Acknowledging our own diversity as a foundation to the one beyond

As foetus, my “Heimat” was my mother’s womb. At birth, my father and sister were strangers and threatening. I had to grow and learn that diversity is life and a need. Once I got over the fact that father and family were a plus, I then was confronted to the extended family, then school, then a working place, then a country, then a marriage, then my own kids, then a different profession,  etc. etc. 

The concept of Heimat/home (where I feel good, productive and giving/creative is constantly evolving and changing as I grow and develop my own identity, my own mosaic.

Some stay stuck at one step, always because of a trauma and that is tragic enough, but supporting this blockage at any step is detrimental for the individual and for society.

It is clear for most of us that a child who do not want to meet his family will be supported to do so. Yes there is always somewhere a bad uncle but we have a chance to succeed in our life because we get support to engage and because the good side of the family will put limits/educate/punish the bad uncle. 

It is the same with the rest of the steps of our growth.

To have a government stopping us from embracing our own individual diversity for capitalizing on our fears is as detrimental as parents who keep her/his child home because the world can be a bad place, sacrificing the life of his/her child.

Governments may have different motives to stop you from growing your own mosaic, like using your fear to gain power, but each of us, therefore society is paying the price. 

Extended across cultures, we have a ground for fear, misunderstanding, fight, anger, dishonesty, suspicion, paralysis, and yes war. 

Since this may not be a positive path , we need to practice the art of engaging with diversity (ex. with creativity, patience, and compassion). Yes, there are bad uncles in every culture but communicating constructively with the majority who are not "bad uncles" is the path to liberty that brings out our best, and that is at the end what counts. 

Staying home and letting the "abusers" take over should not be an option, and yes it takes practice but isn't it part of the meaning of life?

The fundamental reason for our failure at saving life on earth

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The fundamental reason why we are not successful with stopping global warming (support alternative energy, change the car industry), ensuring food safety, saving the bees, render agriculture sustainable, stop tax evasion, etc. etc. is what no politician is allowed to talk about publicly but what is carried internally as the  corner stone that can not be mentioned  by name, and it is the need for the so-called level playing field. 

Argument being, if the others are not doing it, we will loose our competitive advantage and loose our significance with the economical backlash that comes with it.

So, we can save the world from itself with the technology that we have and will have but we do not because the others are not. And with this ball we bounce ourselves into oblivion.

The structure of a solution to ensure a level playing field already exists. It is the UN. All we have to do is to give it decisional power. First in the areas where the world is as a whole under short term threat of annihilation or great sufferings (global warming, military industry, etc), then progressively phase less threatening areas where worldwide collaboration is critical like commerce, tax, etc.

The 21st Century politic of entitlement

More:
http://paulpiff.wix.com/paulpiff#!publications/c240r
http://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcissistic
http://media.wix.com/ugd/80ea24_69eafdc5d036419e93600d80c6d5be33.pdf
http://media.wix.com/ugd/80ea24_edd136e3b72b07c93775906aee3dfa35.pdf
http://media.wix.com/ugd/80ea24_f1f3156bf15b3d57922cd9f146ed5897.pdf
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/4330/npitimeupdatespps.pdf
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc
http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp/1608193411
http://www.politico.com/story/2012/06/vicious-cycle-of-economic-inequality-077280
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/inequality-is-not-inevitable/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/

The little book that...

 

 

(R)EVOLUTION

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 REVOLUTION

I would argue that one human characteristic is at the basis of most sufferings we inflict to each of us and to each other. This characteristic is our unaware obsession for  “Easy and quick gratification”.

It drives us to false entitlement, eating damaging food, feed our lust for glamour, our need to surround ourselves with carbon copies of ourself, our greed for money and power, our disregard of environmental sustainability, justify violence, and the use of pretension and lies. This in return, makes us unable to perceive lies and deceit coming from others (the fish is unaware of the nature of water), as we are ourselves a source of lies and deception.

This is unfortunately our recent actual worldly trend, and as a mass phenomenon, with our actual technical means, it is a recipe for more global suffering or crudely put, for the eradication of humanity as we know it.

Enabling evolution instead of revolution is an individual and collective work of patience and determination, it is a labor of love and of true strength (strength nowadays need to be defined because of the false appropriation of the word by pro-authoritarians who see violence as strength while it is a disguised weakness), and involves the continuous exploration of the meaning of our own responsibilities and intended legacy.

~The Courage to see~

Our need to see the good in man is boundless.  Gosh even the word evil has become esoteric. Yet when someone cuts a budget destined to protect the environment by 31%, eliminates health coverage for 22 millions and increase the war machine budget by 10%, all in one swerve, we ought to see.

I would argue that democratic forces have one shot at this: as the Canadian Harper era has shown, within a year, emphatic democracy is progressively and aggressively infiltrated, its functioning made inefficient and within 1-2 years it has become paralyzed.

Although we know through the history of mankind that that "humanity in us" never disappears, this time there may not be much to return to.

Languagism

We have racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and a lot of other dehumanizing "'ISM". I became aware of a new one, albeit it might already have been discovered, but I never heard about it which means it is not part of global awareness yet, the so-called mainstream. This "'ISM" is languagism. It describes the behaviour of someone who is condescending/aggressive/unfair/violent/etc., of someone who discriminate, this time not based on race, gender, knowledge, or culture but on the mastery of a language: that is, its grammar and vocabulary, its rhetorical use. I acknowledge that at the rise/beginning of a language and certainly during the middle age, the mastery of a language, which included shaping and developing the language itself, language was both vehicule and content.

Today, all major languages adapt to the times but they have achieved a level of maturity where they are mostly a vehicule of information. This is important because as globalization is reaching an exponential growth, we need a common language. Like always in the history of mankind, the choice has been based on usefulness and simplicity, and the choice has been English. Already for more than 40 years, English does not belong to England like French does not belong to France and "so weiter". English has become the world language and as such belongs to all countries of the world.

I would argue that discussion, exchange, communication is at the very base of our survival as a species as we continue our globalization. This "eye-to-eye" communication depends on the content (information, values, passion, interest, etc.) of what we communicate, not on the container (language).
Unfortunately, some countries value more the container than its content and I argue that this belief jeopardizes a sustainable future for mankind.

To demonstrate this issue, I take the example of an average North American or Australian citizen. My experience is that there is a tendency to not put a value on a person based on its mastery of the English grammar and its rhetorical use. They are by far more interested in the content. Europeans including Germans, will automatically put a lower value on a speaker who do not master the German language if (s)he speaks German. This automatism is also reciprocal, that is, they can not envision/comprehend/believe that people speaking English do not do the same. This leads Germans to be more hesitant to engage in a conversation in English when compared to non-English natives from say, North America. As a consequence, one will observe German speaking people organize "international" events  in which German is the main language, even if the majority of the International participants do not speak German. Although it is possible to understand that if you host a conference, you might feel justify in wanting to come out "good", the backlash for the International participants is significant and will impact negatively the expected trust-building effect of the conference, and will probably block partly the information exchange and most certainly freeze the development of collaboration, and trust. Indeed, if one believes that the container  (language mastery) is as important as the content, it is possible to understand the urge to organize an "international" conference where the language is German.

We ought to work on the awareness, that in our globalizing context, a beautiful text may be a piece of art indeed but when it comes to communication between people, what counts is the content, not the container. In other words, we ought to dissociate rhetoric from content if we truly desire to engage in a sustainable global world. For most countries, English is a second or third language and the actual need to work together, build trust, work on creative paths forward requires that we separate rhetoric from content. We should have learned long ago from politicians that rhetoric is an art, nothing more. It says nothing about trust, truth, nor ethics.

That concept says nothing about the value of regional languages. Local languages have their valued necessities and importance. We need them as well, including the dialects because they allow locally a better expression of our inner self. They also allow artistic expressions not possible in a second of third language. Each language also possess characteristics which themselves support different human traits which are in sync with the regional culture. All this diversity is the ground for shaping a better human future.

And yet, we need to communicate eye-to-eye with each other, and English is the language we have chosen. It is highly time that we practice this eye-to-eye thing and separate rhetoric from content.

And no, nothing in these concepts is abstract and out of reach. It is all very near if we simply open up to it and are willing to experiment with it. Hey, it is even fun!