Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Feel-Good-Society

During the last twenty-something years a dramatic change of values has taken place in the Western Societies. We have become weak societies of immaturity, of coward’s and most of all, of victims. And victims are characterized with not being responsible. Some even think victims have a right for vengeance, they are allowed to harm the one’s, who seemingly harmed them before. The methods therefore are very various. One may just get angry, living out the own narcism on others. Another person my tyrannize the co-workers or the family and friends or start a lawsuit to get a compensation for the pain, that had to be feat. Even getting insane, acquiring a mental disease is a way to get rid of society and leave it up all to the other people. And then there are the various “psyche problems” so many people hide these days to live on their pervert and infantile lifestyle and have a “good explanation” for it. Society is stupid enough to believe theses people and psychologist strongly support the poor “victims”!

The worst thing about an immature society is the inability to face the reality, to face the facts. Politicians don’t communicate brutal truths to the voters, the pay marketing companies for giving them advice to “sell” their politics to the people. Other consultants give advice how to deceive commissions and get around obstacles by swindling. That is what happened with Greece, when the poor country in the southeast corner auf Europe joined the Euro zone. But on the other hand, there are not only the people who deceive, but also the one’s who let themselves be deceived. Goethe once wrote that you never get deceived but you always deceive yourself. That is more than true.

People are far more interesting in hearing what sounds nice to their ears, instead of being told hard truths. But in the background there always stays this inconvenient feeling that somewhere in the future we all will have to pay a high price for not seeing the reality in the moment. That is true for individuals as for whole societies and in the end for the whole mankind and the planet. People have lost their freedom to a seemingly nice present, for many it looks nice to be caught in a golden cage, but even a golden cage stays a cage, an instrument of control of someone else and of imprisonment. Whoever sells freedom for security is neither worth the one nor the other. We have to recognize, that the value of freedom is more important than “having a nice life”. Life is a school for learning no place to enjoy yourself and no purpose on its own.

In the children’s society, we are living in, more and more people act out instead of behaving as natural and spontaneous human beings. For they never have become adult, they never had an adequate guidance, nor an example of such a person, they fight the demons of childhood for the rest of their lifes and project there own inner emptiness and problems onto others. So the idea arises, that there is “evil” in the world, and that must be fought. But evil per se does not exist. What is evil for one person, is good for another person. Good and bad are completely relative. Even a war cannot be considered evil, for there are people who profit from it and in who’s perception it is something good. This is another truth nobody wants to hear, and of course it is not “political correct” (political correctness is also an instrument of deception, to make people be “nice” to each other, also if there is nothing to be nice about. Id est the wish to feel good).

The happiness of human beings is not intended by nature, as Sigmund Freund, the great Austrian psychiatrist, declared. Word nobody wants to hear nowadays and whoever can not argue against an argument, must attack the arguing person. People want to hear, that their life is important, that everybody could be a kind of “kind” or “queen”, every person could be successful and the like. Be we all have our destiny and for most, what we call “success” in the ordinary way, is not intended. We have a complete corrupted idea about happiness and fulfilment. The mistake is already rooted in the depth of the culture we live in, that has come to a lower level than ever before in history. In contrary to what most people believe, we live in very primitive and bad times! Immanuel Kant, the German Philosopher and Professor, once wrote, that complete happiness, complete bliss, would mean that all our wished would be fulfilled in quantity and quality. How can that be? Imagine all the different wishes people have, they would necessarily contradict the wishes of others. So, if god wanted to fulfil everybody’s wished, he himself could not do it. Thinking along this avenue, we never come to realize true happiness. Even if we get what we wish, we experience suffering, for nothing is eternal, everything in the universe finds its end, even ourselves, we are going to die and every day on earth brings us neared to the cold grave.

So, what do we have to realize? We have to realize, that happiness does never come from fulfilling wishing, but to give up wishing at all. We enter the realm of reality, if we live without intentions in our life. Wish nothing, crave for nothing, and you are happy in the same moment! Hard to believe, but the only truth, that can be found concerning happiness and fulfilment.

A typical sign of our times is, that everybody feels like a victim, people behave, as if life owed them something and they are looking for the “bad guy”, who is to blame for their own misery. Whenever something in life goes wrong, someone else must be to blame or must be brought before court. That is not the behaviour of adult people, but adult humans are the rarest species to be found on the planet. Ever exotic animals, threatened to be the last of their kind, are more common in the world.

Especially the western societies are bankrupt, not only in the financial sense but especially concerning morality. Tolerance is based on cowardice, “doing good” is done out of feelings of shame or guilt (by the way feelings of guilt and shame are naughty, we should not teach our children guilt or shame, so that they can live a free live) and the hope, that nobody will harm us if we don’t harm others. My own mother used to say: “The way you shout into the forest is the way the words come back to you!” But she was damned wrong! The world is not a nice and cosy place and it never will be, it is not in the hand of human beings to create a “paradise”, that attempt will only lead to hell. What is necessary for human beings is finding oneself in the ability to attack others and defend yourself and be proud of what you can do, find your own strength apart for society of other people. The only thing that really counts in life is you and only you! Everything else is at the ranks behind you.

To see truth and accept it as well as be able to handle it are adult characteristics. As long as people are not adult they will your “tricks”, “manipulation”, “drugs”, “alcohol”, “distractions” (media, movie, TV, Shopping..) and the like, to go through life to give them the feeling of being part of mankind. What we need is intellectual honesty and integrity to survive in this 21st Century. Non-western societies go different ways. Some try to imitate the senseless consuming approach of the West, others are more concentrating on their own core values. But most of these countries a quit noble in their way to communicate to us, but don’t think they know that the west is bankrupt, and that real values have been lost. Our society is getting digged out from inside and it is only a question of time until everybody sees that there is nothing inside and that our way of living, our nations and societies are as empty as the neurotic every-day-person on this planet.

Wake up and change your reality! Or disappear from earth!

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The need to face the game of power

At the age of 16, I had my first summer job in a major electronics company. It was my first true experience with “the real world”. At school you are in a kind of protected area, as long as you learn, are smart and know how to satisfy the teachers, you have a quite easy life (as long as you are no loner, or strange in some special way). Of course you don’t know that then!

My boss in that summer was a man of great integrity and virtues, he believed in values like honesty, hard work, rationality and common sense. His position in the company was stable and he was respected by most people, but his career had been manoeuvred into a corner. For ten years he was the chief of his department not advancing a single step since then. Other people, who were in the company for much less years, were promoted and found themselves in higher positions.

Under the surface there was the frustration you could feel and that influenced the whole department and the people of my boss. For me there was no reason why my boss was not advancing. Other people who where in higher positions like him where much less intelligent and their working moral was not very high. They cared more for themselves then for the company and many of them did not even try to hide their attitude that the company would exists for their own personal good and not for the owners, the people that financed the firm. I thought about the Peter-principle: Everybody gets promoted as long as he finds himself in a position where he fails.
I started thinking a lot about the situation, about power and the way you get it and what so many people seem to do to avoid being promoted. I was fascinated by the dynamics of power and in all the years since then my fascination grew even bigger.

Power is something that is present all around us but in our political correct times people try to avoid the word power. We do not tolerate obvious craving for power like with active aggressive acts. So even more people smile and pretend to be uninterested in power, use feelings of guilt, make others feel ashamed and make massive use of passive aggression. The situation is not so much different form the royal courts in Europe during past centuries. The more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. In some way civilization is a fake and history has shown from time to time that even a very civilized nation, under a certain influence, can loose it’s thin layer of cultivation and show the substance that lies beneath.

Back to my job. One thing became very clear to me: I had a wrong idea about how human relationships work, what really counts in life and how the dynamics of movements can be controlled, even if you don`t control them. I came to the conclusion that moral is a human invention, it is nothing natural, nature would never have created such laws that very often irrationally limited the range of human behaviour. If I could look at things how they really are, and make a rational decision, independent of what people think and if they like me or not, I could get anything in life I wanted. In other words, if I could get independent of the crowd I could be in a position like a cowboy who controls the cows until they are brought to the slaughterhouse (as a specualtor in stock markets I know that it is not the crowd that makes the money – see my other blog http://samuraiofthemarket.blogspot.com). As a 16 year old I felt powerful and knew little about how much I still had to learn even if the basic principle was and is still right: “As a samurai (warrior) you have to have the ability to be cruel and unforgiving to do what is right and create the good in effect”. Or as Goethe wrote in his “Faust”: “I am the power that always wants the evil, but always creats what is good”.
After two months my work at the company was over. I made a few friends but no enemies. I learnt a lot (much more about human nature than about the technical abilities that were needed for my job). We have not created the world and its laws but every living being has to find his niche and go with the flow. You cannot resist the natural order – that is only human arrogance. If you want to make the ultimative victory in life, you defeat your enemies with intelligence and not with acts of violence or vengeance. It may sound very seductive to call the battle for power or war barbaric, but that is completely irrational – you are in danger to loose contact with reality. The truth is even more that war (in the widest sense of the word) is the father of all things – as Heracletus calls it – it cleans things and makes the necessary difference between people, companies and nations. It is neither good nor bad, it is just the human appearance of Darwin’s law.