That to be elected and stay elected in politics to any full-time position requires the suspension of any ethics or good sense a person may possess. Even those who begin political careers with the best intentions and have measurable abilities that would make them successful in any field soon realize that the skills required to succeed in politics are not those required outside politics. Explains that, while competition in the marketplace improves quality or methods to market, competition in politics does just the opposite; as the only improvements take place in the process of doing bad things: lying, cheating, manipulating, stealing, and killing. The price of political services is constantly increasing, whether in tax money paid or in the bribes owed for protection (also known as campaign contributions). There is no obsolescence, planned or otherwise.
And as Hayek famously argued, in politics, the worst get on top. And there is no accountability: the higher the office, the more criminal wrongdoing a person can get away with.
Thus it becomes "a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the State," wrote Mencken. Democracy makes it possible for the demagogue to inflame the childish imagination of the masses, "by virtue of his talent for nonsense" using the methods well established by their religions. The king can do the same thing in a monarchy but only by virtue of his birth.
In stark contrast, in the natural order, it is "raw material, production, and voluntary exchange that are the ultimate sources of human civilization." This natural order, can only be maintained by a natural elite, which would come by the positions of "natural authority" not by election as in the case of democracy, or birth as in the case of monarchy, but by their "superior achievements, of wealth, wisdom, bravery or a combination thereof." This is just the opposite of what is described as a characteristic of democracy through representation.
Instead, representative democracy affords the opportunity for anyone to pursue politics as a career. There is no need for the masses to recognize a person as "wise" or "successful," as the natural order would require. Nor does one have to be born into the ruling family, as in the case of monarchy.
There may be politicians that pursue elected office for the money, but many elected officials are already wealthy by most people's standards. What makes the wealthy and otherwise successful want to hold office? Is it, as in The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, that politicians since "Caesar and Napoleon have been driven by overweening egos and an insatiable hunger for public adulation"?
The work of psychologist Abraham Maslow may provide an understanding as to why even successful entrepreneurs would seek public office. Maslow is famous for his "hierarchy of needs" theory that is taught in most management classes in schools and universities.
The theory is generally presented visually as a five steps stairs, with the lowest or most basic human need — physiological need — shown as a layer along the foot of the stairs. Maslow's view was that the basic human needs — thirst, hunger, breathing — must be satisfied before humans could accomplish or worry about anything else. The next tranche on the stairs, shown on top of the physiological need, is the safety need. After satisfying thirst and hunger, humans are concerned about their continued survival. If a man is constantly worried about being eaten by a tiger, he doesn't concern himself with much else.
The next layer presented on Maslow's stairs is the belonging need, which lies just above safety need. After the satisfaction of the two lower needs — physiological and safety — a person seeks friendships, companionship, and community. Once this need is satisfied, according to Maslow, humans seek esteem. These first four needs were considered deficit needs. If a person is lacking, there is a motivation to fill that need. Once the particular need is filled, the motivation abates. This makes these needs different than the need at the top of Maslow's stairs, the need for self-actualization. The need for self-actualization is never satisfied, and Maslow referred to it as a being need — be all you can be.
Thus, humans continually strive to satisfy their needs, and as the more basic needs are satisfied, humans move up the stairs, to satisfy higher-level needs. Of course, different humans achieve different levels, and it was Maslow's view that only two percent of humans become self-actualizing. Now we see the qualities displayed by virtually all politicians in democracy: the constant need for status and recognition, because democracy is open to any and all who can get elected — either through connections, personality, or personal wealth — it is a social system where leadership positions can become a hotbed for sociopaths. Maslow's self-actualizing man or woman will not have an interest in politics. But those stuck on the need for esteem are drawn to it like flies to dung.
The Catholic church and other Christian churches have over years educated political and intellectual elites in schools and universities to satsify their self actualisation needs to control folk masses and the trade between them for the own economical benefits and privileges. This acknowledges that the desire to manipulate opinion can stem from the motive of seeking to benefit self actualization of the church rather than the society.
With leadership in such dysfunctional hands, it is no wonder. "In comparison to the nineteenth century, the cognitive prowess of the political and intellectual elites and the quality of public education have declined," "And the rates of crime, structural unemployment, welfare dependency, parasitism, negligence, recklessness, incivility, psychopathy, and religious fanatism have increased."
So while the electorate recognizes that they are electing at best incompetents and at worst crooks, the constant, naïve, prodemocracy mantra is that "we just need to elect the right people."
But the "right people" are not (and will not be) running for office. Instead, we will continue to have "the average" as " work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying."
The assumption of the hierarchy is that the lower needs have to be met first, and are preconditions for the realization of the higher needs, although a temporary insufficiency in the lower levels will not undo the aspirations of the higher levels. Conversely, someone who normally has problems satisfying lower level needs, will not find the resources necessary to focus on higher level needs.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
I know that anything I say or write can be used against me.
To understand fundamental causes of political development, we need to frankly and explicitly include and evaluate innate organic forces in humans. These forces help to generate and give direction to development, whether peaceful or violent. I suggest that, in addition to the desire to survive, which mankind share with all forms of life, there are innate metasurvival needs-notably dignity and power. These become active when survival is assured and when minimally solidary communities have been established. They then help determine the direction in which political institutions evolve.
On one hand here is a planet with threats to the lives of ourselves and all species everywhere on the rise. On the other hand here are the sciences, to which we look for answers on how to meet the threats. To act effectively within our dwindling time frame for action, a key strategic problem is to find an inspirational beginning place from which to move ahead.
What if over one hundred years ago, KSP was already there before everybody else not only anticipating chaos theory but also uncovering the “self-organizing processes” that only in our time are being considered the completing principle for evolution theory at all levels?
This is the challenge of defining the human ideal— or the normative end goal we seek to evoke and nurture as parents and as teachers in our functional but largely unconscious task of shaping the future. This is the context of the larger meaning for many years of identifying the normative characteristics of the self-actualizers. It is also what is newly meaningful about the life structural placement for all of us within the shift from defense, to growth, to motivation as the central drivers for personal, economic, political, and cultural evolution.
In constructing everything from houses and gardens to cities, our task is automatically shaped by the models for a range of ideal forms built up over thousands of years of the human discovery of what works best for the peculiar type of being what we are on this particular kind of planet.
Now let us try to construct a theory of evolution with no more sense of the practicalities of the norm and the ideal than a band of aliens newly dumped upon a strange planet. It is as though we were trying to tack together a house according to whatever the wind blew our way—with the consequence we shall see, when I get to more of the real rather than the fictional, of a basement on top and the roof underfoot.
The importance of self-organizing processes at all levels of evolution are based on genes and environment as the sole shapers for evolution, however we must add of a “ third factor,” which is the will—or for both the impact of the mind of the human agent on the shaping of our planetary destiny. So we may see here how in retrospect one can make a strong case for the use of these three pioneers for humanistic, transpersonal, and positive psychology as exemplars in launching a new move to build a “full spectrum, action-oriented” theory of human evolution. I know I speak for everyone who has ever been a student in saying it is people like this, who make life more larger than politics, to bring science— and more importantly the work of science— to life where it can otherwise lie there not only mystifying but dead and boring on the textbook page.
Long familiar to historians, sociologists, political scientists, and the working journalist is the control of most of us by all the hang-overs from the past, that go by the name “the power elite”, characterized by the control of both the masses and a widespread, passive and compliant academic elite through the possession of television, publishing, and practically all other media by an economic and political power elite, which finds in old style survival-of-the fittest, selfishness, that legitimizing or excuse it prefers from and pays for in science as abused by non scientific scientists.
It is vital to emphasize that, stylistic expressions of this kind have been used ever since, to prevent the plain speaking that might otherwise expose and arouse those fresh to science and still unintimidated to rise up against all that presently imprisons the mind of our species by religious indoctrination. It is this skillfully hidden and invariably conservative tandem power behind the scene that not only managed to either bury or hamstring the liberal social aspiration of the 1960s over the closing decades of the 20th century into now. With a realistic sense of what this new move is up against, then, what or who can we to turn to for the shock and the jolt of a new source of vision and an exemplar sufficiently effective to tip the balance of power back our way— which is to say to progressive science with its inevitable link to progressive politics, progressive economics, and progressive education? Enlightenment was and is yet a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or its traditions.
Voltaire was exceedingly vocal against the Church, openly writing how it had been the "consistently implacable enemy of progress, decency, humanity and rationality," and how it had been the Church's interest to "keep people as ignorant and submissive as children. "Écrasez l' infime!" "(Crush the horrible thing!)". The latter because of the way science is abused by politics and economics to promote the “survival of the fittest” religions rather than mutual aid and co-operation for the common goodness of mankind. It must be made apparent in brain and in mind that this complex for education and learning, to run an election by natural selection, embeds the wisdom of past, present, and future in the grounding reality of the full wonder of nature in applied politics and its related economy.
For the right to be human and practice human rights and take action and control, because democracy is open to any and all who can get elected; "we just need to elect the right people." Nature is seen as a complex of interacting laws governing the universe. The individual human being, as part of that system, is designed to act rationally. If free to exercise their reason, people are naturally good and will act to further the happiness of others. Accordingly, both human righteousness and happiness requires freedom from needless restraints, such as many of those imposed by a state under church control.
On one hand here is a planet with threats to the lives of ourselves and all species everywhere on the rise. On the other hand here are the sciences, to which we look for answers on how to meet the threats. To act effectively within our dwindling time frame for action, a key strategic problem is to find an inspirational beginning place from which to move ahead.
What if over one hundred years ago, KSP was already there before everybody else not only anticipating chaos theory but also uncovering the “self-organizing processes” that only in our time are being considered the completing principle for evolution theory at all levels?
This is the challenge of defining the human ideal— or the normative end goal we seek to evoke and nurture as parents and as teachers in our functional but largely unconscious task of shaping the future. This is the context of the larger meaning for many years of identifying the normative characteristics of the self-actualizers. It is also what is newly meaningful about the life structural placement for all of us within the shift from defense, to growth, to motivation as the central drivers for personal, economic, political, and cultural evolution.
In constructing everything from houses and gardens to cities, our task is automatically shaped by the models for a range of ideal forms built up over thousands of years of the human discovery of what works best for the peculiar type of being what we are on this particular kind of planet.
Now let us try to construct a theory of evolution with no more sense of the practicalities of the norm and the ideal than a band of aliens newly dumped upon a strange planet. It is as though we were trying to tack together a house according to whatever the wind blew our way—with the consequence we shall see, when I get to more of the real rather than the fictional, of a basement on top and the roof underfoot.
The importance of self-organizing processes at all levels of evolution are based on genes and environment as the sole shapers for evolution, however we must add of a “ third factor,” which is the will—or for both the impact of the mind of the human agent on the shaping of our planetary destiny. So we may see here how in retrospect one can make a strong case for the use of these three pioneers for humanistic, transpersonal, and positive psychology as exemplars in launching a new move to build a “full spectrum, action-oriented” theory of human evolution. I know I speak for everyone who has ever been a student in saying it is people like this, who make life more larger than politics, to bring science— and more importantly the work of science— to life where it can otherwise lie there not only mystifying but dead and boring on the textbook page.
Long familiar to historians, sociologists, political scientists, and the working journalist is the control of most of us by all the hang-overs from the past, that go by the name “the power elite”, characterized by the control of both the masses and a widespread, passive and compliant academic elite through the possession of television, publishing, and practically all other media by an economic and political power elite, which finds in old style survival-of-the fittest, selfishness, that legitimizing or excuse it prefers from and pays for in science as abused by non scientific scientists.
It is vital to emphasize that, stylistic expressions of this kind have been used ever since, to prevent the plain speaking that might otherwise expose and arouse those fresh to science and still unintimidated to rise up against all that presently imprisons the mind of our species by religious indoctrination. It is this skillfully hidden and invariably conservative tandem power behind the scene that not only managed to either bury or hamstring the liberal social aspiration of the 1960s over the closing decades of the 20th century into now. With a realistic sense of what this new move is up against, then, what or who can we to turn to for the shock and the jolt of a new source of vision and an exemplar sufficiently effective to tip the balance of power back our way— which is to say to progressive science with its inevitable link to progressive politics, progressive economics, and progressive education? Enlightenment was and is yet a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or its traditions.
Voltaire was exceedingly vocal against the Church, openly writing how it had been the "consistently implacable enemy of progress, decency, humanity and rationality," and how it had been the Church's interest to "keep people as ignorant and submissive as children. "Écrasez l' infime!" "(Crush the horrible thing!)". The latter because of the way science is abused by politics and economics to promote the “survival of the fittest” religions rather than mutual aid and co-operation for the common goodness of mankind. It must be made apparent in brain and in mind that this complex for education and learning, to run an election by natural selection, embeds the wisdom of past, present, and future in the grounding reality of the full wonder of nature in applied politics and its related economy.
For the right to be human and practice human rights and take action and control, because democracy is open to any and all who can get elected; "we just need to elect the right people." Nature is seen as a complex of interacting laws governing the universe. The individual human being, as part of that system, is designed to act rationally. If free to exercise their reason, people are naturally good and will act to further the happiness of others. Accordingly, both human righteousness and happiness requires freedom from needless restraints, such as many of those imposed by a state under church control.
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