Holotopia: Convenience paradox

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Convenience paradox

The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek happiness here and now. Their lifestyle changed and their culture blossomed. What will the next "great cultural revival" be like?

We may approach the same question also from another angle. Combined together, the first four insights show that the spontaneous evolution of the academic tradition has brought it, and us with it, to a new turning point—beyond which it continues by removing from us the people the burden of the narrow frame, which made us misunderstand and damage culture. And by empowering us to combine whatever is relevant in human experience, from all time periods and geographical locations and cultural traditions, and create basic insights that can illuminate our evolutionary 'way'.

By highlighting the trials and tribulations of Galilei and Socrates, as founding fathers of science and the academia, we pointed out that providing knowledge for "evolutionary guidance" (by liberating us from power-laden myths and from the delusion of the senses, through devotion to truth, empirical insights and rational analysis) is what the academic tradition is really all about.

To the four example results of such an undertaking, we are now adding the convenience paradox as fifth. Already the power structure insight showed how culture can be used as a medium of power-motivated socialization. By combining it with the socialized reality insight, we could see that the societal 'order of things' we've been socialized to accept as "the reality" can be just a product of power structure. We begin to see our liberation from such myths as a core political issue. The convenience paradox insight undertakes to remove another cognitive obstacle, which is a delusion of our senses—which emphasize instant causes and effects, and obscure the long-term ones.

We don't seek knowledge and wisdom to orient our basic choices because we believe that we already know the answers, that we can experience them directly.

The convenience paradox insight is that convenience is a useless and deceptive value—which by inhibiting the development of culture, and of "human quality", hinders us from pursuing the goals and directions that are the most rewarding, and most germanely human!

When convenience paradox is understood, it becomes obvious that we have indeed no clue about the life's most important and interesting question:

What values, and what goals, are really worth pursuing?

Imagine a culture where the convenience paradox is a basic culture-supported facts, as the Newton's Laws are.

The convenience paradox insight is a beginning, not an end. Beyond it is the pursuit of knowledge, and of human cultivation—leading to a true blossoming of our potential. In no epoch before has the heritage of the world traditions been available to a single human population. And in no other epoch has this population matured epistemologically and technologically to the point of being able to take true advantage of the humanity's cultural welth.

We should not be a single bit surprised if it turns out that a cultural change of a similar scale is ahead of us, as the change in our understanding and transforming the natural world, which science and technology have enabled for us.

What points of reference and what sources will become relevant? What new insights will emerge?

We here point to the breadth and the depth of possibilities by a few examples.

Stories

Political hygiene

The power structure insight points to a possibility—that our ascent to wholeness can be diverted by power interests, in ways that suit those interests. The convenience paradox insight points to the possibility the value we use to make choices leads us in a direction that is opposite from wholeness.

Our senses evolved to guide us to wholeness in nature; why trust that they can still serve that purpose in our completely altered civilized condition?

Wholeness is so precarious: One may have everything else in abundance—and a single nutrient missing in his diet could make it all futile!

Is our civilization (or 'bus') taking us to wholeness?

The interesting fact is that we don't know! There is a popular myth, that we must be living better because we are living longer. Can we answer this all-important question in a more reliable or scientific way?

Imagine this experiment: A sufficiently large human population is divided into two groups. One group continues to live the civilized way, and the other in the way this population lived before it got civilized. What sort of differences would develop?

Such an experiment is of course practically impossible. But it did happen—not in a laboratory, but in real life. In early 20th century a number of world populations were just reached by civilization—which brought about the division we are talking about. Weston Price traveled around the globe visiting those populations, and recording the data. The results were published in a book titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Its message was that the change to civilized lifestyle was a step away from corporeal wholeness!

Price diagnosed that the people who lived in pre-civilized ways manifested higher degrees of wellbeing.

Werner Kollath took this line of work a step further, by doing experimental and statistical research—in for us a most interesting direction. We will, however, introduce it here with a caveat.

In knowledge federation we consider us all as imperfect humans (made more imperfect by the power structure we are part of), who once in a while stumble upon an idea that is vital to humanity ("vital" because it is an essential element in our quest of wholeness). We have conceived knowledge federation as a praxis of empowering such ideas—by giving them visibility, and by 'connecting the dots' or creating synergies with other ideas, and letting them drive a change toward a larger new order of things that they point to together.

When we began researching his ideas and writing about him, Kollath was not translated into English, and was largely unknown in the English speaking world. Now we found that there is a rather extensive Wikipedia article about him, which focuses largely on his Nazi affiliation. Highly compromising (for Kollath) sentences from his 1937 seminal "Grundlagen, Methoden und Ziele der Hygiene (Principles, Methods and Goals of Health)", which were deleted from the post-war edition, are quoted in German, and translated into English. We found this to be an ad hominem argument against Kollath's main or "vital" idea—which was not even mentioned. Neither was Kollath's book in which this idea was published, titled "Zivilisationsbedingte Krankheiten und Todesursachen. Ein medizinisches und politisches Problem (Civilization-Conditioned Diseases and Death Causes. A Medical and Political Problem)".

The question to which Kollath offers an answer is the first one we need to ask about his native field (if we are to create a society that is guided by information and information-based principles, not by power struggle and "survival of the fittest"): Why is our healthcare conceived as curing diseases, not as caring for health. There are two power structures at play: The food and consumer industries, who have business interest in making us prefer certain kinds of goods, and hence certain lifestyle patterns; and the biomedical and healthcare industries, whose "fitness" depends on expensive remedies, and people who vitally need them. It is easy to see that those two form a synergy.

When writing the mentioned book, Kollath's aim was to establish "political hygiene as science". His goal was, in other words, closely similar to ours—but in his own field. His aim was really systemic innovation in healthcare. His point was that the contemporary medicine originated through the successes in combatting infectious diseases. That the lifestyle-related diseases are on the rise. And that they require a completely different approach to health—focused, above all, on empowering the people to make right lifestyle choices, by resorting to the methods and esteem of science.

Weston Price has largely been ignored. But Werner Kollath was (according to the biography written by Elisabeth Kollath, his widow) actively eliminated—see our summary and comments.

Kanyini

There is also this other popular myth, that "the human nature" is acquisitive and self-serving; and that therefore the societal order of things we are living in is the best and most natural one.

What do we really know about "the human nature"?

It may well be the case that the order of things we are living in is just the one that emerged through societal "survival of the fittest"; and that what we know as the "human nature" is just the way we've been socialized by it.

Imagine a culture, on some faraway island, living on the same terrain for thousands of years without contact with the outside world, war or technology. How would "the human nature" manifest in that culture?

Imagine now that this island were discovered by people from our culture. What would that meeting of cultures be like?

There is no need to imagine: This did indeed happen.

Our relationship with the nature is to use is to satisfy our needs. The people who colonized Australia extended that principle to Aboriginal women. As the number of children conceived in this way grew, they became a political problem: Being half-white, their souls too needed to be saved. And so by a political decision, the half-white children were then taken from their families, to attend special boarding schools.

Bob Randall was one of them, who lived to tell the story. One of the first things he observed was that while the white people preached Christianity, his people lived it!

Randall later returned to the place that used to be his home, but he never found his family. Now in reservations, his people were destitute. Inhaling gasoline (to combat depression? or to once again experience the "high" that the nature used to give?) was so common, that Australia had to infuse gasoline with additives to prevent it.

Randall left us a report about the original Aboriginal culture, which included both "the human nature" and the human relationship with nature it produced. The keyword "kanyini", interpreted as "the principle of caring and responsibility that underpins the Aboriginal life", expresses its essence (hear Randall explain it). A young white Australian woman named Melanie Hogan undertook to federate the kanyini meme, and document this meeting of cultures as it was seen from the other side—by creating a documentary called "Kanyini".

Paticcasamuppada

We have now come to the interesting part. We gave it a name, "Happiness between One and Plus Infinity", and then another, "The Best Kept Secret of Human Culture"; and we made it a theme of one of our ten conversations.

The point is that, on the one side, we could be declining in happiness, without knowing that. We have no meter to measure happiness; all we have as reference is our own experience. So even the 'level-one happiness', what we consider "normal", could be declining, without us knowing.

But the far more interesting side is the other one—the limits to growth of happiness. There the exciting fact is that human wholeness has no limits.

Unlike machines, we humans can always be more whole!

Imagine a new kind of science—with its own methods, laboratories, terminology... which experiments with long-term human cultivation, trying a variety of lifestyle choices, cultivation practices... Imagine new insights this science could produce, which would dispel popular myths and illusions in this culturally most interesting creative frontier. Imagine this science producing surprising and life-changing insights, not only about remote and foreign practices such as qigong and yoga, but also about our familiar Christianity and Islam.

Once again there is no need to imagine. Such a 'science' did indeed exist, twenty five centuries ago in the forests of India.

Suppose we somehow managed to federate the insights that were reached in this 'laboratory'. How would they reflect upon our contemporary lifestyle? What new directions for changing it would become available?

Before we answer those questions, let us briefly revisit the "official narrative". This will allow us to illustrate the difference that knowledge federation might make in this uniquely interesting realm.

According to the tradition, a young prince took a ride from the shelter of his palace through a near-by village, and was so surprised to see the people suffer that he decided to go to the forest and seek a cure to suffering. After having tried multiple ways, and meditated for five years under the Bo Tree, in a strike of insight brought by the enlightenment he'd reached, he saw the answer. The first sermon he gave was about the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth is usually translated as "All life involves suffering". Life is suffering; the only way to avoid suffering is to not be born at all (be in the condition called "nirvana").

The official narrative has several incongruities, one of which is that a prince would be surprised to see suffering, that he would dedicate his life to find a "cure to suffering"; and that he would come back to the world with the big news about the existence of suffering. Isn't this just an obvious fact?

When he was still a young monk in Bangkok, Ven Ajahn Buddhadasa had misgivings both about the official narrative of Buddhism, and about the conventional practice. So equipped with a strong motivation and the original scriptures, he withdrew to an abandoned forest monastery near his home village in Southern Thailand, to 'repeat the Buddha's experiment'.

What Buddhadasa found out he considered to be the essence of not only Buddhism, but of all religion.

And it was also entirely different from the way in which religion tends to be perceived. Here is a very brief illustration.

The "official narrative" of Buddhism, which we have just revisited, is completely changed when instead of "suffering" we use the original keyword, dukkha. But what is "dukkha"? Well, that's exactly what the First Noble Truth of Buddhism is about.

Seeing dukkha, or comprehending the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, is a life-changing experience.

For three reasons:

• Dukkha is a subtle psychological suffering, which is so much a part of the normal human life that we normally just take it for granted: "This is just how the human life is." Dukkha may constitute as much as 98% of our emotional lives. The Buddha's first sermon was the life-changing insight that dukkha is curable!
• An even larger and more interesting part of this story is about the dukkha–related suffering we inflict on each other. And about the societal and cultural order of things we create.
• The most interesting and the least known part, however, is about its the long-term effects. Suppose we lived without dukkha; what result would this lead to in the long run? For interesting reasons the Buddhists won't tell you this; but the Sufis will: The result is a bounty of ecstatic love and happiness. It is a completely different inner emotional climate from what most of us can imagine.

The interesting question then becomes—How can one eliminate dukkha? This question is answered by the Third and the Fourth Noble Truth, shared at the end of the Buddha's first sermon—and its substance of course occupies (according to Buddhadasa) all of the Buddha's gift to mankind. We will here, however, only illustrate it by zooming in on a specific detail of a specific method, called "Paticcasamuppada", and translated as "Dependent Origination". While we continue this story, we expect that you'll be amused comparing what is being told by our contemporary culture, including the emotional ecology created for us by all the advertising we are immersed in, and the way in which we "pursue happiness".

The Buddhist formula, by which a technique for reducing dukkha is pointed to, is "mindfulness at the point of contact". The word "contact" here means contact with anything that may ignite a strong emotion—including something we may like, or dislike, something we may fear or regret, and even our own self-satisfaction for being free of such emotions. The word "mindfulness" means that our mind is present and alert at that very point, ready to stop us from engaging in this emotion, and in that waay breaking the cycle of "dependent origination", where one thing leads to another, and ultimately to dukkha.

If we fail to do that, the cycle can still be broken at a later point, but this becomes increasingly difficult. An example of a later point is what is technically called "birth"—which (according to Buddhadasa) is not the physical birth, but the birth of our self-awareness or egotism. It is the where one feels "I want something". It is the the view of the world from the venture point of "our own" interests and desires.

And so the point of it all is not at all that physical birth inevitably leads to suffering; it is that egotism inevitably leads to dukkha!