The Income Gap

There has been a lot of chatter lately about the growing gap between the rich and the poor here in the US and, now, that gap is seen as growing in the UK as well and responsible for the current social unrest there.

The gap between rich and poor has also been growing in China yet China, unlike the US and UK has seen great economic and social progress in the past few decades.

So it would seem that the income gap is a conundrum.

The gap in the US and UK is accompanied by a negative economy overall and in China – just the opposite.

What we are seeing in the West is the exportation and automation of labor with the benefits going to the rich leaving the middle and lower classes less well off. But in China, we are seeing the creation of wealth with benefits accruing across the board.

So the answer is that the wealth gap, in itself, is not the source of discontent. Instead, it is how that wealth gap affects the overall population.

Corruption and Nepotism in Afghanistan

The observation connecting corruption to nepotism in Afghanistan illustrates the tribal level of the society. Keep in mind that a tribe is you and about 150 others vs the world. Nepotism makes sense at that level. The problem comes when tribal societies become nations overnight. The behavioral characteristic is simply too ingrained to change that fast.

The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan

While engaged in Afghanistan, we have observed the wide mistreatment of women and many are calling for the resolution of this problem. While we are all sympathetic to the individuals that we have learned about through the news media, before taking any policy action, we need to take a broader view.

In the relatively enlightened United States, women have had the right to vote for less than a century and a mere 50 years ago, the only professional opportunities open to women were nursing and teaching. Even then, these were low paying jobs.

In the isolated Third World countries, not exposed to the dramatic changes that have occurred in the West, where ignorance, illiteracy and superstition have been the norm for centuries or more, it is a safe bet that most of the men abuse most of the women.

Third World abuse of women is a major cultural problem and, to fix it, we will need to take on most of the males in most of the Third World. The Third World easily has two-thirds of the world’s population and the United States has only about four percent. If this ratio is not challenging enough, consider that, at this time, the country is entirely inwardly focused on its economy.

The obvious conclusion is that this is not a problem that can be fixed in any conceivable timeframe. At best, only a few small steps can be taken in a few places.

In my next entry, I will examine the ‘cultural problem’ and what would need to be done to change it.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

The question of whether money can buy happiness has been bantered around for longer than most of us can imagine. The general consensus seems to be that most think that they would be happier if they had more money than they have.

Yet we all know people who have nothing or at least very little and are enormously happy. And, conversely, we know people that are quite well off and are just plain miserable.

So our experience is at odds with our beliefs. So what’s wrong? The problem fundamentally lies with the materialistic philosophy of western culture. And that is the material, as obtained through the medium of exchange money, provides happiness.

It is certainly true that we exist in a material world. So money can buy sustenance and even enjoyment. The tradeoff is material for material.

The failure of materialism to secure happiness lies in the fact that happiness is not material. It is not a thing that can be bought.

In order to obtain happiness we need to understand what it is and what produces it.

As adolescents, we all strived to understand how we fit in. Somehow, we all understood something very fundamental without consciously knowing just what we were after. We knew that we wanted acceptance and recognition. But we didn’t know why. The answer is that securing acceptance and recognition is the establishment of a positive relationship between ourselves and others. It is that positive relationship that produces happiness.

We can understand this by observing how it works out for common behaviors.

If a close look is made of criminals, even those who have had some success, you will not find a single happy criminal. These folks perceive others as opposing them so they oppose them. There’s no room for happiness in a relationship where the modus operandi is opposition.

The bulk of us are not criminals but focus on our own desires even if they are at the expense of the desires of others. We see ourselves as separate from them and so rationally move to fulfill only our own desires. This separation isolates us from those around us. Isolation does not produce a decent relationship let alone a happy one.

The happy few, intuitively, grasp a different reality. They see themselves as entwined with their environment. They neither oppose it nor do they feel separated from it. So they quite naturally support the people around them. And, interestingly enough, they receive spontaneous support in return. Is it any wonder that they are the happy ones?

The Ecomic Dilemma in Historical Context

We are now, as everyone knows, in the midst of the ‘great recession’. Liberals see the solution as Keynesian stimulus and entitlements. Conservatives see the solution as debt reduction and even regulation reduction so as to stimulate the engines of the economy. In addition to this we have the new Tea Party folks who are just mad at the government and view it as some kind of oppressor. As irrational and uncivil as they may seem, the understanding of our plight lies in the understanding of this phenomenon rather than focusing on the Liberal Conservative debate.

What we are hearing from many people today, is that they have played by the rules and if they haven’t already lost their jobs, savings and homes, they are worried that they will. They see no future for them or their children. Yet CEOs and other Wall Streeters are making millions if not billions.

Two hundred and twenty one years ago in France the populace was also in dire straits. The people had also done what was expected of them but were unable to make a living which, at the time, meant no more than putting bread on the table. And as CEOs today are living the high life without contributing to the general welfare, the elite of their times, the aristocracy, were just as guilty.

What is lost to the general discussion is an appreciation of the implicit contract between any government and its citizenry. Regardless of the form of government, the level of the economy and the degree of civility of the times, there are three fundamentals that any government must deliver. A government must provide protection from invasion, it must maintain internal stability, and it must provide economic sustainability for the populace. Today, economic viability is issue number one.

Therefore we should view the Tea Party noise just as the French aristocracy should have viewed the peasants with their outstretched pitchforks. A government that fails to provide for the economic survivability of its populace will be replaced -- one way or another.

In my next entry, I will examine what kind of leadership is needed for our times.

The Soul

In my last entry in the religion series, the conclusion was reached that life after death was a universal belief because we were unable to resolve the conflict between two realities – the existence of self and the death of self. As both were accepted as absolutes, a third reconciling ‘truth’ had to be that there was life after death. This conflict needs to be faced and not rationalized.

Physical death of all life need not be dwelled on. It is obvious.

But what of the self or, as it is more commonly thought of, as the soul? The general view is that we have an inner permanence that is somehow independent of the physical body.

We can approach the question of permanence of self by examining the experience of life that has already occurred. We need to examine our relationship with and understanding of our past surroundings, especially our past social surroundings. Recalling experiences from early childhood, later childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, mid life, etc., one sees that, at these different times of life, there were entirely different perspectives. There has been no permanence yet we are willing to project a permanence into eternity.

Is it one of these past selves -- childhood or peak adulthood, the one to be projected forever? Or is it our ‘self’ at the time of death that is to be forever so? Is a child who dies always to remain a child? Is an adult who becomes demented in his final years always to remain so?

Not much thought is commonly given to these questions. The reason is that the belief is fragile and easily upset by too many questions. I recall my father saying that he expected to meet his father in heaven and that his father would be just as he remembered him. This would mean that my father would remain forever young and his father forever old. That would be great for my father but my grandfather would likely not prefer to be forever old!

I think that you can see from this line of reasoning that the reality of some fixed self is a fiction.

So is it then that our existences are nothing more than what we experience in the here and now and that all of our efforts are but ripples in a bucket of water? What is the alternative to the comforting belief of the everlasting soul?

This I will address in my next entry.

Life After Death

Virtually every culture, in every place and time throughout recorded history, has had some kind of a belief in an afterlife. In my opening blog entry on ‘Religion’ I listed the disciplines that can be taken to understand this phenomenon -- historical, theological, cultural, mythological, logical, and psychological.

The logical approach would be an approach seeking evidence. Evidence, however, is relevant only to what is within the creation. At the most fundamental level, it is the analysis of the constituents of relativity – mater, energy, space and time. Therefore the logical approach could only envision life after death in physical terms. It envisions life after death as it envisions life before death – as involving relationships and places. It is flatly based on the materialistic based view of reality. But, as we now know, matter is only a transitory part of the creation and is not some absolute baseline. Logic is too limited.

The historical approach would be to search the past for some event providing evidence that there is life after death. But, as suggested in the logical approach, evidence is a self imposed limitation of the intellect and confined to the ever changing creation and therefore can not be any basis for eternity.

I will dismiss theological and mythological quickly as belief or, to put it more bluntly – as a wish and their cultural variations. Why a wish? Theological and mythological understandings are wishes because, clearly, if heaven was a fully accepted reality, everyone would want to be leaving to go there right away. Why put up with the difficulties of life when the perfect vacation spa is available here and now?

The psychological approach, I believe, offers the most insight. This is because virtually every culture has believed that there is some form of life after death and it does so without evidence. No God or gods have come with a message to the masses in such a way as to make it clear to all that there is a life after death. None have come to address Congress or reach us through television. Such ‘appearances’ that have occurred have only been to individuals which has left us with only the equivalent of hearsay evidence. So we must probe the human mind if we are to understand why the belief in an afterlife is universal.

In the psychological approach, we need not go into all of the depths of psychology. What is relevant to this inquiry is how we understand ourselves. The concept of self occurs only in the higher life forms. In humans, it commences in late infancy. This conclusion has been reached by watching babies and higher primates observing themselves in a mirror and noting their measured reaction. The lower life forms, on the other hand, react as if what they saw in the mirror was another of their species and fights with the mirror often ensue. For them, the conclusion is that they have no sense of self.

It is an observation of the developing intellect that I am separate from what surrounds me -- an obvious empirical conclusion. This conclusion, in turn, parlays into the concept of the existence of self. This apparent reality, being accepted so early in life that it even precedes the logic that comes with the development of language, is a reality that is never challenged later in life. It is solidly accepted.

But then, not much later, sometime in childhood, the individual is acquainted with another reality – that of death. It, of course, is someone else’s death but it brings up the unpleasantness regarding personal death. It is clear that such will happen.

So now we have two realities – the existence of self and the non-existence of self because of death -- two opposing realities neither of which we are willing to disbelieve. When such a conundrum occurs, psychologists tell us that we rationalize ourselves out of the enigma. We create new realities. In this case, the rationalization is that the self survives physical death. How does this happen? For the answer, we have invented mythology and theology.

So what we must resolve is which of the two realities is valid – self or death. This I will address in my next blog entry.