Tag: dignity

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- Consultation Discourse Knowledge Oneness

Truth, Civility, and Consultation Part III

Any minority pursuing development on behalf of the collective foists its values onto, and often disturbs, the very population it purports to serve.  Subsuming collective prosperity to their personal values of progress, and sacrificing the participation and engagement of whole segments of indigenous population, this minority allows little room for feedback from efforts as they are made, learning in action, or real-time adjustments to suit realities in the field. These feedback loops would involve acknowledging those indigenous populations as equals to the developers conducting the development process – empowering them. Maintaining a power dynamic has historically been the priority of the ‘global development’ community. Increasing industrial and technological resources are needed to advance the agenda, implement the plan, and placate an unwilling and unsuited local community. Alone and isolated, a driven minority commits itself to increasing scales of intellectual and technocratic sophistication (personal accomplishments) in pursuance to its commitment to a personal vision of prosperity. Soon, corporate investments are needed to bolster ailing engagements, exploitative incentives are needed to motivate corporate bottom lines, a marriage of convenience between idealism and corporate exploitation seems necessary. Right becomes wrong, success in industrialization becomes justified at all costs, ends justify means, cultural and sociological tragedies of all kinds abound, struggle for power becomes end in itself, idealistic ideology is subordinated to camp warfare for competitive contract bidding, development has become imperialism, idealism has become opportunism, and disunity becomes religion.

We learn from this that communication must be made open, free, and inclusive. Consultation should be recognized as cure to these many difficulties. Discourse must seek out participation and respect for all people and perspectives. Diverse and dissenting views must be admitted. Honest and sincere contributions to the global discourse of human betterment are paramount and singular criteria. Manipulation or insistence on one line of action or reasoning must not be tolerated. Each offered thought belongs to the collective and is not attached to ego or camp. Offered for the collective good, and free from calculation for personal or particularistic advantage or gain, proposals are modified, refined, or discarded based upon consideration of global interest.  Truth in this way becomes a function of politeness and inclusivity as this ensures welcomeness in collective participation. Poise, equanimity, and civility have a mysterious relationship with truth. Politeness, dignity, and selflessness maintain the relevance of any one individual to the collective decision making, truth discovering, and knowledge generating process.

Categories
- Consultation Discourse Knowledge Oneness

Truth, Civility, and Consultation Part II

The history of philanthropic movements recounts many instances of people who believe in noble ideals and strive to fulfill their vision of what they think the world ought to look like. One may reasonably ask however, whether what they considered ideal could actually truly be considered a reliable pattern for prosperous order without incorporating the vision and experiences of the people needing ‘development’. Notwithstanding, ‘global developers’ implanted systems of industrial and economic production based on north american models and experience indiscriminately.

The twentieth century saw the collapse of this worldview; its ideals sagged under mounting historical evidence. Development seemed to be struggling as an ideal. Extensive efforts in line with the corrupt core of ideals it cherished met only with results to the contrary. Exacerbated stand all parameters and indices of the severity and profundity of social and economic pathology – 50 years and countless billions of dollars into the movement later.  The undoing of the nuclear family extended into previously untouched rural outreaches, the unprecedented brutality and depravity of criminality, the normalcy of dysfunction at the level of educational systems. The tragic fate of socio-economic development as a western export has eradicated in the global psyche the once-cherished hope that idealistic motives and material resources can correct the problems of planetary civilization. After D-Day and Hiroshima an age of globalization ushered in the consciousness of human interconnectedness and the nobility of co-existent constructiveness. Development emerged as the single most exorbitant and grandiose collective idealism manifest in corporate investment and political discourse to which the human race has ever turned its attention.

Its idealistic naiveté matched its financial and technological investment. Far from narrowing the gap between the minority that enjoys the benefits of western modernization and the vast majority of members of the human family mired in hopeless privation – ironically, the movement towards development that once boasted high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss. By its own standards the movement must be judged a disheartening failure, if not a direct contributor to our current predicament.