Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Conflict

  • A Moral Dilemma

    A Moral Dilemma

    My own petty, unimportant and irrelevant moral dilemma should teach me something about the world and how to improve it. If I can not learn my lesson, then who can?

    So here I am, a lucky old man sitting in his sunny garden in the late spring, contemplating his life and wondering how he gets it so badly wrong.

    If I can get it so wrong and cause such ill feeling and anger then little wonder the world as a whole is a hotbed of war and bitterness. I do not have the excuse of poverty, childhood abuse, pain, illness.  I am not suffering torture or violence. I am not being turfed out of my jungle dwelling in the Amazon rain forest by corrupt corporates and greedy, bribe taking politicians.

    What I have been doing for the past three years is to battle for what I consider justice for a relative of mine who has been beset on all sides by others who appear to be less than rational, reasonable, nice or normal.

    My endless fear it that I have it the wrong way round. That said victim and I are the aggressors, the unreasonable monsters, the people with horrible behavioural problems.

    And perhaps we are. Or there again perhaps that is not the point.

    As ever I have been trying to do what I thought was right and just and am left wondering instead whether I have the whole of life arse about face.

    But endless questioning is right. Not to question is to leave oneself dangerously open to bigotry and a closed mind. In seeking to protect one relative I have been accused of seeking to “ruin” another.

    I have no doubt that that “other” sees the matter in just that way. That “other” must assuredly see white as I see black, or vice versa.  For me to claim that my intention is something else entirely is fruitless and yet to be meek and let my relative be trampled on does not seem to be just or equitable either.

    Sadly the meek do not inherit the earth.  When I see a bully I will take him on.  I must just make sure that I do not become that bully myself.

  • Sibling Bitterness

    Sibling Bitterness

    Why is it that siblings often fall out in such a bitter fashion on the death of parents? Is it a petty dispute over the will? Or is it something deeper?

    For many years a given family of siblings may rally round their parents. As children and adolescents this is usually a matter of physical or economic necessity – unlike most of the animal kingdom human children take many years to fledge.

    As young and middle aged adults the sibling relationship may trog along quite reasonably although at this stage tensions may start to appear as the siblings develop their own relationships and bear their own children.

    The novelty of the newborn and the pleasure they give to the grandparents may heal and unify any rifts which appear in the family unity at this stage. Novelty and young children are a fine glue and many species have evolved to find attraction in the faces and gamboling antics of the young.

    But as life wears on cracks appear in the sibling relationships. Cracks may also appear in the individual lives of the siblings. Their own marital relationships may be problematic. Their children will give them the normal worries of any parent. They will face career difficulties, financial problems, health scares. None of these need necessarily destroy the original family bonding.

    But then the siblings’ parents age to the extent that they, the parents, reach a second childhood and become a burden rather than a support.  Siblings worry and squabble over what to do about the aged and now infirm parents: will their money see them through, who will look after them, will the family home have to be sold?

    By now petty jealousies and rivalries may well have developed between the siblings.  One sibling may envy the life of another, the possessions, the health, the happiness or whatever.  The storm clouds form.

    Inevitably one sibling will play a bigger role in the care of the aged parents than the others. In a well balanced and loving family this may end well – that sibling might be praised and offered just reward for some years of sacrifice and difficulty.

    In other families the eventual death  of the parents leads not to a celebration of lives well lived but to a bitter and vicious squabble over the will.

    A sister (one of five siblings) and her husband and children spend seven long years catering to the every need of a mother with increasingly severe dementia and an increasingly crippled and mentally frail father.  There was no cash to pay them for the full time job, so they were promised reward on death.

    And on the death of the last parent all hell breaks loose.  Two of the siblings accuse the carer of theft – undocumented and totally spurious. The motive for the accusations remains unclear but some long seated jealousy or sibling rivalry seems certain. A third sibling gets involved in purchasing a part of the parental home while the caring family retain the other part in recompense for their effort.

    And boom! Suddenly even that sibling turns on the carer when it comes to “negotiating” financial and physical details of the property division.

    The original parents were not easy people. A father with lifelong depression or bi-polar disorder, a mother who struggled with insecurity, a waspish tongue and, perhaps, fear.  Certainly it was not an easy life for them with five children to raise.

    A life of dispute, back biting, jealousy and unpleasantness trickles down through the generations. Is it genetics or life’s circumstances? Nature or nurture? Who knows.

    How glorious to be a human.

     

  • Right Honourable Gentlemen

    Right Honourable Gentlemen

    There can hardly be a sight so little edifying as the Right Honourable Gentlemen of the House of Commons in full debate.  One has to be thankful we have debate I suppose, and that we do not have to suffer “Putin on The Ritz” as do the modern serfs in the 21st Century Russian Empire.

    We are all monsters.

    But still, the sight of His Right Honourable Bigness from Self-Important-Smugness-in-The Marshes really isn’t much fun.

    Before the advent of televised debate one may have been forgiven the assumption that dignity and decorum prevailed in the sacred debating chamber here at the epicentre of democracy.

    Not so. It is every bit as vicious in there as a meeting of the Parish Council or the Women’s Institute. Bossy self important people score points off each other using ridicule and scorn. And apparently they are paid to do so by the people foolish enough to elect them.

    I’m afraid it all goes back to the origins of violence.

    However good natured and pacific we may be as individuals, get us in a crowd and we turn into monsters.  The will of the people be damned – Not In My Back Yard thank you!

    There may not be much to be done. Given the platform and the provocation most of us would probably behave in exactly the same way.

    We may think we are different. We may hope so. But like rats in a cage, when the chips are down it seems we humans will fight to the death for self interest and a place on the Titanic’s last remaining lifeboat.

    Unfortunately none are blameless. We may become irritated in church at sickly smiles or the petty pecking order, we get road rage, our family can irritate us to death.  Awareness is certainly a help. Thinking and pausing before you speak another. Or delaying sending that email for an hour.  Can we change our minds? Can we become nicer people? Opinion is very divided but it does no harm to try.

  • War – Why do the Nations rage?

    War – Why do the Nations rage?

    War, easy to understand but difficult to prevent, dates back 550 million years.

    Early complex life lived peacefully for most of earth’s history by harnessing the power of ocean chemicals and then sunlight.

    550 million years ago the first proto animals acquired mobility – the Dickinsonia and others began to move around to seek food.  And then arrived bilateral symmetry – a head for intake at one end, a digestive system in the middle and an exit for waste at the other. The evidence of these early life forms can be seen in the fossils of the Ediacara hills in southern Australia.

    Then teeth and claws arrived – the world’s very first weapons.  The evolutionary arms race had begun and humans eventually became the clear winners – they developed a complex brain and the ability to outsmart all other life forms on earth.

    From the very first days man killed his own kind as well as other animals in the battle to survive and prosper. Most other animals do the same thing  – the hawk and the fox being obvious examples.

    And so today from the parish council and the village garden society up to the level of nations we seek our own benefit and are willing to take extraordinary measures to subjugate the competition.

    Old dears viciously competing in the village cake baking competition can be seen as the weak form of Genghis Khan or Pol Pot.  As a society we compete instead of co-operate. We take what we want from the weak; 20th century western exploitation of middle east oil being a good example.

    All it took was modern science to give us the capability to destroy on a global and industrial scale. Zyklon B and the railways, the machine gun and the atomic bomb.

    And the cure? Nothing less than changing our entire nature. Not so easy after 500 million years on the rampage.

    Image: Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. By Robert F. Sargent