Stories

II - Shaping the established order 

1.    Revolutions don’t change the established order – Published 26.4.22
Choosing education as the method to develop the established order means a recognition of the need to change but keeping an open mind about the direction this evolution will take. No longer the absurd notion of progress without any idea where this progress is taking us and at what cost. The goals should be clear, and progress must be a measurable in approaching these goals. 
Egalitarian, fairness, sustainability are not really goals. They are requirements for an involved social that first has to deal with damage limitation. We need to restore a semblance of balance, as a possibility to bring order to the continuous fight needed to control all the destructive symptoms that today’s progress is causing. Balance is not the same as stagnation or standstill. It is however a solid starting point. From there you can control destiny because it will give time for discussion, for an enriching dialogue that needs time and involvement towards the benefit of commitment.
Revolution will not bring that about. It will only bring others in control with their own ideas about how best making use of the control. Historians may or may not agree, but I do not see any successful examples of revolutions. To justify that statement, I may have to classify the American Revolution as a war of independence. Other examples however support this statement. The French revolution ended the Ancien Regime but brought another monarchy that waged war on all of Europe. The outcome of the Arab Spring as a more recent revolution can hardly be considered a success. 
Then what? How to make a step change away from totalitarian control to an egalitarian society. Totalitarian control has different guises. Whether it is the total dominance of capitalism in the western world or the power of dictators in other parts, they exercise absolute control over the common people. 
That control is exercised with the help of underlings. In Irak Tarik Aziz defended the indefensible for Sadam Hussein like Sergey Lavrov is doing now in Russia for Vladimir Putin. Of course, there is a whole band of people around the likes of these that put personal prestige and profit above the confidence placed in them by the people. That is why many politicians have lost the confidence of the people. The same can be said about our intellectual elite as long as it supports a system that needs infinite growth from a finite planet. 
Political correctness is about saying the right things. It needs a good inward evaluation by people in power to restore the faith of the common people in those in power to get away from empty political correctness; away from saying the right things to doing the right things. What are these right things? They should at least be egalitarian, fair, sustainable to be worthy of the involvement and commitment of the common people. 
 

2.    It is confusing to think about timing. Endgame? – Published 27.4.22
I am most certainly not the only one who has ideas about the fallibility of the current established order. The battle for the upper hand is being fought in various ways and the various oligarchs at the top of the pecking order are engaging according to their armoury. The ten richest people in the world (judged by known wealth and according to Forbes) have great influence on the way they can manipulate the minds of the people. They are up against dictators that run some pretty powerful countries that have subjugated their people and have armies. 
One of the ten rich guys owns the Washington Post. Another one felt left behind and just bought Twitter. A third one owns Facebook. Then there are the two guys who jointly started Google. Two others who did the same with Microsoft. The tenth one owns Bloomberg that tells us about every aspect of the global economy. 
When it comes to autocratic countries, we see Xi Jinping as the secretary general of the communist party in China as well as its president, giving him vast and probably nearly unlimited power in that country. Kim Jong Un may run a poor and relatively small country, but he has nuclear weaponry, forcing the rest of the world to take him seriously. Vladimir Putin is the sole ruler of Russia, a relatively small economy but with a large military presence equipped with nuclear weaponry. In other countries like India democracy may be coming under pressure. Narendra Modi seems to support Putin and, together with China, India can support Russia in minimizing the impact of sanctions against the Russian regime. 
What is worse for our future? The war in Ukraine? The takeover of Twitter? The continuing global warming? On humanitarian level, today, it is the war in Ukraine with its huge cost for both Ukrainians as well as Russian citizens. With a man like Putin at the helm of a nuclear power it is impossible to forecast where this will end. He shows limitless cruelty against the Ukrainian people and a total ruthlessness in the way he deploys his forces. Russian families not only lose family members in the hostilities but also see their accumulated wealth evaporate because of the cost of war and the sanctions. 
The problem for Putin is that in his position losing face, admitting defeat, is not an option. Neither is not being able to win and end up with a similar situation as in Afghanistan. He has started to threaten with the nuclear option against countries that support Ukraine, against NATO and Sweden and Finland should they be scared into joining NATO. His words are repeated by his underlings like Lavrov, the foreign secretary, who warns of WWIII.
Within the Russian government there is no room to speak out against the war. The Russian people are too repressed and too fearful to speak out. Yet they are doing the fighting. Making their lives and livelihoods available to a megalomaniac. Yet power to the people would be the only force that can avoid this war developing into Lavrov’s WWIII. It is that power the western oligarchs elsewhere may manipulate by ownership of the companies as listed above.  

3.    How much influence does science have? – Published 28.4.22
I am currently in Oxford. Home to great temples of wisdom. Brilliant scientists have made fabulous discoveries here and written true gems of philosophical work. And yet there are equally harrowing tales of men getting in the way of discovery as their egos outsized their brains, their ability to listen, their willingness to doubt. The way women have been kept away from their ability to contribute is just a case in point. 
Gaining a tenured position in such an esteemed environment must be very influential in the way you can be yourself. I mean, I am basically an irrelevant person in the ways of the world. I may have a strong opinion, but I can easily be ignored. A Don of an Oxford college must make every word count, put every thought or opinion on a scale. He, or sometimes maybe nowadays she, must always be wise. Now who is the judge of this perceived wisdom? The students? The colleagues? The benefactors? The government?
Some disciplines are easier than others. In mathematics or physics things can be proven, but I studied sociology. In retrospect I think I would have felt more at home in an anthropology faculty. Anthropologists study a variety of lifestyles whereas sociology often seems to make sense of the social that has come about by the dealings of the established order, of western society. A civilisation that follows the example of the supposedly great civilisations that have gone belly up in the thousands of years before us. Civilisations that we know because of the monuments they have left us. Go to any cultural history museum and you’ll see how the top 1% in any period lived and looked after their dead. 
They were all extremely hierarchical civilisations, where the near gods at the top were served and kept in place by the guardians of their time. Normal people who just were at the right place at the right time, with the right training, to become part of a system they perpetuated. Perpetuated in their own interest and not in the interest of the common people. All these civilisations have floundered as they became vulnerable because of their vanity and egocentricity. In our day our western civilisation may fail because of its global impact. Because of our gluttony and the way that abuses the planet. 
The dons, just like other people in power, may suffer from mortgage realism. They may have their own thoughts, but also the bills to pay. They may want to safeguard their position. I would call on the students to ask their teachers, professors, tutors, and the like, what they really believe is happening to a society that needs to fulfil infinite greed from a finite planet. A question that may not have worried the dons a century ago, because the scale of abuse had not yet reached critical proportions. It has now. 

4.    Guilt… Can we pre-empt sanitising of our own history? – Published 29.4.22
It is difficult to accept that living a life according to what is generally accepted, and maybe even successfully so, can one day be seen as part of a problem. Nowadays attempts are undertaken to sanitise our history. Thanks to today’s prevailing morality we now must distance ourselves from all the things that no longer fit today’s moral standards. Slave trading and slavery, the robbing of treasures from civilisations from other parts of the world, disowning land of tribes that enjoyed a different civilisation than the Christian righteousness, colonising foreign lands and exporting their wealth to our western world, just to name a few examples of the historical behaviour we are now supposed to be ashamed of. 
We tear down the statues of men that in their heyday were seen as true greats, as heroes. Our wealth today however is built on just that immoral behaviour that was lauded in its day. Tearing down those memorabilia, as if that behaviour should never have been recognised, is however hypocritical if it doesn’t go hand in hand with an attempt to restore the balance in today’s consumption patterns, in the way we burden the planet with our presence. 
Environmental footprints show unfortunately that the western world uses its wealth for consumption patterns that fat outstrip the capacity of our planet. Earth overshoot day is coming forward every year (https://www.overshootday.org ). Earth Overshoot Day is the day that humanity used more from nature than our planet's Earth can regenerate in the entire year. In 2021 that day for the total planet was July 29. That is an average of global consumption. The western world performs substantially worse and overshoot their own natural capacity within just a few months of every new year. They live at the expense of the capacity of other countries whilst setting an example of a lifestyle that those countries would like to follow. A recipe for the disaster that is unfolding around us but that does not lead to any change in behaviour. 
Apparently the ‘developed’ nations feel entitled to that sort of behaviour and do not accept that people from other countries could want the same. We know this today and fail to act. History will come down on us like a ton of bricks for failing to do so. This entitlement is inherently supremacist. It mainly concerns the white people’s world and no amount of politically correct posturing whilst trying to save the growth of the economy that is going to mitigate that. It is not just about separating our garbage; it is about our lifestyle.

5.    On top of the global jungle. – Published 30.4.22
We the people are the most gifted creatures on the planet. That puts us in a position of responsibility. Just as the most gifted amongst the people also puts them in a position of responsibility. If you’re on top of the hierarchy, you are the first to see danger coming. 
In this second part of this series, I’ve pointed out disbelief in revolutions. The actual time pressure, that our civilisation is confronted with, is uncertain. The geo-political endgame of the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons may be immediate. Global warming may allow us somewhat more time. Whichever problem comes first, starting an immediate search towards change, towards a sensible course of action, is needed. 
Science should be at the forefront of raising relevant questions but is oftentimes too involved in the various visions of the morality of the established order. We cannot rely on it as it fails to take an independent scientific position based on facts. It is divided and therefore powerless, impotent. This brings us back to ‘we the people’, the common people, to ask the tough questions and to insist on answers. After all we will be held accountable for the failures of those on top of the hierarchy to observe the dangers.
In the previous instalment about guilt, about the fact that we are shaping tomorrow’s history today, we cannot be ashamed of what we have done in our past. We acted with the innocence of the zeitgeist, of what we believed at the time was the best thing to do. That does not liberate us from a critical perspective of where it has brought us. We cannot be free of doubt whether all our achievements are deserving of the moniker progress. They are not. 
We cannot change what we have done, what we have accomplished, but we can value our doubt by raising the next generation as a more thoughtful, a thinking generation. In fact, I doubt the freedom of mind of many of the people graduating from university today. They are so keen on reaping personal rewards by joining a world that has been idealised for them that they may not have the ability of critical thought as is needed. It is difficult. It is a generational change, a change in attitude, a change in expectations. A need for more attention to the benefit of the jungle than towards benefiting from it.

6.    Preparing the next generation through education. – Published 1.5.22
Even if we cannot change ourselves today, we can prepare for change. In the previous text I have put great value on the ability to doubt. If we are not prepared to doubt our beliefs and just take them for granted, we live with a void in our being. By feigning conviction, when we haven’t put in the effort of doubt and thought, we risk being hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a terrible determinant of character. And it may be one we share.
I read a book about a civilisation that for centuries has never escaped suppression. First suppressed by feudal forces and after a general revolution by communist doctrine and bureaucracy. People have enough to survive, but nothing extra. So, if a family member were to be hospitalised, and you wanted to be in the good graces of the equally suppressed hospital staff, you would want to show the staff a gesture of good will and give them something extra. You would want to give them a sausage or something like that, but when you have nothing to spare, how do you get one. You steal one and you lie about it. There is no selfish ill intent but thieving and lying is something all these people will know that it is something fellow citizens must and will resort to at times. 
The same can be said about refusal to challenge our own thinking. Often you hear people start a phrase with the words “I think…” Usually they did not think. Such a phrase is often based on a fixed assumption of what we believe is right. It is a passive starting point for a position, starting from what we think we know or wish to believe. Knowledge is passive, thinking however is an active process. Knowledge may be the result of study, of copying thought but critical thought is an effort to put that acquired knowledge into perspective. 
Our society is dynamic, it is in constant state of flux and wisdom from the past may no longer fit the future. An example would be the historical push for procreation. Large families were seen as a positive, but with improvements in healthcare it now leads to a population explosion that exacerbates the problems of sustainability that we are confronted with. The choice may be to leave the resultant problems to government and legal measures, but it makes far more sense to let people actively think about their own role in population growth.
Rather than listen to religions with their points of view, or capitalist ideology with its need for growth and cheap labour, or governments overshooting their goals with a one child policy, it would be best to raise the future generations with a more involved ability to actively think for themselves. The capability of gathering knowledge is driven by personal talent and is therefore hierarchical. Thinking is a discipline, a skill, that can be practised, that can be shared as an egalitarian group activity. It is gathering existing knowledge versus discovery. More about that tomorrow.

7.    Thinking independently depends on independence. - Published 2.5.22
My rather simplistic rendition of the three-legged stool in the previous instalment shows what is needed to be a truly independent thinker, an independent person. You must reflect on yourself to know yourself and to derive self-confidence from that. If you then place yourself in an environment that suits you, you will have a stable foundation whilst being yourself. You will be good enough. That is not in keeping with what is needed in a hierarchical society. There it is important to maintain an image of being better or preferably the best. Unfortunately, that is not conducive to independent thinking. It even restricts the freedom of thought. A hierarchical society makes people risk averse.
In an egalitarian society there is no bonus for being right, but there is appreciation for contribution. The truth or best answer is not personal property but beneficial to those involved and the result of collaborative thought. Thinking can or rather needs to be a collaborative process whereas knowledge is personal. Thinking begins with an ability to listen. Listening not to find fault with what someone says, but to try and understand what the intention of a remark could be. To expand on the value of a discussion rather than trying to win a debate. 
The Dalai Lama formulates it as follows: Education is not just about listening to teachers; it’s also about learning to analyse to think for yourself. Being able to say, ‘Yes sir,’ is not enough; you also must ask questions. Questions and argument are helpful, good teachers welcome questions. To exercise creativity, freedom is essential. We have to take a realistic approach and it’s through education that we come to grips with reality. Understanding grows from first hearing or reading, followed by analysis and experiment, and then really thinking about what you learned. This is one of our unique human qualities, being able to look at reality from more than one angle.
So, thinking starts with listening and thought from more than one angle. To be able to do that, you must be prepared to doubt what you think you’ve always known or what you believe in. You may live your life according to your beliefs, but do not turn those beliefs into dogma that should also be accepted as truth by others. Do not reject others because of your beliefs. Their perspectives may differ but that should not disqualify their thoughts. It may be more interesting to find out what they try to achieve, what are their goals?

8.    Towards a more egalitarian society - Published 3.5.22
Society will always have hierarchical structures to run to manage its activities. But the framework within which those activities function, the ethical boundaries of society, should be sustainable, fair, and egalitarian. Society should be about life, about the planet and the living, not about money. That should just be an aid to regulate relations within society. That means that all speaking or literate members of society should have a voice. Not just a right to be heard, but the belief and confidence that they can and should be heard.
I said earlier that in retrospect I could have been better off if I had studied anthropology. I would have been more capable to give accounts of more egalitarian tribal societies. I have been close to some and have read about those as well as about other examples, but ultimately the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) are what this is about. She noticed and stated clearly that our schooling is all about what we should think. We are not educated on how to think. 
What we can absorb as knowledge in our current climate of schooling leads to a hierarchical order basically from our first days at school. Someone can write faster or nicer, another one is pretty quick in making sense of adding and subtracting. Those who are better get a higher grade and the appreciation that comes with it. From day one most pupils are submitted to, no matter how well intended, omnipotent teachers that require all attention and dedication to their words of wisdom. 
That sounds awful from my perspective, no matter how well intended. Sure, children need to be taught skills, but they also need to be heard. They also need to listen to their peers, respect the thoughts and experiences of their peers. Children will discover that they have a different outlook on life from an early age; a valuable contribution to their appreciation of the world around them, of society. Ultimately that is what at least half their educational curriculum should be about.
Thinking is about assessing a situation, not about one person’s dominant opinion, but about the variety of what can be. It is about discussing, not debating but discussing what goals society could have. Such a discussion may arrive at one or two shared goals. Of course, children will develop different ideas with age. Let them learn from their own evolution. Don’t let any teacher prescribe them what ideas they should have. Once they have decided on goals, they should discuss what alternative ways there could possibly be to achieve those goals. Having formulated different ways, they may want to formulate criteria that will help them choose between alternatives.
It is important that all children get to voice their thoughts. That children learn how to manage their discussions in making sure everyone gets heard, that questions are being asked to understand someone’s meaning and that no answers are labelled right or wrong by anyone assuming a mantle of authority. That the consequences of the variety of thoughts and reasons behind them are discussed, never debated. 
In real life of course at some time decisions must be taken. There are various ways of dealing with the acceptance of responsibility for any decision. Let’s fantasise about that later. For instance, by means of problem-based learning. By preparing case studies or using examples from real life. 

9.    What the curriculum should achieve. – Published 4.5.22
First and foremost, children should be made to feel comfortable. They have to know that they are Good Enough being whomever they are. We are all different and have different characters. Some may be very ambitious others like to be left in peace. Some are social animals, others are loners. People are as different as their fingerprints and shaping them into something they are not, are not good at or comfortable with, will make them feel inferior. That way someone can never be egalitarian, never feel good enough. 
I am not the expert to shape the new curriculum, nor can anybody else be, as this approach is breaking new ground. I stipulate that, because in many discussions I have had with experienced teachers very few seem to really grasp what is meant here. I have heard about experiments with philosophy for children. Some of them very good and others with the wrong goal. They were proud to see that the cognitive skills of the children benefited from the philosophy classes. Whilst that may be a side effect, it is not a goal and should not be. It is not the cognitive race today’s society rewards. It is the development of people’s being into what they can and want to be. 
Primary education should be a journey of discovery. It should take children in small groups to get to know and understand things. To meet different people from all walks of life with different skillsets doing different thinks. Go to a bakery, workshops for carpentry, masonry, a blacksmith. To develop an understanding how things come to be. To do this in small groups, like no more than five children, as that does not allow them to escape the experience but mainly allows the children to be curious and see that curiosity rewarded. To go out into nature, real nature and get to understand over time more and more about the difference between nature and culture.
That difference between nature and culture is the driver in causality of events. Something is natural when it is caused by nature, unstoppably caused by nature. You can always go backwards in time to find what event precipitated an event and what caused that event and so further back. Something is cultural when it is cause is goal driven. People set things in motion because they want to achieve something. Once we see the billiard balls collide, their movements are caused by their natural interaction, but what set them in motion, was someone wanting to play that game. The interaction of nature and culture can be seen in farming, in building, in flying an aeroplane, cultural desires with their impact on nature.
Understanding that difference makes us understand we can be critical of cultural but will always be submitted to the forces of nature. It will allow us to be critical of culture. Culture cannot be presented as an essential good, even though it is often presented under the illusion of progress. It must be understood to question it critically. 

10.    Towards an understanding away from simple opposites. – Published 5.5.22
A hierarchical debating society argues to be right. That means the other party is wrong. How simple can it be? Not that simple. Black and white opposites are the result of a denial of complexity and a desire to maintain the upper hand. It is about personal satisfaction or about remaining in power, and not about finding the best solutions. It is simplifying things that are by nature complex. 
My generation, the baby boomers, was for instance schooled in what was known to be true. Gender was determined by chromosomes. Men had an XY chromosome and women two XX’s. Well, apparently things are not that simple. There must be more determinants for gender than that simplified one. I will not go into the complexities of gender or sexuality, apart from the acceptance of the fact that those complexities exist; they are real. They may be uncomfortable realities for some people, who may then try to eradicate the realities of life to suit their simplified beliefs. They are prepared to abuse their power in defiance of the cost to fellow human beings who may not conform to their imposed norms.
Part of the curriculum for future generations should help these generations to find ways towards understanding complexity and subsequently live with it, towards embracing difference. Being sympathetic to difference is a way to avoid supremacist attitudes. To avoid seeing your own shape, form, belief, talent, choice, or whatever metric may make you different from others, as superior to those others. This is a call for Sociological Imagination. We need to educate ourselves in different ways of thinking towards egalitarianism, a more inclusive society. Let’s call that dialectical thinking. Looking from different perspectives. Dialectical thinking helps the search for what divides, with the goal to unite. Like the understanding of the clear opposition of suprematism versus egalitarianism that touches at the heart of society.

11.    Practising dialogue towards mutual understanding. – Published 6.5.22
A component of the proposed education should include practising dialogue. Schooling is unidirectional transferring of information, whilst education is an interactive discovery. With proper dialogue at its origins, it will be an enriching discovery. Dialogue consists of speaking, listening, questioning, and clarification from a variety of perspectives. Because of this all-encompassing involvement, discussion can have a capacity to unite rather than divide. Even if it is only because of an understanding of the differences.  
To achieve this, a proper understanding of linguistics is required. Semantics matter. Questioning, to come to grips with such delicate detail, is part of the capability for discussion, as is its inalienable counterpart listening. Awareness of the relevance of these things can be trained, discussing should be practiced. Its usefulness will benefit from a comprehensive understanding of the role of education. It requires the combination of schooling, parental guidance but also the natural environment of a child. 
We live in a common environment, our commons, a notion I will use more often. Within such commons there are bound to be opposing views. Understanding oppositions helps tolerance towards differences. As long as there is no proselytising involved, an indelible supremacist attitude towards a claim of being right, and no irrevocable choice must be made, a difference of opinion can coexist. There is an easy test to see whether people are tolerant of differences or feel unduly pressurised by it, it is called humour. As soon as humour is no longer permissible, intolerance is the default alternative.
 That doesn’t mean you can always employ humour as it still may be abrasive, it may be supremacist. There is a time and a place. My neighbour in my youth was Jewish and he was blessed with a great sense of humour. He could tell great Jewish jokes. Self-deprecation can be charming, but it can become confrontational when coming from someone with a different background. So, humour needs to be treated with gentle care when it concerns religion, ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation; things that touch upon someone’s personal being. 
If I joke with my cousin and his husband about homosexuality such a joke will land in an established atmosphere of trust and love. If I make the same joke in a more anonymous gathering, I may insult people. I found the Muhammed cartoons several years ago offensive, because they were supremacist and derogatory to an entire group of believers. Not funny for the believers, but funny in a deprecating, condescending sort of way for people who think different. 
Within a common environment we can feel at home. At home with all our differences. In such a climate of basic trust there should be room for humour. You can’t feel at home in your common environment if intolerance threatens your right to be yourself. 

12.    Growing up in an understandable environment. – Published 7.5.22
This is not a new ideology to run the world order. We must distinguish between living locally, with the effects that have been created, and the global challenge we are also addressing here. Both domains are equally relevant. Concurrent attention towards minimising damages whilst working towards a more inclusive society is required. We should start small. If we don’t understand our immediate environment, how can we make sense of the global village that has been created.
In these short posts I rely heavily on the work I did for my sociology degree. The full thesis can be found on the Erasmus repository https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/60589. The name of the thesis is “The social as a diamond on the horizon”. It is a somewhat more scholarly document than these musings are meant to be. The benefit of that scholarly approach is that there are a lot of references to true academicians who have voiced similar ideas or parts thereof that are at the basis of these thoughts. There is the phrase by Murray Bookchin that “the environmental apocalypse drops a veil over a more fundamental crisis in the human condition that is profoundly social”. He also wants to put the Social at large, the hierarchy from top to bottom, all the people, in a position of responsibility. 
I think we can never achieve that desired and very desirable change with an all-encompassing global idealism. That would depend on a hierarchical approach, a top-down dictate and for me that is counter intuitive. I think we must start bottom-up and accept the fact that this will take a lot more time than any dictate would. I find support in the writings of Betasamosake Simpson who realizes that “Tribal forms of living have a fundamentally different normativity, a grounded normativity where the interdependent land and bodies live in a networked fashion rather than a gendered hierarchy distinct from nature.” A grounded normativity as opposed to our current established order. That established order is strictly hierarchical and has developed, at least in those layers that call the shots in society, to be supremacist.
Supremacist means feeling superior, knowing better, or – as those people tend to believe – to know best. It is probably obvious by now that I do not trust people who believe they know enough to save the planet for its inhabitants. Basically, because they do not have the proper respect for all its inhabitants. As Bookchin succinctly puts it: “In its current guise capitalism treats human resources as part of its natural resources”. Simpson equally succinctly looks at this from the perspective of tribal social orders and sees capitalism as “the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on wrongness “. It doesn’t do justice to who we are, what we can be.
We may have turned the world into a global village because of the ways of the established order, but it has by no means the social characteristics of a real village. It is an alien place to grow up in. We should grow up around a commons, an understandable environment.
 

13.    What forms an understandable environment? – Published 8.5.22
One of my favourite phrases is “It takes a village to raise a child”. The common environment of people who know each other and trust each other, even if they don’t always agree with one another. A village where children can roam the streets and where cars adapt their behaviour to the unexpected moves kids will make. Where a mom will open the window and call out to the kids that it is time to go home for dinner. 
A place where the basic attitude is tolerant and filled with humour but also with an open eye for the safety of the kids. Where parents will accept from each other that another parent, or any grown up for that matter, may caution their child because they will trust the basic intention. It is the grounded normativity that makes this possible and that has an enormous impact on the social behaviour within a true community, a commons where the cultural and natural resources are accessible to all members of a society. Such an egalitarian society is natural whilst a hierarchical culture must be taught to be understood. 
It is in that vein that I see education. In schooling, we subject children to authority and order. This is necessary to make classes, of sometimes up to 20, 25 or even 30 children, manageable. For a child that is not a readily understandable environment. Some children fit in easier than others. These others get labels attached to them to explain their ‘problematic’ behaviour. Such children demand too much attention and that comes at a cost to those children who do fit in. I am not a psychologist or pedagogue, but I am worried that they follow the same ambition as sociologists. Rather than finding ways to allow individuals to blossom as such, we “help” them to fit in, to lose elements of their natural behaviour to fit cultural requirements. 
If children do have problems accepting the code of conduct that must come with a class of 30 children, we should understand that the class is the problem instead of declaring a child to be a problem child. Such a child gets punished. It is placed in a corner or even in the hallway. Some children get a bad note on their report card, and their parents are called to the school. They will get a bollocking by the teacher who tells them that other children suffer because of their beloved child. The kid may end up on psychotropic drugs to suppress its natural behaviour to fit a restrictive cultural pattern. 
I see education as a shared responsibility. It is a challenge, or, better still, an opportunity for the commons. A child needs more than just the parents; it needs a small community, even in a city that will otherwise be very anonymous. In education it needs small groups of maybe up to five kids where these individuals can be discovered rather than moulded. That for a child would form an understandable environment.
  

14.    It is easy to deride whole groups of people, difficult to hate up close and personal. – Published 9.5.22
The social only gets a chance if it is close to our direct environment. That is why above I make a call for commons, small scale societies. They are not only more comfortable for our children but also for adults. If people share a common a neighbourhood, they can get to know each other. If we only hear about people, if we don’t know about them first hand, it is tempting to dismiss them based on generalities that never do justice to individual personalities. 
Palestinians hate Israelis and vice versa. And yet there are examples where the gap is bridged. Like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that has been a significant presence for 20 years in the international music world. In 1999, Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian literary scholar Edward W. Said created a workshop for young musicians to promote coexistence and intercultural dialogue. An equal number of Israeli and Arab musicians form the base of the ensemble, together with members from Turkey, Iran, and Spain. They meet each summer for rehearsals, followed by an international concert tour.
You cannot make great music together if you despise each other. You can accept your differences because of the importance of what unites you, the love of great music. You cannot organise great education unless you believe in an educated community. If you want to abuse schooling to stamp a specific moral hierarchy on society, you stamp hierarchy on your teaching. You cannot discuss an egalitarian society starting from a supremacist position. Your personal choices may lead you to be a believer, an agnostic, or an atheist. As a believer, you may have been taught the rules of the Bible, the Koran, or any other book of great learning. Yet they are all personal choices. 
 As a bachelor student I worked along these lines. My thesis (https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/52429), which is unfortunately currently only in Dutch, makes the claim that many philosophies and philosophers start from an established order that has been considered self-evident from antiquity onwards. That order in its day came about because of Homeric Ideals, of the glorification of the ideal person to which people should be subordinated. That threat of greatness is the paradigm that still rules our morality. Already in antiquity that Homeric moral was derided by Epicurus. He felt that people should have a proper choice about the way to lead their own lives. 
We must become independent of those leaders who tell us who are our friends and who are our foes. It is easy to deride whole groups of people, but difficult to hate them up close and personal. The social core groups in our direct environment with a common goal of egalitarian education can do justice to our differences. 

15.    Should we trust people or judge their thoughts? – Published 10.5.22
I cannot understand why people trust some of today’s leaders, people prepared to assume personal responsibility in a world as complex as ours. It becomes easier the more restricted someone views the responsibility. If a leader only feels responsible for the white wealthy Christian male population and is prepared to sacrifice everything else for their well-being, the task becomes relatively simple. It may even give such a supremacist quite a following, a following just as callous as their leader. The consequences of such a scenario are violent. I do not see how suppression can have any other outcome than violence in whatever shape or form. I also fail to see how there is any chance that oversimplification of the world order can bring happiness to anyone. I don’t believe happiness is possible if it comes at the cost of someone or something else. 
There are quite a few authoritarian leaders active in today’s world. I don’t see a single one of them whose main interest goes beyond safeguarding their own position with and within the network that makes it possible for them to function. I prefer the intentions of leaders who are chosen by the people, but it is not enough. Whatever the political motives they adorn themselves with, the economy comes first. The economy with its hunger for growth. Whether you want to divide the benefits of the economy according to left wing principles or right-wing ones doesn’t materially change the picture. Leaders may claim success in managing the economy, but nobody controls the economy. It is about reactions to the challenges the economy always throws up. Those reactions invariably favour the wealthy, restricted in numbers with plenty reserves, whereas the 90% of the population make the difference and feel the pain. 
Political leaders have reactive influence in the day to day running of society, but the philosophers and religious leaders should have a longer-term influence in the direction of society. The philosophers I dealt with yesterday in referring to my thesis that talks about how, but for a few exceptions, they serve the established order. The religious leaders however are wholly responsible for the overpopulation. This overpopulation makes problems out of things because of the sheer numbers involved. Things our planet could cope with easily in 1900 (less than 2 billion people) have become a burden as the population growth started to explode (close to 8 billion today). 
With improvements in life expectancy across the globe and the increased possibilities for birth control the common-sense reaction would have been family planning. Life that is not conceived is no life so there is no tenable cause to oppose that. Why do religious leaders impose their destructive morals on the world? Of course, population growth helps the economy, but religion should not serve the Golden Calf but the creation. 
So, I would like to ask the religious leaders to explain their thinking behind their attitude. I am not sure I can trust them to have the best interests of nature, of the creation, at heart. 

16.    Realism or idealism? – Published 14.5.22
I have been off the air for a few days. We had a good friend staying with us, so I skipped the writing for a bit. Not the thinking of course and my mate and I had a fairly involved discussion about the thoughts I share on these pages. We did agree about the fact that the world is heading towards ever deepening crisis, but he could not realistically see how it would be possible to stop that and called me an idealist, giving it a bit of a derogatory meaning. 
Basically, he felt that we would be forced to capitulate to realism and prepare for the worst. That would be giving in to a nightmare, whereas I believe that dreaming about ideals can show us there must be ways to reverse out of the dead-end society has manoeuvred itself into. The thing is that the dialogue never went beyond a debate as I refuse to be a fatalist and abandoning realism seems to be very hard, even in the light of the consequential reasoning that follows from there. It once again made me realise that it is not in my powers to convince people about changing their fundamental ideas, ideology. 
People can only convince themselves if they are prepared to doubt their fundamental beliefs and to submit themselves to the uncertainty of ideas, ideal ideas. There may very well come a day when people will be looking for a new saviour. Some people will be ready to follow him or her, as new ideologies and religions spring up in competition with each other. Ideologies that promise a better hereafter or whatever based on doctrines. Top-down approaches that may sound convincing but people working together bottom-up striving for understandable ideals will bring out the best of the social. That could be at the basis of an egalitarian society where the burden and the benefit of policy is carried by those responsible for it.