Tag: love

The prismon of equality

prism 5 finalby Albert Brenner

To truly understand a (or any) Zeitgeist, you simply need to imagine a dispersive prism with an inverse movement of (the) Light.

For our Zeitgeist, simply change the colour red with the word race, yellow with sexual orientation, blue with gender, purple with culture, et cetera. Now write the word equality on the front of the prism, and the word love on the (white) beam of light emanating from said prism.

This, in essence, is our Zeitgeist… the (secular-humanist) Zeitgeist of Equality. For practically everything is conflated by/through the anthropological-reductionism termed equality… to teleologically engender that which is commonly referred to as Love (in the West).

This means that if you, for example, believe that race and gender are social constructs, gay and heterosexual marriage are commensurate, and that all cultures are equal in all aspects… then you love. If you don`t, you hate – ergo, the notion (and legal lexeme) called hate-speech.

By the very nature of things – if you reduce, you must exclude. And if you exclude, you must, by necessity, forfend. And if you forfend, you invariably imprison Reason – hence, my portmanteau “prismon” (i.e. prism plus prison).

The history of the West is a veritable procession of prismona… starting from Plato`s “philosopher-state” and continuing all the way to the (still budding) “Gene-fication” of, inter alia, Richard Dawkins. Abandoned prismona like, for example, Communism and the Make Love not War 60s (still) literally litter our path from the past to the future. It is, basically, the ever-hopeful disconsolate discourse of Utopia… at the tragic expense of Reason.

Our (current) prismon, the Prismon of Equality, is no exception.

Very much like Galileo`s near-deadly heliocentric versus geocentric spat with the Roman Catholic Prismon, modern Men of Reason like, for example, the Dr James Watson and Dr Thilo Sarrazin were literally burned at the stake of prismon-predicated public opinion… and all but ostracized from the human social sphere.

The former, a Nobel Prize scientist, simply questioned – from a very defensible evolutionary point of view – whether all races are indeed equal. He simply stated that,`”There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.” 

The latter, the left-wing Thilo Sarrazin, wrote an acerbic book called Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab, in which he rigorously (and very reasonedly) questioned whether all cultures are indeed equal. As a consequence he was fired from his position at the German Reserve Bank… for simply having exercised his right to free speech in the 21st century.

The Inquisition is merciless indeed. For in its defense of (eternal) “equality”, Reason is (like always) its most formidable foe.

For example; how on earth can one maintain that his/her views are rational when believing that gender is a “social construct” while, simultaneously, believing that homosexuality is genetic? Or that race is a social construct when any pathologist can simply do a few measurements on a bone-dry skeleton to determine whether the deceased was black or white? Or just look at the finalists at any Olympic 100-meter sprint event, for Pete`s sake!?

But then, Dawkins has found God in a gene, Freud (his disciples Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, actually) claimed that sex is the Alpha and Omega, and Karl Marx reduced everything to the monopoly of the means to production.

Be that as it may; the fons et origo of the Prismon of Equality can, albeit it rather intricate, be traced back to one very context-bound and, ultimately, non-scientific assumption. It is the first part of the second sentence of the American Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…

This sentence (and, ultimately, non-scientific assumption) was solely aimed at showing the middle-finger to the British Empire`s colonial rule over the American territories at the time. It was not a carte blanche affirmation of gay-marriage or cultural relativism, or black suffrage… for that matter!

Yet alas, it, this anthropological reductionism, has escaped its original context… to infuse virtually all aspects of the moral, socio-cultural and politico-economic sphere of the West. Not unlike Freud`s treatment of a few sexually frustrated Victorian women that then developed into a “science”… whose practitioners can physically send you to a nut-house for the rest of your natural life if you do not conform to the norm – the inherent reductionism – of their prismon!

One Flew Over The Cuckoo`s Nest, indeed.

Be that as it may; every prismon contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. At the most basic level it is Jacques Derrida`s différance… then Thomas Kuhn`s paradigm-shifts and, ultimately, Hegel`s dialectic.

For all these inevitable internal contradictions eventually become untenable… and then (all) these prismona simply flip over to reveal (and engender) their dialectic/al opposites.

For example, the Prismon of Equality is basically (in layman`s lingo) just a very virulent criminalization of the (heterosexual) Pale Male. And if you turn it around, you`ll see a six-letter word. HITLER

Q.E.D

Love is a dying tradition: work is eliminating families

by Charlene Smith

Don’t cry if you’re no-one’s Valentine, love is a dying tradition as marriages and family life disappear according to a rush of new studies released this month.

The Brookings Institute in the United States reported on February 3 that, “Fewer Americans are married today than at any point in at least 50 years.” This correlates with data in the same report that says while half of women didn’t work 40 years ago, it is rare for women not to work now and they’re waiting longer to have children, if at all. Today in the United States a third of first time mothers are older than forty and around 10 percent of men and women are choosing not to marry at all.

Vicky Eriksson of human resources training group The People Element said, “ours are the most job-focused generations ever. We work longer hours -up to 500 hours more a year according to stats – and because we have become so consumed with accumulating degrees, status, and wealth, the other significant need for successful humans – good relationships – falls by the wayside. Yet, stats of the wealthiest one percent of Americans who earn 40 percent of that country’s wealth reveal that 48 percent are in stable, happy, long-term marriages. The very wealthiest have learned the secrets of successful relationships, the rest of us have not.” Figures for South Africa show rampant divorce, multiple marriages and a very high ratio of struggling single mothers.

The Organisation of Economic CoOperation and Development also released a report early in February saying that marriage in Western nations (including South Africa) is a dying trend. “Since the 1960s the family has undergone significant transformation. In many countries, the extended family has all but disappeared, and the traditional two-parent family has become much less widespread as divorce rates, re-marriages, cohabitation, single parenthood and same-sex partnerships have all increased.

“Families have seen more mothers take up work in the labour market, their adolescents spend longer and longer in education and training, and the elderly members of the family live longer and, increasingly, alone.”

Vicky Eriksson and Karin Wellman of The People Element said they were increasingly engaging with people in workshops who had chosen to give up relationships to devote time to their career. Eriksson said, “women especially tend to choose to focus on their career in their early years and then consider a relationship in their late thirties or early forties when they are at the top of their careers. But a relationship requires compromise and some struggle to do that after achieving success in the workplace. This can lead to personal stress and sadness later on.”

Wellman and Eriksson said they were so concerned by the high levels of stress in the workplace that they were organizing a conference on People Effectiveness @ Work to be held at the Midrand Conference Centre on the 8th of May 2012 “It will be a one day bootcamp to look at ways to help individuals and workforces to transform and cope with stress in ways that don’t disable their work performance or their family or personal life.”

Wellman pointed out that OECD figures on the breakup of relationships -especially families – were now imposing significant costs on economies, “In Britain that figure is now £42bn per year and rising, according to the Relationships Foundation. Family breakdown costs more than the entire defence budget in that country. In Britain and here most of the cost to the economy comes from benefits and tax credits that support single parents and their children. Today in Britain there are two million single parent families: there were one million in 1980. In South Africa most children are now being raised in single parent families.”

Recent demographic projections performed by OECD countries suggest that the next 20 years are likely to see a continuation and even acceleration of changes in household and family structures. In particular, the numbers and shares of single-adult and single-parent households are expected to increase significantly, as is the number of couples without children.

In Britain today, 40 percent of all children can expect to see their parents split up before their 16th birthday. At least half of family breakdown takes place within the first three years of childhood. (However, the latest study from the Centre for Social Justice and the Bristol Community Family Trust estimates that, of children born today, no less than 48% will see their parents split by their 16th birthday.)

OECD research has shown that, of all countries (not just the 30 member countries), the UK has the fifth highest lone parent rate, after Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and the US.

Globally divorce rates have gone up about six fold since 1960.

It is estimated that in most developed nations including South Africa up to 15 percent of babies are born without a resident biological father.

Eriksson said, “It’s worth reflecting on these sobering statistics this Valentine’s day, we talk a lot about love, but today we say those words and forget it’s ancillary: commitment, which in turn is part of responsibility. We are good about our responsibilities in the workplace, but have forgotten responsibility for our personal happiness and for those closest to us. Maybe now is the time for a values check.”