From my personal perspective I found the law installed by almost all governments within the course of the past time, was a call for explicit morals, a call for having the many take up a fight, they most likely wouldn't have given into, if not the law has "made" them ("motivated", "initiated" - place in a term) doing so.
Of course, in the moment I speak this out loud, at the same time I think: It was not the law, nor the governments alone which and who "made them doing so" but they themselves (we, ourselves), too.
How quick am I supposed to accept a law, which the upper hierarchies have chosen to bring into the lives of the peoples?
I imagine a scene where children play along and suddenly someone shows up and tells them, the rules were changed and now they have to play it differently. What will be the outcome of such an interference? (I find this analogy not very fitting but use it anyway).
Being realistic about it,
some children will quickly adopt to the new rule (already habituated to obey to the more powerful adult), other children will not cooperate and pretend no one told them new rules, and others again will start to argue with the rule inventing person, even fight it.
The expectation of those who abide by the new rule that all the others shall play it in the same way, is not only unrealistic, it tends to become coercive, once it's not accepted that the players are not equally taking this new rule as "alright".
By now we realize that we are not children.
A law is a human invention, a creation of something
which party A has chosen to install, expecting party B, C, D and so on to follow. A law does not fall from the sky from some divine entity.
State of emergency?
A law, coming upon us in the experienced way, is not at all prepared for all the individual events taking place out of the framework of its expression and commands. This kind of law weakens in fact the individuals single process of asking their own consciousness about a particular matter. In this case, the matter of "emergency".
"Own consciousness" can mean: To consult your inner statistician, to trust your observation, which by its local limitation and subjectivity is able to comprehend the character of your surroundings, as compared to the futile effort to try to grasp the world outside this sphere and to find useless in favour of it one's own thinking, observing and feeling, while it is of course the only thing we can use, since we have nothing else.
translation: Strongfortism
the famous, individual method,
which has made thousands of joyful, energetic and successful people, and which will also enable you to develop the powers of nature dormant in you without medicine or apparatus. You will attain robust health, virile strength and stamina. Stronfort's interesting, richly illustrated free book explains how you can achieve all this:
"Life Energy" ... Photographed from a magazine, dated from May, 1932 - I put it in here for the amusement of yours :)
Why the law is not only weakening but distorting and preventing people in their own judgements about a (given) situation?
My answer on this is, that out of "the given situation" in that sense, that a situation cannot be observed by the many and happens only ever between particular people (therefore reduced to the involved ones) has been commanded as a "situation of the same nature", an attempt to equalize what is different into something which is the same.
Then, the law, in its omnipotence, says: "if things did not occur to be me, challenge me!". It accepts that a damage which it wants to prevent in one case, happens as a damage in another case. Seen it in this light, a law cannot be just overall, it produces injustice in one amount and justice in another quantity.
An emergency which needs to be amplified - is that an emergency?
The reason why I think that the basic message "There is an emergency" already contradicts itself is, for if there would be an emergency indeed, we, the people, would not be in the comfortable situation to argue about it. We'd be more than busy to help each other out to secure the very basic human needs.
Let's take the Tsunami which happened in the year 2004.
That was a catastrophe, a real emergency for all the people which happened to be in the regions where the water destroyed the coasts.
Was it needed that the governments announced a state of emergency? Why, no! Everyone was seeing it with his own eyes who was there. Was it needed that the governments stretched this state of emergency, if it would have been declared (which I really don't know and that also is an interesting fact)?
Centralizing problem solving - is that smart?
Now, imagine, the governments would have set a law which centralized all the steps which have taken place within the happenings. Like telling the locally, more or less, affected people: "You must take our orders. Until you don't have formulated regulations as how the situation needs to be handled you are not allowed to act. If you act against what we have already formulated for you, you'll be punished by the law."
Now imagine the not injured ones. They are surrounded by chaos, broken streets, houses, destroyed coast lines and such. They look around and start to gather, forming teams of rescuers and make shift camps in order to make it possible to help other humans and animals.
Would they wait for the authorities in order to tell them what do do? You bet, they would not. Out of sheer necessity and empathy they would start to act. Oftentimes, also by risking their own lives in order to safe others. In the meantime the expert teams - those who were not killed themselves and from external places - would start to arrive where they seem to be needed the most. They would start to act in a more organized way and help the locals as well as take important information from them.
A rescuer who does not listen to witnesses or does not follow hints from the people who direct him to where things are needed, is a not very smart one, right?
All would want to work hand in hand, taking the actual situation and responding to it locally and personally.
They would not be ordered to first draft a concept of how to handle the emergent situation, send it to the upper hierarchies, wait until those authorities judge the paper appropriate or inappropriate, when they themselves can already sense and observe what is needed a priori. Making themselves an authority for the personal and local and particular situation.
Now, make the comparison.
Do we have a situation of emergency?
Is that really the case? If not, what is your answer to the fact that this law has not been taken back?
How can we even argue at all when the very basic state of affairs has been cast aside?
The big chunk of the unpalatable lies in the idea that ...
... a disaster is only a disaster when it has already happened, marking a past event that cannot be prevented by human intervention.
Everything else is not a disaster according to this definition. Ergo, a state of emergency does not need to be maintained on this basis either.
The frightening and seemingly infamous intention behind this seems to be that one should let things happen first and thereby (horror!) possibly endanger thousands of lives!
In fact, however, it is impossible to "let" a catastrophe happen, because otherwise it would not be one. It is beyond human influence to have a preventive effect on catastrophes. If prevention is possible, then we are not (!) dealing with disasters.
The question of whether one should have waited or let it happen cannot even arise, because humans have no influence on it. A tsunami, a volcanic eruption, a plague (note: I have chosen not to believe in grand scale plagues), a hurricane, you can't make that decision because it's beyond our scope to decide on a catastrophe.
Arguments have been exchanged - is that all we can do? I think it's not only counterproductive to argue whether the world is in a state of chaos, but it holds us hostage.
I need at least a bit of culture in my life.
I need people who are able to celebrate what is important for them. Gathering, singing, dancing, holding funerals, welcoming births, taking part in the local activities. Going to pubs and clubs.
No evidence whatsoever will be acknowledged by the confronting parties, which either believe they are in danger of a plague or who believe they are in danger of a society becoming totalitarian. There will be no winners in continuation of this fight. Nobody will be right or wrong in this in the present time, in the sense that a huge and bright sign will appear in the sky which announces:
"Good people, the crisis is over! Either side is going to be released from the confronting forces! You shall leave now the places of war and disagreement, for it's all settled!"
The only chance I see, is that the confronting and hardened parties of different beliefs grant each other the freedom of choice.
As much as I cannot follow other peoples reasons, for my own reasoning differs a lot from theirs, I refuse to call them names, or, if this happened out of emotions, not to make a culprit out of my heart.
But my statement is clear: I will not coerce others to decide for something I wish myself shall be put upon them. I am free, I need not to make others decide for me, for I may be anxious to take responsibility.
The ethical question of the freedom of the will is in principle undecidable.
But of course I decide anyway - because my will decides, I decide.
I used here a quote from Heinz von Förster.
How could it be otherwise for you?
So how can you prevent or let disaster happen that is outside these possibilities? Preventing a disastrous event and letting it happen is only possible if there is the possibility of influencing it, and it must be said that this would then be a relative event and not an absolute one.
Damage occurs, it is an act that lies in the past, in other words: in its moment of occurrence it is irreversible.
When a natural event breaks out, one can only try to restore what it has caused, insofar as one wants to rework and use the devastated area. But the dead and the loss of material values cannot be undone.
A plague of the kind that has been presented to us would be similar to the outbreak of a natural event, such as the flooding of a region by a raging river. It would have come upon us even before we saw it. The deadliness would itself have been evident and we would not have had to be made aware of it. No measure, however taken, of the kind we experienced would really have been very effective.
If one could achieve effectiveness and great influence, we would not be dealing with a disaster, but with an event that can be regulated. This would make it less threatening - even insignificant - rather than permanent or even greater.
So how can the contradiction still be overlooked at all? I assume that everyone will be able to answer this question for themselves or else cast doubt on the question asked.
Holy grail! My brain went rollercoaster and did some double twist and turns when I read this post.😁
Why was that? :D Was it confusing?
Not exactly. But I really needed to calm down in a quiet place to read and comprehend that. It was really intellectual.
Nice post :-) I can agree with a lot, in principle. However, I would like to ask you how you feel about the reality or unreality of the climate crisis, and how we should act or not act upon it. You state, correctly, that it's useless to, as an individual, try to grasp the world; that's just impossible. But that's why we've developed institutions of education, research, science and so on. That means that collectively we are able to understand the world, and indeed the universe to a rather significant degree. Same goes for the questions posed about freedom. I hold the view that individual freedom is an illusion; all individuals only have as much freedom as the society of people they are part of grants them; this starts at home when growing up under the rules set by your parents. I say that if you "need at least a bit of culture in my life", as we all do, the amount of culture you get is always dependent upon the society that provides that culture. Now we can always take examples to their extremes, which is effective and good to make a principled point, but I do have to place question marks on your use of an immediate calamity, like the tsunami, in comparison to a slowly developing one, like an infectuous disease; that's why I asked your opinion on the climate crisis. Our evolution has blessed us with a set of cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival, but make it difficult to deal with long-term or distant threats. That results in us overestimating simple, but not very likely to occur, like terrorism, but underestimate more complex threats like climate change and covid-19. And about the laws; laws are for a large part codified morality, and codified mores for the remainder, all for the purpose of providing what we call "civil order" to society. I dream about a world where all these unwritten rules can remain just that: unwritten. But since we're a long way removed from communism, that's just unrealistic and will never happen in my lifetime. I understand anyone who is uncomfortable with or even hostile towards the rules and regulations descending down upon us from up-high, especially when these rules and regulations are created in response to a calamity or threat of a calamity; I've raged against all the freedoms we lost as a consequence of anti-terrorism laws after the 9/11 attacks. And I regularly rage against the elite who live by the rule to "never let a good crisis go to waste." I understand. But I also understand that we all stop at a red light. We all got vaccinated as kids. Some rules are simply there to keep intact a functional society (although there's much room to debate the functioning or disfunctioning of modern society).
Okay, I'll stop ranting now :-) I really do like the post and would like to thank you for directing me here.
Thanks for following my invitation. I am afraid, this will be a long response. I split it therefore into three comments. I hope, you'll take your time.
In my former response I have asked you:
You said
To the degree of knowledge about the universe, I answered you in your other post.
I find it impossible to think of a collective as some sort of intelligent entity, for the individuals within this collective, never think, feel and explain things in the same way, but differently. So you have always different minds and different groups of interest within a collective.
Take thousand people. Do you think they act upon a hive mind to the advantage of everyone involved? I don't think so for a minute :) Then just increase the number and take a million, or all people on earth?
Why I don't think so, is not only my personal view but also a view I imagine other humans share. You've got to exclude or quieting (or worse, eliminating) those people in order to make this a collective view. You could use a killer argument like: "You just don't know that you belong to the collective mind and that in this mind everything is being taken care of for you. That you perceive it as bad is just a negative imagination of yours."
I am certain you would not speak to me in this way. And I wouldn't either. The problem here is that once you've come up with a certain notion and you put it into the world through words and political and social actions, something what could be accepted - because unmentioned - lightly into something experienced as heavy and horrific.
You may have the notion that what humans have "evolved into", can be seen as a linear cause and effect pattern, which results into more and more advancements = betterment of earthly live. But chances are, that this might not be the case. For the more advanced "we" think "we" are, the more tendency can take place to reduce the complexity of all living things into a simplistic, reduced form of understanding. We might develop in circles, neither backwards nor forwards, and from what I think, it's nothing, you and I, or a collective can directly answer. A collective does not exist in this way (like a bee hive or an ant colony). We imagine it, that's right.
It's a lot to respond to indeed, and I wish I had more time to do all of it justice... I believe I've responded to a lot of this in my response on my posts, but I will make an addendum here.
Here you strike the essential point where we've seen communism fail and succeed throughout history. It only ever succeeded in the small communities you describe here, like it did in prehistorical tribes, which were communist if we were to give them a label. And I don't know how to expand the community of human beings to the scales needed for levels of production that would make "modern communism," for lack of better words, possible. All institutions we've known so far have always become corrupt. Not even always intentionally, but simply because at some point the institution does thing for its own survival and its own power, rather than for the people it was intended for. Frank Herbert, the writer of the Dune book series once said something like this: "It's not that power corrupts, it's that power attracts the corruptible." This is the tension between my dream of communism and all the ways we've devised to organize large groups of people into a functional whole; such organization has never worked without the use of power and hierarchies. Take the nation; a nation is built around fabricated unity and loyalties, and fits within fabricated lines on a map that's not the real place, but merely a representation of it. Flags, national anthems, national sports, they're all thought up by those in power to foment cohesion between people who sometimes, or even most of the time have very little in common.
Still I believe it's possible. Call me a dreamer. But I do believe it's possible to teach ourselves to see in each other the ways in which we're the same (which is a lot), instead of always hammering on how we're different from each other. Our individual uniqueness is at the same time something that makes us all the same: we're all equally unique, are we not?
Your point about science is well taken and understood. However, I blame the fact that scientists stray away from their true calling and compete with each other to, as you say, "make a difference in the world," on the turbo-boosted individualism ingrained in us by more than two centuries of capitalism. And I know we can do better than that...
I agree fully. And I have the same realism here. Though I would take a different term, but when I make my own definition of "communism" it means only to be embedded in a community I can grasp locally and physically, so I can feel I have an influence and can be seen and heard, so I can see and hear the rest of the community.
How I perceive life is, that I don't think that all what we call a crisis, is a crisis indeed. We may betray ourselves for reasons of fear and the taboo of death. One may sound benevolent and caring to worry about health and the climate but I don't see it confirmed overall. If you care for one thing, even burn for it and put all your efforts and genius in it, you very well can fall ignorant for the needs of humans who oppose the glorification of science and modern art of life.
Once I read a newspaper article, over a hundred years old, I found the exact same worries about climate. It could have been a text from the present time. The author mentioned the melted seas in the very northern part of the earth. And indeed, you could go back in time and watch the people being in agony and fear all the times. If worry becomes the most important thing, people forget to live and feel joy. If I must stay in the state of sorrow and I can't help myself to come out of it, I may realize thirty years later that death still didn't catch me and for all what I've suffered, it was worthless, for I am still alive - I could have spent my life more relaxed. People went and are crazy with aids, cancer and all what modern medicine is not tired to come up with. Instead of decreasing illnesses the Pschyrembel gets fuller and fuller and we add fears on top of each other.
Though I fully agree that people in general are not evil, they tend to overestimate the evilness of others. And so, a destructive circle of distrust and hatred begins to spin. Terrorism is a rare act and does not happen on a regular basis. It's shocking, thats true. But to make a world terror-free, sickness-free, free of the unpredictable you will inevidably become a terrorist yourself. You cause what you claim to pacify. ("you" in the common sense).
Better not speak and scream about it, is what I think oftentimes. Neither a collective plays a role for me, nor if or if I have not free will. I use my will every day and I decide on things undecidable anyways.
I like modernity in many ways. But I hugely disagree on what is called "science" nowadays, or is used for.
You see, I long started to change my lifestyle, I stopped using planes, I gave up my car, I reduced my life to a minimum of objects and consumption. That was freely chosen by me. But I have no right to expect this from anybody else, let alone from all earthlings. It was a choice I made. Seeing free choices being turned into demands and even punishments, I feel, is utterly wrong. Funnily enough, since 2020, I avoid public transportation, use again a car and drive more often and spend many more hours in front of a screen, for I lack social gatherings which have come to a halt on a massive scale.
The main question for each of us remains how we face our own death and that of those we love. If we cannot accept it, if we make it a taboo, this causes as much damage as we think we prevent ourselves from.
You can book a flight for 39 Euro to a distant island, these offers are online. To soothe ones consciousness, you can give part of this money to a fund, where it is claimed that compensation for the damage being done, will take place.
This reminds me of the indulgences of the Catholic Church, where you received an absolution for your sins by donation and they were thereby redeemed. The thing is, these claims that damage caused by me would be compensated are not very credible.
People who are really serious about this have not exactly made themselves popular. For example, an insecticide manufacturer has discovered his conscience and is making efforts to compensate for everything he sells. He makes sure that there are biospheres for insects and that insect hotels are built. In his industry, he was metaphorically stoned for this and was no longer invited to any congresses, as he was henceforth regarded as a defiler of the nest.
But the fact is, and reality will remain, that humans are not able to exactly compensate for what they consume or damage. The modern world cannot be so easily deconstructed and redesigned, certainly not if one pushes it. The idea of voluntariness shocks people because, firstly, they recognise this and, secondly, they cannot stand that it is so. Those who do not feel responsible and would rather have others decide for them will probably find a totalitarian community acceptable and see it as well-meaning.
Nevertheless, the need to use insecticides is there, as much as it pains us to admit it. But the mass production and monoculture on which modern man depends does not allow for anything else. If it were the case that efforts were being made to get people back to some self-sufficiency on their properties, to spend their time tending gardens, keeping small animals and preserving food, there would be government-wide campaigns to support and encourage this. None of this is the case. People are supposed to go to work for others, not take care of themselves.
Contrary to what we might think, there is no solution to the current challenges. Such things are sometimes interpreted to me as fatalism, which I clearly disagree with. I look at the countless houses and front gardens and no one really has any knowledge or would make any effort to turn the dust-sucked garden into a biotope.
So, it seems people really don't want that, are not interested in the slightest to put effort into gardens and perma culture. But if you ask them, they fear climate change, fear nature being destroyed, while their own garden is as lifeless as lifeless it can be. I don't hate those people. They either come to terms on a free basis or they won't. It's more than obvious that if you are interested in this, you could find all the knowledge you need for making your property into a more sustainable piece of ground. And actually, if you give enough time and not rush this, this might be a lifestyle again. But the pressure lies in the expression "we could lose on this race" - for how many decades, if not more, is this expression actually circulating?
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