stressFREEDOM vs. career
Epicurus considered that it was a true opinion to believe that happiness was to be found in the simple life and retirement, a false opinion to think it lay in wealth, power, or glory – so it is normal for us Epicureans to be unambitious in money- and power-related issues.
Other cultures are less congruent: they preach e.g. that “The love of money is the root of all evil.” [1. Tim. 6, 10] and that “It is as easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:23]. And yet they are surprised if somebody takes their moral rules seriously and tries to follow them.
I grew up in another hypocritical culture under the so called communist state religion. Money was less of an issue there than “power and glory”. They preached the equality of all but in practice they produced a new privileged class for the few.
At 16 I wanted to become a journalist and started working for a youth weekly. It soon turned out that the censors can turn an article or a report to the contrary of what I wanted to say. They also expected me to join the communist party and follow 2 or 4 year courses of ideological “studies”. So at 17 I gave up this career plan of mine.
At the University they proposed that I do postgraduate studies and join the faculty. This could have implied an obligatory communist party membership and being an informant of the secret police (giving them information about my friends, neighbors, colleagues, even family members) so I chose to go to a village and teach there. As long as you did not aspire to a leading position you could get along and stay honest at the same time.
We meet at class reunions and those who chose to collaborate with a régime they actually hated do not seem to be happy or satisfied. Many of them turned to alcohol, some of them committed suicide. Some are simply ostracized.
Some of us managed to flee to West Europe or America or Israel. The majority of these ex school mates fell victim to the rat race and now they are either burned out (if they were “financially successful”) or consider themselves losers and feel ashamed of it.
A minority of 5-10% refused to bargain their tranquility for money resp. status and power - no matter whether they went on living under the communist state religion or opted to follow the capitalist state religion. They are artists or craftspeople or small entrepreneurs.
I wonder if the decision is any easier today for those young people who are aware of the option to choose stressFREEDOM instead of career.
why bail out hunger?
We all know that satisfying the basic needs is key to a good or at least tolerable life: you cannot be happy if you are dying of hunger.
We also know that there are enough resources to eradicate hunger for ever from the face of the earth and those who do the maths ask this question:
Could Just 4% of the Wall Street Bailout End World Hunger?
http://www.ecosalon.com/could_just_4_of_the_wall_street_bailout_end_world_hunger/
I am happy for the question mark, because just having the resources will not solve the problem – which is a problem only for those dying of hunger, of course.
No matter how much money there is, as long as
- there is no will to spend it on food for the hungry
- the employees of the government agencies or the NGOs who distribute the funds are corrupt and put that money or large parts of it into their own pockets
- some governments systematically kill their own co-citizens – not only through starvation but also actively shooting them
there will be no eradication, yea not even serious mitigation of hunger.
The mass murder through letting people starve to death will go ahead as it always has since history is being recorded. The number of the victims has grown exponentially – but who cares?
The larger context is – as we also know: overpopulation. But who cares to go one step further and stop the exponential growth of world population through appropriate programs.
the output of our mainstream school education
I made a huge tactical mistake in the education of my own children: I taught them to ask critical questions (e.g. “who does this?”, “what might be their intention?”, “who has a vested interested in this?” “what are the methods used?” “what are the results?”) whenever they want to understand something better. The system worked pretty well as long as we applied our investigative method on TV toy ads or 32 gear bikes some of their friends got for their first communion. But then we got into trouble.
My son started asking these questions in the religion class. In German schools religion is a compulsory curriculum but you can opt for the Catholic or the Lutheran Evangelic version. Luckily there is a standard procedure when children make themselves conspicuous. The German word is “auffallen” and is used almost exclusively in a negative sense. When the kids moved to this country a few years ago, the Head Nurse of the Kindergarten wanted to send them to a psychologist, because they made themselves conspicuous by being much too friendly, almost servile. At that time I explained the Head Nurse that it was my mistake: I tried to educate them in conformity with the manners expected in that other country they were born in, forgetting that too much friendliness is interpreted in Germany as weakness and servility. They enjoyed my re-education because now they did not have to be friendly and were allowed to suppress the weaker ones. My son was so successful that he started beating his 2 years younger sister.
This time, however, we had to go to the psychologist with my son. His verdict was terrible and had far reaching consequences: intellectual giftedness. The psychologist tried to soothe my fears: yes it’s true that these kids accept no authority, do not adjust readily to the expectations of their environment. But on the other hand they can be persuaded by intellectual arguments. He even said that our country would need more intellectually independent persons. Had we had more of them, our whole history might have been different. I was thinking about Karlrobert Kreiten who was a talented pianist but he made himself conspicuous by questioning Hitler’s final victory. He did this in a small circle of friends and family but his mother’s best friend turned him in and they shot him dead a few months before the war ended without Hitler’s final victory. We lived in a street named after Karlrobert Kreiten and our friends were always irritated by the length and unusual spelling of our address so we had to tell them to type in their GPS Richard Wagner Street 68 and then just turn into the first street across the adventure playground. Had we had more people like Karlrobert Kreiten our history would have turned out totally differently, indeed: we would have had millions of people with difficult or unusual names questioning Hitler’s final victory turned in and shot dead.
My son was only questioning the education system. Who invented it for whom for what end – he wanted to know, asking me the dreaded critical questions. He did not see any reason in getting up early and sitting for 5-6 hours in a classroom instead of learning those things at home in an hour and then be able to chase cars on the computer of a soccer ball on the playground.
I did what I mostly do when I feel intellectually cornered gasping for a breath of fresh air: I clicked on the Wikipedia for a definition. This is what we found:
Education in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another.
After careful perusal of this information I had to go back to my son’s basic questions:
What is the aim of HIS school education?
Instead of trying to give a halfway intellectually honest answer I lapsed back into story telling:
- All your friends go to school too
- You all learn a lot of interesting and useful things there
- This is the system, everybody has to conform
His counterarguments were:
- All HIS friends hate to go to school, too. If they want to meet they can visit each other or meet on the soccer ground.
- He can learn from the internet and me what is interesting and useful for him
- Have I investigated whether there are gaps in the system, like taking special long leaves? Why not move into another country where education might be compulsory but not necessarily at school? He showed me on the internet a list of countries where home schooling is accepted.
Having no acceptable counterarguments I flew to another never failing educational tactic of mine: bringing in more aspects for consideration. I asked him what else he has learned at school, besides the curricula taught by the teachers. First he did not grasp what I wanted to hear, but I helped him with leading questions, so he would realize what a treasure chest of skills and culture techniques necessary for his future survival in society he had the privilege to acquire at school:
- how to cheat at tests
- how to look down on those of his former class-mates who did not make it to the “Gymnasium” (the high school after the 4th grade elementary school for the top performers in the 3 caste German school system) but lagged behind in the “Realschule” (high school for the second best performers) or even Hauptschule (the high school for the poorest academic achievers) and how to show the caste differences though hairstyle, clothing and language
- how to impress the teachers by
- saying what they want to hear, rather than what he thinks
- feigning interest in what they say
- how to impress the other boys by
- having the latest cell phone model and the coolest downloads
- distributing some of the cheat techniques in the computer games they play judiciously, selectively and profitably
- changing alliances and loyalties diligently
- how to impress the opposite sex by
- using tough language towards the day care staff
- letting his hair grow down his neck endlessly
- how to increase his revenues by
- falsifying his pocket money account
- lifting plastic bottles at home and at school and cashing the deposit
- how to tease and make fun of his sister in such a subtle way that makes reprimanding impossible
I have the impression that he grasped the value of the skills transmitted by our education system – unlike his sister who, at 8, stills acts in ridiculous childish ways like
- saying what she thinks
- showing her emotions overtly
- trusting her friends and parents
- helping her friends with their home works
- admitting to having made mistakes
But then she has been only two and a half years through our school education system and therefore there is hope that it will take on more and more efficiency and society will “deliberately transmit its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another” so that she will only make herself conspicuous at socially accepted occasions.
comparitis: a zeitgeist disease
We know that comparing yourself with others will inevitably result in stress and unhappiness. The moment you start comparing yourself with others you start making a loser out of youself. Philosophers like Seneca, or Montaigne pointed it out, scientists like Ed Diener or Norbert Schwarz proved it scientifically.
Nevertheless, all the education systems I know – excepting Elliot Aronson’s jigsaw class, the Summerhill and the Waldorf school systems are based on making the kids compete for the attention and acknowledgment of the teacher and for grades. They were established in the industrial age with the aim to perpetuate class differences, to provide the industries with workers, engineers and managers and to keep young people within highly organized and disciplined structures.
Now the Culture Ministers (called Kultusminister, i.e. ministers of cult) of the fifteen German federal states decided to introduce the same standard tests in each state so the can compare students’ performances across the state borders.
The tv programs for kids are mostly structured as team competitions as well.
It looks like those in charge of the reproduction of culture and administration of learning will never learn. Even the tests the designed were full of mistakes: to redesign them will cost the taxpayers 200.000 euros.
greed has destroyed the world’s financial system it has created
‘Capitalism Has Degenerated into a Casino’
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus says that greed has destroyed the world’s financial system as Spiegel Online reported: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,583366,00.html
My question:
Degenerated from what? From profit maximization out of greed to profit maximization out of greed? If “greed has destroyed the world’s financial system” it has only destroyed that what it has created, hasn’t it?
His diagnose:
Today’s capitalism has degenerated into a casino. The financial markets are propelled by greed. Speculation has reached catastrophic proportions.
His prescription:
socially minded companies, where earning as much money as possible can only be a means to an end, not an end in itself. One has to invest money in something meaningful – and I would make a case for it being something that improves the quality of life for all people
But Mr Yunus has nothing to tell us about how to handle
the cause: greed.
Buddha and Epicurus tackled that question pretty efficiently.
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