FAQ

FAQ

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by Dr. Peter Meier, MeaningGiving Informatics (BGI AG), CH-8048 Zürich

Death- and end-
technology
says:
Everything has to die faster to speed up progress!

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What, specifically, can be done to bring our cancerous, money-oriented system into some kind of harmony with human values and the environment?

First, company law enables shares to go from one generation to another and is the only thing on earth which does not die: human beings die, buildings decay, animals die, trees die, but shares (in principle) do not. If a worldwide humanitarian system is to be developed, there must be serious examination of a legal system which encourages the rich to become progressively richer for very little exertion of intelligence or effort, simply by passing on a small commission to wealth managers. The result in America and indeed in the rest of the world is concentration of wealth (I have no issue with people EARNING lots of money). I do have a problem when the richest country in the world, the USA, has a population in which 70% has no net wealth, and 1% holds 30% of the assets. Over the past 20 years, real wages have declined for 80% of the population. And this is a worldwide trend today. I think most of us have no problem with a system which allows reasonable accumulation of wealth gained in return for the exertion of intelligence, industry, risk-taking and sheer effort. But I think most people in the world do have a problem with a system which allows unlimited accumulation of wealth AT THE SAME TIME as allowing millions of people to have nothing when they are exerting as much energy and intelligence as other people AND AT THE SAME TIME as we live in a world of over-supply of all basic goods for the first time in history, which makes it entirely unnecessary for anyone to starve, to have no clothes and to have no roof of some basic sort over their heads.

What has been gained by embedding Prof. Guptara's overview of ethics across cultures within the 1-9Ce system of Applied Personal Science APS®,and by exemplifying it with the established communication in the Clinton case? I claim that more profound answers can and must be given to Prof. Guptara's basic Q&A:

The fact is most people pretend to know what can and should be done and the problem is more one of reconciliation the diverging opinions in a meaningfully converging process based on a sustainable basis - and that is not up for discussion; that has to be discovered and taught. Creation has to reconciliate evolution not vice versa!

By presenting ethics in Prof. Guptara's evolutionary way without embedding it in any meaningfully created system and giving it no purpose other than what is established in Ce and is thus unquestioned, no encouragement at al is provided, on the contrary, it just reveals how depressing the situation is and glorifies intellectual mediocrity by mystifying ethics in the service of mega-business.

Since Plato humans have tried to solve their problems more and more just with content-free technology accompanied with personally neutral rhetorics based on the corresponding denotational thinking.

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Second, in order to build a worldwide stakeholder economy, we must re-examine our international economic system which is based on usury. In every ancient society without exception, usury was banned because every society understood that usury institutionalizes and makes inevitable this kind of increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. It is impossible to have respect for individuals and for the environment as long as we have an international economic system which by its very nature creates unsustainable growth in some areas and unsustainable deprivation in other areas. Every traditional system of morality - Jewish, Christian, Jain and Chinese - regarded wealth as something which was given to be looked after as a trustee, not for one’s own self-indulgence, and this attitude acted as some sort of safeguard against too much of a gap developing. Today, however, few regard wealth as something to be held in trust for the welfare of everyone in the world - at the same time as there is an increasing consciousness of the need to build a world economic and financial and political system which is just and sustainable.

Anyone who really cares has enough access to information and personal experience to know that the denotational, descriptive, prescriptive, referential, pedagogical, iterative, recursive approach can only fail! In the present post-modernism complexity and chaos are used by post-normal intellectuals to obscure this basic fact and the ways to deal with it. The fact is, this refers to the complexity caused by such simplifying assumptions!

Today's major changes do not happen in economies, but in operating systems and it is a old myth, updated by Chomsky that the mind, which is in fact Ce, is something innate to human nature.

In other words, Prof.Guptara's question about bringing the present money system into line is misleading; you cannot improve a technology if you insist on a outdated physics! The question our generation has to answer is: What, specifically, has to be unlearnt and learnt to bring our denotational, manipulation-oriented virtuality/mentality into some kind of harmony with reality and the basic laws of life-fulfillment?

The answer to what we have to learn about is, open-ended generative principles, OEGPs by which the substantiality of real human beings and their modes of being and their shared systems can be adequately modeled in terms of what matters in C3-terms: matter, energy, space and temporal relationships in the past, the present and the future. What we have to unlearn are myths based on virtuality like Ce. Virtuality has to be put in the service of relating to reality truthfully and to substantiality consciously. Virtuality can never sustain itself and should at best be limited entertainment. Whoever attempts something that sounds more simple is creating a world too complex for life-fulfillment to say the least and it is entirely appropriate to name such attempts to deregulate substantiality (like the laws of nature, ecology and life) the source of all evil. The remaining challenge is to cope with such behavior without falling into the same trap by opening up what seems to be an up what seems to be an end by by generating on the basis of more substantial on the basis of more substantial principles e.g. by acknowledging the basic fact, the we are all e.g. by acknowledging the basic fact, the we are all Creatures of a Creator in his Creation.

With this basis, and this is not a philosophy, the prevailing intellectual mediocrity and the incredible misuse of human resources to uphold a renewal of Ce can be transformed, and that will create life-fulfilling work for good-willed human beings. Let us face it, there is no short-cut here; such attempts at power-play are all at the cost of someone else and they backfire increasingly faster, believe it or not!