society (32)

I could not find anything to write about Lebanon's violation, and I still can't. However, someone sent me this Lebanese blogger's site, which reassured me that they can destroy your body but not your mind.

Any process carried out by more than one human is a social process. One could make the observation that organically, every social process has evolved ethics surrounding the activities of the process. Ethics have the role of lubricating the process and ensuring better overall human benefit. Here are some examples in no particular order:

1. Netiquette
2. Craftsmanship
3. The Hippocratic Oath

(In my opinion, these examples are manifestations of ethics, in specific socio-professional settings).

Now since ethics play such an obviously important role in ensuring process quality, why aren't they an indivisible part of corporate training?

This is my participation in Google bombing and armchair terrorism.

Since the point of the exercise is to link the word Egypt with a specific site, I guess it makes sense to talk about my (first) country. NOTE: Googling the word "Egypt" does not yield the desired results.

Egypt is going through a crisis. The majority of its people are illiterate or very badly educated. As a result, they are unable to make informed decisions. Instead of a sense of civic responsibility, Egyptians exhibit irrational allegiances to whatever promises brighter futures: religious sectarism, excessive capitalism, or just plain conservatism.

We are living in an age where societies need to have self-awareness. It is no longer sufficient to react on instinct, tradition, or habit. Society, as a problem-solving entity, needs to know its own strengths and weaknesses in order to survive and succeed in the globally connected world. And for this it needs to face its own behaviour critically and make rational decisions for self-improvement.

Many features of society will be questioned by this new awareness:

Our conception of freedom is self-indulgent. Look at your role model, and see what they've done with their freedom.

Here are some freedoms that are worth fighting for, imho:

Freedom from greed
Freedom from lust
Freedom from envy
Freedom from sloth
Freedom from vanity
Freedom from addictionsssssssssss
Freedom from depression, paranoia, schizophrenia
Freedom from boredom
Freedom from fear
Freedom from hate
Freedom from evil

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Freedom from the self

Every country has some greatness, and some weakness. I think everyone (including perhaps their own citizens) feels love/hate for the US: love in some respects, resentment in others.

I think the core of the dilemma comes from this chief American trait: the underdog. It is a country designed so that anyone, from any background, can achieve success, thus defying the millenia-old hierarchical social systems, from priesthoods to kingdoms to caste systems. This trait is intimately linked to America's origins as immigrants who fled the harsh conditions of European life at the time. Thus the all-important concept of freedom, to help achieve this success. And indeed, the US has produced immense progress, primarily for itself, that has enhanced our standard of living worldwide. Respect, admiration and gratitude.

Cool memory game I'd like to play again and teach my daughter:

You are given 20 objects to remember (or 30, or however many). To remember them, you are going to imagine a physical space in which you will follow a specific path. Along the path you are to choose specific spots in which you will deposit each object to be remembered, in order. Once you've found a place for all your objects, you can start following the path again from start to end, and thus remember the objects.

Pretty intense huh! There are many tricks to it, the most important probably being the ability to visualize the space, the path and the actual objects in their spots. Each image needs to be vivid enough to impress the memory.

From a phone conversation with Ammar.

For nodes in a network to collaborate successfully, it helps that there be a mutual need between them. The need can be for resources, skills, experience, or reach into the other node's subnetwork. Note how a "need" that is expressed to the Other implies self-awareness, self-honesty and transparency. These qualities may be some of the pre-requisites for collaboration.

What happens to the cooperation when the need is fulfilled? That's not a good question. As with any system that grows, the nodes' needs keep evolving as well, and it is up to the partners to make sure they still fulfill the evolving needs of their partners, if they still need their partners.

What if the founding economic principle of the scarcity of resources turned out to be a myth, an unverifiable assumption? The fact that technology hasn't learned yet how best to extract energy from our environment (the universe at large) isn't a proof in itself. The only conclusion is that there is a constant momentary scarcity of resources, brought about by humans onto themselves, as if under the spell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the principle of scarcity has important consequences. It establishes the legitimacy of competition as the higher behavioural value at all levels of the individual and society, at the expense of its dual, cooperation. Indeed, the all-importance of competition is currently being questioned by economic scientists and game theorists.

Faith is a powerful human force, always at work even without the awareness of its agents. Like reason or creativity, faith is a human quality that shapes the behaviour of individuals and of societies.

In the western world, faith is commonly regarded as irrational, and discarded altogether from social or psychological discourse. Canadian philosopher and humanist John Ralston Saul, in his social critique entitled On Equilibrium, argues that democratic society must progress by balancing the essential human qualities or forces, to reach global justice with individual freedom. The qualities that he cites are: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He argues that reason has been the predominant quality in the West, leading to the tyranny of that trait at the expense of loss of balance with other qualities. A humanist message indeed.