Seriously. I could be drunk or high while getting in that booth and helping decide who’s going to run the country. Nobody cares. I could be mentally unstable, illiterate or with an IQ of a shoe. I could be an evil overlord. I bet if Lord Vader would show up at the polling station, they’d hand him a card if the photo in his passport would match his breathing mask. Hell, he’d probably be in the run.

The very least you should be required to know before voting is where is your guy positioned in the political spectrum. Wait, let me make this easy. Where does he/she says they’re positioned. Plus maybe their main political ideas on three major topics, like the economy, the social services and the external affairs. People that vote for a party candidate just because it’s a family/tribe/neighbourhood tradition should be turned back from the door. People that vote for that selfsame candidate just because they like their hair should be kicked to the curb — and never allowed to vote again.

And while I’m at it: electronic vote. We wants it. And don’t give me that online security crap either; if investment funds trust a secured Internet connection with millions of dollars’ worth of transaction each and every day, you should be able to get me a secure way to send you 1024 bits of info every four years or so. It even ties up nicely with my earlier proposal; you can just make a nice online questionnaire as a prerequisite to voting.

Make voting easy and make it count. Maybe then politics will stop being such a dirty word.

Ownership and property are the cornerstones of the modern society. But where do they come from? Where are they going? Do they have a ticket, or are they just getting a free ride? And more importantly, are they real?

The sense of ownership is but a refinement of a much more basic and raw force within us: the territorial instinct. And we are not the only ones that possess one. Wolves have it. Birds have it. Even the bees have it, although it might be argued that for the later we should consider the entire bee-hive as an organism.

Territorial instinct, the spatial awareness of our boundaries, is so important that it is hard-coded in the genes. Wolves born and bred in captivity become nervous and agitated when they are introduced to the territory of a wolf pack, and the only way to calm them down is to bring them back to “neutral” territory. Simply put, they’re scared howlless, as well they should be, since the pack would rip them to shreds if they were stupid enough to linger on these foreign hunting grounds.

The reason territory is so important for a wolf – and for other animals as well – is because it is a cheap way to avoid confrontation. In the wolf world, confrontation is not sought, nor desired; victory in a fight to the death oft comes with its own price of grievous wounds on the part of the victor. The pack would have to care for him and nurse him back to health, if possible, and a valuable hunter would be temporarily or permanently lost. Wolves risk confrontation, but only as a last resort – for instance, if food becomes so scarce that the alternative is death by starvation. Otherwise posturing and grandstanding will suffice – and if that doesn’t work, running is always better than dying. At least for a wolf.

The tribes from the forgotten dawn of the age of mankind were quite similar in approach and social organization to a wolf pack. The most experienced and successful hunter assumed leadership, and the others would follow. The catch was shared within the tribe, to each according to their needs in times of plenty, hunters first in leaner times. It was a rather communist society in that regard, and possession, as much as it was, would be enforced by strength alone. Do not imagine that these men were constantly fighting amongst themselves – that would be as stupid for them as it was for the wolves. Instead, there would be trials and games, enough to assert one’s domination without endangering the tribe.

I do not know how ownership as we know it came to be. Perhaps the practicality of giving the best weapons to the best hunter was turned on its head, so that the one with the best weapons was considered the best hunter. Those weapons thus became a symbol of power, and even if their bearer would only be mediocre, he would still enjoy the benefits associated with them. Ownership is power manifest, and the power was for the first time in history derived from a mere symbol. The world’s first currency was born.

In today’s world, ownership is still power. I own a house, therefore I am entitled to do with it whatever I want. But instead of manifesting the power to hold this possession, I – and you, and everyone – delegated it to a symbolic entity called state. We empowered the state to assert our claims of ownership, and we called this empowerment “law”. Thus, when I say that I, by law, I am the owner of the house, what I mean is that the state allows me to stay in it and protects me from those who would seek to take it from me. I am recognized as owner by the state via a piece of paper, a so-called title of property.

Could the state choose to do take this property from me? Indeed it could, and historically this has happened countless times. If the majority agrees to this, the state is allowed to pass laws to confiscate my property without compensation if need be. The state must do everything in accordance to its laws, as an expression of the will of the people. Even if the laws are immoral or unjust. The majority hath spoken.

And if the state collapses? Then, as portrayed in countless post-apocalyptic books and movies, I will own only what I keep others from having. I’m sure that, given three or four determined individuals with baseball bats, I could be persuaded to give up what I have. And if they’re starved to boot, I’d better run pretty damn fast while enacting this donation. What would  my possessions be then? And what would be their worth?

Indeed, all I own is some paper. With that and a match I can light a fire before the wolves get here.

I do not know when the first rule was invented, but boy, do I wish I was there. The one who made it must have been one pissed off caveman. “MOKO EAT FIRST!!! RULE!!!” And the rest of the tribe acquiesced and waited patiently for Moko to die of indigestion.

It probably took a few (hundred) years until the power of the rule has really been discovered. One of the mothers, fed up with children running around after dark and getting eaten by cave bears, created the immortal rule “everyone in bed after sundown”. Parents all around the world continue to enforce it to this day, cheerfully disregarding the severe ecological impact this rule had over the years – especially on the cave bears, which are now sadly extinct. “Thou shalt not eat spotted red mushrooms” was another self-enforcing rule, which was respected religiously by all who seen (or heard about) one of Moko’s descendants eating them FIRST!!! MOKO RULE!!! and then getting kicked out of the gene pool for the privilege.

And slowly, through the ages, rules became lore. Precious, hard-earned knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation – which herbs are good for healing salves, which animals you should never ever taunt, why fruits left too long to ferment in a barrel are actually a good thing etc. etc. There must have been non-believers among the tribes even in those days, but their life expectancy was directly related to the speed of their conversion. Needless to say, they didn’t last very long.

After a while though a curious thing happened. The original makers of rules were able to explain the reasons behind pronunciations such as “don’t poke the sleeping bear”, but as rules became more complicated and obscure and, well, multiplied, the explanations fell behind. They were replaced by diatribes such as “we’ve always done it like this, you dimwit” or “because I said so”. While these explanations seemed to be quite sufficient to impress rules upon children – indeed, they are still in use today – the adults were not as easily impressed. Until one skinny, but rather smart guy, alluded that the gods might be displeased if the rules were not obeyed.

And thus the ritual was born.

We’re not going to follow the various rituals through the ages. Suffice to say that they were highly successful as a means of passing rules from one generation to the next. Of course, as the environment and living conditions changed, some of these rituals became obsolete, but change was righteously opposed, in the name of tradition. And the reformers, more often than not, were handed the short end of the stick. Or the business end of an axe, depending on the severity of their transgressions.  The lucky rituals got re-explained and turned into science. Others put on robes and called themselves religion. Still others crawled in the basement of the human psyche and turned into superstitions. And finally, some of them were written on ceramic tiles or scrolls or tomes or books, were numbered, bound and called laws.

Laws are cool. They first got written down by rulers, who claimed God and birthright as witness for their right to establish how the society lived its life. Then, when neither God nor birthright intervened, they created bodies of enforcers to make sure the laws were respected. Said enforcers were, more often than not, exempted from obeying some of the rules. For instance: when you killed someone, you became a murderer under the law. But when a policeman killed you, he became a hero. Also, the law is compulsory. You don’t get to choose a law for yourself when you’re a kid, just like you don’t get to choose religion. And little changes when you’re actually grown up.

Later still, the power was taken by the people. This new concept, called democracy, meant that everyone got to vote. They got to vote the laws that their rulers put on the table, and if they didn’t vote the right way, they got to vote again until the rulers were satisfied with the result. That’s how the Constitutions were born. That’s how, in recent history, we passed the Lisbon treaty. Under this new “people” leadership, we still got rules we cannot understand. We still got ridiculous laws. We still execute reformers – we’re just using lobbies and backroom deals instead of execution squads. And from our lofty tower, we look down our forebears and their primitive ways.

If Moko the Caveman was alive today, I’m sure he’d understand. And with a bit of effort and education, he’d make a damn fine lawyer.

But that was then, and this is now. Democracy is the preferred form of government for more than half of this globe’s population; from Greenland to India, from Russia to USA, Japan, Latin America and South Africa, democracy spread far and wide, much like a certain form of flu. And it likewise mutated.

How does it work? Well, people get to vote. Every 4 or 5 years, they vote a party, a platform, an ideology or, if they’re really lucky, an actual person. But who chooses the candidates? Who pushes them in the limelight, who writes their names on the ballots? In a democracy you may choose whosoever you desire – as long as you choose from our own carefully selected candidates.

Oh yes, democracy is the rule of the people in the true sense of the word – as long as you’re in the majority, that is. And if you, as a majority, vote to, say, deny utterly and unabashedly that a minority even exists, let alone is entitled to some rights, well, let it be so, right? The democracy hath spoken.

And even if you, as majority, do care about minorities, and treat them well to raise your status as a country in the world. You do your job, you elect your politicians, based on their platforms and their promises, and then… and then you go home, you shake your head and you fully expect to be disappointed yet again by them. They all lie, you tell yourself, but you still hope against hope that this time, this time you sent an honest man in office.

Have you noticed that, whatever the report or response of a politician, everybody expects him to lie? Maybe just a little bit. When Amnesty International denounced the war crimes committed in the Gaza strip in the latest soon-to-be-forgotten Israeli-Palestinian war (well, Hamas, actually), both sides jumped up and said that the report is biased and unbalanced.¹ Accusations are promptly met by denials, rebuttals, counterclaims; proof is brushed aside, a counterfeit, an image coup manufactured by the political adversaries. Politicians cry their innocence on the way to prison – and then wonder why the vote turnout is low, why people loose interest and stay away from politics altogether. Why indeed.

Take the Lisbon treaty. It was shot down by Ireland, in what must have been the biggest news story of 2008 for the Old Continent. European political animals pulled a fast one and continued the vote in other countries, in spite of the treaty needing unanimous approval by the member states. Most of them didn’t even dare ask their voters via referendum, knowing full well what happened with the late European Constitution project. And now Ireland votes again. Who’s willing to bet it’s going to be a Yes this time?

And yet, when we do vote, we chose the trustworthy candidate. The one with strong moral values. They got a black man to take office as president of the United States and are now claiming that for an extraordinary feat, but mark my words: an atheist wouldn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell. No, we need God-fearing politicians – at least they fear someone, the saying goes.

And the part that really cracks me up?

This is the best we can do.

1. Yes, hello, Israeli can of worms, I’ve been sitting on you a long time now, but finally I couldn’t help myself – I had to look inside, you see.

Advertising is the art of selling you a solution you never knew you needed to a problem you never knew you had.

How’s that for a nutshell?

The main goal of an ad campaign is to make you feel dissatisfied. Let’s skip the obvious ones, like the ads for the Wear-these-and-lead-a-carefree-lifestyle Jeans ™, or the dreadful My-laundry-is-whiter-than-thou Detergent (TM as well, dammit). Even the “good” campaigns, like the ones for Save the Children or other such just and good as apple pie humanitarian cause will usually make you cringe a bit inside for being a selfish little bastard and not forking up some of your hard-earned dough for the poor little buggers. Or whales. Or pandas. Or whatever else we’re saving these days.

A successful ad campaign will be able to trigger in its target audience a feeling of discomfort, and that particular brand of magic relies heavily on the theory of cognitive dissonance (go ahead, click it, it’s Wikipedia). Relevant quote:

A powerful cause of dissonance is when an idea conflicts with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as “I am a good person” or “I made the right decision.” The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization, the tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one’s choices. A person who just spent too much money on a new car might decide that the new vehicle is much less likely to break down than his or her old car. This belief may or may not be true, but it would likely reduce dissonance and make the person feel better.

Speaking of which, have you clicked on that Wikipedia link? Nice site, Wikipedia. Did you know it relies entirely on donations from its users? Well? You just burned a hole in their budget there, you bad bad person, you! Want to be good again? Donate something to Wikimedia!

Ok, that’ was a bit heavy-handed, I must admit, but that’s how it works. Triggering cognitive dissonance in its target audience is an essential part of a good ad. The second part of this one-two punch is handing out a seemingly obvious solution to this attack on one’s self image. A sort of “duh, just do/buy/donate this and you’ll be fine”. It’s mostly sleight of hand that does it; the brain is still trying to come to terms with the previous statement, which was essentially a form of “you’re a bad, unaccomplished, not-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of person”. Suddenly, there’s a new piece of information coming in, and the brain yells: “Hey! A straw! Let’s grab it! It’s only 59.95!”

There are some exceptions to this rule, as some of you are likely to point out. Some ads are using humour to rack a sell: high-brow, low-brow, self-deprecating or even downright infantile. Others dress it up in science, using either lab-coated men with serious demeanours or pie-charts and statistics to show you why you’re wrong if you don’t buy their product. But whatever their tactics, they always have the same goal: to sell something to you by the end of that minute. Your defence? Use your head. Or stop watching commercials.

Note from our sponsor: Studies have shown that 92.5% of the people that read this blog lead happier, more fulfilled lives, are envied by their peers and greatly admired by the opposite sex. So keep on reading!

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he’s studying wisdom.

The main purpose of any commercial enterprise in this world is to make money. Or, to translate in marketspeak, to create value for their customers, and thus create value for themselves. This value is created by you, me, and anybody else who works for a living, by converting our time and skills into products that are useful for other companies and/or other human beings. This has always been so. In the past it was worth knowing how to plow a field, how to shoot a bow, how to distinguish the really bad mushrooms from the merely poisoned ones. These were all skills one could turn into profit.

Enter the banks. Banks do not create value directly, by themselves, but rather help create value, by lending money to active companies and individuals that need money to exercise their skills in order to create value. In return, a portion of this value returns to the bank. Banks also help people save money, and pay interest for the right to use those money for lending. In effect, banks are vast meeting places, where the people that need money meet the people that have money to the mutual benefit of both parties.

Or at least, that’s the theory. In reality banks are no longer safeguarding and managing other people’s money. Banks have and produce value in themselves, above and beyond what is needed to function as a bank. They use their guarantees and deposits as assets, which can themselves become guarantees if the bank itself needs to borrow money. And past events teach us that this reality is quite prone to abuse, often with catastrophic results.

It all boils right back down to value. Since value is a subjective property, driven by the marketplace’s two opposing forces, Fear and respectively Greed, there is always a risk factor involved when evaluating the value of an asset or investment. Take salt, for example.

Salt is now by and large a commodity, to be picked up once a month at the grocer’s and passed around at the dinner table. But it wasn’t always so. Before we discovered how to extract salt from the sea, the only way to acquire salt was to dig deep in the earth an pray for a salt vein. Salt was expensive, treasured. Wars were fought for control over salt mines. And to spill the salt was to invite serious trouble upon oneself.

Now imagine that you would buy a salt mine mere days before the sea salt extraction process came into power. Your rock-solid investment, 100% guaranteed profitable by a thousand years of history will become a loser overnight. Your net worth would plummet accordingly. Any loans that may have been available to you against that mine are now a pipe dream, and if you’re really unlucky you have your creditors knocking at your door.

Those were the salt bubble days. We’re now in the housing bubble days. There also were a dot com bubble, an Asian market bubble, an African lending bubble and lots and lots of other smaller bubbles, distanced about 10 years apart. Each of these bubbles was new and unexpected. Each of these bubbles taught us absolutely nothing about risk management in the marketplace. And if you disagree, get in touch; I can tell you all about some really hot opportunities — biotech startups, gene sequencing, next-gen targeted viruses… the way of the future, man! You can’t afford to miss it!

Sounds familiar? Almost every one of you reading these words has heard the sermon about lies and liars and (if you were lucky enough) the eternal rewards set aside for the good honest children. Your parents tried in their own way to teach you that lying is bad for you. And in 99.999% of cases, they failed utterly.

If truthfulness is such a praised and desired quality in today’s society, why aren’t the liars the exception, rather than the rule? If everyone was better off telling all of the truth, all of the time, why aren’t we living in a world where lies and deceit are things that belong to an ancient, unenlightened past? I’ll tell you why. Because that in itself is the biggest lie of all.

Indeed, unless you’ve spent your tender years in a vegetative state — in which case, you have my sympathy — you first leaned how to lie from your own parents. They lied to you, willingly or not, and when you lied to them, they rewarded you, thus reinforcing the behaviour. And when you got caught with a lie, they punished you for it, thus forcing you to learn to lie better next time. And so you lied, and so it went, and if anything, you should be thankful to them for teaching you. After all, your own ability to function in society is solidly based upon your ability to lie.

There are indeed degrees to a lie, and you went through them all. First there was the blatant, stupid lie, when you painted the walls with your mother’s cosmetics and then denied vigorously — while wiping rouge off your hands. Your parents’ feedback made you give that up pretty early in your lying career, and you should be grateful for that.

Then you learned about the difference between telling the truth and being polite, like that time when Aunt Irma brought you that horrid pink sweater for your birthday, and not only you had to thank her, you had to wear the damn thing until she was gone. Or when you had to spend a whole day in your room for telling your daddy’s boss that he’s ugly and he smells — because he did, and it was the truth, and why weren’t you supposed to tell it all of a sudden?

In time you also learned that you can protect your parents from certain aspects of your young life that they strongly disapprove. Like hanging out with friends they don’t like — “Where were you?” “Oh, out playing, ma’” “Not at Johnny’s?” “No, I was with Paulie and Amber with the bikes around the park”. It’s just a little white lie, and they’re now happier for it. Or, if your parents were really strict about lying, you would just “forget” to mention some parts of your day. Lying by omission is not technically a lie — after all, you haven’t said anything untrue. And so it goes.

Of course you’ve seen your parents do it. You’ve seen your mum being all nice and sugary the new neighbour, only to talk trash  her with her girlfriends afterwards. You’ve seen dad handling door-to-door salesmen. You’ve seen them engaged in a million social interactions where they lie and hide and smile about it, because that’s how it’s done.

That’s how we’re able to function as a society. There was a film called “Liar Liar” where a young Jim Carrey was compelled by his son’s birthday wish to tell the truth for one whole day. The results were hilarious — in the movie — but also quite scary, when examined in depth. We tell a hundred lies a day and never even think about them. They are ingrained in our social persona, part of the reason we are able to live among people. Ever tried spending one whole day telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Try it, and tell me how you failed.

So teach your children to lie. If you’re squeamish about the word “lie”, call it something else, but teach them anyway. Teach them how to lie and how to recognize a lie. Teach them about self-serving lies, social lies, political lies, attorney lies and advertiser lies. Teach them how to recognize the intent behind a lie. Teach them how to use lies, fight lies and go beyond lies to find out who they can and cannot trust.

And if you want to teach them to always tell the truth to their parents, you have to make yourself worthy of their trust. Teach them that your love for them is unconditional and not affected by what they say or do. That being your children is reason enough for you to help them and support them to the best of your abilities. Everybody makes mistakes in life — I know you did — and the best you can do is learn and move on. And if you love them enough, and care about them enough, you will teach them above all this one important lesson.

Everybody lies.

Fast food culture. That’s what it’s being called. That’s what it boils down to for some people, this powerful, all-encompassing current that sweeps around the globe, this accumulation of creative potential unlocked in people that are better fed, better educated and with more free time on their hands, all thanks to the industrial revolution. And then there came the telegraph, the radio waves, and now the Internet, information links that ultimately brought people together, allowing them to see and hear what other minds have created in lands they only ever dreamed of.

Take photography, for instance, which evolved so much in a decade thanks to digital imagery that now a mere mortal with some time on their hands can create what masters of half a century past could only ever dream of. Sites like DeviantArt and Flickr allow anyone to showcase their work for the world to see, art galleries and critics be damned. And its so simple that even a 3-year old could do it, provided that a 3-year old would take enough time off from writing the next great American novel on his blog to indulge in such menial activities.

Of course there’s lots of bad art out there. There’s bound to be. For starters, there’s so much more of it. It’s bound to happen that people become fed up with the abundance of cat pictures over the Internet (or cat porn, as it is endeared by the fans of the genre). They can’t stand another overweight, yet not-that-cute Dutch teenage kid dancing away on some obscure Romanian hit song. Or yet another writer wannabe bashing them away on his blog. So they turn to the classics, the true artistic values, the ones that stood the test of time.

Ah, time. The great equaliser. Let enough time go by and Homer will stand next to Shakespeare, Aristofan next to Lev Tolstoi and Handel next to Debussy and no one will question this unnatural closeness. Yet they are centuries, even millennia apart. They were the finest of their generations, of their cultures, and they endured through the ages, so that we learn of them today. Is it fair then , I ask, to compare them with all of the artists in the world today? Is it not a bit hypocritical to conveniently forget that some of those artists were never a la mode in their time — indeed, some were discovered after they passed away — and compare them with the whim of today’s art consumers? It is my firm belief that we’re unfair.

For time is also the great filter. It gives us Mozart and takes away Salieri. It gives us Baudelaire and Robert Frost, but buries the thousands of poets de salon that bundled pretty rhymes together to win the hearts (and more) of frivolous demoiselles. Keats died of consumption, attacked on all sides by his critics, only to later be enshrined as one of the greatest that English Romantism has to offer. Where are his critics now? Their words are dust, subjects of dusty papers written by dusty scholars. We’re left with Endymion and a nostalgy of ancient, happy days. But ancient as they may well be, they were never that happy.

Who’s to say that not the same will happen in a hundred years time? Perhaps people will look back fondly towards the 20th century and say: “ah, those were the days”. The birth of rock’n’roll, ah, what I wouldn’t give to see those times. The rebels, the bards, the poets, baring their souls, burning their lives away on the altar of artistic expression. The great pioneers of information technology, the first feeble expressions of Web culture, that led all the way to the full sensorial sharing that we have today. Which we don’t like, there’s so many people sharing sensyms of them banging their heads to the walls on YouSense.com, all in the name of art. Art? Garbage I say. Now give me the 2010’s… ah, those were true artists then.

Because it’s oh so easy, can’t you see? With classics we don’t have to judge, because they’ve already been judged. We don’t have to choose, for they have already been chosen, and so they stand before us already validated by the hands of time. None of our friends would dare comment on our taste, because we stand on the shoulders of generations that valued the same art. Not to say that there are no true admirers of the classics. But its such a convenient hiding spot for the snobs of our time.

I dare say: there is no real fast food culture. There is no real fast food art. There is just man’s drive to create and express his innermost feelings and desires. There may have been performers with greater talent than Beethoven, wasting their life away between one fair and the next. Born in the wrong place or at the wrong time, not lucky enough to win the patronage of nobles, dying in squalor and misery because those were the times. And for every one of those there were hundreds of thousands of mediocre dabblers, which are best left forgotten as far as The Art is concerned.

And you have the unique chance to have a real understanding of today’s artistic manifestation. You live here. You have the background knowledge, an unique understanding of the environment that fosters and nurtures today’s art. Don’t be ashamed to be drawn by your contemporaries’ artistic manifestations. Enjoy it. It’s history in the making.

Time, the great deceiver. Indeed.

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

We’ll get back to our regular program presently.