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September, 2022:

Is Peaceful Political Justice Possible?

Peace, something which statistically has been hard to accomplish for any duration. Let’s look at it from a different viewpoint – what drives war from a democratic government viewpoint, comparing with dictator driven, and all the way down to the individual.

My last blog talked about the bully and how his/her insecurity is resulting in well, bullying and physical attacks. Some groups of people have adopted the viewpoint that the individual is nothing, maybe from thinking he’s too weak, and the group is everything.

It’s pretty clear that a group of people can generally survive better as a team, sharing duties and being able to accomplish more together. Just the simple increase from one to two people makes many tasks so much easier and certainly allows for it to be more interesting or pleasant.

If we scan to the war Vladimir Putin started and see how the Russians military is suffering as of this writing, you can see that one immediate problem is their supply chain. It is very visible, and easily attacked. We can look at US and China navy’s and see their supply problems are equally challenging.

This gave me a thought, what if we stop wars the way they are being fought. Because until man can be cleared from his pathetically irrational behavior to solve his problems, we are stuck with them for now. What we need is a solution which does not look on an individual country but on all countries.

The primary barrier appears to be something very basic – communication. The ability to communicate towards a solution where everyone wins. And though wars do create apparent benefits they are not long lived. They are not sustainable.

Why do we have individual countries, areas such as states within the US, for example, where different policies apply.

I believe the basic of that is related to wanting to survive well. In an apartment building some might make enough noise to keep others from sleeping. One party feels that loud music is how to loose stress from the daily grind, while another prefers to just sleep.

One might feel that cows are sacred animals, while others don’t eat during some parts of the year, while others cannot allow a drawing of their spiritual leader. Those are examples of attempts to increase their survival potential.

We are all of us just trying survive the best we know how.

Most people unfortunately appears to be completely and utterly without any practical knowledge of what is or is not pro-survival. When someone steps up and says something often or loudly enough, it will convince some that this is a way to improve their living conditions. To increase their survival potential or identify some injustice being committed.

Too often they lead to what I call unusual solutions, they are not good, standard (and workable) solutions that takes everyone into account. They cause NEW problems for others. For a solution to be good it must be MORE beneficial for ALL than destructive.

Of course who today think of anyone but themselves?

Life is being seen and promoted as something difficult and hard to understand – and nothing could be further from the truth!

But hang on here! If it is so easy why do so many have such a hard time?!?

Yes, why indeed?

What does it take for a person, a family, a group, the city, county, state, country and planet to flourish and prosper? Why are there such disparities (difference in quality) between them?

I’m sorry to say it first comes down to personal integrity. Because if you don’t have it you will not only loose sight and forget what that is but you will hold yourself back as you have lost your self respect.

Then caring and having compassion for your fellow man (as in mankind). Because if you don’t care and are not able to be compassionate then not only will the person you are supposedly helping notice that your help is not sincere, your help will not be very helpful.

Next comes a tolerance to operate even if there’s a lot of confusion. You have to be able to deal with those random particles or you will get confused yourself and take wrong actions.

Now you will need to have some understanding and be able to acquire knowledge even though you might have an innate (built-in) knowledge already, you need to be open and willing to learn, to observe others and the environment. Without proper observations you are not operating with the current situation and the outcome will be random.

These points are not trying to say that you should stop helping or anything, these are guidelines for how to do it more successfully.

Lastly, if you can look on any person, regardless of who they are or what they have done, and be WILLING to give them care and compassion, now you can look beyond their deeds, their crimes and shortcomings and evaluate what a proper path would look like for them. For it is not correct to blindly do nice things for someone actively engaged in some criminal activity. But they do need our help.

They must first stop and come clean if they are to have any chance. They have to come to realize the errors of their way, to see what the urge was to commit their crime, what problem it supposedly solved. Only then will they be able to come up the conditions.

OK, so we need to be able to rehabilitate people. This in essence means getting them their self respect back. Which only they can give to themselves. We can accept them, but they need to say “I’m once again standing tall and able to face the world, their group, their family and feel not good but great about it. Because this will be a great burden lifted off their shoulders.

Once we can give this priceless gift to ourselves and each other we can truly move towards peace everywhere.

That adventure starts with maybe a small group that is successful. Others who notices and inquire how come they are doing so well. Then others adopting their methods and policies, repeating over and over until whole nations can walk tall.

When people see something that is working well, something that is not what we today call political, but something that helps them, then we will be well on our way. Politics have a bad reputation because people are not taking part.

When people are not taking some active role, especially voting, then you are telling the elected that you don’t care. Even if you only have one vote. It is not about if your vote will change the outcome it is you telling the elected that you better pay attention or you will be voted out next election.

Of course if enough people feel the same way then you help making a change.

Today with societies being well established and not easily changed, it will take a big disaster for people to not only wanting to change things but to agree how. The politicians role is to work things out in such a way that as many as possible get the best possible improvements.

And yes, it does require more integrity than less in the involved.

If you don’t vote you know they don’t care what you think.

Let’s circle back to wars. Neighbors might conduct some limited war against each other, generally it does not get too out of control with the military called in to stop the unrest. States certainly made war as in our civil war. Countries have been and are conducting war, whatever they call it.

These wars are started by individuals.

Individuals, in the case of countries, where they have the power to call men to war against others. But why are they even calling for war? Something is obviously wrong, at least in their mind. Look at Putin, his motivations might be to be the big ruler that made Russia great again as in days when they indeed controlled much more land than presently.

How about the probably more than 100,000 men, women, children and animals that have been killed and injured during this war. That is a horrific number, mostly caused by one single person.

Russia due to their climate have a harder time to growing food than many other countries. One solution has been to conquer neighboring countries and take food from them. With the fall of Soviet Union a number of these countries managed to leave Russia.

Russia has been made up by over a dozen different countries and is now called the Russian Federation. Putin has done a decent job of moving Russia forward but began implementing a number of changes to laws which once again prohibits disagreeing with the government (around 2005 I think).

Before this Russians enjoyed a high level of freedom similar to ours.

Unfortunately, due to centuries of hardship Russia is a very corrupt country. The corruption is on every level, and each level take “their” cut. In the end financing is not reaching where it is supposed to. The corruption is a direct result of living conditions so bad you have to cheat the system to stay alive.

This is one of the fundamental flaws in their “system” which stopped them from being able to simply walk in and conquer Ukraine’s capitol Kiev. The volunteer soldiers were supposed to earn money, even good money, but are not getting paid. Unable to send money back to their families. Why?

Each level taking “their” cut. In the end nothing is left for the guy actually doing the work. This has eaten its way into every part of the Russian society.

If you were to take my suggestions for having more success in life and apply that to the Russian situation, you can see it is an uphill battle. [Now I do understand there are underground Russians sabotaging Putins war efforts by blowing up supply trains (Russia is primarily using trains for their military supply lines) and other efforts to bankrupt the war and ultimately bring a stop to Putting one way or another.

Civil unrest comes from the people not being able to survive.

In Russia many top oligarchs (the richest business people) have suddenly had incidents such as fallen out of the 6th floor window in a hospital, being blown up when their car exploded and so on. What they had in common was not agreeing with the war as this is being very costly for them and so they speak up.

The Russian government did not even tell the Russian soldiers where they were going or why.

This should give some indications, and just touching the surface, as to how things can go here if our democracy fails.

Whatever you think is wrong with anything here in the US, it cannot be compared to how it is now in mother Russia. If you are any kind of free thinker you would be concerned about some nosy busybody reporting you for something, probably not true, which you would suffer for whether real or imagined.

Imagine not having freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, speech, religion and so on. Where at anytime they might come for you and you had little recourse. Imagine how it would be to live with a constant worry, or fear, of someone reporting you for anything.

This is one of the great things with our Constitution, the land of the free! If you have never lived outside that freedom on a daily basis it is not obvious what that does to you mentally and physically. You reach a point where you no longer care. You can’t afford to care to keep some semblance of life. Your life is built on one loss after another.

This is actually what is at play with the attack on Congress. It might seem like a horrible injustice if an election is stolen from you, but compared to a dictatorship it is NOTHING.

And it is possible that the democrats had an election stolen just a few cycles ago in Florida. It was settled legally. No violence. And our social experiment rolled on to see another day.

Once you seize control illegally, very few people who are willing to be violent, and my guess is none, are fully aware of where that road leads to. I bet none has lived in Russia or under any other long term dictatorship. The common dull look in their eyes, not daring to get excited should it too be removed.

Imagine being a child under parents that think you are a problem and a bad slave. No love, no care, no affection. Not allowed to do anything really, just expected to be silent and invisible. Beaten regularly and told how lucky you are. If you survive mentally you are planning your escape. Do you think a country can be the country of the free, of We the People, under anything but a republic?

The Right to Post and Not Socialize

The world is a moving target. New ideas comes up all the time, some are great in forwarding our survival potential while others are not offering much and can even be counter survival.

We’ve recently seen how some were forced to socialize with fellow employees after work or get fired while others feel they have the freedom of speech threatened if they can’t express whatever they want wherever they are. I’m going to express my views on the above and how it’s easy for me to make the right decision.

I start with looking at the intention behind a communication. Some people manages to make you feel uneasy using words that does not necessarily sound, well, bad. This is where I ask myself and often the person – What was the intention with that communication?

That tends to instantly make it obvious to me that the other person is indeed trying to squash my survival potential. Or, it might just show the the amount of insecurity the other person is suffering from.

When someone lack understanding of a subject or person(s) they may resort to attacking others to cover up their own insecurity. Bullies are prime examples of this. If they did not feel insecure there would little reason to belittle others. The instinct is to shift attention away from themselves so nobody notices. And if people, especially kids, were not so quick in making fun of others the world would have fewer bullies.

Children are typically not very educated and lack answers to a lot of things, so it’s not all that surprising that they ridicule each others. When I grew up one learned to grow a “thick skin” and not take things so personally. Why take to heart things people say that are clearly not me?

Have you noticed how friends and family can hurt you more than strangers? You have many more agreements and often depend on them and any disagreement is a larger threat to your survival than a what a stranger says who don’t know you from a hole in the wall.

These days there is definitely a generation of people coming into adulthood who grew up with little tolerance of anything not absolutely clean and socially perfect. And though these are not bad things in and of themselves, they tend to come with a limited ability to deal with things that are different, or could have a single bacteria. In other words low tolerance.

Wanting a perfect world might be a perfectly valid goal – but should not come at the expense of not being able to deal with anything out of the ordinary. I call this having a lowered survival potential.

A high survival potential means being able to deal with a large variety of things. Have little to do with what you desire or want. Simply, can you handle what is going on in your environment?

One should be able to sit back and view the world from three feet behind it and simply observe.

Free from social ideas and pressures one has a vantage point to observe things that might not be clear when being in the middle of it. This is a simple yet very powerful ability to assume. From here one can make decisions that benefits more than it hurts (if it hurts at all).

Having a good understanding of people you can see what is going on and come up with a way to improve the condition they are in without getting bent out of shape because they said, for example, mean things.

I grew up intensely interested in people and what makes them tick.

In fact I spent my years up to 18 studying them to learn as much as I could about people. After having satisfied that I decided to observe myself in different situations and how I handle life. With that I arrived at a very stable place where nobody could easily shake my certainty. I discovered that I had a much higher survival potential than most. (I was able to make decisions that had a high level of success and it brought me a lot of happiness.) Unfortunately I also became arrogant which was not helpful.

It was not until I realized that compassion was something that helped others at a level much higher than just my own survival. I really should have learned that lesson sooner but I was happily “coasting” through life and livingness with few cares.

Fortunately I arrived at realizing that my happiness depended on others happiness and that to be able to help others you had to be able to equally carry a big stick and have a lot of compassion for your fellow man. (Yes, I know that this is not politically correct and I should say person. But in my eyes mankind means all people not just men. And certainly mankind would not survive (biologically) as a species with only men, or women for that matter.)

OK, looking at being compassionate, the ability to look at people with love and a desire for them to succeed and win in spite of. That clearly does not mean help a person committing crime or other actions that lowers people ability to survive. So where is the line, the line that separates pro-survival and counter-survival?

In actuality it is rather simple – does that action help or hinders the greatest number?

For example, if someone is about to blow up a building with people in it and the only way you can prevent that from happening is to kill the person about to do so, that is pro-survival. Sitting back and while in disbelief and horror and simply let him do so would be counter-survival. Taking the risk of personal injury while attempting to stop him is your decision. But doing so could be something you would do because of personal integrity.

Personal integrity is a key ingredient in having a happy life.

Many have lost track of what that means, often because no or few examples was present while you grew up. Life can be a jungle, where life can appear to have little value. We do have an innate (built-in) sense of integrity. There are things we would not do, or always do. Defending mom, for example, is a common always-do. These are the things that makes up each of our’s integrity. Thing that makes us feel good or bad about ourselves when dropping all the social attitudes and honestly look ourselves in the mirror.

If there has been enough violations of our own integrity we might find ourselves in situations we don’t really want, bad luck might be increasing. Right and wrong might be not clear due to having collected too many justifications in an attempt to not feel bad about wrong decision and not knowing how to correct those decisions. I consider luck being closely related to how I feel about myself and my personal integrity.

OK, let’s look at the right of free speech.

If you have your own or are visiting someone else forum there are typically rules of what is acceptable and not. In other words the owner can dictate what goes and does not go on their forum. Free speech is not a universal thing you have and can do as you please.

Free speech is the First Amendment in our Constitution and relates to what the government can silence or not. Not what others can enforce in their home or forum. In other words you can cry foul play if it is the government that tries to stop you from expressing something.

In a public place you have the right of free speech and you can seek help, and protection, by the government to be able to publicly express yourself in a public place or forum.

The First Amendment struggles with where to draw the line. For me it once again is a simple call – does the expression suggest or motivate people to commit legal and ethical crimes? Back to the greatest number of pro-survival or counter-survival acts.

The US is a country founded on laws. Laws that is intended to be pro-survival to ensure the people in the country survives. However sometimes they are out of date, out of touch and even plainly wrong.

One can commit crimes to try to correct the laws but that is ultimately not resulting in an increase in survival, even if it appears to do so in the short term.

Our laws are governed by the Supreme Court. Their job is to be the legal back stop, to ensure that when a law is applied it is applied fairly and justly. The Supreme Court adjust its view as the popular view changes. They are however usually many years behind.

When we dislike or even hate what others think there is a great possibility that we are not relying on our own observations but what someone else says is so. In other words we often rely on “knowledge” from others. Knowledge that might not be so much like free speech like but colored by someones personal gain.

How does one make one’s own observations when it seems too difficult or entirely impossible and out of reach?

Clearly in that situation one can’t.

In that situation one has to get good at evaluating the source of the information. Do they have personal observations or in their turn relies on someone else? If you read it or hear it in the news what is the actual observed evaluation you have done of what they say? Are they mostly forwarding bad news, speak in generalities with few or no specifics?

I do my own investigation of the type of articles a reporter writes. What is the language and the intention in their message? Is it promoting pro or counter survival actions and views?

Again, here it is important to see if it is legal to follow their suggestions?

Some people (and reporters) tend to hide their intention behind a message that promotes something that might be good for some but is destructive to others, and also have a tendency to not offer a legal solution, one that could result in jail time, physical damage and even death.

Having evaluated the above points one then looks over the balance of the various points to see where do they fall? When adding them up you must brush aside personal views and simply evaluating it from greatest good for the greatest number, which includes legal options.

Look at it this way. If you go around violating the law you are promoting not following the law, which is why often laws are enforced in a way as to set an example. Unfortunate for the person in question, even bad luck, but without following our laws we will not have a country of the free.

Laws are broken down into civil and criminal law. Which breaks further down into levels of severity.

Traffic law is usually a violation of civil law but when the violation is sever enough becomes criminal.

Running your car into a group of protesters that you feel are a threat to your survival might seem like the thing to do but ask yourself this question, does it violate any law, and in this case criminal law? The person doing so might think it was the right thing to do because of the perceived vile nature of the demonstrators.

However a quick evaluation show that the demonstrators were actually exercising their First Amendment. Hitting people with your car is not a protected action but falls under criminal law (murder or attempted murder). Looking at both the short and long term potential solution to whatever problem that person thought he was solving that action did not make any difference other than get him sent to prison.

Therefor it is a good practice to evaluate the action, and to do so more thoroughly the greater the liability involved.

For example, regardless of what you think of any political party, having an armed insurrection and storm a sitting Congress, even if the sitting president says so, is filled with huge liability with next to no positive potential outcome.

It might be considered a fun activity, lots of challenges and excitment. You might feel you have the opportunity to be part of 1776 part 2 and have your name in the history books.

It is however full of really real liabilities. In 1776 we fought an invading force trying to remove our independence. If you have looked at all at US history you can see how political things swing back and forth and does not go over the edge in either direction.

Inciting a violent overthrow of the government is not the American way. That happens in countries where people don’t have a strong constitution such as ours. They do it because their living conditions are so poor their only hope of actual survival is to force a new government into place.

Unfortunately for those countries, it never ends up with a fair government by the people for the people. Look at Russia, several countries South of the border, throughout history people in these countries have very low survival potentials. Something I hope the US will never sink to.

If you support illegal actions you never end up with in a long-term increase in survival potential.

The excitement of a successful coup is quickly squashed when the new dictator grab the reins. Russia has never had anything but a dictator in office, except for a short period which resulted in the end of the Soviet Union and brought democracy to the public. Putin ended that over a number of years but slowly installing new laws that limited, for example, free speech. Now it carries 15 years to speak up against him.

The way to happiness does not come from or is accomplished through illegal and violent actions but from caring for your fellow man, from showing him compassion and support, from increased education about people and certainly from knowing the laws of the land and how to successfully operate within it.

Remember, lies persist and truth solves problems.