On Stupidity

From my personal experiences with myself and other people, not being intelligent, or to put it bluntly, ‘Stupidity’, is a function of not being open to life and not participating in life. Life constantly throws stuff at us, and if you simply be and act in it, you will change and improve and get better at whatever it is. Of course that process of being in life comes with risks, possibility of failure and the possibility of looking like a fool. All of those are scary things. But, when we bow to them and ‘hide out’ from life we stay static and not learn and improve. We hide because of past experiences in that area that hurt us, so we don’t want to try again. 

Part of being open is doing what people tell/ask you to do. In my opinion, there is no fundamental reason *not to* do what people tell/ask/request you to do. Most people operate from there is no reason *to* do what other people ask you to do. Other people have their own life experiences and their own knowledge of life. When we do things according to their worldview, we get some benefit from it. When fear/ego/something else stops us from that, we don’t do something new and we pass up an opportunity to learn. An immediate question that might come to your mind will be on the lines of ‘If someone asks you to jump off the top of a building, will you do it ?” There are practical answers to that but a deeper answer is that the question itself is coming from doubt and resistance. The same doubt and resistance will come up even when you have an opportunity to do something that will genuinely enrich your life. It prevents you from trying new things in life and learning. 

‘Deep listening’ is another aspect here. When you’re listening you’re judging and filtering stuff. That causes you to constantly reject a lot of good stuff and you don’t learn and grow. Can you listen without judgement ? It doesn’t mean you sway to every opinion or idea you hear. As you practice deep listening and go through some ups and downs with it, you will reach your own new equilibriums  that are better than the old.

On Violence

My friend Deepak Menon has an abiding interest in non-violence. After a meeting with him yesterday where this came up for discussion (along with many other things), I thought I would write down my thoughts on it.

At the first level - violence is doing harm to someone and its a bad thing.

While its easy to identify and condemn physical violence, psychological violence is a more subtle thing. Constantly criticising someone. Not providing children the care and love they need. Organisational heads creating or allowing a toxic organisational atmosphere with back-biting and self-interested actions. These are example I would say, of psychological violence. Is it possible or desirable to completely eliminate psychological violence ?

Violence within oneself. Having a strong desire to inflict physical harm but suppressing will result in the violence showing up in other negative ways. I was struck by the fact that despite Gandhiji's strict adherence to non-violence, finally the country got independence through one of the most large-scale episodes of violence in its history (partition). One wonders if this is a symptom of suppression of violence engendered by Gandhiji, that finally burst out. But contrarily, Gandhi's genius in seeing how one could accomplish the goal of getting rid of an oppressor without violence, has to be acknowledged. It was the first time that it was tried, particularly on such a large scale, in the modern world. 

Other examples of internal violence: Feelings of hate and other strong negative emotions. Internal conflict, eg. pushing yourself very hard all the time.

People who have had some amount of corporeal punishment as children often grow up to say that it was a good thing and that the 'healthy fear' of the punishment put them on the right path. I've wondered about this. Is a small amount of physical punishment for children a bad thing? My feeling is that it is. When you do this, you are implicitly saying that under some circumstances its okay to be violent (and that its okay to use a position of superior strength to impose your will on somebody by force).  These kind of things (another example is violent toys) add up. They add up for example to an adult who is okay with war as a means of settling disputes.

Standing by while violence is happening is not so different from participating in it. In that way, we are all complicit in the matter of the many wars and other large-scale conflicts happening in the world . For another situation, consider World War 2. If a country had a choice of joining in the war or being neutral what is the right thing to do ? America did indeed have that choice. Personally, I am unable to see clearly what is the right thing to do in this situation. 

I think violence is sometimes an immediate or temporary tool for example in self-defence at different levels (single individual, community, country). But its continued or systematic use is not correct. 

On a personal level, I have to deal with how to address this issue in the context of my growing child. I have felt that society's casual acceptance of violence in the matter of toys (and in entertainment like TV and films) is a deep pathology.  Vibhat plays an online game called Clash of Clans which is about attacking other clans and capturing them.  He talks with casualness about bombs and so on.  He is also practising Karate now and I wonder what are the messages he is picking up in the process. 

Elements of a life philosophy 3 - "Empty and meaningless"

Sartre said “Life is empty and meaningless” and Landmark clarified that to “Life is empty and meaningless and its empty and meaningless that its empty and meaningless” 

One way to look at this is something like: 

You are a speck of a human being among billions of others , billions before, and billions after. And all this on planet Earth with the vastness of the Universe around us. Can you try to say our lives have meaning in the face of all this ?

If you’re very conscious of this insignificance all the time, you might freeze into inaction. Or surprisingly, you might find it very liberating and free yourself up to do whatever you want. 

Even if you don’t get into the cosmological analogies above, you can see the meaninglessness in other ways: we are all born, we go through whatever we go through and then die. That’s all that actually happens. Everything else is our attempt to make sense of this and give us courage to live in the face of the apparent pointlessness. Religion and morality are prime examples. 

Going further into this, all our opinions and judgements are ultimately invalid. We may respect someone, love somebody, dislike someone, hate someone. But if you look into it, all those judgements don’t have objectivity in them. There is always another opinion or judgement you can have that it equally valid. This is best illustrated by a practical example, I'll add one in when a good one comes to mind! In the meantime, you could just try it yourself taking some situation or person that you really feel negative about. Then see if there is a valid other way to view it. 
There is no way to have a truly ‘correct’ or ’objective’ opinion about something. 

I believe that the ‘Maya’ idea of Indian philosophy was trying to express the same idea.

“Empty and meaningless’ can be understood as a theory but to really impact how you live life, it has to be experienced. That experience can be pretty discomfiting - a feeling of the ground giving way under your feet. 

How does ‘empty and meaningless’ influence me? I have a tendency to make negative judgements about people and create elaborate justifications in my mind to support that. 

Having internalised ‘empty and meaningless’ I’m able to catch myself often in this process and drop it and accept that its just my judgement and its up to me to stand by the judgement or not irrespective of the justification.  

Also, I don’t get too much into ideology - all ideology is an intellectual exercise that can never capture the entirety of life. Use ideology as an aid to thinking, but realise that’s its temporary and provisional 

On (Not) Living in the past

Life’s experiences leaves their mark on us. Most of the time we think of this as positive - learning from life. But experiences also distort our thinking. Someone who has been through severe poverty may go through life always insecure even if rationally they have made enough to feel secure. Someone whose parents have had a difficult marriage or who comes from a broken household will likely carry that over to their own marriage. They have no other experience on which to base their behaviour in marriage. 

This holds true at a societal level too. Certain ideas have strong hold on the national imagination and it is difficult for people to think rationally about this. Examples include the Kashmir issue in India and the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

One of the most valuable services that a human can provide another is to free them from this grip of the past, to help them to drop their 'baggage'. To quote from Landmark, to be “informed by the past, but not limited by it”.  To help a person to design their future, outside of the constraints of the past. However, the requirement for such a service is not even widely recognised today, leave alone provided. 

On a national level, I see an impact from this, for poverty alleviation and national progress, economically and otherwise. In particular, moving people out of poverty can be quite challenging because of the mindset changes required of the poor.  If societies as a whole could provide  service, it stands to reason that, freed from the ‘demons’ on the past, individuals and therefore societies will progress much more rapidly and in a  win-win way, than they could otherwise. 

Kissinger jokes

Henry Kissinger's work has many examples of what decent people would find enormous inversions of justice. Like, for example, that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing an end to the Vietnam war, when he was in actuality responsible for things like the massive bombing of Cambodia as part of that war. Giving him the Nobel was appropriately labeled 'the death of satire' when it happened.

Chomsky is not usually given to humor, and one of the few examples I've seen is in relation to Kissinger, whose guts he really hates.  Debunking one of Kissinger's arguments where he says that that Western civilisation has a culture of 'toleration' (never mind a couple of World Wars and decades of colonial cruelty), Chomsky comments with an undertone of frustration and bitterness: "One can always count on K for some comic relief, though in reality, he is not alone" ( http://www.iran-bulletin.org/history/chomsky3.html)

And finally one from that fantastic commentator on US political affairs, Gary Trudeau author of the Doonesbury cartoons. In a series of strips, Kissinger is visiting faculty at a Washington DC university and leading a course while doing his stuff as Secretary of State. While he tries to use the seminar to talk about realpolitik and world domination and such, there are one or two idealists in the class who keep bringing up useless questions about truth, justice and the suffering of the common man. Finally Kissinger in frustration bursts out "Human rights! Human rights! I'm sick and tired of human rights!"

Touche. Sometimes I feel a similiar sentiment : "Climate change! Climate change! I'm sick and tired of climate change!"

For perhaps a more rounded portrayal of Kissinger, see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger