Tag: press

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An Age of Corruption

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed. – Friedrich Nietzsche

As some of you may know, my daily routine starts with a 4-5 mile walk every weekday. This is my time to cogitate and try to make sense of what I know, have read, or have inferred about the world around me. Few distractions (almost no cars on the road at 615) in the darkness.

The other morning I was thinking about what the age we’re living in should be called – Anthropocene, Ignoramuscene … the Age of Stupid? Nietzsche’s quote, however, seems an all-too-accurate description of our modern world. We’re witnessing the attempted murder of Responsibility. Our culture has become a caricature of what it once so vibrantly was, corrupted by a lack of accountability.

When parents turn raising their kids over to the educational system or social media or …, the kids go from being Johnny, Mary, Lakeisha, and Juan to White male 53, White female 27, Black female 31, Hispanic male 22, i.e., they become identitarian statistics. No one is ever held accountable for mistreating or not educating statistics.

Our history has either been forgotten or so badly distorted by Hannah-Jones’ bastardization of Howard Zinn’s communist re-imaginings to be unrecognizable. Our “leaders?” A demented dolt and a braggadocious narcissist. Our “humorists” – whether Colbert on the Left or Gutfeld on the Right – are indeed witty but simply aren’t funny. Their mean-spirited sarcasm is more aimed at de-platforming – a form of social and economic murder – than of satire. Our supine press publishes the verbal scraps handed them by Government without questioning or probing their veracity. Even our Science is perverted by partisan politics.

We know that many of our educational institutions at all levels are failing too many kids. The disadvantaged have probably been hurt the worst. When the majority of kids in schools in our largest cities get social passes but “graduate” without being able to figure or read – or think! – something’s wrong. When over one-sixth of our young women contemplate suicide or have other mental health issues – something’s wrong. When our health establishment pushes “gender affirming care” as the answer to our kids’ mental health crises – something’s wrong. When the pill pushers pump our young men full of Ritalin or Adderall to tame their “toxic masculinity” – something’s wrong.

Perhaps the most atrocious indicator that we are living in an Age of Corruption is how seemingly blasé we have become to Corruption itself. In my youth, a muck-raking journalist exposed that the Chief of Staff to our President had received gifts of $1,000 in paid travel and a vicuna coat; Congressional pressure forced him to resign. Today, we have the sad spectacle of Congressional sophists ignoring millions of dollars of bribes to our President’s son by hostile foreign governments, and billions of dollars to be “managed” by a President’s son-in-law from a shaky ally. And the press seems unable to muster the muckrakers to uncover what these foreign governments have received or hope to receive.

A dark portrait of our Age, but one we can brighten. First, we must rebuild trust in our institutions. This starts by electing real leaders – intelligent people who are worthy of our trust; who care about our communities, our nation, and all of our people; who have the courage to make the tough choices; who hold themselves and those they work with accountable regardless of party.

But at the same time, we as parents have to take responsibility for raising our kids. That starts with recognizing that we – and no one else – are responsible for their passage from child to adult. Yes, the schools should play a role – teaching the kids to read, write and think critically. But if their schools aren’t doing that, or if the schools are indoctrinating them rather than teaching them, then we have both a moral and legal obligation to ensure the kids’ education in some other way.

One of the things that we as parents can do is make sure that the schools set standards and hold our kids accountable for reaching them. I recently read a nice piece in the Free Press about the Classical Education Movement. It is sort of “Back to the Future;” its foundations in the classical trivium and its focus on enabling critical thinking as preparation for training in a vocation. People on both the Left (Cornel West) and the Right (Ron DeSantis) have seen what this could mean for our future generations.

Our institutions need firm standards firmly enforced as well. For example, we need to nail shut the revolving door between regulators and regulated, lawgivers and those bound by the laws.

Most importantly, we need a resurgence of wisdom:

  • Understanding what is known, and recognizing what is uncertain;
  • Assessing conditions based on facts as we know them, not someone else’s idea of what the facts are, no matter how well said;
  • Using reason and logic – not emotion – to make decisions; and,
  • Holding ourselves to a high ethical standard.

If we can start on these, we can eventually pass out of the Age of Corruption.

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On a related note: several weeks ago, I was notified that Transparency International had published their new Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI reflects perceived corruption in the public sector of 180 countries around the world.  I had seen previous versions (the first was in 1995) but hadn’t looked into the making of the Index. It’s really an interesting piece of work.

Transparency International uses 13 different sources of data relating to corrupt behavior (e.g., diversion of public funds), or mechanisms to prevent corruption (e.g., legal protection of whistleblowers). TI vets its sources based on their reputation, methodological reliability, focus on corruption, quantitative scalability, cross-country comparisons, and repetition over time. TI then standardizes the data to a 0-100 scale, where “0” indicates the high level of perceived corruption and “100” the lowest (I know; this does seem a little bass-ackwards!). In this year’s compilation, Denmark was the least corrupt (CPI = 90), and Somalia the most (CPI = 11).

We all “know” that corruption is an enemy of freedom and free enterprise. But we really haven’t paid attention to what that means in the real world. One way to do that is to plot the CPI against the GDP per capita of the 180 countries (GDP, adjusted for price parity, available from the CIA World Fact Book).

The blue line indicates that a country’s economy (as measured by its GDP) apparently is constrained by its public corruption. Although I haven’t found any comparable data for communities, the plot at least suggests that economic developers should pay attention to community corruption. Certainly there are other constraints – the wide range of GDP’s for countries with a CPI ~ 75 attests to that. However, eliminating corruption may be crucial, esp. for those with poorly developed economies.

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Trumping Resilience and Biden Time

While it seems that everyone has an opinion about “The Donald,” this post is not really about him, nor about Uncle Joe.  But I do want to riff on “group-ism,” unity and resilience.  I know that this will be controversial, but if we are ever going to have an adult conversation about these subjects somebody’s got to go first (Then again, you can always spot a pioneer by the arrows in his back and his blood-soaked boots!).

What’s group-ism?  It’s simply identifying – defining – a person on the basis of the group he or she belongs to.  Depending on your particular point of view, it may be called racism, gender-ism, identity politics (or a host of others).  And it can have a profound impact on a community’s resilience.

Let’s start with what should be obvious – something like group-ism is a part of our human DNA; it transcends color, culture, gender and breeding.  The ability to recognize “Others” was a key to our species’ survival.  Whether it was a wild animal or a member of a different tribe, our ancestors’ inbred ability to recognize something or someone that was different was important for prehistoric humans’ survival.  So in this sense we are all racist, sexist, anti-immigrant… – group-ists.  To deny that we are is to deny our own humanity.

But the world today is very different from prehistoric times.  Few of us live in isolated self-sufficient villages in the forest any more.  Stones and spears and clubs have been replaced by laser-guided weapons.  Many of us eat exotic foods from half a world away.  Our standards of living exceed even the wildest dreams of our atavistic ancestors; for the first time in recorded history less than 10% of the world’s population lives in abject poverty (or at least they did before the pandemic).

But these advances have required that we become more connected.  Interdependencies abound.  Our isolated village in the forest has become one of many neighborhoods in a concrete and asphalt jungle.  If a disaster strikes, we will have to work with our neighbors and friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends in order to return to something like our prior lives.  And if we wish positive change in our communities that means working with other neighborhoods very different from our own.  To paraphrase Bill Clinton, for community resilience “It’s the connections, Stupid!”

And it is in these connections that we can find the antidote to our inherited “group-ism.”  Humans are social animals.  We want to interact with other humans.  If I have had a positive experience with blacks, or Asians, or women or any of the other “Others” then I am that much less likely to trigger my inbred “Others” instinct when I see someone from these groups.  Conversely, without those positive interactions, that instinct will continue to hold sway.  And that’s why the growing tribalism in our culture is so dangerous.

Clearly “The Donald’s” blatant and often bigoted outbursts are bludgeons battering the bonds that hold us together, threatening our communities and their resilience.  Sadly, though, there are Montagues to his Capulet.  Uncle Joe with his if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black, and calling Trump voters clowns, chumps and worse.  Throwing boulders in the path to the unity he aims for. And the press: Trump’s boorishness and silly lies are matched (perhaps even exceeded) by the meanness, poor reporting and downright dishonesty of much of the media. Indeed, a plague on all their houses!

There is no greater threat to our communities’ resilience than these politicians (and media pundits) pandering to us in terms of the groups we belong to.  Dripping a seductive acid into our ears that our weaknesses are someone else’s fault; that those “Others” are holding us back.  All the while building suspicion and fear and reinforcing our atavistic instinct that leads to pathologies that further weaken our communities such as college students demanding re-segregation of residence halls (What would Dr. King make of that?!?).  How can we prevent – let alone recover from – another Ferguson if we have not built bonds of respect among all of the groups in our communities?  How can we spot the outsiders that truly threaten us – the Dylan Roofs and Omar Mateens – if we see everyone who is different from us as an outsider?  How can we be resilient when disaster comes if we have no connections outside of our own group?  The answer to all of these, of course, is that we can’t.  Our politicians are “Trump”-ing our resilience – crimping our connections in a world that demands connectedness.  Connections we must have to overcome our atavistic instincts; connections we must have to survive in this modern world; the connections needed for community resilience.