Raz's blog includes a post made
yesterday which points to a series of photos that really tell stories... On the subway the photographer sees the darker side of our world.
Take a look at New York City's underground underground underground. Under-ground.
Funnily enough,
optimal behaviour on the road is altruistic, as is the behaviour that usually tends to result in better results for everybody (economists know this from game theory).
Steven D. Levitt (co-author of
Freakonomics) tells the story of a New York City traffic jam he was stuck in the other day, and his cab driver cut in from an exit lane. Just down the road, however, police officers were stopping every car that had done that and handing each driver a ticket for $115 fine! Two officers doing this would write 30 tickets an hour, roughly $1,500 in fines per hour. A drop in the ocean given the number of rude drivers but a significant amount to make such police action highly profitable. I couldn't agree more.
I'd love to see that happen on roads everywhere. If only I saw such actions from our local police... I would not only feel that much better about my own road ethic, but seeing the uncivil drivers get punished would simply make my eyes gleam with hidden joy!
I've been listening to more audiobooks over the past few days. A few conversations between
David Bohm and
Krishnamurti included: on "The Transformation of Man," "The Future of Humanity" and such. Interestingly, I found these on a peer-to-peer search, almost by accident.
I'm not going to summarize any of the ideas here, debates on "the future of humanity" are many and there's even an
Oxford Institute set up to look into this topic (wouldn't that be a cool place to work in? probably almost as good as toiling in Mountain View for Google).
But this isn't the point I wanted to make. I want to get you to think about something: many have said, in the East in particular (I refer to Eastern Europe looking at it from Romania) that people have, for too long, been a part of the so-called "sacrificial generation." Generations of people who have been deceived by the powers-that-be into accepting a fate below their desires, lesser than what they could have had, in the name of whatever (Communist?) ideal.
Bohm and Krishnamurti do not idealise; they say, however, that the fundamental starting point in life-choices must be deeply altruistic. I think that makes perfect sense. I would invite people to think on this. It doesn't mean denial of comforts or enjoyment of life, nor of desires or ambitions. It does mean making your choices with awareness of the state of the world and of your place in it. Not only can we, but we constantly do contribute to the embetterment, or worsening, of our world in many ways. Just be aware of it, and remember it.
It's not so much a responsibility as it is a way of resolving a deep personal struggle: we all need meaning in our lives, and while meaning can be found in all kinds of things, if you keep asking the dreaded 'why' question, you'll eventually end up in a place where you have to change your life and make it coherent with with the world as you understand it.
I may edit this later, it feels extremely condensed. It's maybe a start for something I can add to, in actions as well as words.
Being the Leuven alumnus that I am, my postbox regularly receives something called "Campuskrant International," KU Leuven's magazine for international alumni. The
current issue includes an article on
what makes a marriage satisfying. It seems that basically it's the man that makes the marriage: not in any traditionalist or misogynistic sense, though! Rather, "a family-oriented man with a well-developed feminine side is a source of married bliss." This is what recent Leuven PhD graduate Ann Van den Troost of the Faculty of Social Sciences tells us results from her findings. There is a new breed of man out there, and he's not your stereotypical male.
Hell, at least I'm not alone. I wonder what the research would show if carried out in Southern/Eastern countries though.
This is my first post to include a photo taken using my mobile phone. I have been against putting cameras on phones... I'm beginning to think otherwise: it opens up opportunities for picking up and sharing bits of information that would otherwise never be 'digitized' as it were.
Here's my latest take in a Romanian household appliances store:
Metalica is not the same as
Metallica, you see?
Raz's blog includes a post made yesterday which points to a series of photos that really tell stories... On the subway the photographer sees the darker side of our world. Take a look at New York City's underground underground underground. Under-ground.
