On 06 Apr 2015, at 08:09, Samiya Illias wrote:
John,
How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each
one knows/understands something more about something than others,
and is less informed about something than someone else?
The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human'
wisdom. A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting
human (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith
in the timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original
sources, and sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need.
Its always been with us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant
to use it, and thus wander aimlessly, searching in vain?!
It is because the message has always been with us that we need to
search inward, and to be skeptical for text and people pretending to
know the answer. If you trust the source inside you, it will talk to
you. If you trust the talk of any others, it will leave you.
Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology,
we assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and
that it needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot
imagine that it just 'appeared on its own'.
Today we know that simple relation (like z_n = (z^(n-1)^2 + c)) can
lead to highly complex structure.
We even wonder about the purpose or utility of it. Yet, the idea of
a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of the Heavens and
Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures [User
Manual]. Why?
I reject, not God, but the idea of using God to justify anything. Even
if true, it cannot be used in an explanation, as it reduce a complex
problem into a more complex problem. The human designing a building is
more complex than the building. A priori God is more complex than the
creation. Invoking God in an explantion is bad science, as it stops
the inquiry. It is like the élan vitale of some ancient biologiste.
Then "user manual" can be inspiring and helpful, but none has the
right to say that a manual is more authentical than others. That leads
to useless conflicts, which again hide the real question. We need to
be humble, and to say that a text is authentical against other texts
is immodesty.
Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that ignorance
leading to arrogance?
We might need to go toward God, and then we might understand
something, but we can't use God as the explanation itself, because
that is a mockery of an explanation. "God made it" can only be a
poetical way to say I don't know. Yet, when people take scripture
literally, it is transformed into "shut up and obey", and that leads
to the criminal use of religion, genocide, etc.
On the contrary, accepting that a sacred text is a human text, pale
recovering of a plausible mystical experience by a human, we allow
ourselves to comment it, criticized it, and through sequence of
comments we can progress, and get possibly closer to the original
experience.
A vicious circle of arrogance -> rejection -> innovation ->
experimentation -> failure -> suffering -> humility -> resilience ->
rebuilding -> arrogance -> ...
We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos]
and the welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and
everything on planet Earth] is our collective responsibility and in
our interest. We have to help each other understand that, if the
journey is to be pleasant and worthwhile!
I agree with this, but Earth and Cosmos are still images, and might be
less real than Boat and Sea :)
Bruno
Samiya
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com> wrote:
Brent:
your line
"Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families."
is a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related
peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political
system - and you know it.
I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to
general welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to
be established, definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is: W H O
can make it and W H O can estblish it?
Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico
establishment.
What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their
interest? if those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile
dictu - VOTERS start to T H I N K ?
For starters: when there will be a "NON" vote? (better: NO WAY
vote).
I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful
aliens with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of
thinking. The result was:
that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but
not becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those
ideas in no time.
Or: those would be useless under our circumstances.
Hence my search for someone smarter than me.
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 4/4/2015 6:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi John
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:10 PM, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com>
wrote:
TELMO:
I did not expect from you to point to the 2 centuries old obsolete
and theoretical exercise of Marx-Engels (irrespective of Lenin's
intermitted LATER speculations) as "blueprint" for a (still?)
viable(?) political system.
I don't think it was ever viable, and I don't think it's relevant
to the current times, as it is based on too many assumption from an
era that is long gone (early Industrialism).
What I mean is, when people use the word "communism", there is a
document that describes precisely what this word is supposed to
mean. A blueprint for communism.
I do think that Marx-Engels correctly identified social problems
that remain being problems to this day, namely the self-reinforcing
nature of wealth inequality. The issue is that their proposed
solution seems to equalize society by throwing the majority of
people into extreme poverty and servitude.
It never got further than a tyranny of 'leftish-sounding' slogans
by pretenders. As the original authors dreamed it up, it never (and
nowhere) did get off from the ground.
I know, I lived in a so called "Peoples' Democracy" (Called 'commi'
system - ha ha) which was neither "peoples'" nor
democracy. Nor Marxist, nor Leninist.
It was a Stalinist tyranny. And Maoist, Pol-Pot, plus a KimIrSen-
istic one.
I would be very interested in any story you had to share about
those times.
I agree that these societies never achieved anything resembling
what Marx proposed. The remaining communists of today tend to argue
that all of past communist movements were not sincere in their
motivations. That might very well be true, but even then it is an
important piece of information on human nature. If we are trying to
get from A -> B and we always stumble on the same horrors along the
way, maybe the plan is just not viable for this world. So far we
have learned that either communism is a terrible idea or communist
revolutions always end up being hijacked by sociopaths. To be
honest, I think both are true.
Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. A
lot of political problems come from trying to extend ethics that
evolved for families and small tribes to nation states of millions
of unrelated people. Capitalism has problems from the same source.
Owning a flint spearhead you made is unproblematic. If you own it
you can prohibit its use, sell it, bequeath it, etc. But when this
idea was extended to owning land it created problems. John Locke
thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only "own" the
temporary use of land. Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it
was problem that had to be solved for agricultural society.
That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the
same kinds of questions about ownership of capital. Given that r>g
in Piketty's analysis, is it a good idea to allow the Koch brothers
to inherit a billion dollar business (that their father built by
drilling for Stalin).
Capitalism - in my view an advanced form of slavery, following
feudalism - started to destroy the entire human experiment on this
Globe - way before the "warming" entered the picture.
It never 'faced' a competition of any 'socialistic' challenger. It
succumbbed to the authoritarian religious tyrannies (brutal and
violent, or just retracting and philosophical).
As with communism, there is a big gap between the theory and the
implementation. "Advanced form of slavery" might be a way to put
it, but an even more cynical view would be that there's always been
slavery to some degree.
I believe that the big challenge that we face is how to move to a
jobless society. Worse, I think this transition already started but
there is still no political will to admit it. Robotics and AI are
Marx's worse nightmare. In the limit, the number of employees
required by a business will tend to zero, while the ability of a
business to provide goods for the rest of us keeps being more and
more leveraged by technological advance. One of the realities about
the current economic crises that few are willing to admit: there
simply are no longer jobs for everyone.
I think the best idea that we have so far is the universal flat
salary.
The trouble with that is that when everyone has the same income
nobody feels rich...and people like to feel rich. It's Nietzsche's
"will to power". So people who have $100 billion don't want to give
up $99 billion to the general welfare, even though it would make the
world better and make no discernible difference in their life
style. So they instead use a few billion to persuade people to vote
for politicians who won't tax them.
Brent
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