I would like to work further on the subject of dialogue.
Why should a dialogue be bonding? A form of love?
Because the aim of human life is love: all activities in life should be aware of love, not only dialogue. If love is not the main ingredient in the process, the activity is not a human one.
We can see if the activity is human or not if we look at the intention. If it’s human, it is “loving”. Any activity done without the ingredient of love is unethical and in the unethical behavior people have become used to assume in the development of their jobs, we can observe that they are not conscious of the humane or loving aspects of them selves or their work. Love is supposed to stay somewhere between the closet and the bathroom!
One of the reasons people are so depressed in our times is because of this. The idea of being a “professional” is not having to “serve” others because one is supposed to be in the “elite” and out of the “service” domain. The “elite” is supposed to receive the services of those below them. “Serving” has become a job of the lower classes and is hence, looked down upon. Ironically it is in how people serve each other that the love and the humaneness can be mostly observed but because “serving” is looked down upon, even “servants” are beginning to serve “professionally” or “without love” and life takes place amongst people who “do the job” without their “self” in it.
Children get fed but quality time between them and adults is rare, they are brought up in kinder-gardens with many other children in an “institutionalized” environment in which the adults “do their job”: feed them, make sure they survive and “live” if they are bright enough and give them back to the parents. Teenagers and young adults are also passed through the mill in similar manner, always in institutionalized relationships with adults who are at best, doing their job with some sense of their own humanity but the average standard are there only because they need the job. Most people live the life they can live not the life they would like to live. Since this is the case, they avoid “being” there fully and present other people with the bill of their discomfort. Since people are doing their job badly, they get little respect from costumers or the other people they come into contact with.
To keep the job the individual has to put up a positive “façade” and even convince their self that their company and job are the ultimate realization. They need that conviction so as not to "fall" out of the job that they need economically.
What this picture gives us is an image of the “double life” that most people are living in western “civilized” society. The “schizophrenic” aspects of that reality are harmful for various reasons: first because people are actually dividing into various personalities and those divisions are not easy to handle and second because in dividing, the energy that they have is neither here nor there and that makes both or the many personalities weak and unstable. Each personality struggles for “time” in the person’s life and most often the façade personality completely takes over leaving the “original” version in a state of suffocation and shock.
Why should we be surprised with the suicide of 23 people in the telecom company of France in the past two years to mention only one example?
When we look at the suicides in Japan it should tell us very many things about what is happening because what I believe we are seeing in those cases (and I am still only beginning to look at them) is not grown up adults whose life has been lived and perceived as a failure that they cannot take but young people who are not even willing to take the challenge. Japanese society is as strict as western society but in different areas that I would call, the “area of being” and that is why suicide there has become so “common”. The individual’s tenacity, his "self" still matters in Japan and that is why young people are giving up even before they attempt it. It is a "dignified" gesture in Japan while in the west it is a recognition of failure, a giving up, a renunciation. In the west the suffocation comes not from not having the “being” from the very beginning but from giving up after being mauled by the status quo.
These cases of suicide and homicide in our societies are not "accidents". They are the "perfectly coherent consequence of the status quo: if people don't force their self to FIT in the status quo, they are banned from society, if people force their self to FIT in the status quo, they are banned from humanity and condemned to the elite that is no less decadent in its inhumanity and if people force their self to FIT and work a lifetime to "make a living", they shoot themselves anyway because it wasn't worth it. It's a grim picture and fortunately the "human" continues to throb everywhere, but the tendency is what needs to be taken seriously into consideration.
The "work" people do needs to be reconnected to the sphere of dignity. The ethics of life needs to be recovered to stop the tendency to self destruction in today's societies. Love, humaneness, needs to be recovered. The purpose of our different activities for our well being, needs to be assessed. Everything "unnecessary" needs to be discarded. The futility of useless production needs to be stopped. People must regain their sense of their selves and the human within them.
I guess “dialogue” cannot be talked about without understanding the speakers!
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