Yes, Graham, what you present is another moral conundrum. But all this could disappear if all humans would accept the indisputable fact that there is only ONE species of humans currently left alive on planet Earth and that is Homo sapiens. There are no subspecies , there is no other Genus. We are it. I have no idea if we killed off the neanderthals, and Denisovans, and I don't really care, there are no individuals left behind, only fossils and relics. You rail against capitalism, I rail against the lack of enforced regulations. I have the distinct feeling that neither of us are right or wrong!
Thanks for this, Fay. You're right, it's a conundrum of sorts, but it's not moral. It's one of mores. A moral conundrum is one in which my own moral standing is in question. A conundrum of mores is one where the perception of my standing is in question. The question then, which of the two should win the day?
No, it's a construct. People hate each other because they see material benefit in doing so. It's like eating sensibly. It takes a huge amount of effort to diet, which is why many people fail. They want quick fixes and lose faith, so return to cream cakes and Mars bars. The dieting benefit is elusive unless you work at it. At the benefit of love is elusive, unless you work at it. People revert to the easy way. They see benefit in hate, because in the short term, there is.
We weave through the warp and weft of history between periods in which we exploit others with a tinge of benevolence, and those in which we go all-out for gain.
"The darkest hour is just before dawn." The reason why the world is hurling helter-skelter for the dawn, and why it is therefore becoming so dark outside (which, in its quest for dawn, it is failing to appreciate), is because we are slowly entering the eye of the maelstrom. When you run a bath away, you don't even notice the water level dropping at first. You think the pipe's blocked. As the final pints of water descend, the visible whirl around the plughole reassures you the pipe is free, by which time it's too late to replace the stopper.
I was born into the time when we'd never had it so good. 1961 was the mid-years of the post-war path of progress. I am now living through the years of decline, and I vouch that nobody can hold this back. Not even a fractious coalition of French lefties who would as soon impose their own political dogma as block someone else's. Where they race to, they do not know; they chase a pie that is elusive, because it is behind them the whole time. They are tools of paymasters and have contracted to pursue a path that is not their own, for lucre that they shall not even enjoy. We have been doomed since the day that we sold our political integrity for raw cash, and the race is now on for the payers to squeeze the lemon of its last few drops of juice before, like all good capitalists, they throw the dross behind them and move on. Who knows, maybe to Mars.
In 1945, the world awoke as if from a nightmare. There was jubilation in the streets, and a sense of gratitude for having survived the ordeal. John tells James in our favourite movie, "Live a good life," and James is sorrowful at the prospect that he may have failed his saviour. Well, the time has gone for regretting having failed one's saviour.
In those years, there was resolve: a new welfare state, promises of pensions, work, work, work, to rebuild and reconstruct. An immense task, about which, especially in the worst destroyed places, like Germany and Poland and Japan, there were no illusions. The boom period of the post-war years - it sounds trite to say it - could never have happened ... without the war.
Work conditions improved and peace was proved to mean security. The American Dream was born - albeit mostly an aspiration instilled in Americans' minds by oil and motor car companies (Henry Ford didn't just bring automobiles within the reach of ordinary Americans, he colluded with banks to invent the instalment plan so they could pay for them.) Education boomed until, in the 1960s and 70s, you were strange if you didn't go to college.
All that was a product of determined, conscientious, hard-working individuals in the populace and in government, who were determined that the price paid for the Second World War would be redeemed in full: a sense of duty towards those who had perished in the fight. My mother fought that fight, as a teenager in a war-torn port city; my father's father worked like a galley slave to keep RAF airplanes flying to defend Britain's shores. They knew first hand the net sum of that price. But the new generations had no direct ken of the privations of the wartime. The war ended when I was 16, if I counted backwards. Counting forwards, you're oblivious of it.
In the 1980s, you could be anything you wanted to be. Look at the movies: Brewster's Millions, Changing Places, Ruthless People: an array of opportunities, just select the one that fits you. The trick is of course that upward mobility, as the yuppies would call it, was by its very nature limited in opportunity. There is, in the end, only so much to go round, and he who grabs most does deprive everyone else. It's an equation that is ineluctable. As one mounts the pyramid (capitalism is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme), the opportunities become rarer; the ruthless become more ruthless. Illusory chances at windfalls of opportunity come and go: NFTs, cryptocurrencies, dot.coms and the new tech madness. Not that it matters, the talk of AI is likely a screen because, really, a computer does only what you tell it to do. So if AI screws up, there will be someone behind its screw-up, rest assured. Just you won't be able to finger him.
The post-war explosion in benevolence and benefit, in growth and opportunity, only came about because the rulers had learned that repression discourages. If, as Voltaire said, one has to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others, then the contrary is also true: one must shower the plebeians with generosity from time to time, to keep them at the grind.
Well, the time for generosity is over. We were taught our lives long to beware the extreme left, and beware the extreme right, and adhere resolutely to the middle way. The middle is not a way. It is the greatest illusion of all, for it does not exist, other than in the mind of a tight-rope walker, for it is the narrowest and most perilous of paths of all to tread. It is not the lateral that a tightrope walker fears; it is the vertical, and right he is to fear it. For as long as he remains atop his wire, he is its master; if he falls, he is doomed. The eternal struggle for peace in our time lies not in a confrontation between left and right, but between top and bottom. That is the reason why totalitarianism looks and feels the same, whether it wears a swastika or a red star; why commerce is naught but war without the cannon; the battle is not engaged between left and right, but between the mass at the bottom and the rarified heights at the top, and ever has it been thus, with only one small exception: the years 1945-75. They were the most wonderful, ebullient, fantastical and aberrational expedient. The crank handle to restart the Model T after its stall, which cost 85 million their lives and whose aftermath was a stillness around the world that would not be heard again until the pandemic. So start the baby up, they did, but who needs a crank handle once the motor is running?
What do you know, Fay, it was meant to be a riposte, and it became an article.
I think people hate each other because that's what they are told to do. My mother had a list of types of people I was supposed to avoid. Fortunately for me, mother and I never got along, She loved my brothers but I was Daddy's girl,. and Dad wasn't a hater
Yes, Graham, what you present is another moral conundrum. But all this could disappear if all humans would accept the indisputable fact that there is only ONE species of humans currently left alive on planet Earth and that is Homo sapiens. There are no subspecies , there is no other Genus. We are it. I have no idea if we killed off the neanderthals, and Denisovans, and I don't really care, there are no individuals left behind, only fossils and relics. You rail against capitalism, I rail against the lack of enforced regulations. I have the distinct feeling that neither of us are right or wrong!
Thanks for this, Fay. You're right, it's a conundrum of sorts, but it's not moral. It's one of mores. A moral conundrum is one in which my own moral standing is in question. A conundrum of mores is one where the perception of my standing is in question. The question then, which of the two should win the day?
Offence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Who do I "as an outsider" think I am to wade in and level criticism or even advice? Further on this topic: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/must-you-have-an-interest-in-peace.
Agreed. So it's more like a conundrum of conondra?
No, it's a construct. People hate each other because they see material benefit in doing so. It's like eating sensibly. It takes a huge amount of effort to diet, which is why many people fail. They want quick fixes and lose faith, so return to cream cakes and Mars bars. The dieting benefit is elusive unless you work at it. At the benefit of love is elusive, unless you work at it. People revert to the easy way. They see benefit in hate, because in the short term, there is.
We weave through the warp and weft of history between periods in which we exploit others with a tinge of benevolence, and those in which we go all-out for gain.
"The darkest hour is just before dawn." The reason why the world is hurling helter-skelter for the dawn, and why it is therefore becoming so dark outside (which, in its quest for dawn, it is failing to appreciate), is because we are slowly entering the eye of the maelstrom. When you run a bath away, you don't even notice the water level dropping at first. You think the pipe's blocked. As the final pints of water descend, the visible whirl around the plughole reassures you the pipe is free, by which time it's too late to replace the stopper.
I was born into the time when we'd never had it so good. 1961 was the mid-years of the post-war path of progress. I am now living through the years of decline, and I vouch that nobody can hold this back. Not even a fractious coalition of French lefties who would as soon impose their own political dogma as block someone else's. Where they race to, they do not know; they chase a pie that is elusive, because it is behind them the whole time. They are tools of paymasters and have contracted to pursue a path that is not their own, for lucre that they shall not even enjoy. We have been doomed since the day that we sold our political integrity for raw cash, and the race is now on for the payers to squeeze the lemon of its last few drops of juice before, like all good capitalists, they throw the dross behind them and move on. Who knows, maybe to Mars.
In 1945, the world awoke as if from a nightmare. There was jubilation in the streets, and a sense of gratitude for having survived the ordeal. John tells James in our favourite movie, "Live a good life," and James is sorrowful at the prospect that he may have failed his saviour. Well, the time has gone for regretting having failed one's saviour.
In those years, there was resolve: a new welfare state, promises of pensions, work, work, work, to rebuild and reconstruct. An immense task, about which, especially in the worst destroyed places, like Germany and Poland and Japan, there were no illusions. The boom period of the post-war years - it sounds trite to say it - could never have happened ... without the war.
Work conditions improved and peace was proved to mean security. The American Dream was born - albeit mostly an aspiration instilled in Americans' minds by oil and motor car companies (Henry Ford didn't just bring automobiles within the reach of ordinary Americans, he colluded with banks to invent the instalment plan so they could pay for them.) Education boomed until, in the 1960s and 70s, you were strange if you didn't go to college.
All that was a product of determined, conscientious, hard-working individuals in the populace and in government, who were determined that the price paid for the Second World War would be redeemed in full: a sense of duty towards those who had perished in the fight. My mother fought that fight, as a teenager in a war-torn port city; my father's father worked like a galley slave to keep RAF airplanes flying to defend Britain's shores. They knew first hand the net sum of that price. But the new generations had no direct ken of the privations of the wartime. The war ended when I was 16, if I counted backwards. Counting forwards, you're oblivious of it.
In the 1980s, you could be anything you wanted to be. Look at the movies: Brewster's Millions, Changing Places, Ruthless People: an array of opportunities, just select the one that fits you. The trick is of course that upward mobility, as the yuppies would call it, was by its very nature limited in opportunity. There is, in the end, only so much to go round, and he who grabs most does deprive everyone else. It's an equation that is ineluctable. As one mounts the pyramid (capitalism is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme), the opportunities become rarer; the ruthless become more ruthless. Illusory chances at windfalls of opportunity come and go: NFTs, cryptocurrencies, dot.coms and the new tech madness. Not that it matters, the talk of AI is likely a screen because, really, a computer does only what you tell it to do. So if AI screws up, there will be someone behind its screw-up, rest assured. Just you won't be able to finger him.
The post-war explosion in benevolence and benefit, in growth and opportunity, only came about because the rulers had learned that repression discourages. If, as Voltaire said, one has to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others, then the contrary is also true: one must shower the plebeians with generosity from time to time, to keep them at the grind.
Well, the time for generosity is over. We were taught our lives long to beware the extreme left, and beware the extreme right, and adhere resolutely to the middle way. The middle is not a way. It is the greatest illusion of all, for it does not exist, other than in the mind of a tight-rope walker, for it is the narrowest and most perilous of paths of all to tread. It is not the lateral that a tightrope walker fears; it is the vertical, and right he is to fear it. For as long as he remains atop his wire, he is its master; if he falls, he is doomed. The eternal struggle for peace in our time lies not in a confrontation between left and right, but between top and bottom. That is the reason why totalitarianism looks and feels the same, whether it wears a swastika or a red star; why commerce is naught but war without the cannon; the battle is not engaged between left and right, but between the mass at the bottom and the rarified heights at the top, and ever has it been thus, with only one small exception: the years 1945-75. They were the most wonderful, ebullient, fantastical and aberrational expedient. The crank handle to restart the Model T after its stall, which cost 85 million their lives and whose aftermath was a stillness around the world that would not be heard again until the pandemic. So start the baby up, they did, but who needs a crank handle once the motor is running?
What do you know, Fay, it was meant to be a riposte, and it became an article.
I think people hate each other because that's what they are told to do. My mother had a list of types of people I was supposed to avoid. Fortunately for me, mother and I never got along, She loved my brothers but I was Daddy's girl,. and Dad wasn't a hater