Trust

Trust, a noun, is defined in my two volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as: "Faith or confidence in the loyalty, strength, veracity, etc., of a person or thing; reliance on the truth of a statement etc., without examination."

 

Now in the World today, (I almost wrote "dystopian World"), what is it or who is it that we can say truthfully and honestly we REALLY trust? 

 

Governments and the Politicians involved? Surely not.

The banks? I don’t think so. 

Law enforcement? Their image is slipping I believe – so maybe not.

What has been called "Big Pharma" – the giant pharmaceutical companies that control the production and marketing of the products the medical profession prescribe? Again, I don’t think so. 

Big business – those multi-billion dollar companies? Especially those involved in producing what is known as Social Media or in extracting fossil fuels. Once more, I don’t think so.

Religious organisations? Surely not now after all the abuse scandals – at least the ties that used to bind are now broken.

 

So what or who are we left with who are trustworthy?  This is almost impossible to answer. I really don’t know. Most certainly not every person involved with these organisations is untrustworthy; many would hold themselves to the highest levels of integrity.

 

The trouble is that money and the accumulation thereof gets in the way. Company board’s of directors are often pressured to producing ever-higher dividends for shareholders. Such boards are almost obliged to pursue any means, repeat any means, to increase profits – and damn the consequences.

 

Likewise members of parliament are often fixated on holding the "Party Line" and hanging on to their "seats" by satisfying the wishes of a relatively narrow cohort of voters in their electorate.  

 

But then all this doubt leaves us lesser mortals in a state of quandary. Who or what do we trust? We are left, metaphorically, seemingly up a creek, in a canoe, without a paddle.  This is not good for one’s state of mind or for the well-being of Society as a whole. 

 

In such circumstances people may turn to their own interpretation of the news or events and construct conspiracy theories to suite their interpretations. This may provide a version of the "certainty" that many are searching for – however misinformed it may be. Again this is not good for the wellbeing of Society.

 

But this is what I believe is happening.

A good poem I think!

I think you'll enjoy this poem by Brazilian, Mario de Andrade (Sao Paulo 1893-1945), poet, novelist, essayist and musicologist.

I’m not sure if de Andrade wrote the original in English or if in Portuguese, who translated it.

And I certainly know that I have many more years behind me than are ahead!! So I can relate to this poem. Not quite sure about the title though.  

                                                            …///…

MY SOUL HAS A HAT

I counted my years
& realized that I have
Less time to live by,
Than I have lived so far.

I feel like a child who won a pack of candies: at first he ate them with pleasure
But when he realized that there was little left, he began to taste them intensely.

I have no time for endless meetings
where the statutes, rules, procedures & internal regulations are discussed,
knowing that nothing will be done.

I no longer have the patience
To stand absurd people who,
despite their chronological age,
have not grown up.

My time is too short:
I want the essence,
my spirit is in a hurry.
I do not have much candy
In the package anymore.

I want to live next to humans,
very realistic people who know
How to laugh at their mistakes,
Who are not inflated by their own triumphs
& who take responsibility for their actions.
In this way, human dignity is defended
and we live in truth and honesty.

It is the essentials that make life useful.
I want to surround myself with people
who know how to touch the hearts of those whom hard strokes of life
have learned to grow with sweet touches of the soul.

Yes, I'm in a hurry.
I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I do not intend to waste any of the remaining desserts.

I am sure they will be exquisite,
much more than those eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience.

We have two lives
& the second begins when you realize you only have one.

                                                                        Mario de Andrade

What we can learn from the past – Take 2

Another of Aesop’s Fables. 

I wonder to whom this may apply – anyone you know?

The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf.

A shepherd boy who tendered his flock not far from a village, used to amuse himself at times by crying out “Wolf! Wolf!” His trick succeeded two or three times, and the whole village came running to his rescue.

However, the villagers were simply rewarded with laughter for their pains.

One day the wolf really did come, and the boy cried out in earnest. But the neighbours thought that he was up to his old tricks and paid no attention to his cries.

Consequently the sheep were left at the mercy of the wolf.

Moral: Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed.

Whistleblowing has its roots in Injustice!

As always I rely on my one loyal reader and the support I receive. I know that this reader is concerned about the increasing injustice reported daily. Injustice affects us all and has a toxic and corrosive effect on society generally.

People know when they are doing  wrong – lawyers, accountants, real estate agents milking Trust Accounts, for example. So do businesses. So do banks. So do Governments. So do religious organisations. They are all aware of wrong doing but they keep doing it!

As I have stated many times before the root of injustice is unethical conduct – people, businesses, governments either for personal gain, trying to gain unfair advantage or to avoid scrutiny or to cover-up some dubious conduct. This applies to all levels of human conduct.

Now we have the serious allegations (they are still just allegations) that a commercial subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia  has been offering bribes to encourage sales of the bank notes that it prints. This is the banker bank and is owned by the Australian Government! If the allegations are proved this will be a REALLY serious affair.

Also just recall the recent Olympic Games – taking drugs to gain an unfair advantage. Then there was the Tour de France – more drugs. Also of course there is the unethical conduct of banks and financial institutions – greed, manipulating interest rates, money laundering, betting on credit default swaps and fraudulent practices; the Catholic Church and paedophilia; businesses – poor customer service, greed, price gouging, squeezing suppliers to lower prices and general anti-competitive conduct; individuals involved in crime – be this “white collar” fraud, violence, sexual or physical abuse. Then there are the breaches of human rights by ALL governments (think Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib and “renditions”; China and the Falun Gong and official corruption; the basket case that is North Korea; Russia with endemic corruption and Putin’s attempt to crush all dissent; Australia and the “stolen generation”, the treatment of asylum seekers and the Defence Force sexual abuse scandal – and so on and so on. The list is unfortunately endless).

This type of conduct, which hurts people either physically or emotionally, is often carried out by people who show a complete lack of empathy – an inability to feel what another person is experiencing. They show no remorse, are callous, have poor behaviour controls, are impulsive and fail to accept responsibility for their own actions. This evidence of anti-social behaviour is typical of people who usually would have high scores on the relevant clinical checklist for psychopathy.

On the face of it, psychopaths are often highly intelligent, charming, outgoing people, who are eager to make a positive impression. But this behaviour is a façade and an imitation of what they know to be socially acceptable: the so-called “mask of sanity”. The clinical checklist for psychopathy refers to "glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, need for stimulation, pathological lying, conning and manipulating ", and such like.

You may think that sounds like some of the businessmen and politicians we know!

Research shows that high-functioning psychopaths are often very successful people. On the surface they appear to be confident and calm and seem to have their act together. The Human Capital and Management Library says: "High-functioning psychopaths...tend to rule the world. They rise to the highest levels of power in politics and business."

Research also indicates that about ten per cent of CEOs could be diagnosed as psychopaths compared to about one per cent of the general population who show this same tendency. What allows these people to manipulate and control others is their ability to do so on a very rational, logical level with no feelings of emotion or empathy for the other person.

The importance of whistle-blowers stems from the fact that most of the unethical, unjust and downright criminal behaviour in government and in commerce that has been exposed, has been exposed by people with a conscience – whistle-blowers! Without whistle-blowers how would we know, truthfully, how any government, of any country was actually governing? Without whistle-blowers how would we know truthfully, as tax payers, how our money was being spent in any jurisdiction? Without whistle-blowers how would we know, truthfully, how our law enforcement officers were performing? Without this knowledge provided by whistle-blowers how could there be any trust in the performance of any branch of any government or any company or corporation? Every one of them has something to hide. Every one of them has a skeleton hidden somewhere (as do we all as individuals).

Whistle-blowers perform the very important function of shining a light into the dark corners where these activities are normally hidden and exposing the perpetrators of injustice for what they are.

Remember the advice Polonius gave to his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78–82.

Long live whistle-blowers!

Why Fundamentalism holds people back.

Any individual, group, society or culture that claims to be the sole protector of the “truth”, be that truth Scientific, Statistical, Christian, Muslim, Communist or whatever – holds a fundamentalist view. In fact anyone with a fixed belief, is Fundamentalist. Fundamentalism constrains human innovation; fundamentalists want to revert to what the purveyors of the ideology consider a “cleaner’ more “pure” past. Or in the case of science (and my pet aversion, statistics) if it can’t be “proved” it doesn’t exist, it can’t work or else it is a figment of someone’s overactive imagination.

Fundamentalist either forget or ignore the human spirit, which cannot be constrained. The human spirit (however defined) needs to be free to seek, to strive and to find, in its own way - and not everyone is the same or wants the same things. Anyone who tries to hold back the human spirit, or attempts to direct it into one particular path is doomed to ultimate failure. To prove this point just take a look at what is happening in the Middle East and the hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the practices of financial institutions in American cities and it other cities around the world.

The possible exception here, to returning to the past, is the Scientific Fundamentalist who believes totally in the power and purity of scientific exposition and innovation – and there have been some wonderful inventions and discoveries. But the Scientific True Believer, in whatever field of science, has an absolute conviction that scientific “knowledge” is the basis for everything including Life itself. This scientific evidence, it is often claimed, can be proved statistically; that Statistical “facts” trump all else; that scientific concepts which are supported by statistical “proof” must therefore be true, and anyone who does not see this or who voices any opposition, is worthy of nothing but contempt.

Just recall the years of ridicule and isolation suffered by two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall who in 1982 discovered that the main cause of stomach ulcers is the bacteria Heliobacter pylori. In their original paper, Warren and Marshall contended that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by colonization with this bacterium, not by stress or spicy food as had been assumed before. They did not conform to current scientific thinking and were pilloried for their stand. Had they been scientific fundamentalist they would never have made this discovery and those suffering from stomach ulcers and medicine would have been the poorer. Stomach ulcers are now cured with a short course of antibiotics.

When the subject turns to Religious (or Political) Fundamentalism we delve into murky waters indeed. To my way of thinking religious or political fundamentalism (often considered one and the same when there is no division between “Church” and State) also holds back innovation by demanding (often on pain of death) that all people believe that they (the Leaders) alone know what is best for them – the populace – and that they (the fundamentalist leaders) are following God’s will. And generally fundamentalists of this ilk try to reduce the role of women to virtual slavery and to being totally dependent on the males in the family. Again, look at the Christian fundamentalists in America, the Jewish fundamentalists in Israel and the Islamic fundamentalists in many Muslim countries, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia and then of course there is the basket case of North Korea.

I may be wrong (the favoured expression always used by someone who believes they are right!!), but by restricting education to learning the Koran and Sharia Law, or applying a strict interpretation of the Torah or the Bible, and by not educating women, these fundamentalists are holding back their citizens.

One needs to ask how fundamentalism, in any form, adds to the material or spiritual well-being of Mankind?

The truth - always the truth

I am amending this old post as I have had another look in Pascal’s “Pensees” and I cannot find the reference. What I can find is that Leo Tolstoy quotes the saying as by Pascal, buts that’s as far as it goes. 

The sentiments expressed, I will admit, sounds like something Pascal would write – very pithy and very apt. So I have kept it.

How about this for as true an observation as you will ever read:

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) in his ‘Pensees’, it is here assumed that he wrote:-

 “There is no greater unhappiness than when a person starts to fear the truth lest it denounce him.”

I wonder if any politician; any businessmen; any cheating husband or cheating wife; any schoolyard or office bully is prepared to stand up and be counted?

And likewise how about this one – again quoted by Tolstoy.  And again, something that Pascal would write I believe:-

‘Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.’

Tolstoy also wrote, in about 1880, that:-

"Men of our times believe that none of the absurdity and cruelty of our lives, with the ridiculous wealth of a few and the embittered poverty of the majority, and the arms and wars, is seen by anyone and that nothing prevents them from continuing such a life."

You see, Justice and Ethics have been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. And I will fight injustice when and wherever I see it.