( A Ten Minute read that might open your eyes to the Obvious)

I am sure like me you often wonder why it is that when something is obvious we humans are unable to react.  It is obvious that Technology is changing the world and us but nothing hides like the obvious. The obvious is best disguised into itself. One obvious hides another. 

Intelligent reason should visit its basic assumptions, regularly; but it doesn’t.

We all know that an own goal is an accident when it comes in sport unless there is some ulterior motive.

In the course of our own lives we have many own goals, some obvious, some accidental, but when it comes to collective action on one hand we cannot bear to notice our children becoming strangers and our parents growing senile. However on the other we are less concerned about Nations heading to war, companies going bust, greed and technology ruining our civilisation.

The obvious turns perverse.

We have too much stake in them to see clear and hear change ringing.

Is this the reason we cannot enact the obvious.?

We do not see what we do not wish to see, hoping that it will go away or solve itself. We grow blind to things we cannot cope with. We see and hear but we keep forgetting at once as if under a spell of neglect.

Our attention is so easily diverted… we just move on with inertia and sleep-walk unable to draw the undesired conclusion and to do something.

We do not grasp the incommensurable, out of proportion with us, with which we have no common standard of measurement: the trillions of billions, the hazy dots shown by the electronic microscope in a cell, or all the same, the blurred dots being huge stars of the infinite, mean nothing to us, exactly like the hypocrite warnings of cancer and death on cigarette packs. Is this because the things smalled below our threshold or amplified huge – in proportions or in meaning – we do not grasp;

If this is so we have a narrow human window of perception and judgement with limited parameters in wavelength, amplitude, intensity and nature.

However we are the measure of all things we conceive.

Whether it be demographic and social change, shifts in economic power, technological breakthroughs or natural resource scarcities, climate change – the world, and those of us in it, need to be more adaptable than ever before.

Overwhelmed by the creativity of Artificial Intelligence, our governments do not protect us anymore, so that the risk is now our own business.

Reason has become asks references, with a hidden price of selective blindness and thus freedom diminished.  It is easier to observe other people’s basic assumptions than yours.

 If that which is not there is difficult to see,  that which is obvious, plain and evident, is at times even harder to notice.

For instance:

Is it not blinding obvious that Twitter now holds unmitigated power when it comes to posting Donald Trump’s tweets.

Is it not bleeding obvious that Google wants to control all knowledge.  Very few of us spending an instant to examine Google Fraud answers.

It is beyond the obvious that in a world that is getting more complex and multipolar each and every single day the truth does not cease to exist when it is ignored.

Not missing the things right under our nose is our last protection against danger, loss and disappointment; it grants our judgement to be sound and wise, with feet on ground.

You will agree though that the obvious is the very face of reality.

Take notice of the obvious and suddenly, instead of nodding sheepishly “This is how things are.” you gain the power to make choices which you and most people around you ignored before.

The obvious known, comes alive for us to do something about it only when understanding turns it into personal image, vivid and simple enough to be of our size; otherwise we stay paralysed and dumb.

If you are like me, we need to let  people participate in democracy and get collective decisions that are reasonable.

I often think when it comes to politics and our governments that there are things that are so blinding obvious (when all the bullshit is set aside) to do.

For example to reform the European Union.

Is it not blinding obvious that we should stop the moving of  the £130 million travelling circus that sees MEPs decamp once a month from Brussels to Strasbourg.

Why should we all be held to ransom by France.  On Monday, about 1,000 politicians, officials and translators will make the same journey on two specially chartered trains hired at taxpayers’ expense. If France want it let them pay for it.  “Its madness.” Just think how many better ways there are to spend this money.

It boggles my mind as to why we put up with it.

God only knows what the cost of Brixit will be.

There is no doubt that seething resentment over widening inequalities in the wake of the financial crisis played a big role in boosting the Brexit vote but it is also blinding obvious that England is now facing a major realignment that will need the EU market and the free movement of people to survive economically.

There is NO simple solution – if there was it would have been done by now.

How do you know a politician is being dishonest? He blames something on “special interests.” What is a special interest? Why, it is an interest opposed to the “general interest” or collective will.  There ain’t no such thing.

That might not be possible.  The challenge for me – and you – is to sort out which is which.

 

 

But this is not the purpose of this post, rather to examine the broader question.

I am also all too conscious that there are any number of people out there who have deeply held convictions about what’s right and what’s wrong. I may just be right about some things, I may be wrong about others.

In a world predominated by power of a more self-interest nature, has the obvious being consigned to the rubbish bin of politics.

Without having read and understood the instructions book of life, algorithms are switching on an immensely complicated machine.

Once injected into to the political system they can develop a life of their own.

Politics stems from human misbehaviour, which clashes with the terms of modern democratic belief systems in which all adults are assumed to be entitled to behave as they feel inclined, at least within the scope of their income and the constraints of public law and insofar as they refrain from damaging the opportunities of their fellow citizens to do likewise.  Algorithms have none of these constraints.

” It is blinding obvious with the election of Donald Trump a man who revels in his own ignorance, racism and misogyny, that there is no single way of acting.”

Even if there was how would we set about determining what it is? Whom can we trust to do so?

Whom is to be judge? What is an advantage to one group of human beings and what is not to the advantage of another.

Until recent times politics and science usually managed to ignore each other.

Not any more:

Social Media which is riddled with algorithms are now blindly leading us down the road of Technological Inequality by turning the obvious into Fake News.

As a result politics appears where the main contours of collective and social life set the principal interests of groups of humans beings against one another.

Where they do not Conflict politics will not occur.

Social Media politics by Twitter will achieve conflict with a plum. Watch this Space.

So where does this leave us.

You would think that when something becomes blatantly obvious it would be common sense with no need for political input to enact or rectify it.

Isn’t that blindingly obvious to everyone except our politicians.

Contrary to popular belief, “the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition” and that “wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change.” DONALD TRUMP’S LEGACY. Politicians and bureaucrats, naturally, don’t enjoy being criticised. But if the response is to shut out those who criticise then they are making their work even harder and setting themselves up for more criticism.

The view that to understand politics we first need to know what politics is has a certain immediate force.  BUT WHAT IS NEEDED is something which reaches beyond the tribe and doesn’t rely on conventional party politics within the existing structures. Instead of “to me” we need to change it “to us”.

I know that people drown in stats and often put their fingers in their ears when it comes to the blinding obvious. The fact of the matter is that all wisdom does not, and never has, resided in government’s. Changes must be initiated with Indigenous people’s informed consent, in ways that resonate with their views of what is legitimate and in ways that gain their support.

This will not happen by coercion and imposition.

Consider this:

The most incontrovertible long-range social observation ever made? Was the Galilean carpenter Jesus’ comment that “The poor will be with you always”

Governments have had 222 years to get this right. On any evaluation, governments have fallen seriously short. Every indicator says government is not capable of solving this alone.

The words that feature prominently in Politic confronted with the squalor are appalling, dismal, neglect, waste.

Without comprehending the magnitude of different cultural outlooks – and without often understanding our own – we make it artificially difficult to create the kind of society we think we are as a nation – or the one we want to be.

It’s blatantly obvious that to solve the world’s problems we need a renewed reformed United Nations that is fully funded. (See previous Posts)

I do speak as someone who gives a damn, I don’t share is any thought that nothing can be done. “ Not bleeding hearts, just the bleeding obvious”

Or will we dare create something that people can point to and say “Now that’s what justice and decently looks like?” The answer, I am convinced, lies with us working – together – for humanity. And that, to me, is just “bleeding obvious”.

Let me conclude by being so bold as to suggest the “bleeding obvious”…..

I avoid the word “solutions” We’ve got to look to the future.”

All Technology must be vetted by a new World Organisation that is totally transparent  to ensure that it complies to enhancing our lives, and that is has a source of responsibility.

We cannot have various visionaries tell us that the real world is not what we experience but the one they reveal and proclaim, so that we must follow them.

I invite government to let go of the idea of imposing universal solutions and support those programs that respect and honour the multiplicity of cultural differences.

The useless conclusion is that our senses and memories cheat us, our common sense is no good and our judgement false.

Science does almost the same in all good faith; it invites us not to believe our impressions and intuitive reasoning but to delegate all-knowing to its specialists, the knowers and witnesses of verified truth too-complicated- for- common- people- to-understand.

Knowing our history is part of being human.

What are the seeds our common humanity? What right and decent? And so I ask will our final words be tragic, like those Henry Dunant “Where has humanity gone?”

The passion and commitment of so many decent people out there is constantly being tested. Keeping up the energy and the enthusiasm is a constant battle and it shouldn’t be obvious.

Liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves.

That should be obvious to one in all.

All comments obviously welcome. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am still pissed off.

 

We need Bottom up development. If Europe does not set social limits to competition then the market outcome will be exploitation of workers and not innovation. European social standards together with massive investment in skills are more than ever necessary.

The Syria crisis will only make things worse for Europe, which remains incapable of fixing its broken migration policy, and the chance for migration reform in the United States has faded away.

 

Globalisation-induced changes in the sharing of wealth in the world, combined with the demographic trends of the continents will soon generate new needs for regulation

All this is easy to say but what to do about it?

 

Detecting the obvious, the one which we do not notice any more, is a vital art of liberation; glimpses that can change the world.