Parvati worshipping Siva: in mythic terms, love worshipping reason

Some follow up comments on Greece and its financial woes are in order, I think. 

The Greek nation is hovering on the brink of sliding into third world status and then third world living conditions. If they can't submit to the discipline that will be required in order for them to repay their debts, then in a very short time, they will not be able to run their country at all. Greek embassies in foreign capitals will have to close. The police, the armed forces, the port authorities ...all government departments will have to cut payrolls radically, and the staff remaining will have to take drastic pay cuts or even do without pay altogether for an indefinite period into the future. Such imponderables have happened in other lands many times.  

And then where will they get new funds? What government or individual in the rest of the developed world will want to buy Greek bonds? I'm retired. I live on a modest pension. I have almost no investments, though I do have friends who are more serious investors. No one I can think of in my circle of friends and relations is going to be willing to buy anything that is Greek-based for a long time. It's easier and less painful to set fire to your money now and get it over with.

It is no use for the Greeks to complain that the innocent are suffering or that they have big problems with tax evasion by ordinary citizens and corruption in all government departments. These claims are true. No one is saying that they aren't. But those problems are rightfully and practically speaking only problems that can be solved by the Greeks themselves. They are the ones who must put incorruptible tax collectors in office and those people must get accountability from the better-off citizens who have been avoiding paying taxes for so long. I repeat: these problems are for the Greek people to tackle. No one else has a moral right to come in and try to clean up the system. Imagine the howls of protest if government watchdogs from some other state in the EU or the IMF even suggested such a thing. 

My point today is that at bottom this problem in Greece is a problem to be solved by moral realism, the big concept that I keep promoting in this blog. The Greeks have been a very courageous people in the past few generations. No one would dispute that. They have also been very loving and giving to others in need. Immigrants continue to pour over Greece's eastern borders, and none of them are shot down trying to enter. On the contrary, they are given blankets and soup and then put in camps or other accommodations where they are housed until they can be processed as if they were regular immigrants, even though thousands of them have not applied to come to Greece, and many do not even have documents to show who they were in their homelands. 

But courage and love are not what is lacking here. These must be balanced with wisdom and freedom. In other words, accepting that hardly any wealth in any form comes to humans out of the air is a basic tenet of realism. Someone has to do the work that creates the wealth that the whole community wants to consume. Every citizen in a democracy is supposed to be able to choose which work he is willing to do and what goods or services he wants to try to sell in the marketplace. But the work has to get done by some of the adults. Always. Otherwise, people freeze or starve or both. 

Also, in a democracy, if you are an adult citizen of the community, your democratic right to live in your own way and be yourself comes with a responsibility attached. That freedom to be a grownup, not a supervised child, means you have no right to expect anyone else to take care of you. To give you some of the wealth that they have earned in exchange for nothing in return, in other words. 

Values have to be so deeply ingrained in the minds of the big majority of the citizens that their doing work, paying taxes, dealing honestly, etc. are automatic. Then there will be wealth to distribute because the economy will simply be efficient. Every dollar exchanged will be for some real goods or services, not for someone in a position of power to wink and look the other way while you sell the public motors that don't work, food that is inedible, or clothes that fall to pieces in a few weeks. And perhaps some of the wealth can be spared for the needy when we are moved to compassion by their circumstances. But that last move is a choice, not a necessity, and in addition, even if we are feeling moved by someone's suffering, if we have no wealth to give out, then we can offer nothing but our tears for their misery.  

One only has to look around the nations of the world to realize how desperately important hard work and honesty, the value hybrids that come from courage and wisdom and love, really are. Our values got to be respected as abstract concepts in cultures all over the world because they enabled those who lived by them to survive. Courage and wisdom in balance - and the patterns of behavior that those values steer us to - are our responses as human beings to the hard facts of physical reality. Our ancestors learned those values eons ago, and they passed them on to us because the values work. They let the people who live by the values survive in greater numbers over the long haul.  

An inescapable constant in physical reality is entropy. Things are always breaking down and falling apart. It takes both courage and wisdom in human beings to devise and do the tasks that give us our living in this ecosystem that is always overtly and covertly trying to kill us. Life is hard. If you don't want to do your share of the work, then someone else who is more responsible is going to have to do his share and pick up yours as well. If you have gotten ill or injured, he might take on that extra work for a while while you heal up. If there's nothing wrong with you, and your neighbors decide that you can take care of yourself, do some work, however difficult that may be for one of your sensitive temperament, you may howl and complain till the birds in your neighborhood all fly away. The matter is simply not your neighbors' problem. Not physically, and not morally. 

It's harsh to say so, but maybe it needs to be said. New Zealand is one simple example of a country that lived beyond its means for three generations. But when the country really did hit the end of its creditors' patience, sympathy, and trust, the people rallied. They found a new sense of unity and resolve, and they worked like demons until they got back on their feet as a nation. Kiwis (the people call themselves) are very proud of what they did back in those hard times, and they have every right to be so. Greece and any other nation can do the same. 

And maybe as long as we've stepped this far we should go the rest of the way. The Japanese suffered terribly - emotionally and financially - from the earthquake and tsunami that hit them in 2011. But they just got up and got on with the job of rebuilding. They have their problems the same as any nation does, but there is no disputing one thing: they know how to work. That fact was clear long before any disasters came down upon them. In a land almost devoid of natural resources, they have made a modern, affluent industrial state. In recent times, several other nations that have had major natural disasters happen on their territories simply haven't shown that kind of character. 

It is important for me to close by triple underlining a simple fact: values are programmed into us by our cultures. They have nothing to do with race. There are hard-working and creative nations on every continent in every skin tone that the human species contains. And there are nations stuffed with graft and corruption on every continent as well. White people can be just as self-indulgent and deluded as any who are brown, red, or black. Threats, excuses, and complaints only distract us from the truth of the matter. If a nation wants a high standard of living, then it has to use every available means to program deep into the mind of every individual citizen the values that will make that standard of living come about. 

This is the real world. There are no ways out of death and taxes, only some measures we can take that can make them a bit more palatable.      

                                   

                                              re-building in Japan after the earthquake/tsunami