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INTERCONNECTED
You Can’t Bring A Knife To A Gunfight
Peaceful vs. Military
EBTV presents host Evita Ochel with special guest Paul K. Chappell – author, former military captain and leadership director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The interview covers major topics from Paul’s newly released book, Peaceful Revolution, including:
– Paul’s personal journey growing up in a military household
– Paul’s personal journey of being in the military
– proof that human beings are not naturally violent
– how propaganda creates an illusion of necessity for war
– the role of dehumanization to making war possible
– the repression of sex and its consequences
– the repression of death and its consequences
– our obsession with violent media
– examples of solutions for humanity to achieve world peace
– Paul’s wisdom and advice to those who want to enlist in the military
Putting Out Fires With Oil Again?
The Future Civilization: Separation or Integration?
Sylvie Brunel, writer, geographer, Liberation, France: “For five centuries, the world has lived under the domination of Europe, which imposed its ‘universal’ values, democracy, human rights, human equality, right to development. Today the world looks at the decline of the West and claims the right to rewrite history of subordination to the West. Through violence (colonization, slave trade), Europe has imposed its supposedly universal values to prove its supremacy, but begot only beggars and outcasts.
The homeless are beggars, single-parent families, all those who struggle to find their place in an individualistic and materialistic world. Outcasts are foreigners, old people, condemned to loneliness. What is civilization in which one finds his place only as if he is in the prime of life, physically attractive, fit, well off, and male?
Africans consider it unacceptable the way we treat the elderly. Muslims make fun of our criticism of polygamy, but our men make polygamy a norm de facto. Asians are stunned by how the individual can put greed above the interests of the group. There is more solidarity between slum dwellers than between developed states, drowning in bureaucracy. Inequality has exploded. The work has been devalued against the omnipotence of money and return on capital.
Barbarism is bursting from us when we fight against those who practice neither our language nor our religion, conduct ‘just’ wars, which cause only chaos and violence, wars for oil and access to the sources of energy in Africa. The West, sure of its success, is everywhere, with impunity trampling on the value of those people whom supposedly it came to civilize. How dare we say that one civilization is superior to others if it is built on arrogance, xenophobia, conquest, domination and exclusion?”
Western civilization, as the most egoistically advanced and developed, has conquered the whole world and imposed its own values. But the rest of the world is not a good example to follow. It is time for the development of a new civilization: universal and integrated, when all nations, while remaining in their own cultures, for the sake of survival unite above all the differences in order to be similar to Nature.
Social Scientist Philip Zimbardo: Factors Other Than Character Determine Behavior [TED Talk]
As a child growing up in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx (an inner city ghetto of New York), social psychologist Philip Zimbardo learned at an early age that “the line between good and evil (which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable – with them on the good side and others on the bad side); I knew that line was movable and permeable.”
In this TED video [23 minutes] Zimbardo presents three factors which can determine the likelihood of evil acts from healthy, normal well-intentioned people:
Bad Apples, A Bad Barrel Or Bad Barrel-Makers?
The 3 factors influencing the transformation of human character towards evil can be summarized as:
• Dispositional: Inside the person. This is the factor most often considered by culture, religions and government as the cause of behavior.
• Situational: Outside the person. This is the factor pointing to the influence of a person’s immediate surroundings, typically one in which a person’s normal, habitual behavior is not possible.
• Systemic: The power structure that creates and sustains the situation.
“Since the inquisition we’ve been dealing with problems at the level of the individual and it doesn’t work.”
He recommends a paradigm shift of focus “away from the medical model which focuses only on the individual, towards a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease.”
Promoting Heroism As The Antidote To Evil
Zimbardo suggests the following:
• Promote the heroic imagination of kids in our educational system. “We want kids to think, ‘I’m a hero in waiting,’ waiting for the right situation to come along to act heroically.”
• Motivate people to overcome the natural tendency towards passive inaction in social situations [as demonstrated in the Bystander Experiment].
• Teach children to think and act socio-centricly, rather than ego-centricly.
• Unlike childhood heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman who have special powers, children need to be told that heroes can come from everyday people.
Source: Zimbardo quotes, cartoon and video from YouTube/Philip Zimbardo: Why Ordinary People…
Source: Popeye word cloud courtesy Terry McCombs
Embryo
EMBRYO HD from Vladek Zankovsky on Vimeo.
A very powerful clip paralleling the development of one human embryo to that of human civilization
Humans within this planet now are the newest experience of the universe in what, biologically, always seems to come down to cycles: of unity to individuation, through which arises conflict, negotiations happen, cooperation is arrived at; and we go to unity again at the next higher level.
And that’s why the story of evolution is so important today, to help us understand where humanity is, and what is our next step.”
– Elisabet Sahtouris, taken from Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Finds Evolutionary Purpose In Crisis
Like Cells In A Body: Seeing Humanity As Parts Of One Organism
Man’s irresistible drift away from conflict and towards cooperation is but the complete adaptation of the organism (man) to its environment (the planet, ‘wild nature’), resulting in a more intense vitality.”
The above and subsequent quotes are taken from the book, The Great Illusion; the work of one Sir Norman Angell, economist, politician, author, and nobel peace prize recipient.
Almost 100 years ago (1913) Angell wrote on issues which remarkably hold particular relevance today:
1) The individual as a part of a nation.
2) The nation as a part of all nations. And;
3) Man as an individual, nation, and together all nations, as one organism.
The Biological Argument For Mutual Consideration
Part of Angell’s argument, for mutual cooperation among people, stems from a biological observation:
Now, a body, the various parts of which are so interdependent that without coordination vitality is reduced or death ensues, must be regarded, in so far as the functions in question are concerned, not as a collection of rival organisms, but as one. This is in accord with what we know of the character of living organisms in their conflict with environment. The higher the organism, the greater the elaboration and interdependence of its part, the greater the need for coordination.”
Seeing Humanity As One Organism
As cells must operate in mutual consideration for the body to remain healthy, Angell argues that so must the person, as a part of all people (one organism), operate the same:
The individual in his sociological aspect is not the complete organism. He who attempts to live without association with his fellow dies. Nor is the nation the complete organism. If Britain attempted to live without cooperation with other nations, half the population would starve. The completer the cooperation, the greater the vitality.”
Fast Forward To Today
Today, modern science, in all of its branches, is touching on what Angell had championed a hundred years ago.
Here is evolutionary biologist Bruce Lipton speaking on humanity evolving as and towards the realization that man is one organism:
One cell later becomes a human; which later becomes humanity. And when humanity is complete the earth as an organism completes its evolution… when the earth completes its evolution we are then at the level of a unity, with a voice of unity, which allows us to speak as a one…”
Cell photo courtesy of wellcome images.
Spring Come
Clouds in My Coffee
Nature is filled with examples of endlessly repeating patterns, where the whole is built on the balanced interaction of the parts. For generations, man has only looked at his “parts” – individuals. Now, maybe it is time to consider the whole – humanity.
I feel another downhill day coming, and I dread going into work. Will I get a sudden escort out this morning like poor Erika? Our manager, Phil, wouldn’t want us to steal or damage anything, especially staff morale – as if there were any left! I’ve known Phil for 30 years; what’s happened to him? To the whole world?
At least we still have some creature comforts, most notably – a gourmet cup of java to give me some courage. Watching that drop of cream in the coffee, the pattern of swirls within swirls, I can’t help thinking back to that 1972 Carly Simon song, “I had some dreams; they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee…”
Clouds in coffee… swirls within swirls… patterns, unfolding within themselves, over and over, like variations on a theme. Isn’t this the way all of Nature is? Fern leaves, coastlines, clouds – each is composed of a geometric shape that’s repeated at a smaller and smaller scale, each shape nested within its larger counterpart. Isn’t there something to be learned at this time from this property that is so pervasive in Nature? Perhaps the world’s problems and solutions are hidden within these unique, yet universal, patterns. And perhaps we could unlock this universal secret if only we had a master key, the “fractal”!
Patterns of Life
This term, referring to all these pervasive self-similarities, was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot, due to the common element in the recurring patterns – their fractional dimension. The math behind a fractal is a simple repeating formula, yet it can produce awesomely beautiful visuals. Looking into them, one senses a deep, almost frightening, power – a two-way ebb and flow, as though looking into the eyes of Infinity itself.
There really is a dynamic transcending the still image. As pointed out by Robert Shaw, a pioneer in the science of “Chaos”, there’s actual communication reflected up and down the orders of magnitude between the inner and outer patterns. But for us, the consequences are a lot more serious than pretty pictures.
A most important example is our complex heartbeat and circulatory flow. The complexity actually keeps us alive. Because all the components work together in perfect harmony, communicating as though in mutual love, coronary interactions operate smoothly on every scale. Natural fluctuations at any level are corrected by the system as a whole. However, if this “love” breaks down and a part of the system selfishly pulls itself too far away for too long, something ominous begins to happen. The beat pattern grows smoother, at first glance seemingly a sign of stability; that is, until it smoothes down to a simple sine wave, and finally – the straight line of cardiac arrest.
The fractal’s universality makes the above a fundamental law of nature, ruling all systems: mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. But only at the human level is there the freedom to follow a dysfunctional policy of “every man for himself.” Sweet as it may first appear to gifted predators, beneath the surface the system begins an accelerating decay, until the nightmare finally comes out of the woodwork as Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
It’s a bit like an enormous pocket watch over wound to the point of no return. Though it may still be beautiful, gold and shiny on the surface, a look at the inner mechanism will reveal a flaming explosion of snapping teeth and mainspring, leading to the grand finale – the freezing of gears, grinding to a halt. So it is with our business models: systematic doom seals the fate of even the most “successful” individuals along with the rest of the human mechanism. It’s just a question of “who by fire and who by ice.” And the predator , who was so gifted, sees he now has no prey.
Hope for the Future
Humanity’s evolution into a global economy through ever-growing and entwining infrastructures has given it a worldwide heartbeat and circulation. Murphy’s Law has already started to go berserk before our very eyes, yet we continue to proceed mindlessly against Nature, like lemmings treading toward a cliff’s edge. No force can turn the situation around other than every person’s individual, free choice to see others as the greater part of himself, rather than isolated prey to feed upon. Do we not yet realize that the pattern in each of our personal fractals is actually made of all of us?
The clouds in my coffee dissipate on a hopeful note – a song the Youngbloods provided five years before Carly Simon, “Come on people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together; try to love one another right now.” And when we look into the eyes of Infinity, maybe we’ll be met by an infinite fractal smile. Wouldn’t that be something!
Despite the odds, my cup of java has once again kept its promise to encourage. What message will your favorite brew be giving you?
Elliot Ponderer