There is only one problem: inhumanity

There is only one problem: inhumanity

This text here is very interesting because it reveals the inability that people trying to find solutions to the many problems are in, for they themselves are usually in positions of power and questioning the real problem would imply taking the sit they are sitting on away from their selves.

From one angle there is no problem! As there is no problem when a teenager reaches the age in which life demands of him to start behaving like an adult. These are natural problems that every individual and society must face and that mankind is facing in its totality. Mankind up until today and for some time still, has been separated into nationalities and within each of those nationalities the respective struggles but science, which is the most democratic creation of all, even when its intentions are war, has brought us so close to each other that we are all speaking through the same television: the internet. What the time requires is that we rise to this reality and start acting coherently before it. All the problems are problems only because in the immaturity of teenagers each nation has been tearing its piece of the pie without concern for others. What we need to acknowledge is that THAT is the way things happen to teenagers and even so, the process has been necessary and each nation has brought forth a great and powerful life of its own.

Each nation has taken care of pushing the whole of mankind towards certain ends and each of those ends has been necessary. We must acknowledge each other’s role as much as each other’s worth. The problems today are not whether one or a few nations have always been more or less imperialistic and others have submitted or fought it, the problem is that we are actually one world no matter where the privileges come from and the first world is as destabilized as the third world. The problem today is not where is the power but where is the sanity!

The insanity is in the disconnectedness of the economic-political process to the religious-cultural- human process and that insanity is present, above all, in the developed nations. The underdeveloped nations that have not yet been rolled over by the madness of a century of behaviorism still have enough human beings able to act humanly to their immediate surrounding which is what people in the advanced nations have lost. To take a simple example, we can see that the people connected to self-destructive cults such as the Fellowship of Friends, aka, Pathway to Presence, are incapable of reacting humanly to the disaster and seriously try to prevent it by taking whatever legal action is necessary. These are whole communities of people but if we look at individuals, the same situations apply. People are so constrained by their economic situation in institutions that they are afraid to act against inhuman behavior towards themselves or others because they’ll be sacked from the jobs. The enemy is within every individual, every single individual willing to avoid confrontation with what is inhuman, repeating roles of power at home, in the work place and in society at large and supporting wars against other nations to establish equally inhuman societies.

The problem is within each and every individual who fails to act humanly due to the fact that he and his family have, for generations now, been submitted to an inhuman treatment that has now become acceptable and not only acceptable but ideal. An idealization of crime is what we are suffering today: a systematic repetition of inhuman behavior in individuals as much as nations approved by those in power and stimulated by every individual blindly accepting it as an ideal form. The ability to protest and confront the inhuman is what such behaviorism is annihilating from the individuals and whole nations are pretending to impose it on other nations by enforcing their globalized economy and the madness of such economy: if you behave you have a job, if you submit you have a position, if you don't control yourself you're a lunatic and you'll go to the asylum or we'll shoot you. In the developed countries people are put in asylums or shot, in underdeveloped countries they are shot.

We must each work on our own self as much as on our surrounding to enter into a personal and social process of healing. Those in the first world must seek for help in the third world where life is still simple enough to be human, where there is still time to be one’s self and allow for others and nature to play their part, where the children still play in the streets because the public space is our space and we still have a sense of us and ours and the third world must accept the need to help those in the first world without seeking for revenge for the long history of imperialism between the worlds. The first world must give up its greed and respect the resources of the nations of the third world and resources all over must be distributed in such a way that we all live a more human life.

Third world countries must consciously give up the race for industrialization that has proven fatal to the countries that endured it. The sacrifices that they have made to be “rich” are too inhuman to be worth the effort. They have already tred too difficult a road for anyone else to sacrifice themselves in it. What matters in these difficult times is not that we become rich but that we don’t all die in the greed. Progress is no progress at the cost of human lives or human behavior and capitalism as much as communism are too inhuman to be viable solutions for our present world. We must continue implanting real democracy, human democracy and not this dictatorship that the so called capitalist democracies of today pretend to impose on the whole world.

Third world countries must view the sacrifice that first world nations endured in their race with compassion, for, on the other hand, the development of science and technology that has also been a product of their work, is the most democratic and universal richness that we have all gained. We must work together in the distribution of technology as a rational exchange for resources but above all, we must come to a human entente amongst nations.

People of every nation know what human is but human must be human beyond national, race or class differences. We all know what this means. Too many great men in every nation have been teaching us about that for us to pretend not to know it by now. The “God” be with us all is a human God, no matter what religion we belong to. We are each the hero that needs to stand up against inhumanity wherever it appears.


4. Complexity of the inter-problem network

By the manner in which the simple interactions between the problems combine together, a new condition, namely a problem system or problem network is identifiable, as illustrated by the following:

"Many of the problems we experience today have been with us for a long time and those of recent vintage do not seem insurmountable, of themselves. The feature that is wholly new in the problematic aspects of our situation is rather a frightening growth in the size of the issues and a tendency toward congealment whose dynamics appears to be irreversible. The congruence of events appears suddenly possessed of a direction and a total meaning which emphasizes the insufficiency of all the proposed solutions increasingly and reveals rigidities that are not stable or set, that do not confine the problems but enlarge them, while also deepening them. This suggests that our situation has an inner momentum we are unable fully to comprehend; or, rather, that we are trying to cope with it by means of concepts and languages that were never meant to penetrate complexities of this kind; or, again, that we are trying to contain it with institutions which were never intended for such use. Therefore, even to be able to talk meaningfully about these problems (or, is it a single problem that is facing us?) we need first to develop a conceptual approach and a language we can use, which correspond better than what we now have to the essence of the situation." (Hasan Ozbekhan. Toward a general theory of planning. In: Eric Jantsch (Ed). Perspectives of Planning. Paris, OECD, 1969, p.144).

"Problems misbehave. Instead of neatly slipping into clean-cut categories that correspond with the names of ministries, scientific disciplines, and problem-solving programs, they tend to fuse with each other and become a tangled web. Thus, as a society becomes more complex, analysis of the housing problem leads one into industrial location, transportation, technological development, fiscal policy and intergovernmental relations. Any serious analysis of the population problem leads one into the consideration of the resource base for supporting any given population level, appropriate technologies in the use of such resources as well as in birth control, social security, opportunities for female education and employment, and a variety of cultural and motivational questions. Any problem of ethnic or geographic imbalance within a country cuts across all problems and programs that affect any ethnic or regional subdivision of the country." (Bertram M Gross. Strategy for economic and social development. Policy Sciences, 2, 1971, p.353).

The Club of Rome introduced the term "world problematique" to denote the current situation in which mankind is no longer confronted by identifiable, discrete problems, each one amenable to being dealt with on its own terms, but by an intricate and dynamic maze of situations, mechanisms, phenomena, and dysfunctions, which, even when they are apparently disjointed, interfere and interact with one another, creating a veritable problem system. "Our present situation is so complex and is so much a reflection of man's multiple activities, however, that no combination of purely technical, economic, or legal measures and devices can bring substantial improvement. Entirely new approaches are required to redirect society towards goals of equilibrium rather than growth. Such a reorganization will involve a supreme effort of understanding, imagination, and political and moral resolve." (Commentary by The Club of Rome Executive Committee on The Limits to Growth. New York, Universe Books, 1973, p.193).

Although there is agreement that interrelationships between problems are so numerous as to constitute a complex network or system, little concerted effort has been made to map this complexity. Such tentative efforts as have been made have generally been limited to the production of simple maps of the relationships between major or critical problems, or (in a few cases) the production of more detailed maps for some particular problem area.

5. Increasing inadequacy in response to the problem network

The traditional and planned approaches to problems are recognized as increasingly incapable of containing the problem complex as it is now emerging. This situation is illustrated by the following:

"Evidence is mounting that the environment which managers seek to control - or, at least, to guide or restrain - is increasing in turbulence and complexity at a rate that far exceeds the capacity of management researchers to provide new and improved methodologies to affect management's intentions. Faced with the consequences of force-fed technological change, and the concomitant changes in the social, political, psychological, and theological spheres, there is real danger that the process by which new concepts of management control are invented and developed may itself be out of control relative to the demands that are likely to be imposed upon it." (Introduction to a 1968 management conference session of the College of Management Control Systems, The Institute of Management Sciences)

"While the difficulties and dangers of problems tend to increase at a geometric rate, the knowledge and manpower qualified to deal with those problems tend to increase at an arithmetical rate." (Yehezkel Dror. Prolegomenon to policy sciences, AAAS symposium, Boston, 1969)

"Social institutions face growing difficulties as a result of an ever increasing complexity which arises directly and indirectly from the development and assimilation of technology. Many of the most serious conflicts facing mankind result from the interaction of social, economic, technological, political and psychological forces and can no longer be solved by fractional approaches from individual disciplines." (Bellagio Declaration on Planning. In: Erich Jantsch (Ed) Perspectives on Planning. Paris, OECD, 1969).

"What finally makes all of our crises still more dangerous is that they are now coming on top of each other. Most administrations...are not prepared to deal with...multiple crises, a crisis of crises all at one time...Every problem may escalate because those involved no longer have time to think straight." (John Platt. What we must do. Science, 28 November 1969, p.1115-1121).

"Scientists and business and political leaders in virtually every country are becoming increasingly aware that the human race is facing more crises than its social and political institutions can handle adequately....Many important steps are now being taken to meet these problems. These steps, however, are often shaped to fit existing institutional patterns or to be politically or commercially expedient, while other measures of perhaps equal or greater importance have not yet been started. Moreover, the multitude of crises and their complexity and interactions so overburden the mechanisms that have been designed to handle them that there is a valid fear that these mechanisms will break down at the critical moment and make the disasters worse." (R A Cellarius and John Platt. Councils of Urgent Studies. Science, 25 August 1972, p.670-676).

"...the world is becoming so complex and changing so rapidly and dangerously and the need for anticipating problems is so great, that we may be tempted to sacrifice (or may not be able to afford) democratic political processes." (H Kahn and J Wiener. Faustian powers and human choices. In: W R Ewald, Jr (Ed). Environment and Change. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968).
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Labels: There is only one problem: inhumanity
The connectedness of things-We are One

Elena: Until we are willing to accept into our consciousness that We are One and that all problems belong to all of us, each will keep pulling a part for themselves and trying to separate from others and justify those separations with arguments of class, religion, academic title, nationality, etc, etc, etc. This whole article is worth reading. I'm extracting little pieces.



http://www.uia.be/node/165?kap=1

"There is, then, no such thing as the food crisis. Similarly, there is no such thing, in isolation, as the population crisis, the urbanisation crisis, the pollution crisis, the armaments crisis, the oil crisis, the energy crisis, the fertiliser crisis, the resources crisis, the water crisis, the soil crisis, the fish crisis, the technology crisis or the trade crisis. Each of these crises acts on the others, and while it may be useful to focus attention on them one at a time, none of them can be solved unless the others are taken into account. This hydra-headed world crisis is difficult to comprehend. The dilemma at Rome, as at Stockholm, Caracas, Bucharest and elsewhere, is that the poor and hungry nations sense that the isolated crisis on the agenda is but a part of a wider population- resources-development crisis which unless resolved in toto will condemn them for good to the status of second-class citizens on their own planet...the present series of international conferences suffers from a universal catch-22, which states that any problem we can solve is part of a larger problem which we cannot." (Jon Tinker. The Green Revolution is over. New Scientist, 7 November 1974, p.388-393).

Although there is agreement that there are interrelationships between problems, little concerted effort has been made to identify how many there are and between which problems. Such efforts as have been made have generally been limited to determining adequate descriptions (in mathematical terms) for the nature of the relationships between a handful of major or critical problems. The relationships between other problems have only been explored within the various specialized domains, irrespective of any wider significance. Communication between such domains is generally agreed to be poor or non-existent.