Friday, May 29, 2009

The rational World

The world is getting very interesting these days.
There are the social democratic countries with a more flat economy facing debt problems, mainly with pensions (Medicare, a federal health-care programme in USA, will run out of cash by 2017).
There is China showing what humans can do when they want development. China is supposed to be masking its growth index, so it could be growing faster than expected. The power of the government in China is similar to Venezuela, but one should not confuse the ancient dragon culture of kung fu with a newborn culture. The people in China give a strong power to the government, who did very well under the circunstances. But there are much poverty to face yet.

Brazil is dancing, not that it is a bad thing, but it ever was this way. A newborn culture built upon fear and desire, because most of the people came in the "promised land" running away from world war or wishing to get rich. But no matter what the people came here to do, even if it was a nice beautiful thing like building the "promised land", it would never be anything like a "promised land". Because there are much problems to solve, morals to develop and solutions to accept. And people are always wanting to have the best possible life without changing anything they believe. Do not ask me how did we prove that we are rationals, maybe it was an axiom.

Latin America, like most of the newborn countries, face strong social problems and solve these problems with something more simple that only makes the problems scale. The economy seems to be the unique saint (in the point that the enterprises mind the future and have a culture of development), but in a land of evil, the saint becomes evil.
People are facing the normal problems of a new capitalism in the 3rd world. And China will likely not be part of the 3rd world by 2050. But the government must solve the economic inequality there by this time and I do think less moral and intellectual barriers should be up (they will not need it, but I think it will be very difficult to dissolve or change this power structure, even if they want it).
Strong religous countries are walking slowly. They have something more than just the greed as a motivation for their lives and this at the same time that let them deal with their situation also makes everything difficult to change.
The most reasonable political country seems to be Netherland, but this could be just a consequence of being probably in an advanced stage of capitalism. Because by 17th century and 18th century, the Dutch were arguably the most economically wealthy and scientifically advanced of all European nations.
If you do not believe that the capitalism has stages of development, then take a look at the victorian time and compare it with Europe now. If you consider what was said by Marx about the capitalism, check that Marx have lived during the Victorian Era and have saw a capitalism in its puberty. Notice that the same problems seen by Marx happen now at the 3rd countries and check that the Economic Inequality of Europe (what generate the strong classisist divisions) is low.
The idea of capitalism stages came from a economic book, but when I asked about the development of capitalism once, the economists showed little to no interest.
Economists are reading too much math equations and less history these days. This is why people are getting all surprises from a natural emergent human phenomena. Some argue that Finance is blinding, but I do not think so. Finance is well developed and interesting, but people should not think with 10 years of experience and complex equations they would be able to solve an emergent complex human equation that is capitalism. This would be very boring.
The world is happily a changeling place and as rational beings, we could not help but eager for the next problem to solve.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Languages inside languages

Nowadays it is really easy to hear "developing critical professionals". What this simple phrase means is that the world is trying to bring people with opinions. They are motivating the discussions.

But what should be the meaning of that? They are surely not trying to develop personal fights, but rather to increase the exchange of information and reasoning. Some times it does happens, but when people from different cultures (what does not mean they are from different countries) come to talk, they rarely exchange information or do some reasoning. And the reason for that is that there are a bunch of different communication ways out there, that we could not see, but we sure feel.

For example, when talking to a criminal, you may found that the most important thing in the speech is to find a hierarchical position and maintain that. Anything that could broke that hierarchy in speech after it is have been established will undoubtedly bring only a fight. But if you keep that hierarchy in the talk, it could be very reasonable.
In a executive talk, it is almost the same. And in both kinds there are words that should and should not be used.
Can you imagine a executive talking like "fuck, do ya know what u've done boy?" or a criminal using difficult to understand words or too much politeness. But at a logical point of view their talks (criminal and executive), although opposites in some aspects have lot of equal characteristics, they are keeping the status in the speech.
An executive and a criminal will probably face problems while talking to each other, because they do not talk the same language.

A talk that would be very different is from a philosopher or from nerds. They also have some kind of fight inside their talk, but the essence of the talk is normally logical. The main point in the talk is the logical thought and everything is derived from it, even the status.

Aside from the cultural differences, there are also behavior characteristics. Some people like to talk loud, some get irritated with it. Some like to use flexible slangs others think it is too much inexact, some like to preserve a language pattern to show some status while others dislike status in speech, some like offensive charges in speech just like an army of arguments while others prefer to keep it calm, some get hurt personally others always consider talk a non personal thing.

With all these differences it is hard to imagine that people would have the same way of communicating, but the problem is, in what extent can they communicate and how this exchange takes place? Is it enough to discuss the subject?

Sometimes the answer is no. And in this world of languages inside languages there is just one way to talk, learn another language. And do not get me wrong, learning another language is not only memorizing words, it is more like understanding cultures and behaviors.