On The Rocks

Recently,  British TV personality and author Michael Mosley died while on holiday on the island of Symi in Greece.  He had been with his wife and friends at a beach they had arrived at by boat.  Sometime after midday, Mr. Mosley decided to walk back to the town of Symi.  It was a 40°C day, and though Mr. Mosley had taken an umbrella with him for shade, it's not known if he took any water for the trip.   Symi is a small island that is mostly barren rough bedrock, with a form that could be a many-petalled flower, a coastline of sharply indented deep bays with tiny beaches and barren points of land.  On his hike back to Symi, Mr. Mosley reached a small village of Pedi, from where it was a 2km hike over a saddle of hills with a rise of about 100 meters. Because Mr. Mosley was unfamiliar with the island's geography and hadn't taken his phone or a map with him, he seemed to have ignored this direct route and taken a path that led along the narrow bay he had just traversed one side of.  Perhaps on such a hot day he thought he would stay near the sea instead of making the climb that would have led him to Symi.  Along the route he walked, he may have seen far below, another beach with a cafe and umbrellas.  When he discovered that his path didn't lead anywhere and he would not be able to hike around the point which had become steeper as he went along, he doubled back with the intention of going down to the cafe.  It is presumed that he lost his footing and rolled down the almost vertical rocky slope, coming to rest beside a stone wall that marked the perimeter of the beach property.  His body was spotted from a boat four days after his disappearance because it had ended up behind the perimeter wall.  It was estimated that he died on the same afternoon he fell.

This tragedy has stirred up difficult memories for me because it is so close to what could have happened to my nephew when he visited me on the island of Rhodes in the late 1990's.  He was a young man and as soon as he arrived I had a talk with him about Lindos in summer being a place where if he indulged in bad behaviour, there would be nobody to lecture him about it when he got home.  He should behave like an adult and set his own limits so he was not one of those sun-roasted cocktail-swigging casualties who had scraped their way along the white walls as they stumbled home.  Sometimes they didn't make it to their accommodation and passed out in the middle of the street, where the other tourists, after checking that the drunk was still breathing, would step over the casualties on their own way home.  

One night, my nephew Ben, met some people in a Lindos bar and went with them to their apartment in Pefkos so they could continue their party.  At the first sign of morning, my nephew decided to go back to the girlfriend he had left in Lindos, so with a bottle of Sprite in hand, he set off for Lindos on foot.  Rather than walk home 5km along the paved road, he decided to take a shortcut.  Unfortunately he had not looked at a map and assumed that Lindos was "just over the hill" from Pefkos, which it is not.  With this in mind, he began climbing the steep rocky hillside behind Pefkos.  Somewhere up the steep slope he lost his footing and fell, injuring himself worse than he thought.  After sitting for a while to recover his senses and decide what to do next, he started off again on his upward trajectory, but he fell again.  He remembered waking up again, and trying to get up and carry on but had trouble doing so.  Sometime later in the morning, perhaps around 10am, a carpenter named Manolis Koukouras who has a house at the bottom of the slope, was out on his back terrace having a coffee when he thought he saw something move far away up the hill.  He thought it might be a plastic bag stuck on some rocks and thorn bushes, so called one of his sons to look.  With binoculars they searched the hillside until they found the strange object, and after passing the binoculars back and forth, decided that what they could see might be larger than they thought.  There seemed to be some movement from whatever it was, perhaps a goat that had fallen.  Manolis sent one of his sons up the hill for a look, and he soon came running back to report there was a man up there, a tourist who was dazed and injured, with a face covered in blood and who was unable to remain steady on his feet. He was thirsty because he had lost his bottle of Sprite in the first fall.  Since Ben had set off about 4am and wasn't found until after 10am, he had been up there for 6 hours in the morning summer sun.  Ben insisted he had only been there for five minutes.

That day I had been in Rhodes shopping, but when I got back to Lindos, everyone was looking for me to tell me about Ben, and that he was in Rhodes hospital.  I jumped in a borrowed car to go find him, and caught up with him in a bed in the emergency department of Rhodes Hospital.  His head was covered in dried blood, his arms and legs were scraped and dirty and he had lost his shoes.  When I was finally sure it was him, because I wasn't convinced at first, he immediately asked where his shoes were.  They were Vans and he had bought them especially for the trip.  Considering the state of him it was surprising he was so concerned about his shoes.  An air ambulance had already been arranged to take him to the hospital in Athens because some of his injuries were serious enough they required specialized attention.

Back in Lindos that evening, I managed to arrange a flight to Athens for the next morning so I could follow Ben's progress in Athens.  I already knew from visiting acquaintances in Rhodes hospital that families were expected to assume some of the workload of patient care, and to supply extra food and drink if the patient wanted it.  The hospital in Athens was an old hospital, where we were introduced to the future prime minister Karamanlis who was visiting hospitals on behalf of his party.  Like the rest of us, he had no choice but to overlook the battered condition of the place.  Ben was conscious when we were able to visit him and though he had a bandage wrapped around his head, he was as dirty and blood covered as I had seen him in Rhodes Hospital.  As next of kin, one of the doctors called me into his office to tell me that Ben had fractured his skull, and that the next few days would be critical in determining how well he did.  He also cautioned me that Ben may not make a good recovery, that his brain might be permanently damaged, and that perhaps his behaviour would change. 

On the second day we visited with McDonalds' hamburgers in hand, Ben was in the same condition we had found him the day before.  Peeling back the neck collar that had been on him since he had first been put in an ambulance, I saw he had a huge gash on his neck which looked to be festering as if it had not even been cleaned.  When I asked the nursing staff why nobody had attended to him and cleaned him up, I was told they didn't have time.  When I pointed out the ugly wound on his neck, I was assured they were doing what they could, but that his head injury was of more concern than the neck wound.  One of the nurses was kind enough to inform me that it was possible to hire a private nurse to come in to look after Ben, and I immediately asked the nursing staff to organize it for me.  The next morning, a kind and motherly Romanian lady was there when we went to visit Ben. She had been there since the evening before, had washed his entire body, cleaned up the dried blood on his face, dressed his neck wound, and made sure he stayed hydrated and fed.  Things were looking less desperate, so we could only hope his fractured skull knitted together properly with no complications.

Ben was in the hospital for 5 days and was discharged into my care back in Rhodes. He could have gone back to Canada but didn't intend to cancel the rest of his summer vacation.  Although he carried on drinking too much along with most of the rest of the tourists his age, he never went hill climbing again.The aftermath of this was that although he seemed not to have any permanent damage from the broken skull, he was deaf in one ear, which put paid to the career he had intended to have in the military.  He also still has a keloid scar on his neck that looks like an unsightly gash, and needs treatment and reduction occasionally.

When I heard about the disappearance of Michael Mosley I was reminded how treacherous a sunny hillside under a blue Greek sky can be.  It also brought back to me the fate of a handsome Greek man I knew who had goats that grazed on the hillsides around Lindos and Pefkos.  Sometimes the goats jumped over garden walls and decimated gardens.  I complained to the mayor that the village needed to do something to keep the goats out of the local properties.  One of my clients had woken one morning to find a huge smelly billy-goat in her bedroom, chewing on her sundress.  I told the mayor it shouldn't be us who were living behind concentration camp barbed wire fences, but the goats.  A few years later the owner of the goats disappeared, only to be found a week later, deceased at the bottom of a crevasse where he had fallen while chasing after his wild flock. He had injured himself in the fall, but the crevasse he was in had a false bottom so he was not visible from above.  A searcher eventually noticed the glint of his wrist watch.

As we grow up, most of us learn to respect the power of nature, be it land, sea, or weather, but miscalculations are made and the results can be disastrous and even tragic.  My sympathy goes out to anyone who has experienced this kind of tragedy, and I am aware that if it hadn't been for the attentive carpenter who noticed something strange on a hillside, my nephew Ben, who now has two teenage children, might not be around today.  Others who have ventured out of Lindos Bay on pedalos or air mattresses have been carried far out to sea and had to be rescued.  The beautiful scenery makes people forget that they are not in an enclosed protected resort, but in a place with a climate, landscape, and sea conditions they know nothing about, and which can, if taken lightly, prove deadly.

The Banality of Evil

Nothing is good or evil in itself.  Evil is a concept that people who are not religious have trouble understanding.  It can be thought of as an absence of good, but action or inaction can push things to one side or the other.  When they hear the word evil, non religious people might think of torturers, murderers, dictators, or regimes, but what puts these villains on the wrong side of the fence is their actions.  Those who have power are adept at justifying their actions, whether they are for the common good or the common ill.  Their actions will be judged negatively if they are based only on expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or neglect. 

The tabloid press was recently occupied by a 35 year old mother who in a hot July went on a trip to another city with a new boyfriend and let her 18 month old child die of thirst and hunger.  She originally gave birth to the baby in a washroom because she didn't know she was pregnant, and had been heard to say the baby was an obstacle to getting on with her life.  She defended herself by saying "Nobody liked me when I was a child, I had no friends." but she had employed enough mental gymnastics to allow her helpless daughter to die.  Some mothers suffer from postpartum depression and have been known to kill their children.  Was her inaction evil?  Was it a mental illness?  

People who do evil are aware of the consequences of their actions but mentally ill people are not cognizant of the results. The evil one is assumed guilty while the person with a serious psychological problem is not. Psychiatric conditions are considered to be involuntary, while in behavioural disorders, choices are made.  One of the choices available is inaction with full knowledge of the probable consequences. If a person has a toothache they can go to a dentist to have the problem resolved or they can do nothing.  Their inaction will probably result in even more pain, but there may be factors that stop them from doing the right thing, like fear or finances.  Their teeth might completely decay and they will have painful abscesses, but they will not act as if by closing their eyes and ignoring the evidence, magical thinking will make the problem go away.

The mother who allowed her baby to die, was able to convince herself to stay away from home longer than she knew was reasonable, but she deceived herself into believing everything would turn out fine.  She left the child with two bottles of milk, two of water, and one of iced tea for the few days she was away, but when day three came around and she couldn't get a ride home, she figured the baby would be good for another day.  If anyone she knew asked her about the child, she told them her sister was looking after her daughter. Perhaps in her mind she believed it. She was afraid to ask her new companion to take her home because he didn't want to know about the baby and was full of insults about her stupidity.  When enough days had passed and she began to doubt her own fantasy that someone had gone into her flat to look after the child, she also knew it was too late and that the child might be dead.  If the child was already dead, there was no hurry to go home, so she stayed away for 6 days, while a small part of her brain continued to believe she would find the child alive. The deceased child had eaten part of her diaper.  The mother said she never meant to harm her daughter.
"I was worried about her," she said, "but I was afraid of my boyfriend's reaction. I was afraid to talk to him because he was aggressive. Once he pushed me against a glass shopfront in an argument. I was nervous about asking him again to take me home.  He said he loved me, but it wasn't true. He just used me.”

She claimed she was abused as a child at the hands of a family friend, shunned by her family, and was sad and solitary.  There were drunken parental fights, missed birthday parties, no gifts, and no school friends because they all thought she was too serious.  She said she failed at school because she had no interest in studying, married young but miscarried and her husband divorced her because he said it was her fault.  Her family disputed all of these claims and said she was a normal child, perhaps on the slow side.

As a writer I am curious what her thoughts were while she put off going back home to save her child.  "If he's in a better mood tomorrow morning, I'll ask him again if he'll drive me home. I could take the train but that costs money I'd rather spend on other stuff.  Maybe the baby hasn't hasn't finished all of her bottles.  I left her five, which should be almost enough for at least two days.  Yesterday would have been the right day to go back, but my boyfriend was really affectionate in the afternoon and asked me to stay for another day.  He told me if I loved him, I'd stay, so that's what I did.  Sometimes the baby slept so soundly she went through the night without a bottle, and that was ten hours, so she could go for a while before she got hungry.  She was a chubby little thing anyway, everyone said so, but I really must go tomorrow one way or the other."

"It's already the fourth day and I should have gone back yesterday, but he didn't feel like going out to take me to the station.  Maybe my sister stopped by.  She knows where I leave the key.  Did I leave it there the last time I used it?  The baby would be so happy to see my sister because she would have been lonely and calling for me. I knew what being lonely was like.  I'd gone away for a day or two before and the baby wasn't any the worse for it when I got back.  She'd have to be an independent sort to make her way in this world.  Maybe she'd even found her way out of her crib.  She could stand up if she held onto something, and if she was hungry or thirsty enough she could get out."

"I really should get home no matter what he says.  Maybe he'll have time tomorrow.  The baby's going to be really hungry by now.  I know I would be starving after five days, but then she's just small and doesn't need much to keep her going. For sure my sister must have passed by and the baby is all right.  It would have been polite if she phoned me to tell me what she'd done, but then she was one of those who said I should have given the baby up for adoption so I don't  trust her. My phone is out of minutes and I asked to borrow his phone to call my sister but he told me I needed to learn to be independent.  What did I care about my family?  They'd never done anything for me.  He was right.  If I called my sister and she hadn't checked on the baby, she'd give me an earful I didn't want to hear."

The ability of a person to convince themselves of something that is contrary to all logic, is boundless, even if it means the death of an innocent.  "They probably had it coming," they'd say.   People are killed in so many tragic circumstances one wouldn't think the human race needed to add to the carnage by engaging in wars for territory or resources.  The way humans are able to mobilize their populations to go off and kill other people, is the same way that humans are able to kill their fellow man, is by Othering.  If a person, a tribe, or a nation are not like us, it is easy to put them into a box called "Them."  They are less human than we are.  If these people look different from me, dress differently, have different customs, worship differently, it is easier to keep them at a distance, and our fear of the unknown encourages that.  Governments are adept at manipulating their people into believing that the others are the bad guys, while the opposite government does the same.  Judging others as separate from ourselves is easy to do, and some factions, let's call them the evil ones, or the bad actors, encourage us to exaggerate our differences instead of appreciating our differences.  So-called evil, or incorrect behaviour can lurk just under the surface of any of us and is usually kept under control by our society's expectations, but it doesn't take much of a scratch in the surface of a supposedly good citizen, to reveal a darker nastier selfish side.  The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrates this idea.  The surface of Dr. Jekyll's respectable life is disturbed when he ingests a drug.  Although the good doctor can't remember the details of the nasty things he did as Mr. Hyde, this does not excuse the fact that he was the one who took the wrong action. He and not Mr. Hyde is the guilty party because the sane Dr. Jekyll knew there was a risk but he took it anyway.  Hitler and his ilk knew the consequences of their actions but undertook them anyway.  Whether we are soldiers marching off to a so-called patriotic war, or shrinkers from the truth and responsibility, the scales of good and evil can easily be tipped in the wrong direction.

When the court gave the neglectful mother a life sentence, they accepted the theory of evil, and ruled that although the mother had certain delusions, she was sane enough to know what she had done was wrong.  Once the sentencing was over and the mother was back in prison, she went on a hunger strike, which some thought was fittingly ironic, but she was in the hands of the judicial system, who didn't permit her to make a serious error of judgment on their watch.  She should be alive to remember what an evil thing she had done.   

America's God Problem

 I grew up nominally Anglican, an inheritance from both my parents.  My mother grew up with a Scottish Presbyterian father whose religious observances were in line with his other severities, like sitting up straight at the dinner table.  Religion for him was all about how it looked to the neighbours.  I never heard him talk about God.   My parents rarely went to church, except on Christmas Eve for the carols.   Neither of them went to church on Sundays though they sent their children to Sunday school, believing they should know something about religion so they would be informed when they were old enough to embrace it or reject it. They weren't bothered either way.  God and Jesus weren't people whose names came up in everyday conversation.  I understood later they just wanted their kids out of the house so they could have a few precious hours to themselves on Sunday mornings.   We were trained to say grace before meals but the only trace of religion in it was in the "May the Lord make us truly thankful."  For all we knew this Lord could be the guy who issued the paycheques that allowed us to buy food.  There was no spiritual connection in this recitation of grace.  The Lord's Prayer that we learned at school was more specific, but was too archaic for our young minds.  Who wants daily bread when there are so many other interesting things to eat?  Did trespassing mean raiding our neighbour's garden?

Although we lived north of the border we grew up on American television. Among the cultural references that jumped out because they were different from our own were the ubiquitous twin beds of married couples and televangelists like Oral Roberts.  Supposed miracles from the laying on of hands and the blatant pitch for money seemed to cancel each other out and make fools of these people and their message. In my teens I became even less religious than my parents who were barely there at all, and was vindicated when I finally renounced organized religion and wasn't struck by a thunderbolt from God.  Although I had heard terms like the Bible Belt when talking about the eastern US, I also knew there were pockets of Bible thumpers in Canada, not only in the farming communities of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver, but in pockets in the prairies.  I saw these people as misguided because although I had no objection to what anyone believed, I didn't agree with their aggressive ministry which was only a short step below the pests of Jehovah Witnesses who came to the door on Saturday mornings. 

American television networks didn't blatantly broadcast all of the evangelist's more strident messages, but their norms were inserted in more subtle ways.  American television networks rely on sponsors and are sensitive to feedback from their viewers, so words or images that might offend delicate sensibilities are omitted.  In the movies people can swear and say they don't  believe in God, but these were usually the bad guys.  Blasphemy didn't make it onto television at all. 

Not only the Christian religion, but many others besides, at their inception understood the power of fear and isolation.  They spoke as if their Gods were the only way.  Everything else belonged to the evil other side.  They nurtured the philosophy of "If you're not with us you're against us."  There was not an option of accepting their misguiding beliefs without participating in them. For Christians in the last half of the 20th century, the choices for fair minded people became even more restrictive by using a clever tactic.  I learned at my mother's knee about what she called "motherhood issues."  She was scathing about politicians who got on their soapboxes and said "I'm all for motherhood."  This would get huge cheers from the crowd because it was an obvious good thing.  The dirty side of this sort of message is that it implies anyone who doesn't agree with them must be a monster who thinks that motherhood is bad.   

In the 1950's the American Pledge of Allegiance was altered to insert the word God into it.  The original pledge of allegiance to the flag was written in 1892 and made no mention of God or which flag people were pledging allegiance to.  When the Cold War heated up in the 1950's, Eisenhower agreed to add the word God to the text to make a statement that Americans believe in God, while those who didn't include God in their pledge were by definition Godless communists.  Even as late as 1987 George Bush Sr. said, "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."  Americans had claimed God as their own and anyone who didn't share their capitalist value system, must be a child of Satan.  Bush may or may not have been aware that America had only been one nation under God since 1954, only 33 years earlier.  

In America, politicians are expected to be, at least in name, God fearing citizens of one stripe or another, mostly Protestant Christians.  90% of US congressmen identify as Christian, leaving the rest to be taken up by 7% Jewish, negligible Muslims, with hardly a non-believer in sight.  In short, it is impossible to hold any of the levers of power in the US unless a person is religious.  There are probably those who lie about their beliefs to save awkward questions and make themselves acceptable to electors, and there or those who profess belief in a religion while blatantly doing the opposite of what is acceptable in any religion.  Selling a holy book to raise money for legal fees to escape from crimes committed, wouldn't wash anywhere in the world, yet in brainwashed America it gains a political con man millions of dollars and followers.  This is a perversion of morality as defined by any religion or any secular society. 

America's God perversion was nurtured by an exploitation of people's fear that if they didn't follow the herd, they would be condemned and sent to some mythical hell. They raised their children to be God fearing just as they had been, and not to ask rational questions.  The children believed their parent's fanaticism was normal.  However, statistics show that 23% of the public in the US,  privately admit they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”. Where are these people in the political discourse?  Not only do they have no voice in government, according to some like Bush they should not even be considered citizens. Non-believers are considered militant extremists and should have no right to take place in public discourse.  Although the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,"  there are many ways beyond the legal system that a religion can become a state sanctioned religion.  

It has been said that, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and wearing the cross."  Using people's natural fear of exclusion, America long ago wrapped itself in the flag with the 1804 chant,  "My country, right or wrong."  This outlook promotes loyalty and devotion to a country, prioritizing the nation's interests even if they are not morally or ethically justifiable. The evangelists and other so-called God fearing Christians are not much different from the Ku Klux Klan and their fiery crosses, with their calls for exclusion, intolerance, and retribution.  "When the rapture comes, those who were against us will burn in Hell."  Simple souls believe this rhetoric and are happy to carry out their God fearing master's wishes in real life. "Kill the Godless judge or politician and his unholy children."  Religion has been twisted beyond recognition and has come to live in America.  Americans watch in horror at theocracies in other parts of the world with their medieval prohibitions, while being blind to their own restricted fundamentalist outlook.  They have painted themselves into a corner that it will be impossible to recover from without education, but generations of children continue to be brainwashed and told that to ask awkward questions is unpatriotic and unAmerican.  Intelligence is a dirty word in America, an attitude that successive governments continue to foster.  Uninformed people whose ignorance is glorified, don't ask questions, but blindly obey their church and state.  "God is on our side," they say, "therefore whatever we do is right and justified."  This is not the path to a fair and equal society.

Levers of Control

Control can be external and internal.  Some prefer confinement to freedom while some react badly to any restriction, but freedom is an abstract concept that doesn't translate into a concrete way to live. To many, freedom represents a liberation from control, but freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose. Like happiness, freedom is a fleeting sunbeam that touches us and is gone.  It is not a permanent state of being.  

 A murderer, abuser, or exploiter might justify his behaviour by convincing himself he is above the constraints of normal society, but his freedom to act outside the law results in damage to another person.  Some people like to have the church and state decide things for them, to tell them what to believe and how to behave.  In military service there is strong evidence for this.  Some are comfortable in the armed services and some are not. Many discover when they leave the services that they are without direction and that they were less anxious when they had someone organizing their lives. Being organized and logical is among the set of human survival skills, but some people need help putting and keeping their lives in order so are more comfortable when the rules of duty and behaviour are imposed on them.  

Orders from above bring us into the religious sphere because the same principles of control apply there.  Those of a spiritual inclination prefer a God who explains the world to them and tells them what to believe and how to behave.  Without the guiding hand of religious morality, they are at a loss and flounder from one 'ism' and excess to another until they find the control they need. Religion has always been a crutch that people use to prop themselves up with, a mantra for deflecting the void of free will.  

Most people don't understand how controlled they are.  Cultural norms are a form of control, as the passive aggressive statement of "We always do it this way," is a tool for keeping members of a society within bounds. Belonging to a group is more comfortable than being ostracised by them.  Mutual cooperation means survival, so villages, towns, cities, and nations have existential reasons for maintaining law and order.  If an individual decides to act of his own free will in a way that damages the community, he is not welcome as part of the herd and puts his own survival at risk. Being pushed out to the margins of a society is the price a free thinker pays.  His society and culture would prefer he accept the imposed control even if it is against his nature. He is confident enough in his own world to go against the trend.  He may have once been a religious person who realized there was no destructive lightning bolt when he said aloud he didn't believe in God.  He may have learned that putting his nose to a daily, soul-destroying grindstone, did him more harm than good.   There were positive ways to live that didn't involve the more crushing forms of societal control.

Control is not only a political position but is essential in our emotional and psychological lives.  Everyone knows, in a relationship there is often someone who loves more, or someone who is easygoing and someone who is more demonstrative. In any pairing, there is one of the partners who prefers to have control and one who is willing to acquiesce. Many would deny this about themselves, though would grudgingly admit that living with another person requires accommodations on both sides.  Some will hold their ground on certain territories while recognizing that compromise is necessary to keep the couple in balance. Bargaining begins. "I will give this but not that."

If a man is abusive toward his wife, why except for kids, would she stay with him?  Often it is because she has a strong desire to please a man, perhaps a substitute for her father whose attention was never enough.  Her need and willingness to be controlled can be stronger than her own safety.  A man doesn't want his partner to be a doormat but neither does he want to continually fight. If two people who are together feel they each need to control identical aspects of their lives their relationship is doomed. Only a  sensible preference-based division of control can make a workable partnership.  If both parties are free spirits, the stars may move in the heavens but the cohabiting connection will ultimately be lost.

In most marriage-like relationships, when one partner is happy about something, the other one is as well.  If the two are in love they want the best for each other.  When one partner acquiesces to the other's wishes it is because they want to see the other happy.  People who are truly in love will sacrifice themselves for each other.  In the dynamics of these negotiations, control is the main element.  From a distance, a partnership can appear to be a perfect balance of power but there is always a nuanced interplay of dominance and surrender below the surface.  Dominant and acquiescent dances are all about control, with rules and benefits that are needed for it to be acceptable to both sides.   

I've never enjoyed wedding ceremonies because I feel like a witness to a conclusion, when for the happy couple it is only the start.  I don't want to know how the movie ends as more than likely it will be sad.  Sometimes by accident, we stumble across a person who instinctively knows how to navigate the byways of power and control in us and they become permanent parts of our lives. Rousseau wrote that "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains." This has been misconstrued as a war-cry for freedom but it is not Rousseau's complete idea.  In "The Social Contract" he argues that our societal chains must take precedence over individual freedoms.  He supposes that we have to accept restrictions until the needs of society are met, which may be never.  Control is part of the social contract we have agreed to, whether it is religious, military, or cultural.  These days it is almost impossible to survive totally isolated from so-called civilization. Some people can live inside the confines with a minimum of control while others need all aspects of it to help them function. An office-working, church-going parent is less threatening to society than an atheist free-lance outsider with ideas of revolution. By examining the unifying laws of the social contract, it is easier to understand and accept the levers of control.  A parent who disciplines a child might say "It's for your own good," and though as a child we detest these admonishing chains, we grow to realize they are necessary. There is such a thing as the common good, where the majority of society's needs are met, but it requires small sacrificial surrenders control from each of its components.

Here's Looking At You Kid - Artificial Intelligence

    Artificial intelligence is being touted as the next existential threat to mankind.  The press jumps on doomsday scenarios to grab our attention, but this is old news.  "The end is nigh" goes back at least as far as a predicted biblical apocalypse, and has always been a big seller on the religious circuit.  The alarm is not any more or less worrying now that it was in Jesus's time.
    Artificial Intelligence as we know it, is a way of mimicking thinking that is based on data collection.  Data has no life of its own, but is a collection of things known or assumed as facts. Communal data was probably first assembled by tax collectors, and that information was used to decide how much citizens should be taxed.  The pharaoh was less interested in how many people were in his kingdom than in how much money they could bring him.
    We are in the infancy of learning how human intelligence works, how it is created, nourished, augmented, diminished, passed on, damaged, and diverted. This is in line with how little we know about our bodies. Why do some people get diseases and others not?  Do we know how much is nature and how much is nurture?  In their prescriptions for health, doctors have followed assumptions that are based on perceived communal knowledge, which turns out to be wrong as much as it is right. Using leeches to draw out bad blood, drilling holes in skulls to relieve headaches, or administering shock therapy to disrupt anomalous behavioural patterns, are treatments that have all but been abandoned.  Their foundational data was limited and selective, or those who collected and interpreted it, had motives to skew the conclusions.  Back then we were mostly ignorant of the body's processes, but though we may boast about our advances, we have still not come far down the road. We can talk about nerves, synapses, and electrical impulses, but who really knows how a memory, a signal, or an image, is transferred through material that is like the goopy white of an egg?
    Compared to the capacity of the brain, our present technology doesn't have the resources to store and compute the amount of memory and experience that exists in a single human body.  A computer and a brain can both process information, but most humans are better than computers in some ways and worse in others.  While it might take a computer a long time to calculate the galaxy of options and possibilities of a single body movement, a human can do it in a split second and does so countless times every day. Apart from a storage capacity problem, the collecting methods and processing parameters for data would leave room for human bias in the heart of the machine.  Like computers, people decide things based on what they know and what they have learned, but humans are endowed with the wildcard of emotion.  A computer can't be angry, sad, or happy.  Human decisions are made using not only data and experience, but every other tool in the homo sapiens kit, much of which a computer doesn't have access to. 
    A computer can learn that there is a threat to its resources and take evasive action, but this is no more intelligent than a car giving a warning signal when it is low on fuel.  There is no emotion on the part of the car.  In "2001 A Space Odyssey", the computer Hal objects to being unplugged and disabled.  In the story he can do nothing but threaten.  This is a reassuring scenario but Arthur Clarke could also have made Hal kill the human who wants to unplug him.  Hal has already managed kill the crew and send the second astronaut off into space. In the film there is a tiny but gigantic leap Hal can't make - the ability to see into a human's brain to guess its motives and planned actions.  He only discovered the plot against him by reading lips. Artificial intelligence will be dangerous to humans when computers are able to look inside our brains and know what we are thinking.  This is a bridge we should never cross. If Hal had been able to read minds, he would never have allowed parts of his brain to be disconnected. A computer can make guesses about us, recommend shopping choices based on what we have shown interest in, but it will never understand entirely why a person buys a certain jacket beyond attributes like colour, comfort, and price.  Algorithms can't know that the jacket reminds the potential buyer of a similar one they once had, or be like the jacket of an admired friend, or conform to the image of themselves they have created in their own mind. Some shopping apps let buyers virtually try on garments but this is no different than playing with dress-up cutout dolls. It lacks the psychological and emotional input for what we ultimately choose. 
    Artificial intelligence can do many good things for humans, but its information gathering skills can also be abused. Like a knife it can be used for good or bad. With the arrival of surrealism, television, and computers, people became more attuned to the difference between reality and artificiality.  Dramas as artificial creations, the news is supposedlyreal, though using the surrealist argument, whatever we see on our screens is an image and is not the real thing. A century ago Rene Magritte made the point with his painting of a pipe, whose title is "The Treachery of Images."
    Nobody believes they are seeing the real world when they look through virtual reality glasses, but if we destroy our planet and are unable to venture outdoors except with cameras and drones, we will lose touch with reality.  We will be comfortable in this second hand world being fed images that are easy to manipulate.  We won't be able to smell the poisonous air through a drone image or taste the bitter wind.  These nightmares aside, we should only be alarmed when artificial intelligence takes a step away from the artificial and tries to get inside the human brain. 
    We need to be on the lookout for what until now have only been science fiction scenarios where computers can download the contents of our brains.  In the film Total Recall, based on a story called "We Can Remember It For You," citizens can have false memories implanted in their brains, which creates the idea of having been somewhere or done something. Clients wake up believing they have lived through their wildest fantasies with no risk to their physical bodies.  We are easily lulled into thinking the next great product will revolutionize our lives and give meaning to our pointless existence, but in our rush to fill that void, we don't always think through the implications and possible eventual abuses.  Our technological advances are amazing achievements, but we need guardrails on how technologies are used.
    When cloning became possible, it was seen as a potential threat to existence, and it caused UNESCO and the WHO to ban human cloning. Some may believe this moratorium is holding up potential research, but many science fiction works have warned us about the unexpected implications of the wholesale production of organs.  We don't yet know all of the fields that AI can be turned loose in and its power is growing exponentially, but we need to listen to the voices that remind us of mankind's worst tendencies and how easily ambition and the lure of profit, can sweep aside common sense.

Untruth In Advertising

In looking for a name to call untruth in advertising I arrived at the word "disinformation", which by itself is indecipherable. Examples are the best way to illustrate these advertising tricks.  Whatever is being sold, whether it is cars, snacks, sunglasses or kids vitamins, might start off with a line like,  "Next time you take the family out on a road trip...." which assumes many things that may not necessarily be true.  The marketer targets his statistics-proven audience by assuming that they are married, have children, live in the suburbs, and have disposable income.  Often it is difficult to understand at the beginning of these ads what the item being sold is going to be, but it doesn't matter because the same marketing techniques work for everything.  The "take the family on a drive" slogan leaves out single people, inner city dwellers, bus riders, the unemployed and the poor.  It insinuates that a person is not 'normal' if he doesn't have or doesn't want the latest car, massive television, or display of holiday selfies. This exclusion creates a mass of unsatisfied people, who are chasing after a dream that has been created by a marketing team.  It is an open secret that advertising works by creating its own markets.  The billion dollar perfume industry has prospered by using this concept. The consumer is not being sold the actual bottle of scent, but the image of someone who is a Hugo Boss man or a Chanel wearer.  What chance does an ugly duckling from Cincinnati have?  She buys the perfume and deludes herself with Instagram duck-face filtered photos that she has the glamourous life of a Parisian model.  It all starts with the first lie about who people are and what they want.  Like the claim that we in the West live in democracies that are approved by the majority of the people, the narrative being sold is a lie.  If voting is only done by 60% of the population and those votes are split into parties, governing rights can be claimed by those who have the majority of the voters, but are not the majority of the population.  Democracy ends up being governance by minority. 

Watching a commercial for Volkswagen, I saw a type of bullying advertising that made my blood boil.  We see a man in front of his house retrieving the morning paper and as he does so, he sees "your'" new Volkswagen in the driveway next door.  The newspaper is already a clue that undermines the man's credibility.  Having a newspaper delivered to his door every morning is a signal that says 'old school'.  Newspapers are a waste of paper.  An up-to-date man would check the news on his phone.  Clearly this man is not in sync with the times.   A female voice that is sure of itself, even a little righteous, says, "Your neighbour (meaning the man with the paper) thinks Volkswagens are expensive to maintain."   Next we see him in his kitchen pouring lumpy milk into his coffee.  We wonder why he would do this and we are meant to think he is too stupid to tell the difference between good and bad.  The man appears to be single.  Why hasn't his wife checked the milk as he seems to be inept at doing so.   The false reality of a single incapable unshaven man in a slightly messy house, is designed to undermine whatever the man thinks.  Volkswagen is a progressive company so they'll accept single men even though they are clearly faulty.  Maybe he is married but he is an early riser, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  The female sales voice says, "He also thinks the milk is perfectly fine so maybe don't listen to him." This implies that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive, is a dolt who doesn't care if he poisons himself with sour milk.  It is a type of groupthink that was used by the Nazis to make people believe that if they didn't think like the rest of the group, a group who had already been brain-washed and conditioned by the state, that they were crazy and misguided dissenters.  The Nazis put them in concentration camps, the Russians in insane asylums.  

It is a fact that some cars are more expensive than others.  Nobody would dispute that a Ferrari is costly to buy and maintain.  A Volkswagen is not a Ferrari but it is not a bottom of the range vehicle.  The company is not denying the car is expensive and lets itself off the hook by having 'your neighbour' as just one stupid person, but it skates close to the edge of semantic hair splitting, which in this case could be construed as lying. Compared to some cars, Volkswagens are expensive.  They are good cars, but they cost more than many other brands, and rightly so because they are well made.  But to imply that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive overall must be ignorant, misguided, or insane, is a technique that is as old as propaganda. Unfortunately, there is a world of weak-minded, easy-answer, gullible, and brainwashed consumers out there, who will be intimidated by the company's insinuation that they too could be sour milk drinkers.  It is impossible and undemocratic to outlaw double-speak since diplomacy is based on it, but the psychological games used in marketing should be taught in grade school. A degree of critical thinking can save a lot of  heartbreak and disillusionment later in life but the companies trying to sell products would prefer that the underpinnings of their seamless lies are not visible.

In a more crass and equally dangerous arena, politicians are often straightforward liars.  They will say things like "Under this leader the country is on the road to ruin," when the opposite is true. Some people believe what politicians say, since they must be upstanding enough to get elected and sworn into office, but telling the truth is not something politicians promise to do. Either side is capable of the one-note propaganda which tells lies not only by omission but as bald-faced untruths.  Being caught in an outright lie should be grounds for shame and censure, but in the political world the ability to lie without blinking is considered an asset rather than an impediment.  We have become so used to untruths being told by advertisers and our governments that pundits consider we are living in an age of 'post-truth' which I can only take to mean an age invented reality.  This disconnect with objective facts has the effect of isolating people in their own magic bubbles where everything they chose to believe is true, while what they chose not to believe is a lie. A society that drifts too far into the distortion of provable facts, creates a disunited, bickering population that is easy to control.  That is the objective. 

Chasing The High

    America's inner cities are dying from a drug overdose. City centres that were once the backbone of commerce were abandoned as the suburbs expanded and industry moved away.  These urban wastelands have become home to legions of modern-day zombies.  Some of these neglected downtown areas were already known as hangouts for the drunk, addicted, and homeless, but since fentanyl hit the streets in 2005, the population of vacant humans has spread like an uncontrolled infection.  This is the American dream come home to roost.  
    Unique in the world, America's Declaration of Independence in 1776, included not only the right to life and liberty, but the right to the pursuit of happiness.  It also stated that all men are created equal, but this was in an age when "all men" didn't include women, blacks, or men without property.  The phrase about the pursuit of happiness was meant as a right that certain men should have to enjoy their property in safety, security, and happiness.  It was never intended as a guarantee of happiness for the entire population, which is how many in the last century have rigidly interpreted it. When people believe their government owes them happiness, they are disappointed when this doesn't turn out to be true, and believe that their government has betrayed them. How often have we heard Americans protesting that something is their right as citizens, as if the accident of their birthplace has given them special status among humans?  The Bill of Rights says in so many words that Americans have been endowed with these rights by the Creator.  Dragging the name of God into the rights of man obscures the fact that man is only allowed rights that are assigned to him by his master, whether that be his government, his employer, or his peers.   It is apparently not a human right to kill his fellow man unless his government declares the opposite and sends him to war.
    The expectation of certain things by a population inevitably leads to disappointment.  To lessen the disillusionment when things don't go as planned, Americans have come to expect that there will be immediate easy remedies, and if there are not, it must be someone's fault.  In the early rampantly capitalism of infant America, snake oil salesmen promised a cure for every ailment and so the pharmaceutical industry was born.  Feeling unhappy?  Drink this.   Feeling depressed? Take a pill.  Feeling hopeless?  We will show you God.  America has never stopped chasing the high of a promised land that never was. When politicians shout about Making America Great Again, they are selling a dream that was never a reality.   There have always been holes in the dream.  The dream is only conceded to those with money, property, and the willingness to exploit others.
Schizophrenic America can have a presidential campaign that thunders on about Saying No To Drugs, while the main street of every small town has a neon arrow pointing to glossy storefront pharmacy and that spells out in huge letters,the word Drugs.  Schizophrenia is the policy.  Take drugs, don't take drugs.  Maybe just take the ones that are socially acceptable like alcohol or others that the doctor prescribes but don't take the ones that mother says are bad.  
    Those who are disappointed with their lives are encouraged to seek remedies outside themselves because they can't find answers elsewhere.  Some turn to religion, some to all-consuming phobias, from obsessive cleaning to hoarding, hoping to block the emptiness of their existence. Many of these lost souls have reason to be untethered.  Their religion and state have let them down, and the drugs aren't a permanent fix.  Unfortunately, many are not brave or intelligent enough to understand the origins and objectives of their governments or religions, and mistakenly believe that these institutions should be responsible for their well-being.  
    There is another problem with the slide into drug consumption to keep the disappointment and unhappiness at bay.  Once a person is prescribed certain medicines, there is a fear on the part of the drug taker, that if they give them up they will relapse and might be unhappy, something that is unacceptable in Thomas Jefferson's Bill of Rights.  If a doctor prescribes medicine for high blood pressure it is understood that this medication needs to be taken for life.  There is not a doctor alive who will advise a patient to stop their hypertension medication.   Patients are led to assume that if they stop their meds they will die, and doctors don't contradict this notion.  "Of course you can stop," they say, "but it's your funeral."  Antidepressant medications are much the same.  A doctor might go so far as to suggest that a patient could taper off antidepressants, but the reluctance this time lies with the patient.  Will I go crazy again if I stop?  Many are unwilling to take that chance.  Drug companies would prefer that once we are on medication, we are on it for life.  That way their profits are certain.
    America is chasing its own tail.  Drugs are needed to survive the emptiness of existence, but the drugs, and the attempt to use them to find nirvana is an empty solution.  Not all turn to drugs, as some go overboard with fitness, religion, games, and a thousand other distractions, rarely getting at the root of the problem. A man can be a shining example of health and fitness and have a spiritual and emotional life that is as desolate as a burned-out inner city.  Adrenaline can temporarily satisfy us, but like many drugs it requires more to get the same effect.  
    It has been said that the constant search for a high is a hedge against boredom, or maybe proof that we are alive in a restricted society.   The only solution, the way off of this treadmill of chasing a high that never was, is to take aim at the pillars of society that keep every citizen in a mortal struggle for survival.  There are enough resources in America to pay everyone a generous living wage, but that does not suit the higher powers as they are afraid it will rob them of their control over the desperate masses who will kill each other to get the best place in the machinery. Churches are not as focused on a man's spiritual health as they are in swelling the numbers in their congregation.  More members bring more money.   With so much emptiness in their lives and with no vision of how to make things better, the perpetual search for a quick fix to make things better is as American as apple pie and just as unhealthy.  It will not be a surprise when future nations without the same poisonous baggage come along to supersede mythical but flawed America.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

 There is no doubt Albert Einstein had a wife and a secretary to remind him to take his heart medication. He had enough going on with the Theory of Relativity and studying Gravitational Waves to tend to the necessities that kept him alive long enough to accomplish what his remarkable brain was capable of producing. All of us at some point could use a helpmate, a partner, a waiter, a cleaner, a social secretary, a bureaucracy cutter, an extra pair of hands, and an extra mind.  If one mind is overwhelmed by the pressures of the world, it is beneficial to have another mind to pick up the slack, as backup, power in reserve.  A second mind can keep us on track, call for reason or calm, but can also incite us to action.  Those who ignore the input of others are destined to become isolated dictators who rule over silenced populations, kings of the wasteland.  The collective knowledge of our fellow men can keep us from making catastrophic mistakes.  It is worth our while to listen.  

Folk wisdom suggests that men are bad listeners and that may be true.  They tend to be single-minded about things and don't always consider all sides.  Maybe that is why many women are not fast shoppers.  There is a time for consideration and a time to act.  Prolonged deliberation promotes frustration and in that state people often make rash and harmful choices.  In our decision-making, all voices, whether they are individuals, companies, or governments, are not equal.  We tend to pay more attention to what has helped us in the past, but this can lead to stagnation, with the helpers wishing to  perpetuate the status quo so they can maintain their position as valued advisors.

Every individual has the potential to bring an unknown universe to another's doorstep. We learn from each other and if we don't we are doomed.  We learn that we can teach one another, defend and protect one another, and if we listen, we will understand that we have basic human desires in common.  There are differences in the way each goes about fulfilling his needs. Individual cultures permit certain things that are forbidden in others, but if we can see beyond these, and not go to war over the details, we can all benefit from the relationship.  

If a scientist has a brilliant idea and shares it with his colleagues, the idea can take wing, but if it goes no farther than him, it risks dying in his own mind. Collaboration and cooperation are the best ways to complete many tasks.  None of the great civilizations would have been built without these pillars, but as high-flying as these pillars seem, they are constructed through the act of one man communicating with another.   The state apparatus of these influential civilizations may have been questionable, based as it still is on versions of slavery, but with reluctant cooperation, advances were and can be made.   Many lives were sacrificed to pull the majority of the world population out of starvation.  There is backsliding and there are leaps forward, but as MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."  With good will and correct action we can steer ourselves in the right direction, but we need to listen to each other to understand the varied colours of the arc and to accept them as being as valid as our own. In silence, ignorance, and rigidity, lies misery.

Like minds can inspire each other to step up to new heights.  Van Gogh and Gauguin entangled their universes and bounced off each other, both coming away altered by the experience.  Each had his own style and palette. They weren't trying to be better than one another, but to show each other what they could do.  It wasn't a competition, a sport that pushes a man beyond what he believes are his physical limits, requiring a winner and a loser, but a game of comparative virtuosity.  The goal was not to win, but to strive to be better, to run faster than before, jump longer and higher, to try for a personal best. 

We don't understand all there is to know about the chemistry of human encounters.   When we see other humans from a distance, we exchange non-verbal signals as they get closer to us, hoping for a non-violent outcome of our impending encounter. When we are a short distance from each other we try to read body language, faces, and intent.  Even closer we might exchange words and odours.  If we don't know the person there may be eye contact and there may be a greeting as we pass. If we do know the person or are intentionally meeting them, there is often some form of physical connection, a handshake, a hug, or even a kiss.  It's in this physical contact, like animals touching noses, or circling nose to tail, that we exchange molecules, perhaps bacteria or viruses, but a physical exchange happens. If we pick up a virus from the other person, something that might not require contact but simply closeness, our well-being can change.  We can bring death to one another.  In every human interaction there is the possibility of gain or pain.  Van Gogh experienced the anguished side of the equation when he cut off his ear after Gauguin abandoned his idea of a community of artists.  Two can be stronger than one, they can stand back to back against the slings and arrows, but they can also destroy each other.Yet someone who opts to be solitary, risks floating off into the clouds like a hallucinating saint with no church to anchor them. 

The common wisdom is that it takes a village to raise a child, but I believe it takes a different type of village to raise an adult.  We never stop learning, and are always touched by the lives we encounter, whether we want to be or not. John Donne understood this when he wrote that "No man is an island entire of itself."  Since we are connected by our common humanity we must learn to give more space to the ideas of others, to listen to considered advice, to remember our history, embrace our divinity, and to act for good when action is necessary.   Separation, isolation, and entrenchment, lead to wars, but communication, tolerance, and understanding, can bring peace.  If we are able to put aside our egos and listen to others, we can arrive at solutions neither of us would have come to alone.  This is not a stand-off compromise, agreeing that one plus one will always equal one plus one, but that one plus one can equal two, lifting both parties to a better and stronger state.  The unity of two heads, two minds, and two hearts, is always better than one head alone in the wilderness.

The message here is a love letter; a thanks and appreciation for all of the souls who touched me, who shared their lives with me, who gave me their sparks of genius and their diseases.  Many are lost but not forgotten, and I treasure all of those communicators who tapped me on the shoulder, and said "Pay attention to me." 

Russia's Nightmare

 "At least we have a roof over our heads."  In rural Russia, where the ceilings of temporary housing disintegrate overhead, and the earth reabsorbs the inadequate building foundations, it is a small but misguided comfort.  There is no money to fix things and the collective apparatus has broken down, so everyone struggles to get by.  It's the best that can be hoped under the circumstances.  Anyone with aspirations has gone to the city.  The people of the land who have scratched out a living for generations, first as serfs to landowners, then on collective farms, are now cut adrift in the middle of nowhere.  The infrastructure that supplies them is rotting and the government hopes these last outposts will disappear when the roof really does fall in.   

When the communists took power in Russia, small landholders were forced into the collective farming system, but when that collapsed it left individuals to whom private property was prohibited, with nothing.  These people were initially robbed of their land, made into slaves of the collective, then thrown out the door when the state collapsed on its imperfect foundations.  There is a generational sadness in the eyes of men and women whose dreams have been reduced to ashes.  Like the rest of the world, they were wrenched from the age of God-sanctioned monarchs by the Godless carnage of the war.   While the west retired to lick its wounds and rebuild, Lenin decided to experiment on Russia by translating Marx's thoughts into single party communism that had nothing to do with democracy.  Lincoln's definition of democracy was "by the people, for the people", but the Russians were only allowed half the cake.  Their government relieved them of the "by the people" burden on the grounds that ignorant people didn't know what was best for them.  Until they are re-educated, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of self governance.  Under another guise, small landholders again became serfs working under a master's whip.  If they didn't carry their weight in the collective they were punished, not with the Tsar's riding crop, but by peer pressure and accusations about sabotaging the entire motherland.  The world would never know the glory of collectivism unless everyone stayed in line. If they stumbled they were traitors to the noble cause. 

Rather than give an opinion on why the communist experiment went wrong, perhaps the best idea is to illustrate one of the many mistakes made by the planners of this new society.  The Russian government wanted to change the way people lived.  Workers shouldn't be at the mercy of capitalist bosses, have their wages reduced or be fired from their jobs by greedy corporate barons.  In a communist brave new world they would be provided with essentials to live a dignified life, including an all-important roof over their heads.  In cities like St. Petersburg, where there had  been a massive influx of the poor in search of work, the government of the day confiscated noble houses and partitioned them into accommodation for families.  When the communists took over, they declared that a person only required 9 square meters to live comfortably.  A few years later this was reduced to 5 square meters, which allowed people to rent a corner of a room.  When there was no more space in converted palatial residences, the government began to construct communal apartments.  They were late in doing so and were desperate to prevent a catastrophic housing crisis, so the buildings were thrown up quickly and as cheaply as possible. Usually these communal blocks were built in newly created satellite villages on the outskirts of cities but they were poorly served by public transit.  Nobody except a bureaucrat had a car.  

On Lenin's orders, the accommodations were to be organized on collective principles.  Each family had its own room, or two if the family was large enough, but the hallway, kitchen, and bathroom belonged to nobody.   Although these common areas should have technically been everyone's responsibility, they were considered nobody's, so if one resident made a mess, nobody should clean up after them.  Notes were posted to remind the delinquent residents that keeping their space clean was their duty to the state, and if they failed to do so, would be reprimanded at the next compulsory tenants meeting.  There were schedules and rules to be sure, but these were for kitchen or bathroom use so everyone wasn't underfoot at the same time, but queues still formed.  Though each family had its own cooker, or as little as a burner on a cooker, there were not enough sinks to go round so dishwashing times had to be staggered.  In the few bathrooms of no-man's land, everyone brought their own toilet paper and their own toilet seat.   The shotgun central hallways in these residences were lined with wardrobes, suitcases, bicycles, and crumbling boxes.  Electricity cables looped across the ceiling. Locks were not allowed on doors.  After all, everyone was part of one happy communist family.  Why would anyone steal from a comrade who was just as badly off as him?  Lenin's objective was to "unite different social groups in one physical space," but it was an idea that seriously underestimated human self-interest.  A doctor who works long hours, with life and death responsibilities, is not going to live comfortably with a drunk who is determined not to work and disrupts the entire group with his brawling and fighting.  Neither one or the other is better off for the experience.   Communism only works for the committed, and there has always been and always will be those who do not agree with the government of the day.

I was a child in the 1950's who grew up in a small frontier town in Canada.  We didn't lack anything, had parents who worked full time, and had a mortgage on our large comfortable house.  There was never any expectation of paying it off. That would only happen years later when all the us children had grown up and moved away.  Two working parents allowed us to have a car and the borrowing power to replace the wood fired heating in the house with a gas furnace that would run as long as we could afford the fuel.  Our childhood friends all lived in the same circumstances and we presumed everyone did.  Very few children lived in apartments.  There were sprawling suburbs for those who didn't want to live in the inner city.  If a family's budget didn't stretch to a house purchase, there were always houses to rent. 

If I compare this to a child growing up in Russia in the 1950's, who lived at the same latitude as me, our lives were very different.  We had neighbours but we did not all live together. Everyone had their own free-standing house on at least a fifty foot private lot, with a front and back garden. If we didn't like our neigbourhood we could move to another one, or to another city.  The government hardly kept track of us except to keep our address current, and we were permitted to live anywhere in the country we wished.  In a wide open and new country like Canada, this gave its citizens a sense of limitless possibilities.  I presumed my Russian brothers lived the same way, but at that age I had little knowledge of how hemmed in and controlled they were.  Russia had the same open spaces and possibilities, but its citizens were not encouraged to be individuals, to rebel, and go exploring the country or the world for themselves.  They had a duty to the motherland that was more important than frivolous voyages of self discovery.

I recently heard an interview with a young woman who had grown up in Yugoslavia.  The Russian ally Tito had been in charge of keeping the country united, but  by the 1960's the cracks were showing.  The young woman's parents had grown up in a society that wholeheartedly subscribed to the Russian version of communism.  Up to that time, the national factions in Yugoslavia had been at each other's throats in centuries-old tribal bickering.  The newly unified country was happy to wear its young socialist identical uniforms and do its part for the glorious nation that would show the world what miracles a communist society could perform.  Things didn't go as planned, and Yugoslavia was marginalized on the world stage.  Years of rote propaganda couldn't hold up an economy that was based more on hope than reality.  When Tito died and Yugoslavia separated into its original tribal units, the parents of the young woman were devastated.  The more European their country became the more they realized they had been made to live and believe in an experiment that was based on a faulty interpretation of Marx, and that they had suffered and sacrificed for nothing.

Although political and economic movements like communism profess to serve the common good, scratch any human being and one will find some self interest.  Everything can't be for the state.  Although it is admirable for a man to  contribute to the community that supports him, he is more than that. He is an individual, and to take that essential state of existence away from him is to do violence to his psyche.  

In the 1950's, European countries and large cities in America also threw up faceless housing for the post war population boom, and most of these buildings were quickly and cheaply constructed, but outside the Soviet Union, families weren't expected to live all together by sets of strict rules and believe the propaganda about sacrifices for the motherland.  Outside Russia, many of these housing projects became slums because they were not owned by the residents but by the government so they were not maintained.  These attempts at social housing using the Russian model failed spectacularly.  In capitalist America the government had better luck subsidizing the construction of individual residences because that's how people preferred to live.

 Half of my family origins are English / Scottish, so because of their immigration, I knew from a very young age that travelling was as easy as buying a ticket and getting on a boat or a plane.  It never entered my mind that this was unusual and that citizens of some countries, those designated a communist, were not allowed the same privileges.  Why would a country lock its citizens behind a wall?   

When I was a young man I drove and hitchhiked through much of Europe, often meeting like-minded souls from other countries, mostly European ones, but also American and Australian.  We had little money and weren't allowed to work in foreign countries, but we had saved money from jobs we had quit when he left home.  We were free spirits who were able and allowed to go wherever we wanted.  I never met a Russian doing the same thing, but then neither did I meet anyone Chinese - if they weren't American Chinese.  China was in the middle of a revolution.  I never met a black from Africa hitchhiking around Europe, though I did meet Arabs from North Africa who had the same urge to explore as I did.  American men were few on the ground because of the Vietnam war, but Russians were nowhere to be seen. I met a professor from Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 who had found his way out for a few days and was on a culture-absorbing rampage through as much of Europe as possible before the iron curtain came down again.

Russians of my postwar generation had already grown up with parents who accepted communism as an everyday fact.  Spiritual life was not allowed unless it was underground, because religion was the opiate of the masses and those who believed in God were victims of a cult of superstition.  Atheism was the official doctrine of the party.  If there ever was a country that needed to provide an opiate for its long-suffering and deluded workers, something to allow them to escape the monotony of their predestined future, it was Russia.   Instead, many Russians tried to forget their grey lives by drowning themselves in cheap vodka.  Besides hockey, drinking was the national sport.  Western society offered every kind of decadent temptation although Westerners knew that the best of these things were available only to the rich.  But they also knew that with good judgement, luck, and hard work, they could become wealthy and have the stuff of their dreams as well, not something that was an option in Russia.  

In poor countries, often the only way to get ahead is by trickery, by cheating, and not playing by the rules.  If a man lets another steal something that is not bolted down before he does, then he is a fool.  The wise man is not the one who listens to his scruples and conscience.  He will go hungry, but the better man is he who got there first to claim the illicit prize.  This moral stance erodes all trust.  When people see the agents of government indulging in corruption, they understand that there are no rules, and that dishonesty wins the day.  It's worrying to think about several generations of Russian people growing up like this, people who do not play straight, who will lie and cheat to get what they want because they have been brutalized and used like lab rats by their governments, and have lost all hope or aspirations for the future.  Having a roof over their head is as much as they can expect.  Instead of dreaming about being head comrade in some state-supported disintegrating factory, they would probably rather be cruising the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a prostitute in the other, doing every decadent thing their government has denied them.  If they or their fathers had been allowed to flirt with these impossible dreams all along, they would have learned how shallow such aspirations are, but it's hard for a man to think deeply about his actions, to question his morals, when every trace of the higher human spirit has been erased from his soul by a failed experiment.

In my view there is still time for Russia to rise from its ashes, learn from her mistakes, and build a truly socialist state that does not strip away personal initiative and allows free movement of its people.  The country has the resources to re-invent itself, but in this century has done nothing but resist the dubious charms of the West and try to resurrect its long lost empire, without offering its people workable solutions for modern life. There is no reason except pigheadedness why Russia doesn't look at her Scandinavian neighbours who have high levels of social satisfaction, and try to save the crumbling motherland  from another bloody revolution, though perhaps things have gone too far by now for reason to prevail.

Post Paradigm

The digital revolution has decimated print media and network television and changed the way we receive information. These days a wise man would be foolish to limit his input to one editor's opinion, to squeeze his information-gathering and entertainment into a time slot dictated by a television executive. The ten o'clock news has fallen by the side of the road along with tree-gobbling newspapers and the dial telephone.  Citizens can record the day's events on mobile phones and post them on the net faster than media empires can move their monstrous behinds. Though the traditional news media have deep archives for context and experts to offer sophisticated analysis, they don't broadcast the news itself, but an ongoing aftermath of opinion, a sort of journalistic masturbation.  Meanwhile the tom-tom drum of worldwide events is available on the screen of a small device that a Saharan camel herder or a Tajikistani nomad has access to.   An African migrant on a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean has a cellphone.

Visual entertainment media is a sector that has grown steadily since the invention of moving pictures.  In a sense, it has been around since men painted on the walls of caves to tell hunting stories.  And thanks to our hunting and survival skills, the moving image has a visceral effect on our attention.  It draws us in like a cobra.  There is a place to contemplate the image of a man on a cross, but big media tempts us with a compelling and lazier way to get the message, by telling the story with heroic characters blazing across a screen.  Media conglomerates have the resources to raise production values far beyond the capabilities of an individual with a mobile phone, so it is more satisfying to watch the big boys.  Unfortunately, the nuances of the lessons are scrubbed away in the process.  Entertainment spectacles encourage us to sit back and take it in, no effort required.  All the work has been done.  Watch, don't think. While we're watching we're offered a special deal on reclining chairs that will allow us to lose the excess weight caused by our sugar addiction and inactivity. Moving visual media fascinates us, whether it is the latest streaming blockbuster, a collection of funny videos, black and white wartime footage, a classic movie, or shakey mobile clips from the streets when revolutions take place.  

More information is available to more people more of the time than ever before, which has caused a leap forward in our understanding of each other. We can see a person in the Siberian countryside preparing vegetable stew, or another in Tokyo making rice cakes.  This low-level information exchange helps us realize that we are not so different from each other no matter what our governments and its media would like us to believe.  

These days, if an alien landed in Africa, the event would be on social media within minutes. When the traditional news outlets pick up the story they will speculate about what it means, but the news of aliens without the analysis would be enough to turn many of our neat scientific theories on their heads.  We know things within minutes of them taking place, and everyone can know them.  Governments may block internet sites but that is as futile as trying to stop the tides.  Information and images leak through barriers in spite of efforts to destroy the evidence.  People have eyes and memories. 

Although the technological revolution has changed the way we see the world, there is also a risk of being plunged back into a new dark age as I described in a previous essay called Book Burning.  We hope that this doomsday scenario never happens as we give thanks to digital mobility and the strides it helps us make in knowing each other on an individual level.  Travel broadens the mind, but when we are not allowed or able to move, we can instantly connect to see how each other live and die in our simple profound universes.  We still need businesses to provide the infrastructure for communication, the smart-phone manufacturers and satellite launchers, but the platform providers who host content should have no political axes to grind.  Currying favour has always been the lifeblood of traditional news peddlers. The freedom of information that the world wide net offers, has ripped the shabby cloak away from the man who would be king, and shown him to be a money-grubbing petty dictator who will sell out to the highest bidder. Give me a phone and a walk through a favourite city, or sit down in a Greek mountain taverna, listen to an interview with a rebel from a previous generation, see a cartoon to make me laugh and remind me how human I am, or watch a refresher on how to fix a bicycle tire, and I can dial the roar of media hysteria back to its proper level. 

Apart from the phone's original function as a connective device that has upended perception, it has also wormed its way into so many aspects of our lives it has become another appendage. Phone books don't exist anymore.  There was once an industry of data collection, printing, delivering, and recycling that has come to a halt.  I no longer have an address book - everything is on a phone and backed up online. I don't need a timer to know when the laundry is finished or an alarm to wake me up.  If I want to make a note of anything my phone is always at hand.  I don't need reference books like encyclopedias, or any books for that matter.  I read my news from a variety of sources without consuming a single tree.   I don't need a bus schedule, plane, or train times as I can follow transport on a digital tracker.  I can take photos and show them to my friends or to the whole world. I can monitor my heartbeat or the intake and burning of calories.  I do my banking online and purchase goods that are delivered to my door. I can translate from Korean to French, check medical results, identify pieces of music, and so much more. The magic in a pocket that digital media offers is a science fiction dream, but for those who cling to the traditional, the beeps, alarms, and ringtones of personal devices are an electronic death knell. The old guard can't accept what history teaches, that once the genie is out of the lamp, he can't be stuffed back in.

The bad news is that we didn't know when we let the genie out of his bottle that he would have a flea in his ear.  Now that flea has grown a million-fold and become an infestation of individual users who believe that their ignorance has the same value as knowledge.  The algorithms that are programmed into hosting sites cater to individual users by suggesting content that is similar to the user's viewing choices, so will show only that to the viewer and leave aside the larger picture.  This has created a society of individual insects without the sophisticated organizational skills of a honeybee, who are more like wasps who will attack and dismember each other. They have no group-massage instinct toward the greater good, only their individual survival.  The Internet brings a unique and beneficial connectivity to our hive, but we must be on guard against the deadly wasps in their single poisonous nests.