Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Our World, Plato and Mandela

I feel sure, dear readers, that you must have the same thoughts I have - the world is a violent mess. People seem to gave forgotten how to live in peace, showing tolerance and love for their neighbors, their fellow countrymen and the wider world. Perhaps it was never quite as peaceful as we remember, but there were fewer violent confrontations surely. But I do not place blame on entirely either on people or on governments. More than two thousand years ago Plato said : "Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments." He could be describing 2013. For today, we are witnesses to a great chasm between governed and governors, between conservatives and socialists, between Christians and Moslems, between rich and poor, between young and old, between democrats and tyrants. Plato also observed that "The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector." This is perhaps the common thread in all of the opposing forces of the 21st century. Every society, every popular cause, every nation and every religion raises someone to icon status - this is not new but it is exaggerated today because of the instant communication in our Internet world. I cannot imagine that we are being led by men and women who are seriously inferior to those of ancient Rome, or who are more violent than the rulers of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. Our leaders are, for the most part, less violent and more toletant of oppositions. But they age fast because they are constantly in the eye of the media and dissected on the Internet. Again Plato -- "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find way around the laws." And are we not also subject daily to the evil deeds of bad people because of the same media and Internet? Our reaction as 'normal' citizens is to demand absolute perfection in our leaders and to turn violently on those whose violence we detest. This can only make matters worse because perfection does not exist in human beings - so every leader will fail - and violence begets violence - until everyone is mired in the same sub-human mud and the formerly non-violent no longer recognize themselves. But through it all, we clamor for liberty, for complete freedpm of action and for government to become our nanny at the same time that we demand that it disappear from our daily lives. Not an easy puzzle to solve, is it? Two hundred years ago, Edmund Burke addressed these issues : "Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public council to find out by cautious experiments, and rational cool endeavours, with how little, not how much, of this restraint the community can subsist; for liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must, in the course of human affairs, be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty for as the sabbath (though of divine institution) was made for man, not man for the sabbath, government, which can claim no higher origin or authority, in its exercise at least, ought to conform to the exigencies of the time, and the temper and character of the people with whom it is concerned, and not always to attempt violently to bend the people to their theories of subjection. The bulk of mankind on their part, are not excessively curious concerning any theories whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the propensity of the people to resort to them." Burke wrote this in a letter to British sheriffs. ~~~~~ Dear readers, these thoughts come to me from two very different fronts -- there is the uproar over the US government's Internet sweeps that certainly violate personal liberty, but at least in part as a response to the demand of its citizens to be protected from terrorists. And there is Nelson Mandela, struggling to hold on to life in a battle every bit as fierce as the battle he waged on Robben Island against fear and maltreatment and despair. He is in a sense the embodiment of our own struggles against violence and dehumanization at the hands of evil. We will lose Madiba one day. But we should hold fast to his spirit of love for his fellow human beings, to his sense that reconciliatipn is the only way to overcome violent opposing forces, to his belief that talking to your enemy is the only way forward. In this he echoes Lincoln, who tried always to persuade Americans North and South to be friends and brothers and not to be enemies. As Plato said, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

5 comments:

  1. Our peaceful world has become a Hodge-pough of one calamity after another. There seems to be no liquidity in what is happening. There is nothing but disruption and turmoil in the Universe.

    Obama has so many unanswered scandals that he is directly connected to either by logic or indirectly by association. There are assaults on the Constitution, there are invasion of privacy, there are now sex scandals at the state department, IRS using citizens personal information maliciously, the Justice Department violating it's constitutional duty, Benghazi's murders. And another half dozen that seem to be somewhat unimportant when compared to the aforementioned.

    Obama must feel like he's Macbeth and the 3 "black and midnight hags" are rendering up their brew ... Justice Department, IRS, and State Department.

    WE have institutions of government that have never been the subject of suspicion singularly let alone in concert.

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  2. Maybe I am straying from the subject here and if I am I apologize. But COMMON SENSE I think you inadvertently missed quiet possibly the real "villein" in this most serious equation ... The NSA.

    In the NSA we have a charged agency that deals solely in "Electronic Ease dropping and Intelligence Surveillance". That's what they do - period. So if one knows and accepts this, then one should not be so surprised that they are at the center of this "constitutional crisis" that is being generated by this administration for yet unknown reasons.

    The NSA has had some of their own indiscretions over the years ... some public, some that have been hushed up.

    So grant me for a moment that my description of the function of the NSA is what I described above. So ask yourself how big or how involved are they in this field of"Electronic Ease Dropping and Information Surveillance"?

    In a very small town in rural North West Utah the NSA as
    as Americans demand answers about the government's wholesale electronic snooping on its citizens, the primary snooper -- the National Security Agency (NSA) -- is building a monstrous digital data center in this remote corner of Utah capable of sorting through and storing every e-mail, voice mail, and social media communication it can get its hands on.

    This top-secret data warehouse could hold as many as 1.25 million 4-terabyte hard drives, built into some 5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes (binary code system) that make up your digital fingerprint.

    Now ask yourself what is this all for. Are they still just listening to foreign threats to the US or are they completely out of control as they have been at various other times in the NSA existence.

    And how much more do they have really. And for what. For us mostly. Not for foreign intruders who wish to cause us in America harm.

    But that's just one way to catalog people, "The NSA -- like any large organization -- is using numerous kinds of storage systems," including "innovative SSD and in-memory systems for high performance applications like real time analytics."

    Some reports have suggested the data center could hold as much as 5 zetabytes, an astronomical sum equivalent to 62 billion stacked iPhone 5s. That is "difficult, if not impossible to conceive.”

    “That would mean deploying about 5 million storage systems running roughly 1.25 billion, 4-terabyte hard drives,” he said.

    Be concerned, be very concerned for ... "We have met the enemy, and he is us" as someone once said.






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  3. De Oppressor LiberJune 11, 2013 at 10:44 PM

    The chasm are more prevalent and deeper than at anytime in my life time.

    Even with the election of the first Black president the divide between blacks and whites have reach a "polite" division.

    We need to repair the problems in our own house fast.

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  4. Stand Up And Be CountedJune 12, 2013 at 7:56 AM

    "Listen my children and you will hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere".

    What was happening way back then is alive and well and coming not from England and the King, but from Washington DC and our elected leaders.

    This country fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked.

    Our lives are now so digitized that the government, our government is going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.

    This outrage needs to be stopped and stopped right now. In a few years extrication of this matter may be out of reach. We only know what little we know about this trespassing into our private lives ... how much more is there out there.

    "One by courts and two by force". Will we let OUR government start to turn neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, citizen against citizen. We need to wake up. this is not simply the revelation about a small misdeed. This is methodical and planned out.

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  5. I like the comparison of Mandela to Lincoln. Maybe the Hippies of the '60s were right with "Make love not War."

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