The Negative Collective

I'm a great believer in the collective. However,  I don't  necessarily believe that the whole is greater than it's sum. In fact at this time in history, in 2014 Canada is demonstrating that we are collectively less than the sum of our parts. Collectively, without positive leadership, we are a poor example for the rest of the world.

My wife and I just returned from a trip to Bentonville Arkansas. Here we toured the Walton's Museum, a tribute to the founder of WalMart. Walton along with their Republican/Conservative government leaders,  Reagan and Bush in spite of their folksy persona, have acted to destroy the American middle class and destabilize a once powerful economy. It shows you how poor leadership, focused on Capitalism and free enterprise, can decimate an economy, a country.  But the Walton heiress, Alice Walton, has erected an art museum in Bentonville. The art museum has free admission. Capitalism's altruism at its best.

When we returned to Canada the news headline was that McDonald's Canada had suspended its Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) hiring practise here. It appears that McDonald's Canada, after exposés about it abusing Canadian workers by paying them less and not hiring Canadians in preference to foreign workers, realized it was hurting their brand. They were falling out of favour by the collective here. McDonald's at least shows more leadership and insight than the government that allowed the policy to hurt its own citizens. This TFW policy clearly undermines the labour force in Canada. But it is is just one example of a Conservative government working here in Canada to undermine the middle class by favouring special interests.

Canadians deserve the dysfunctional government they have now. We collectively suffer from the individuals that voted for these Harper Conservatives, or the ones that apathetically sat back and allowed it to happen. By allowing this collective conservative mindset to dominate our government, the roots of their mental dysfunction finds expression. As an example of this form of mental dysfunction, I work with an admitted Conservative who, although has worked all his life in government and is about to retire on a government pension, does not believe in taxes! He's a rugged individual, a leader of his church, who is a professed Christian. He doesn't realize that Christ was a socialist who believed in caring for the collective. This type of individual mental processing helps explain our present collective state whereby our national sport is the only team sport that allows fighting.

Oh well, we can only mature and get better.  In the meanwhile, pardon me while I tranquilize myself with trivia and return to watching the Blue Jays lose.

A Humanist Credo

I'm a humanist. I believe in my fellow man. This is sometimes more difficult in practice than in principle. But I like a challenge. First and foremost though I recognize that I'm a member of homo sapiens. I have evolved.  

I believe that religious and political identifications split us as opposed to unite us. Once we've seen the planet from space we should realize that we're all in the same lifeboat and either we all row together or we row apart, inevitably onto the rocks. In unfettered capitalism with its emphasis on competition and the rugged individual we certainly row apart.

In cleavages caused by religion or income inequality we row apart. Growing up we're taught to suppress our egos in order to better function in society - to be civilized. 
Yet many of our cherished institutions emphasize splitting the human race into competitive factions. Time for a rethink.

If evil exists it resides in the individual or individual worship, a psychopathic leaning. Hero worshiping emphasizes the individual. Nothing wrong with being inspired by leaders that emphasize the humanity in us but God help us if we admire those that emphasize only the individual.

In a Capitalistic society for example, where all boats rise with the rising tide of individual wealth, the problem is that some boats are yachts that swamp the rowboats. It doesn't recognize we're all ultimately in the same boat together.

Humanist don't generally leave it to God to solve our problems. For many, God is an individual, and like the Devil, acts as one. Most joy and productivity, like in sex, occurs with the merging of more than one. Homo sapiens are social animals and to become human we must unite and take joy in our success as a united group.

When you primarily identify yourself as a particular race or group, First Nations, Christian, Jew, Islamic, WASP, Conservative, Liberal, Democrat etc. you divide yourself away from the collective (humans that we are) and make yourself more of an individual. That may have been desirable, even necessary in the past, but a recipe for disaster in the present.

Good is God

Just a thought for this December.  Here is a corny video but cute.

You may also have seen this article about a New York policeman.

This policeman's actions was great but it's inspirational underpinnings is given here by Mychal Judge.

"With all the commotion over this photo of simple, perfect kindness came an affirmation of a theological precept once proposed by the late Father Mychal Judge, himself widely known as the FDNY chaplain who perished at the World Trade Center. Judge was also an unofficial chaplain to Manhattan’s homeless, able to call many of them by name as he strolled the city in sandaled feet and a friar’s brown habit. “Hello, William!… Hello, Ralph! … Hello, Peter!” he would say.

His smile was always joined by a few buoying words and a dollar, folded lengthwise because he thought that made it seem less of a handout. He one day summarized his particular theology by inverting the old Irish mantra that God is good.

“Good is God,” Judge said.

What he meant was that just as the devil is to be found in evil, God is to be found in goodness. He further believed that in recognizing the good in others, you strengthen that good and therefore God. He also felt that embracing your own goodness is the way to grace."

Judge died as a first responder in the World Trade Centre doing good.

Christopher Hitchens in his 2007 book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" effectively argued the case against organized religion.

Interestingly you can say the same thing about profit for business too. Good practice leads to profits. Profit by itself is greed. It's similar to the idea of looking at stars being best done indirectly with your peripheral vision.  Whenever you seek something directly it becomes counterproductive. The best things are accomplished it seems by just doing the right things, as this New York policeman demonstrated.

News Today is Not Real

News today is not real.  It's like wrestling was in the 70's. You know there's a hint of truth about it.  But it's all entertainment.  Even Colbert in The Colbert Report uses a term "truthiness" that implies there is no real truth just a semblance of it.

With the Colbert Report, Jon Stewart, The Onion and This is That satire, for example, the line between the news and entertainment has never been so indistinct. For those who have watched the recent US election coverage you'll know where this has taken us. Journalist are now politically aligned pundints. You throw in a few anecdotes and you then draw your conclusions. It may be highly entertaining but not informative.  And as we see in the Mitt Romney's campaign in the US, if you tell a big enough lie long enough, people believe it. It's all marketing.

Blame it on the toxic bipartisan polarization that exists now but I think you can also blame it on Halloween in 1938 and the radio drama "War of the Worlds" by Orsen Welles.  Orsen Wells used a news-bulletin format. If you came into this program, after the notice at the beginning that it was fiction, you were scared to death that Martians were invading. This marketing gimmick worked. The entertainment industry took notice. This is when people started purposely confusing news for entertainment by not giving any notice about the distinction. Now we confuse entertainment for news. 

Mind-forged Manacles

Today the Arab countries are ablaze with protests in the streets for a slight to their Islamic god. Yesterday it was the physical assault of the Crusades against the Moors. The pattern repeats itself. Who says history can teach us anything?

Nothing better describes religions than the expression used by William Blake in his famous “London” poem -  “mind-forged manacles”.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

Surely religion is the root cause of much of man’s self-inflicted suffering. Oh if only we could shed those chains, those non-evidence-based claims. Not easy but not impossible. We put them on ourselves. Tradition and authority impose them. An uncritical uneducated population maintains them.

William Blake was aware of the self-inflicted limits placed on thought.  He advocated imagination as a means to overcome the restrictions of tradition and authority. He especially disliked science as he saw it as nature being tooth-and claw and in his London poem quoted above saw the nasty effect of the industrial revolution. But Blake himself had a mind-forged manacle based on the time he lived. For he was limited to what was known at his time. He died in 1827, 32 years before Darwin published his “Origin of Species”.  So when he published his Lamb poem asking, "Little Lamb, who made thee?/Dost thou know who made thee?", he did not realize that Darwin would, for the first time in history, provided an alternative answer to the only one at that time - a religious-based explanation.  Tyger complementing the Lamb poem has the narrator ask: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The answer of course is yes. Nature through evolution made both. We know today there is now no need to invoke good or evil or a God for paradoxes seen through the lens of religion. Good, evil, God are anthropomorphic terms that may one day be anachronistic. Unfortunately, as we see in the daily news, they still rule in the southern religious intolerant Taliban-like states of the US and in the eastern Islamic countries.

Why not use our imaginations and slightly rewrite the Grassroot’s song Let’s Live for Today?
I think John Lennon would approve.

"When I think of all the worries people seem to find
And how they're in a hurry to complicate their mind
By chasing after religions and dreams that can't come true
I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do"

False Economies are Based on Arbitrage - the Sleight of Hand Myth of Hedging.

I was fortunate enough to have obtained a science degree before I got an MBA and learned about arbitrage. Something about arbitrage just didn’t make sense to me. Otherwise I might have bought into this win-lose proposition that business use to hedge their bets and thought it made sense. Basically arbitrage is a form of financial speculation whereby you find a resource that is under priced and then buy it as fast as you can and resell it as fast as you can for the real market price or higher, thus making a quick profit. Business use it to hedge their risky bets; to take risk off the table so they say. But in doing so obviously someone (the someone who had underpriced their resource) loses. But for business, especially Conservative or Republican oriented businesses, where a dog-eat-dog mentality prevails, this sleight of hand is fine. In fact it’s ideal because it minimizes your risk at someone else’s expense. An excuse used for arbitrage is that it determines the real price of a commodity. Again the hidden hand of arbitrage reveals all. Hocus pocus. It’s magic. Let’s not really look too closely at it because it works for this and those in power - the wealthy 1%. In fact arbitrage kills capitalism. 

Conservatives Don’t Know Arithmetic

I have often heard that Conservative times are tough times. But I think Bill Clinton proved that in his nomination speech for Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention last week by providing us some very interesting numbers. He pointed out that Democrats produced twice as many jobs as Republicans in the US.

The Conservatives in Canada are in lockstep with their Republican brethren in the US. Unfortunately Canadians are now suffering under a majority Conservative government. It seems collectively we’re not smart enough to learn from the US experience with Republican governments. It seems we need to find out ourselves how bad the Conservative mind set  really is for our economy. Perhaps we can take a reality check from Bill Clinton.

Clinton pointed out a very interesting but not surprising fact, if you know that Conservative times are tough times. In the US jobs growth with Democrats is much better, double, than with Republicans over the last 50 years.