Playing with Fear

Fear is a natural instrinct that we have developed over the millennia to protect ourselves from predators in the wild. To be afraid of the unknown is the most natural reaction, it keeps you and yours away from harm and ensures the propagation of the species, any species. With human beings and our “higher” intelligence fear is also linked to knowledge and a wider awareness.  So what happens when you are the top predator and the only thing you have to fear is yourself and your own? The answer to that is simple, look around, this is what happens. We fear sharks, tornadoes, floods and other such acts of God because they are known to cause harm and devastation. But we also fear more abstract things that we have little knowledge of.

Fear is no longer just an instinct that protects us, it is now a tool used by people, predominantly politicians and people in influential positions, to control society. Society is no longer build on the simple rule of survival of the fittest, we do not live in an agrarian economy so food is not just out there in the garden or in the field. Today our lived are built on abstract concepts which are retained and controlled within plastic and metal boxes with 1 & 0s quietly ticking away creating value out of thin air.  Our education system is so advanced that it ensures a build in ignorance of socioeconomic structures that keep us subdued and fearful enough to be perfectly controllable. Deep down we know something isn’t quite right and every now and again that feeling is brought out of us by a dissident voice out in the wilderness that reminds us we are not a herd of sheep, and then the fear mongers do their job and we are behind our desks again working quietly away making money for the super-rich and super powerful. 

 

Fear is everywhere these days, we turn on the TV and the news covers violence, economic disaster, political instability, job cuts, social unrest mainly caused by poor political decision. We are too afraid to show people who we are because we may be judged if we are slightly different. Since when is it ok for an individual to be afraid to be themselves? And this fear is no longer spreading just through regular TV and newspapers, we now have new and ingenious ways of picking on the different, the weak and the unusually natured. Social media shows humanity in its’ two most extreme forms. We cannot control social media, we cannot fully censor it – although we try – it moves too quickly for us to be able to protect ourselves and our children from the trolls on the internet waiting to exploit our fears for their own personal gain and entertainment. At the same time social media allows us to see the astronomical capacity humanity has for empathy. It connects us in a way that has never been possible, it makes the feared unknown accessible through a protective filter and that in turn lets us learn and therefore fear less.

The point I guess to this impressive rant is that people play with our fear, they use it against us but at the end of the day you are always and forever in control of your own life and if you think otherwise then you are wrong. Do not ever allow fear to stop you in your tracks. Risks are a part of life and the fear of failure, pain and the unknown can be paralyzing, but only if you let them. Life regardless of the hardships, the heartache and the general messiness is beautiful and should not be wasted. Go ahead play chicken with your fear! Bet you you’d win!  

I want to leave you with this beautiful video because I think it perfectly shows the beauty of being human, the grace, elegance and boundless eloquence we are capable of: Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter..."

A failure to Inspire

I recently wrote a book review on GoodReads.com  reviewing  “The Diamond Age” by Neil Stephenson. I had to edit out a lot of what the review said because it was not relevant to the story. Having to censor myself didn't leave the best taste in my mouth and therefore I wanted to share the cut out part on here.  I also was reminded of it last night while watching a scene from “Good Will Hunting”, so I have dug up the original review and polished it a bit to a more coherent rambling.  

My issue today is education, not just in our schools but at home. Our failure to inspire young people through knowledge is devastating. In his book Stephenson touches on a social illness that I have been observing for quite a while. This illness is the cloning nature of our education system.  Every year, hundreds  of thousands of students are spit out by higher education institutions in this country having been imbued with almost no real knowledge. They have learned the ins and outs of their fields through the opinions of others, and like their fellows before them there were rarely - if ever - think on their own. From my own experience at university any statement I made had to be backed up by a quote or reference to show that it was valid. While I agree that making (un)educated guesses based on feelings or points of view may not be in the best interest of academic vigour surely being told that no thought of yours is really acceptable unless it has already been thought up by someone else is not a good way to build confidence and nurture curiosity. It is not the fault of the students, from an early age we drip feed our children information of all types, socialising them into the public sphere, teaching them what is right and wrong – never giving them the tools to decide and evaluate the good or bad of a situation on their own. 

This is the illness that runs deep through our society's core. Our children believe in things because we have taught them to, but they do not know why they believe in them.  If I am not able to explain why I believe (in) something do I truly believe it? I have no understanding of it, because if I understood it I would be able to explain it and would therefore be in a better position to believe it or not. This blind trust that what we are told is true is derived from social indoctrination. It has stifled our creativity and made society – in the west at least – complacent. We now largely lack critical thinking, we unquestioningly lap up what we are told and reproduce it on a greater and greater scale.

Many people try and blame technology for our problems. They blame computer games for the violence, telephones for communication issues, social media for devastating the confidence of youngsters and promoting promiscuous and “unsocial” behaviour.  All of that is not a failure of technology, it is all a failure of society. We are too shallow and vain to be able to use the great discoveries in a constructive manner –and by the way I will be the first one to put my hand up and say that I waste my time on the internet looking and stupid things, but I can also list under my hobbies “reading Wikipedia entries and following the reference links”. As a professional nerd I also correct Wikipedia entries .

Now social structures exist for a reason, I am known to use Roger Griffin’s terminology - although probably not in the way he means it - and call those structures  the “sacred canopy” – a protective layer of social norms, traditions and religious practices that provide a community be it of local or national size with rules by which they can exist in a comfortable and (re)productive way. Social change comes about either when the sacred canopy is forcefully removed through violent means or is eroded through the alienation of its members from the community. Today in the 21^st century both are occurring all around the world simultaneously. Young people – of which I am still one for now – find ourselves unable to find an identity because there is no stable community from which we can derive it. As social creatures we identify ourselves through languages, and language comes from our community/nation. When the language that we use is conflicting or simply not delivered we can suffer an identity crisis.

One way of combating this is through equipping our children with skills to use knowledge to (re)construct the sacred canopy, improve it even. So far we have failed, and I think it is because we have forgotten to nurture, we have tried to give equality to all and have therefore made everyone equally socially inept by distorting some natural roles within human structure and behaviour. While we have self awareness and higher intelligence than any other mammal, we also don't tend to develop the tendencies of a sociopath because we are brought up by our mothers (and more often these days fathers too) in a nurturing way. Unfortunately that has been eroded by the socio-economic need for both parents to work like horses just to make sure their children can eat. In turn the children lack the upbringing that would come naturally in a less materialistic system. We are now vain, self absorbed, selfish, greedy and cruel, but we are only those things because the social sphere we thrive in promotes that kind of language and defines us so.

I have endless faith in human nature, the empathy we are capable of displaying in our darkest moments borders on the divine. Unless we teach our children how to be empathic, be kind, be thoughtful, be useful, we will fail and self-destruct through our own ignorance.  Education is not just being able to recite poetry, regurgitate hundred year old theory, and answer a few mathematical problems. Education is about looking at what humanity already knows, questioning it and testing it to see if it is still valid, God knows we have disproved our own theories before!  Education is knowing who you are, having confidence in that, and using it to promote and improve others and their abilities and well as your own. This is not something that people are born with, this is something that is nurtured first at home and then if you are lucky at school and in the community.  

When you have children send them to school, let them learn history and the rest of it, but also challenge them, make them do things that may scare them, ask them questions, argue, disprove and improve their points of view, but most importantly allow them to change your point of view because age doesn't always mean wisdom. Sometimes young eyes see clearer.

Mind the Gap

I live in Oxford so I would not blame you if you thought that poverty is not something as obvious in one of the most affluent cities in the United Kingdom. But it is here more than ever that I feel the Gap between the rich and poor, and it is here more than any other place in the world that I have been to that this massive discrepancy leaves a rotten taste in your mouth.  Among the streets of this ancient city walk the children of millionaires and billionaires, sharing the walkway with rich Asian tourists and future oligarchs, as well as countless regular folk that go about their regular business. The streets of Oxford are clean, and contain a 1000 years of history. Intelligent men and women rush about, and at night during ball season the city is awash with colour and glamour. 

Yet Oxford with its walls of blond stone hides a deep secret. Amongst its thick walls and on its cute cobbled streets in front of the shiny windows of expensive boutiques sit huddled under damp duvets the homeless. A class of individual that we rarely acknowledge, who’s hand we shrug off when they extend it our way asking if we can spare some change. We look down upon this person who has hit rock bottom and is digging even further down. We excuse our own callousness with thoughts such as “they are a druggy or an alcoholic”. More often than not we are not wrong, some are people with deep social problems of drug and alcohol abuse, but some are just people that have lost control of their lives.

 As you all may know I am Bulgarian, and my country is hands down the poorest one in the EU. Beggars are everywhere, they have quite literally become part of the scenery in my mother land and people don't just ignore them, they actively loath them. They look at them with spite and unveiled hatred as these men, women and children walk, hobble, craw, and drag themselves over to ask for change and help. Many are part of gangs that use and abuse young children and women for profit through begging. But not all of these people are corrupt and trying to steal our hard earned money. We have one of the highest percentages of pensioners that are literally starving and freezing to death and who are forced to go out and beg.  It will not be an uncommon site to have a little old lady, doubled over by age and 50 years of serving the old socialist state, who’s pension is so miserable that she is selling packet of tissues at a bus stop in the desperate hope that she will be able to buy a loaf of bread with her earnings. The response to her is nothing, total oblivion to her existence. Her goods will only be sold to those in desperate need of a tissue and only at that time will her existence be acknowledges by anyone, for the briefest of moments and with total lack of empathy or emotion. A coin or two will be thrown at her, she wont see a smile, and may by some miracle hear a mumbled thank you. After some number this type cold encounter her desperate state of affairs will soon come to a miserable and undignified end, which  will be recorded in a death register somewhere, she will not be missed, her life will be forgotten. Does this all sound bleak to you? A bit dark for a Friday night isn't it?

This darkness is a place where countless number of people live in every day. We don’t just ignore them, we label them with names such as drug addicts and alcoholics, and God knows what else. Partly because some – never all – are such things, but that is never all that they are. Partly to hide our own feeling of guilt for being better of. We actively hate these people, we judge them for the choices they have made in life without knowing what those choices really were. We never ask ourselves, what if they weren't given a choice? What if they were born in a family that wasn't caring, were abused by people that should have protected them, were failed by their teachers who were too busy meeting government targets to notice the systematic destruction of this persons. What if they were in this place begging and homeless because it was the smaller of two evils?  Who are we to judge without the knowledge of who they were and are?!

The saddest part is that giving this person a pound or two will have no effect on their destitution, and is likely to only help sustain any drug or alcohol abuse that is holding them there. The solution is one that requires the empathy of an entire nation, a deep change in society that steps away from shallow consumerism, instant gratification and short term planning.  A change to a society that celebrates and supports both the individual and the community they live in. That supports family values  by allowing mom and dad to spend a bit less time in the office and a bit more time with their children. That objectifies both men and women less. Where school isn't all about the next test but is about teaching young people to communicate, gives them confidence and self worth, as well as skills that are vocational –  boiling an egg and washing a dish is a good start if some of the young people I know are anything to go by!

I know I am preaching, but I am not really asking much, all I would like is next time you walk past a homeless person, even if you don't want to give them money, give them a thought and if you want a smile and a “sorry”. Especially now in winter, because you are going home to warm bed and a cup of tea, they are sleeping on a step in negative Celsius temperatures. Kindness goes a long way and doesn't cost you anything.


If you want to help lower homelessness please get involved here: http://www.crisis.org.uk/

Good Night     

Pondering on Climate Change

Freezing weather in the state of New York

Is the Weather out to get Us?!

It’s a  bizarre sounding question I know, but bear with me a minute here. You see in the world of academia [where I primarily exist these days] there has been this shift of ‘securitization’.The best way to explain what securitization is is by quoting Barry Buzan; making something a security issue means it “is presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measure and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure” (Buzan et al, 1998, p. 23). If you or I were labeled a security threat that would mean that all violations to our human rights are acceptable, they can listen to your phone conversation, read your [e-]mail and bust in on you while you are in the shower, arrest you and take you somewhere where not even God himself will find you. How does this relate to the weather you ask? Climate and the way it is changing is being portrayed more and more as a security threat, and after all weather is what you see but climate is what drives is.  

This event is not occurring just in academia. In everyday life the changing climate of our planet is being labeled “dangerous”. It is stages as a threat that needs to be eradicated.But how are we to save mankind for Climate Change? Well I would love to tell you but that is usually a step too far for these beacons of security. All they really do is scream “DANGER, DANGER!”
You don’t believe me? Here is an example:
In a newspaper article Professor Anthony Costello says that:
“Climate change is the biggest threat to human health” that is it a “clear and present danger…that is affecting billions of people!” (The Times Online May 14th 2009, Sam Lister) The article continues in a similar tone telling us how we need to do something now to secure humanity’s future.

Why are we so scared of Climate Change?  

This is why: 

Property Destruction from Sever Storms in the USA

By this stage our heads are SO full of the fear that this monstrous climate change poses that we will gobble up anything that will be fed to us as a solution. We will buy electric cars, recycle, buy organic products, wear hemp and pray to Gaia in the hope that we are saved! 

Now before you label me a climate change sceptic let me make one point PERFECTLY clear! I am NOT disputing that Climate Change carries huge costs to humanity, the pictures above show that only too strongly. I am also NOT disputing that being more responsible with your consumption of transport and other goods as well as recycling is going to make a change. All those are things that we should all do. I am disputing however the use of a language of fear, crisis, insecurity, and panic. It is hardly going to deal with the problem by making people run for the hills, or buy products labeled “environmentally friendly”! With all due respect to  ALL the professors out there, we need a language of awareness and empathy.

I know what you are thinking, oh god not another one of them hippies that is gonna tell me to go hug everyone and it will all be better. Don’t worry although I am an idealist I am a pessimistic one, it balances it all out that way, although this is gonna get heavy from here on! What I mean is knowing what we are doing, and trying to change it out of pure empathy towards the harm those actions have done. And lets face it:

Our actions have caused: Destitution, Hunger, Shame, Pain, Fear, Loss, and Death.

Sever Famine and Overindulgence

So when I say awareness I mean making people aware of how their actions cause the above, but not just that. Making people aware of the simple facts; not just of the dangers that the changing climate poses to us, but our part is creating this danger. Some ugly truths about the highly consumerist, self-centred individualistic nature of many communities need to come out so that we do not have to see pictures as the ones on the right or underneath. This needs to be done in a way that does not point the finger of blame and try and shame us into action. We need to understand WHY we need to change our actions. And here is where the empathy kicks in.

Sever Flooding

We are all despite our many and wonderful differences the same at the core of us. We generally do not want to see people suffering as the mother and child are above. Even though we have do not know these people we feel a deep sadness and an urge to help in any way we can, we empathise, because despite everything else they are like us. Making us aware of the harm our western culture produces in developing and underdeveloped regions will hopefully make that empathic instinct kick in on a larger scale. It will make us understand that we are literally the cause of those starving and dying children, and as members of mankind we have a responsibility to stop it, now!

Our greed, gluttony, consumerism, selfishness, and most and worst of all apathy is slowly choking the life out of our planet and many of the people on it, and our planet will in turn return the favour.

I am going to start the awareness process with the video below. I dare you to watch it and throw out perfectly good food!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjtIl5B1zXI&feature=youtu.be

We only have one Earth please look after it!