeare Dead?" (1909)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Twain-Samuel-L-Clemens/100702464206

Comments

A cold fact of life is that in the European Union of today the local parliaments get just to fine-tune the regulations that are decided on a higher level and I think that this is just as it should be.
As a Finn I am quite convinced on the fact that the best interest of also Finnish companies and corporations are served when more and more of their competitors are forced to play with the same rules on for example on the rights of workers and environment and as they are forced to use.

In fact I do think that the greatest problem in economy of today are those competitors who are not using the same rulebook and not the existence of this rulebook at all.
During the still ongoing process of globalization an immense amount of production has been transferred to countries where in the best of cases this rulebook does lie in the book-self gathering dust or it is in the worst case on the list of banned books.

At the bottom of this process is of course the astonishing collapse of price of the international shipping and transportation of goods, that was brought about by the use of the containers and the immense jump in the efficiency that it did bring about.
This process made it possible to transfer the production of smaller and smaller batches of cheaper and cheaper products to the other side of the planet, where work was still cheap.

Now many very basic things are made in countries where the protection of the environment is next to nonexistent, the security of work-force is on zero-level, the safety on workplace is just a tame joke and the collective bargaining for better conditions and wages is quite impossible or very, very dangerous at best.

All this means in the end that for this production there is a quite different rule-book in use and the ensuing competition is in fact not honest and fair, as in a every fair and honest competition every player plays by the same rules.
In this globalized world it must be understood that the best interests of the Finnish, Italian or American worker (and of course the local companies and enterprises also), but also of Chinese or Indian workers are best served when we would simply demand that all product that are sold in our markets are produced in a such way that the health and the well-being of the workers and their environment has not been compromised in the process.

In this globalized world of course no single country can go solo in a matter of grave importance like this, but all individuals and of course most of all politicians could be take part of the building up international pressure that would demand the use of a single global rule-book in all of the industrial production of goods.

The best part of all this would be that this process would lead to a fight for the upholding of the basic human rights of the Chinese or Indian or Bangladeshi workers.
Of course customs levies could be used for a good measure for preventing the marketing of products that are produced in a way than does endanger the well-being of the workers or the environment.

However, if these barriers would be conditional and lifted always when the some of the basic requirements would be met, they could in the end greatly help in rectifying of the current immense social and environmental problems that are present in production in countries like India or China.

Of course creating customs barriers to drive through social, ethical and environmental progress in developing countries can only be very slow and incremental process.
In the deeply interconnected world of ours it is of course quite impossible to make abrupt changes.
However, I think it is possible to change the climate of opinion slowly, bit by bit to favor such policies that would be implemented in little increments, the more so as this kind of changes are not easy and fast to make in the first place.

I see that a great way to really make a difference would be to create economic incentives and punishments that would force international conglomerates pay attention to social and environmental effect that their operations are really causing in the developing world.
It should be remembered that also the Apartheid-government did fall in the end, when the business was really hurt and it the economic sanctions started take a real toll.

In the end this policy would help in producing a healthier global economy where all participants are playing with the same rules.
To be able to compete also in the future in the extremely important western markets the international companies would need to correct at least the most glaring injustices, if rectifying these problems would be a requirement for being able to enter these markets in the first place.

A crude fact of life is that a corporation will change its current profitable policies only if it is forced to be a law or by clear financial pressures. Creating these clear-cut financial reason for addressing some of the most glaring global social problems of our day would of course not serve the short-term interests of the international corporations that do run the global marketplace just now.

Of course they would fight every single inch to prevent any of the measures that would lead to the end that I am proposing here.
On the other hand the only locally active companies and corporations could benefit even greatly from it.

Consequently there would not be a united front of the Owners in this issue.
This division of interest could be used for a good measure to drive this kind of policies through, that would in the end greatly benefit ordinary people both in the developed and in the developing countries.

Comments

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
- Carl Sagan in "Cosmos" (1980)

"It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million"
- Carl Sagan in "Cosmos" (1980)

"Relativity does set limits on what humans can ultimately do. But the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human aspiration."
- Carl Sagan in "Cosmos" (1980)

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."
- Carl Sagan in "Contact" (1985)

"The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation."
- Carl Sagan in "Contact" (1985)

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. "
- Carl Sagan in "The Burden of Skepticism" (1987)

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
- Carl Sagan in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]

"We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster."
- Carl Sagan in "Bringing Science Down to Earth" (interview with Anne Kalosh), Hemispheres, October 1994

"I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in."
- Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark" (1995)

"If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph.D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find—because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I’m not prepared, I’m in deep trouble."
Carl Sagan in "Wonder and Skepticism", Skeptical Enquirer Volume 19, Issue 1, (January-February 1995)

"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism."
- Carl Sagan in "Billions and Billions: Thoughts of Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium " (1997)

" If we keep on with business as usual, the Earth will be warmed more every year; drought and floods will be endemic; many more cities, provinces, and whole nations will be submerged beneath the waves — unless heroic worldwide engineering countermeasures are taken. In the longer run, still more dire consequences may follow, including the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the inundation of almost all the coastal cities on the planet."
- Carl Sagan in "Billions and Billions: Thoughts of Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium" (1997)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan

Comments

I do think that this is a question of wages tailing behind for the lower half or even the lower two thirds of society and this happens largely because of the continuing effects of the globalization.
The work-force just can demand and also get better wages only when owners have no choice but to pay them or lose orders and business because of lack of local available manpower.
Corporation do pay just as much they need or are forced to and not a cent more. They simply exist just to make profit for their owners, who have invested capital in them and for no other reason. Corporate leaders need not to be any kind of evil or bad people, but they can do nothing else as but play by these rules or perish.

The core problem still remains that more and more mass-production was transferred into the low-income countries after it became feasible after the revolution in global transport with containers.
Containers dramatically reduced the cost of transportation and made to feasible to transfer such production of such products overseas that were earlier just too cheap to absorb and withstand the cost of transcontinental transportation.

As it is an American, German or Finnish industrial worker has now to compete with people getting just a fraction of his or her salary and this just cannot be without dramatic consequences.
However, the planning, marketing and design of very many products did remain in industrialized world and some new even extremely highly paid jobs were created in these functions.

Most of all globalization did also produce a new kind unbelievably well paid class of corporate managers, when globalization-process did lead to a all new kind of accumulation of capital, the like of which world has seen never before.
In the new world of wheeling and dealing, mergers and acquisitions, the skills of individual industrial leaders were suddenly deemed to be much more important than any other asset a company had and their pay soared often beyond comprehension.

This happened even if these people did not in fact often contribute in producing, designing, planning or marketing their wares, but were only creating new kinds of alliances, conglomerates and quirky financial games.
They did admittedly often pay well in the short term, but did generate all new level of risk for the economy as whole. Of course we are paying for their already socialized mistakes this very moment all over the world, but profits that these mistakes did have time to produce before inevitable collapse of this house of cards have remained exclusively in the private hands.

But back to to main story: selling, warehousing and distributing these extremely cheaply produced wares brought from overseas did create many low-end jobs, but these are nearly without exception much less paid than the old jobs that were lost in the production of things locally.
So, the number of jobs could at times have been increasing and with the high-end jobs receiving tens or even hundreds times more money than before, the average incomes may look deceivingly good.

The stark fact just might be that the real purchasing power of the lower half of the society can have diminished even dramatically at the same time.
This kind of development does not bode well for the society in the long run, the more so if the willingness of the rich to pay taxes does seemingly also diminish with the increase of their wealth.
This may be also because they are receiving their profits from abroad at the moment, they are not really interested in the future of the local workforce anymore.
They just are not ready to invest in housing, schooling and training of this workforce anymore, as there seems to be no profit in it for them anymore, as was the case at the time when they did buy industrial work locally.

However, my main point in writing all this is that I do think that all this will eventually lead to stagnation in economy and the whole society. A hundred even extremely well to do people will never create a demand that would would equal the demand that 10 000 people with median incomes can create.
The more money that you really need you get, the more you are bound to put it into all kinds of safe heavens and most of all the great lottery of the stock-market. There money mostly goes in endless circles without benefiting the real economy again, as these lottery tickets called shares are just bought and sold endlessly.
The trickle-down effect coming from few rich may just might be only crumbles to compared to the real flood of real, healthy for demand for products, that is coming a large and well-paid local industrial workforce.

I'm afraid that the other major effect of this development has been in breaking the bargaining power and most of all the will to fight of the workers. As often happens, a trend in a society intensifies as it goes along, as more and more people start to think that this just is the way things are now. People are inevitably just afraid to ask for even their fair share, if they know that the whole factory can disappear any second.
More and more people do consequently think that the capital just has now the upper hand and it is quite pointless to fight against it. This attitude of course greatly intensifies the real loss of bargaining power that that had already really happened.

However, I do think that Hegel was right; any major movement and change in a society will eventually create a counter-movement. I do believe that also the current hegemony and even idolisation of the rich will eventually produce a counter-force, even if I do not know how or when this will happen.
One thing that my decades spend in the study of history have learned me is that there never is the end of history, but every phase in social development will reach its climax some day and its demise will lead to new era, that is quite unknowable for the people living in that preceding era.

Comments