We (our nation and our world) need three things, which are intertwined:
Commitment to the Truth:
Truth has a very high value; we should recognize this fact. Truth multiplies the power of groups, because individuals can rely on the information they receive from others without the inefficiency of questioning the motives of others. With truthful communications, groups can operate as a single organism, collecting and processing information no single individual could collect and process alone.
Truth is more than facts, and more than a collection of facts. Our presidential campaigns bombard us with huge numbers of facts in attempts to convince us to vote for their candidates. They purport to tell us the Truth, but they carefully lead us away from facts that might weaken their candidates' positions. We should not stand for this. The time before elections should be a nationwide discussion about what is True, with every side willing to concede points (where warranted) to others in a quest to determine where we are and where we should go.
This discussion necessarily requires that we accept that people can honestly disagree about important issues. In fact, Truth is subjective. What I feel is True may not be what you feel is True. What I feel is True today may not be what I felt was True yesterday, or tomorrow. But what is important is that when we interact with other people, we communicate Truthfully about what we know and what we feel. And the fact that our own knowledge and feelings change over time should help us understand that someone else's differing perception of Truth doesn't make them evil, or even a bad person; they're just different. If we can convince them that our perception of Truth is superior to their perception, great. But if they manage to convince us, we need to admit it. In few cases will either perception be either fully correct or fully incorrect; the full Truth lies outside either perception, waiting to be more fully uncovered.
The object is not to define a static, objective Truth that all can agree on; the important thing is that all parties be committed to the search, and honest in communicating what they find.
The second thing we need is Faith. We need Faith that Truth is our friend. Too often we are afraid to tell the Truth, or know the Truth, or seek the Truth, for fear of the consequences. Faith is the confidence that we'll be OK without depending on the status quo. My wife, a statistician, is fond of saying the most important factor in predicting whether you'll be alive tomorrow is whether you're alive today. The reason you're alive today is that, overall, the things that led you to where you are now have kept you alive. You have a lifelong record of survival. There are any number of things in your past that could have led to your demise, but you have avoided them all. That's a high recommendation for keeping on doing what you're doing.
This thing about committing yourself to Truth is pretty threatening. You got to where you are based on a set of assumptions (which may have change quite a bit through the years) about what is important, what is True, what's, what's wrong, what's OK, and what's not OK. And when these assumptions are challenged, you have a choice: you can either be open to change, or you can defend them. It's often safer to defend them. Change is a threat to your survival, because what you perceive before you change has been successful in keeping you alive. That's why Faith is important. You have to have Faith in the Truth in order to seek Truth. And you can't be committed to Truth without seeking it.
Trust is the third component to this triad. We need to trust others. If we're confident others are committed to Truth, trusting them is simple. And that's another reason for being committed to Truth ourselves; others need to be able to trust US.
Trusting doesn't require us to accept as fact everything anyone else tells us. If someone tells me that Vitamin C can prevent cancer, I, frankly, wouldn't believe it. But I should be able to trust that the other person believes that it does. And I don't necessarily need to get into a discussion with that person about whether it's true; that discussion may not be worth my time. But I, and we as a society, shouldn't condone people saying that Vitamin C prevents cancer if they don't actually believe it themselves. But I think we tolerate this time type of misrepresentation all the time, in others, and in ourselves. And we shouldn't.
When I criticize toleration of behavior, I want to be clear about the danger of branding people as 'bad'. I believe we're all a mixture of admirable ("good") and inadmirable ("bad") qualities, and the distribution of these qualities in us change with time. The fact that I lied once, or perhaps lied a lot, doesn't make me an incorrigible liar from that point on. A person who is untrustworthy at one time, or about one thing, isn't necessarily untrustworthy about everything, or even that one thing all the time. Who among us hasn't learned from a mistake?
We shouldn't tolerate dishonesty, but we need to be willing to risk loss by sometimes erring on the side of trusting too much, rather than playing it safe and never trusting anyone who has let us (or others) down in the past. This is another example of how Faith is important in our lives.
So there you have it: We need a commitment to Truth, because that allows groups to function efficiently and cooperatively. We need Faith that this commitment to Truth will benefit us all in the end. And we need Trust to take advantage of the benefits Truth provides.
So ends my first post on my Philosophy.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
So far, good news on the value of the dollar...
A brief followup on the 9/29/08 post:
The dollar has risen in value in the past 2 weeks. Only 9/29/08 it was worth 0.695362 euros; by 10/10/08 it had climbed to 0.742335 euros, which is as high as it has been since the first part of 2007.
But we should still pay close attention to the value of the dollar. When it drops, expect interest rates to climb. And, with a 10 Trillion dollar debt, high interest rates will be devestating to our federal budget.
One other note: the current economic crisis has caused people to seek the security of Treasury notes and bonds, which has the effect of reducing the interest rate the government pays to borrow money. So it creates a short-term advantage to the federal budget. But it also means that money is less available to commercial operations (can you say 'credit crunch'?) so it's not a long-term solution.
The dollar has risen in value in the past 2 weeks. Only 9/29/08 it was worth 0.695362 euros; by 10/10/08 it had climbed to 0.742335 euros, which is as high as it has been since the first part of 2007.
But we should still pay close attention to the value of the dollar. When it drops, expect interest rates to climb. And, with a 10 Trillion dollar debt, high interest rates will be devestating to our federal budget.
One other note: the current economic crisis has caused people to seek the security of Treasury notes and bonds, which has the effect of reducing the interest rate the government pays to borrow money. So it creates a short-term advantage to the federal budget. But it also means that money is less available to commercial operations (can you say 'credit crunch'?) so it's not a long-term solution.
Kitchen table conversations
The presidential candidates and pundits refer to families getting together for conversations 'around the kitchen table' to figure out how they can cut back on expenditures. But the solution to our current economic crisis really involves raising a different subject in these family conversations: "How can we help be part of the solution to the problem?"
Recent generations have been taught to think of individuals and families as 'consumers'. When you go to work, either as an employee or a businessperson, you're considered a producer, but as soon as you get home, you're merely considered 'a consumer'. This unhelpful dichotomy needs to change. People at home do more than consume, and they have an important role to play when they're not consuming. (The idea that they are literally 'nothing if not consumers' is extremely dangerous, since overconsumption is a key cause of most of the problems the world faces.)
Back to the kitchen table conversation: This should not be presented as a negative thing: "What do we have to give up?", but rather as a more general, and possibly positive "What do we do in this situation?" This can include cutting back consumption, but can also include "What can we do to help?" Patriotism is love of country, and when someone or something you love is in trouble, you look for ways to help, even if these actions require sacrifice. Knowing you are part of the solution can be far more rewarding than hedonistic consuming. People and families can endure much more hardship when they consider themselves helping to build (or rebuild) something important. Our leaders need to enlist the power of American families and citizens to contribute something other than taxes to our society. And leaders should not consider tax breaks the only way to solicit this response.
I'm really thinking about one particular way American families can assist in the economic recovery: 'buy American' or, better yet, 'buy local'. Money spend on domestic products is more likely to stay in the domestic economy than money spent on foreign goods. Money that stays in the domestic economy helps business after business (and thus employee after employee) keep going, and that's what we need.
I realize that American goods are generally significantly more expensive than foreign goods, and therefore 'buying American' necessarily means people can't buy as much as they could if they bought cheaper foreign goods. But there is a significant psychological advantage to viewing the issue as making a positive decision to make things better, rather than a negative decision just to reduce expenditures in order to survive.
We really lost an opportunity last Spring to make this point at the time the 'economic stimulus' checks went out. People should have been encouraged to consider how long their money would stay in the domestic economy when using this windfall income.
One last point: there are somethings national leaders really can't say. I suspect the President can't say 'buy American' because other countries would react negatively. "Protectionism" is a dirty word. Other countries rely on the American market consuming what is produced overseas, and they wouldn't like to hear American leaders interfering with this process.
But at some point citizens need to take care of their own countries. We are not sheep that are led entirely by government tax policies. Democracies are based upon citizen participation, and participation is not just a matter of voting whenever elections occur. Yes, we are "consumers", and we are "voters", but we are not just these things. Our nation's future depends on people adopting a broader view of themselves and each other.
Recent generations have been taught to think of individuals and families as 'consumers'. When you go to work, either as an employee or a businessperson, you're considered a producer, but as soon as you get home, you're merely considered 'a consumer'. This unhelpful dichotomy needs to change. People at home do more than consume, and they have an important role to play when they're not consuming. (The idea that they are literally 'nothing if not consumers' is extremely dangerous, since overconsumption is a key cause of most of the problems the world faces.)
Back to the kitchen table conversation: This should not be presented as a negative thing: "What do we have to give up?", but rather as a more general, and possibly positive "What do we do in this situation?" This can include cutting back consumption, but can also include "What can we do to help?" Patriotism is love of country, and when someone or something you love is in trouble, you look for ways to help, even if these actions require sacrifice. Knowing you are part of the solution can be far more rewarding than hedonistic consuming. People and families can endure much more hardship when they consider themselves helping to build (or rebuild) something important. Our leaders need to enlist the power of American families and citizens to contribute something other than taxes to our society. And leaders should not consider tax breaks the only way to solicit this response.
I'm really thinking about one particular way American families can assist in the economic recovery: 'buy American' or, better yet, 'buy local'. Money spend on domestic products is more likely to stay in the domestic economy than money spent on foreign goods. Money that stays in the domestic economy helps business after business (and thus employee after employee) keep going, and that's what we need.
I realize that American goods are generally significantly more expensive than foreign goods, and therefore 'buying American' necessarily means people can't buy as much as they could if they bought cheaper foreign goods. But there is a significant psychological advantage to viewing the issue as making a positive decision to make things better, rather than a negative decision just to reduce expenditures in order to survive.
We really lost an opportunity last Spring to make this point at the time the 'economic stimulus' checks went out. People should have been encouraged to consider how long their money would stay in the domestic economy when using this windfall income.
One last point: there are somethings national leaders really can't say. I suspect the President can't say 'buy American' because other countries would react negatively. "Protectionism" is a dirty word. Other countries rely on the American market consuming what is produced overseas, and they wouldn't like to hear American leaders interfering with this process.
But at some point citizens need to take care of their own countries. We are not sheep that are led entirely by government tax policies. Democracies are based upon citizen participation, and participation is not just a matter of voting whenever elections occur. Yes, we are "consumers", and we are "voters", but we are not just these things. Our nation's future depends on people adopting a broader view of themselves and each other.
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