Stupidity About Politics And Governance
Liberty emanates out of the primary acceptance that Reality cannot be singular and as there shall always be different shades of Realities for different people, everyone must be at free will to accept Reality as per his or her individual cognitive expressions and practice whatever principles he or she deems fit. Liberty therefore underlines the Reality of human world and human life-living. It allows accommodation and prosperity of relativity of context and relationship that humans have for acceptance of Reality. Liberty in turn engenders such sub-realities, which form part of the systems and rules of collective life-living.
This means – individual, his or her relativistic and contextual perception of Reality and the resultant primary need of Liberty is the core basis of everything in life and living. It creates the system of society, cultures, politics and economics. Liberty being the primary Causality of humanity, creates sub-causalities that require specific media and as Liberty is human expression of Reality, it is only natural that Liberty installs media, which are human creations within societal life-living domain. This social-societal necessity of Liberty originates political ideas and spaces and in turn, the emergent and evolving political causalities create economic structures and functions. Therefore, in simple one line – Individual is the undeniable and irreplaceable basis of everything in human life-living and its collective management. Individual and its Liberty is Causa Sine Qua Non of everythingness…
That is probably why as early as 16th-17th century; humanity had accepted individual liberty as the singular guiding principle of all human practices in collective domains. It clearly accepted all human institutions and groupings, even state power and society as subservient to the individual Will. This universal idealism of liberty and its optimal expression postulated the central and predominant position of individual in all human scheme of things to come in future march of civilization and culture.
However, this idealism had always had roadblocks and vitiation primarily because humans could not ensure the quantum of compassion required in social, cultural, political and economic milieus for the idea and idealism of liberty to play out. Rather, gradually, the reverse happened as state authority, nationalistic identities and sentiments made liberty subservient to state power. The compassion element gradually gave way to competitiveness and conflicts. The power structures of state and its agencies innately aligned to money-wealth to create such an economic realism, which shattered every probability of compassionate and co-existential life-living. Interestingly, this was done on the name of individual’s empowerment and wellness! The brute force of state power however, happily termed itself as ‘Welfare State’!
It has to be understood, the big trouble is that the very idea of Liberty is highly entropic in nature as it unleashes powerful energies of diversity and asymmetry. It is only natural that such powerful energy field has to have enough scale magnitude of operative space so that it does not interfere with the energy field of another individual. Also, it was essential that overall milieus remained sufficiently compassionate and resource-distribution among individuals had much-required equitability to minimize conflicts and competitiveness. These remained dream for humanity, as societies grew to become more complex with rising population and resource availability.
Politics in its contemporary structures and functions came into being in human world with this specific requirement. Politics by definition of its nature means humanly designed and devised structures and functions to accommodate, assimilate and systematize different competing and conflicting shades of Realities. Politics by its very origin means a ‘Compassionate Meeting Point’ of all competing energies in society and cultures to optimize Liberty by arraying and aligning conflicting ideas and demands into a System of Sanity. And, democracy was accepted globally as the single working tool of political maneuvering for Sanity.
It is altogether different matter that politics itself had such inherent and innate ‘Causalities’, which engendered the Frankenstein of Insanity and Conflicts. The ‘media’ of politics, which the core reality of liberty created, may have been designed to communicate and express the compassionate element of assimilation and accommodation in social-cultural life-living but this ‘medium’ of politics had its own ‘message’. The massive power structures, causalities of authoritative control and legitimacy for violence etc ensured that politics itself turned out to be the single largest killer of compassion, assimilation and accommodation.
This however is only one aspect of trouble of politics. Second crucial aspect is that contemporary nature of politics globally has come to stay as ‘Dispenser of Solutions’, which it is not designed for. Politics has no solutions to offer, as solutions for human life-living originate only in societal and cultural domains. It is so because, troubles of life-living have origin in society and culture itself. Individual liberty has its play ground in society. Naturally, problems emanate in this playground. Societies and cultures themselves have answers and solutions. Politics simply has the role of compassionate and amicable assimilation and accommodation of competing solutions of a problem or trouble. Politics has the role of administrating a solution through its authoritative structures and functions and never the creation of solution.
Tragically, instead, politics in contemporary world is the single largest trouble of humanity! It is primarily because politics in contemporary human world has illegitimately donned the mantle of ‘solution provider’, sidelining society-culture, and this the politics does to install such ‘solutions’, which only serves its own petty interest. Politics in contemporary human world is the best example of the calamitous reality of ‘Medium Is Message’. Interestingly, modern politics is behaving almost similar to the ‘mechanism of evolution’, which is accepted by most as ‘stupid engineering’.
Liberty, by very definition is itself contextual and relational as Liberty is a Reality only in societal context and social relationships. There is no meaning of the reality of Liberty in a vast jungle where a single human being lives. Liberty is a socially-contextual Reality and as a natural corollary, stands as a competing idea just because of the fact that its operative domain is a physically defined space of society where people with different perceptions and perspectives live side by side; often in uncomfortably intrusive limits. Naturally, across the world, societies are in untold disarray and politics steps in destroying most liberties to install ‘peace and order’.
Human population is now many many times more than what could be the idea of ‘enough space’ for every individual to practice his or her personal diversities peacefully. The population is also not equitably dispersed. Also, in modern times, all human lives with their stakes on available resources on Earth are so intricately linked to each other that it is truly tough for an individual Liberty to express itself and not interfere with that of others.
The very idea of liberty stands as a competitive entity as its innate nature, which makes it highly entropic. It is simply because Liberty has meaning only in human world and humans live in finite domains of space, time, resource, etc. Naturally, liberty of different individuals shall always compete with each other to optimize the energy field of Liberty. As human population is much beyond sustainable limits of the Earth, every passing day, the operational space available for each energy field of individuals liberty is shrinking, making the competition harsher and exceed the probabilities of compassion, accommodation and inclusiveness. So, liberty itself engenders such causalities that play out their realities in a way that erodes compassion. Erosion of compassion in personal/social life-living and human milieus is such powerful causality that it unleashes elements that murders sanity. Naturally, politics gets the license to restrict and kill liberties, on the pretext of ‘order and peace’ and ‘welfare of people’.
In contemporary human world, it is this hugely entropic energy of Liberty, which is incessantly hiking the quantum of insanity and disorder in societies. Take the example of how modern world has come to stay as a major theatre of liberty of women, across the globe. Since thousands of years, women liberties were suppressed and now they have come to the forefront of all major societal, political and economic discourses. However, as majority of men world have not taken this women enterprise for liberty with sufficient quantum of compassion, accommodation and inclusiveness, the entropic structures between men and women have only strengthened, causing more chaos, conflict and confusion between them. Similar is the case with all other hitherto ‘marginalized’ sections, who are attempting to take their liberties to the mainstream of societal-political-economic discourse. Every new expression of liberty is shrinking compassion and enhancing stress of conflict. For politics, entropies are great news as they extend it the much required legitimacy to use brute force of power and authority to kill liberties. Politics essentially plays smart and is scrupulously selective in taking sides with those identities and liberties, which populist energies provide sufficient mass and volume. Politicians are rather hugely skilled to even influence public opinion, create a virtual reality and authoritatively install it as ultimate Reality! We have talked about it at the very start of this eBook…
It is however debatable, whether there could be a possibility of sanity and non-conflict if there were only five humans in the entire cosmos, living in far away galaxies. It seems, even then there probably could not be peace because some day, the five would get connected and even while there would be enough space, the causalities of Liberty would creep in and at least one of the five humans might feel that he or she should ideally own 95 percent of the cosmos, instead of the current 20 percent! Liberty as the expression of reality that human consciousness perceives is a ‘causality’, which automatically finds a ‘media’ for entropic probabilities.
Essentially, Liberty is also dualistic, like all realism of life and living. As the famous saying goes, ‘My right to swing my arm ends where the nose of other begins’; this very dualism makes liberty a recipe of chaos and conflict. Liberty cannot stand divested of Duties as every individual is entitled to liberty of his or her personal perspective and viewpoint of a Reality but then, so are others. And in a collective space, where energy fields of personal liberties are uncomfortably close, because of huge population pressure and limiting resources, it is only very natural that even a ‘small swing’ of arm by an individual gets restricted by the intrusive ‘nose’ of other individual. Naturally, liberty in modern world is getting ‘restricted’ by loads of burden of ‘duties’, usually very harshly imposed and administered by state power and even societies. It is only very natural that compassion in contemporary times is tested hard and probably cannot stand the heat of conflicting competitiveness. The ‘space-resource-crunch’ is however only one aspect of the trouble for Liberty.
Liberty by its very nature is entropic and therefore, for Liberty to thrive and spread, it requires less controlled socio-political-economic milieus. By its innate positioning, liberty is best expressed in milieus where duties are less and authoritative restrictions are fewer. This very positioning is recipe of disaster for political systems and governments, which by their own nature and positioning, thrive on disciplinary restrictions and larger duty compliances of individuals. Interestingly, this modern ‘welfare state’ is so colossal in structure and function that it swallows most of the available ‘spaces’ for its own ‘Liberty-Expression’, which in turn uploads such huge loads of duties on individuals that personal liberties are always gasping for a few breaths. The conflict between liberal individual and authoritative state is a classical battle in human world and it keeps going out of hand as human world is evolving as it is. There is a history of how the so-called democratic ‘welfare states’ have wreaked stringent authoritative controls on individuals and their liberties.
Globally, in so many countries, which have had a good record of Liberal traditions and cultures, there has been a rise and emboldening of right wing nationalist political ideology. This rising right wing nationalist voice is against ‘unfettered’ liberty and wants to install selective restrictions on the name of nationalistic sense of duties. In USA, in many countries of Europe, even very liberal nations like Sweden, India, etc, the right wing nationalistic surge has taken over the erstwhile ‘Liberal’ traditions.
The idea behind this global development is primarily about the dualism of Liberty itself. The idea of optimization of liberty is a vast-resource enterprise. Liberty is a happy-times manifestation of human individuality. The very rise of right wing nationalistic sense of duty-restrictions over liberal rights is the manifestation of bad and crippling times for humanity globally. The issue of ‘Ethnicity’ and ‘Localization’, as against the post-second world war era of liberalism, open trade and globalization is the reiteration of shrinking space for energy-fields of liberty. The right wing insurgence of the restrictive nationalistic ideology of ethnicity and localization is aimed at ‘elimination’ or ‘taming’ of those ‘noses’, which the majority ethnic group, having some sort of commonality, symmetry and uniformity sees and accepts as ‘alien’ or ‘misfit’ into their own worldview and perspective of ‘Reality’.
For those, who see, belief and accept Reality in its holism, have the reason to feel warned. This is sure sign of what we know as the most lethal and incurable malaise of humanity. This is called the Auto-Immune-Syndrome. It is a situation where body’s own immune system begins to eat and feed into one’s own body. It is suicide stage for humanity. It is what the scientists have been warning that ‘Intelligent Races Make Themselves Extinct’. When individual liberty gets restricted, pruned and killed by the very structures and layers of human world, which have the primary duty and responsibility to feed, nurture and empower liberty, it is the primary symptom of beginning of the end of Possibility Of Sanity in human world and life-living. We already seem to have entered the stage and it is dangerously maturing globally, with ever increasing advocacies of insanities in the name of better world.
There is a long history of humanity that tells us categorically that humanity has passed through unimaginably tough and disastrous times and situations. However, humanity could survive and still progress because it always kept the collective quantum of compassion high enough to limit the calamitous causalities of all entropies. It seems, this collective quantum of compassion was high enough because average individual in its own personal capacity held compassion as core element of human life-living. The biggest repository of compassion probably was the ‘family system’, which could survive and prosper only because of this single major resource of mutual compassion. This repository is in major crisis and like the denuded forest cover on Earth, compassion has denuded from families as family system itself is deeply stressed under contemporary expression of liberties.
No doubt, there always were many, especially those who wielded power, authority and wealth, who worked against compassionate life-living but they too could not subdue compassion in consciousness of average person. The human history is too long and varied but still, it seems that there was this single uniform element of ‘compassionate community living’ at grassroots levels in all histories of all geographies primarily because life-living in general and especially for average population was tough and therefore compassion was instinctive in the part of average individual for survival and wellness needs. This seems to have changed in contemporary times with life-living becoming reasonably easy as humanity reached new heights of growth and development. The instinctive compassion seems to have given way to evolved smartness and ingenuity of individual. Individual growth naturally weakened the instinctive bond of compassionate community living.
In contemporary human world however, there is an emergent realism that politics and economy have gained predominance over familial and societal live-living and the former have occasioned themselves as the largest annihilators of compassion. Democracy and market economy mechanism and processes seem to have changed radically the old world foundation of life-living. The competitive individualism that stood to gain in the new polity and economy from detaching itself from societal fabric of compassionate bonding may well be accepted as the late 20th century evolution of modern humanity. This in turn has eroded the quantum of personal and individual compassion. Naturally, the contemporary world with ever diminishing quantum of compassion is conditioned stage for entropies to go out of hand and thus kill the possibility of sanity in human world and collective life-living.
Therefore, individual men and women alone can make an enterprise to restore compassion, allow liberties the less competitively conflicted milieus to enhance possibility of personal sanity, even as collective space has lost it. This restoration process may begin by every individual consciously attempting to align more of his or her individual aspirations with collective ones and side by side become less intensely attached with polity and economy. The family and society must get back their due and innate superior situation and position in human life-living, compared to polity and economy. The polity and economy induced competitive individualism must accommodate compassionate community life-living elements to make them breathe easy and fine.
Globally, a small group of rationalists have been warning that there has been a constant and persistent effort by politics and market forces to unleash such trends that blunt the propensity of human minds to think and rationalize. The education systems globally has been divested of liberal thinking and rationality discourses and invested with skills for human minds to perform ‘assigned tasks’ to repetitive uniformity and compliance. This needs to be understood not only as a localized or regional reality but a global causality.
Earlier, at the end of 20th century, education was designed to create humans who could work uniformly like machines. Now in 21st century, the machines and artificial intelligence has replaced humans as they do the same task better. Now economy, markets and corporate do not need humans as work force but only as consumers. People are now being trained, not by education system but my ‘media-message-management’ to become insatiable consumers with little or no ability to think and rationalize. Ideal situation for insanity to prevail and sustain for optimum profiteering!
We can surely put this phenomenon into a perspective. As we proceed into a life-living situation, where milieus around us have become growingly and unimaginably complex and expansive, the modern average consciousness of common men and women develops the propensity for ‘entropy suppression’ to avoid abstractions and confusion of thinking and action. This is natural. When reality or perception of it becomes complex and confusing, there is a natural urge to make things simple and easy to avoid complexities. Thinking and rationalizing is surely not easy and simple!
So, this rising trend has its own set of troubles and allied repercussions on cultures and society. The entropy expansion; the reverse of entropy suppression, usually leads to independence and liberal expressions of consciousness as the accommodation space expands. Historically, liberty and its optimum expression has been directly associated with entropy expansion mode of consciousness. This however leads to larger randomization and diversities of thoughtfulness, perspectives and behavior-actions in society and cultural landscape. This liberal consciousness and independent cognition is a definite recipe of trouble for society, culture and especially the political set up and government.
Political structures always have trouble with liberal and expansive perspectives as it weakens the legitimacy of authoritative patterns of governments. Liberal governments historically have been associated with less nationalistic and ethnicity fervor and less authoritative administration. This has changed as governments are under pressure to perform batter, look after the growing consumption demands of people and compete better in their global economic adventures of moneys and investments. This has made the modern governments to seek and administer more authority, more discipline and more uniformity of actions. The liberal population with larger independence to thought-action expression is now in direct clash with political authority. This may be called the China-Model of Growth, which is threatening all other erstwhile big and powerful economic powers of post-second world war era. Somehow, many countries are now happily following the Chinese model of growth-governance, even while braving up to counter surging Chinese power.
Naturally, average individual facing political and societal repression for ‘uniform’ and ‘unified’ behavioral regime, willfully starts doing entropy suppression. This compresses accommodation and assimilation urges of consciousness and therefore, many liberal elements and their asymmetrical expressions are either mitigated, subdued or squeezed. This itself in long run creates another set of trouble for societies, cultures and politics. This entropy suppression and adherence to uniformity of consciousnesses creates deep crisis of Monolithic Cognition. Monolithic cognition means majority of people have singular, partial and uniform viewpoint and perspective on core belief and utility that political masters offer. This kills holism.
Initially, the monolithic cognition suits the political structures as it enables and ensures discipline and uniformity but in long run, this becomes the license to autocratic tendencies and kills democracy. This is already happening in many parts of the globe. Experts warn that in USA, India and many European countries, the monolithic cognition of collective consciousness has dawned upon and consolidated itself. It has begun to influence the political structures and popular psyche there, especially in USA and India, where majoritarianism has started to supply license of autocratic behavior to the political system and violence to societal layers. It has already percolated down to demographic levels where majority identity behaves autocratically and violently towards minority expressions. Naturally, the minority cognition and perspectives are in dire threat. The societies and cultures are under huge threat of uncontrolled entropy that is set to unleash catastrophic energies of conflict and chaos. They already are!
The discerning minds and receptive people with rational and holistic perspectives can see and visualize that at macrocosmic levels, things have moved to such extremes that a correction and restitution to normal is now almost impossible. The trouble for humanity and its growing propensity towards insanity seems to have become systemic. The milieus have become so charged and filled with reactionary energies and belligerent competitiveness that it is gradually but decisively shaping and coloring average consciousness of even normal men and women to self-centered and self-obsessed cognitions. The end result of this prolonged self-obsession, which majority of people believes is a must for survival in contemporary socio-cultural and political-economic milieus, has considerably eroded and dwindled the collective altruism, especially personal as well as collective quantum of compassion, which is core to the sanity of system. The solution is not with politics and governments. It is with us – you, me and they. Can we rise up and do the needful…!
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