Making Science Accessible to All

On December 20^th, 1996, Dr. Carl Sagan passed away after having lived the life of a successful astronomer. Carl Sagan had become a celebrity because of his brilliant television series Cosmos.

Sagan made science accessible and comprehensible to all. I watched his television series Cosmos at the age of 16-17 years, and this opened my mind to science and to the universe in general. Later I read his books Broca’s Brain and the Dragons of Eden. Cosmos was not only about the stars, it also described life on earth and potential life on other planets. It talked about the history of science and of the great discoveries on earth and in the universe.

There is no nobler and more beautiful work than popularising science. Sagan could also raise enthusiasm with his audience. He testified from a certain spirituality of science, something that I still seem to live from today. What is this spirituality of science? It means that we can stand in awe for the cosmos and its beauty. This also includes the inherent beauty of the laws of the cosmos, so we can also stand in awe for science itself.

Sagan did not deny that the Cosmos could not become a threat someday, as the laws of nature can also lead to cataclysms and to the end of humankind. He didn’t deny the inherent timeliness of our presence and the vulnerability of humans on this planet and in the universe. In this space age, science and technology, including space travel, seem to become ordinary commodities. People tend to become cynical and indifferent.

We need more people like Carl Sagan to encourage young people to enter the world of science and to stand in awe for this “Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring”. These were the last words spoken by Sagan in his television series Cosmos, and these words have been resonating in my mind since 36 years now.

I refer to my science blogs among which SETI and Day of Wrath.

Absinthe

Absinthe is a police thriller by Guido Eekhaut. The scene is located in the Low Countries, in the cosmopolitan cities of Amsterdam and Leuven.

It is a story about Russian oligarchs, cold-blooded murderers, right-wing politicians and corrupt policemen, typical ingredients of a Saturday evening whodunit on television and I don't see why this story could not become the script for a television thriller. The plot is certainly solid enough to start with.

The main character Walter Eekhaut is the archetype of the stubborn policeman with unconventional methods (somewhat like Inspector Morse). The author sketches several parallel story lines in short chapters, picturing several individual colourful characters. He then brings these lines together in unexpected events that somehow ignite the story, so that you will not easily stop reading. It was a good idea of the writer to serve this story with a glass of Absinthe as this brings in real warmth and taste into the story.

To enjoy all finesses of the unexpected, the reader needs a certain understanding and feeling for rules and procedures that might be applicable in an international police context. Although the author educates his reader in this sense, the lay reader may miss the unexpected in the denouement and at this point the author might have been too demanding of his readership.

The hardcover edition I bought looks and feels very nice and I could not spot a single error in the text.

Slender Man is a book by the same author. You will find an equally good plot and a similar background view on society, but the narrating technique used in Slender Man is quite different.

The Pain of Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a 20th century war product. The central thought of postmodernism is that truth, goodness and beauty are only illusions, chased by ignorant people. Truth, goodness and beauty simply don’t exist. Every kind of veneration already carries the seed of self-destruction. This awkward idea got its power from the destructive forces of the Second World War. The War did not only destroy houses and people, it also destroyed ideas that were originally believed to be great. Postmodernism is, in a strange way, a cultivation of a permanent feeling of disappointment and many artists keep finding their inspiration in postmodernism.

An interesting question is whether postmodernism is still playing a role in today’s society and whether that role is still ‘constructive’, although a constructive postmodernism seems to constitute a “contradictio in terminis”, if not an oxymoron. In his book “History of Progress”, the Dutch author Rutger Bregman points out that postmodernism has not only been good at destroying our traditional beliefs, but also our belief in progress itself. And as “Belief creates the actual fact”, non-belief also destroys the actual fact, therefore non-belief in progress will also halt the actual progress in society.

Cultivating postmodernism, as seems to be the case now since 70 years, constitutes a certain risk of lethargy. Postmodernism has however the merit it makes us critical against all kinds of fanatic belief be it in religion or political systems. It somehow keeps us on a sane track, because all fanatic belief must be insane. A moderate degree of postmodernism is healthy as mainstream current in society, as long as we remain somehow open-minded whenever new ideas emerge.

I refer to my blog “A Sea of Change”. My blog “De donkere kamer van Damokles” covers roughly the same thoughts about postmodernism in Dutch.

Picture: Artwork “Totem” by Jan Fabre and University Library tower, Leuven. This blog is not inspired by recent press.

New Peace Carillon

In my home town Leuven, we celebrated the 100-year end of World War I today by inaugurating a new Peace Carillon in the church tower of the Park Abbey. You need to know three things to understand why this is so important.

First, my home town Leuven was particularly hit by the violence of World War I, when a large part of town was put to fire and a lot of civilians were killed. The inauguration of the new carillon was supported by the German town of Neuss from where some of the troops had originated and with which Leuven now established good relations.

You also need to know that Park Abbey is one of the best preserved original abbey sites of its kind in the Benelux and in Europe. And like with many historic places, its history is deeply interwoven with the lives and the hearts of many local people. And you need to know that carillons belong to the nicest and finest pieces of heritage Flanders has to offer.

What is amazing on this 11 November 2018, is the incredible mobilising force from the centennial celebrations of the armistice. Most people who walked through the rain today never went through a war in their lives. I guess we all realised that our togetherness today is the best way to make clear why we want peace in this world.

What They Don’t Teach At School .. Yet

When you read a title like this on a social web site, you can expect a truckload of cynical advice from people with bad experience and a bad character. This is obviously not the case here.

In fact, school should become less cynical, not more. School tells pupils how to behave, but doesn’t tell them what to do if others don’t behave. As such the strong guys are told that they should not bully the weak, but the weak guys are never told what they should do in case they are bullied. "Go to the teacher or headmaster", is a good advice from the point of view of the adults, but we remember quite well it didn’t work very well in the old days either. The issue is important, because school performance is in my honest opinion, more often affected by lack of a safe study climate than by a lack of intelligence. In her book Dreamers who do, Hilde Helsen mentions three basic skills all children should become familiar with at school:

•  They should teach all children the principles of non-violent communication. Non-violent meaning here: not based on humiliating arguments of power, but based on arguments of perceived behaviour. In the Bible, the fraternal admonition is recommended. You should talk "under four eyes", and if that doesn’t work, you should get one more witness. If that doesn’t work, go to old wise men. The strong should be confronted with their weakness, and the weak should be confronted with their strengths.
• All children should be taught some type of meditation: yoga, mindfulness or transcendental meditation. In the old days, we had prayer. It is now a lost type of meditation because we became too idle and too proud to believe we could need it.
• All children should recognise compassion as a universal human feeling and a universal human value. Compassion is neither an emotion to be ashamed of, nor an obligation that is imposed by one or the other religion.

I guess most schools do something implicitly in one or more of these topics. However, these remain side topics, being done in the margin, during a break. The way schools are organised, suggests these things are less important than the hard topics that determine whether you succeed or fail. I am convinced that you can raise the quality of education more by teaching these soft skills than by raising the bar for the hard topics. I refer to my earlier blogs: “The Importance of Being Gentle”, “Bullying, Indignation is Growing” and “About Meditation - die Schöne Kunst des Innehaltens”.

Political Paralysis by Polarisation

If you live in a prosperous country, you are probably unhappy. Partly because your salary is no longer increasing, but also because your society is divided over the question whether to share that prosperity with newcomers or not. In the US, you may be in favour of Trump or against Trump. In Britain, you may be in favour of the Brexit or not. In Sweden you may be in favour of the Swedish Democrats or not. In Germany, France, Belgium, there is a deep trench between traditional parties and the so-called ‘populist’ parties. Not a single country escapes and the entire political system gets polarised about the issue.

The cause of the polarisation is obviously: we don’t succeed well in integrating the newcomers. While the newcomers already have a social backlog and tend to live in ghettos, the original inhabitants work themselves to death to stay ahead of them. Two camps exist: those who believe there is no work/ integration possibility left for newcomers and those who believe that humanity needs to prevail. The press tends to reduce the problem to a problem of racism. At both sides of the trench through society, people accuse the other side of being immoral. 

People draw the wrong lesson from World War II. We see the War now as a fight between good and evil. That is because we can watch the 1930 - 1945 years with the eyes of someone who lives in 2018, knowing what happened after 1930. We believe we know what was an appropriate moral conduct in 1930, but we forget that the people of 1930 lived in an uncertain world, just like we do today. People of 1930 believed an appropriate moral conduct was to fight communism. Why ? Because communism was believed to be dangerous. Just like we think we know what is dangerous today. Some believe ethnic nationalism is dangerous and some believe the Islam is dangerous. Who is right? We can’t say, because this is a question about the future.

I believe therefore that the best moral conduct possible is to stop with this polarisation and admit that we don’t know what is dangerous. We can only say extremism is dangerous because it leads to violence. We should not be naive and tolerate anything from those who don’t behave properly. But we should plead for dialogue with the ones who seem to have an opinion that is different from ours. We should stop digging trenches and start taking more risks. It takes courage to do that. The real victims of this polarisation are the ones who live in precarious circumstances: the refugees including the trans-migrants and the original inhabitants of the poorer suburbs.

I refer to my Dutch blogs about polarisation and Christmas 2016.

Leaving Lazy Tasty Land

In this time of the year, we are all leaving our favourite vacation resort and returning back home. This could make us feel sad, as we face a new period of work, cold and darkness, also called wintertime. It could also make us feel sad for a totally different reason: the embarrassing feeling that maybe, we didn’t reach every destination we wanted, and maybe, even worse, we didn’t enjoy vacation time enough. In some cases, you might even raise the most prohibited of all questions: why didn’t we stay at home?

In the Middle Ages, vacation and travelling for vacation would have seemed a totally unreal activity. For most people, attending a fair at the occasion of a yearly holy day was the top of happiness. Everything beyond that belonged to the world of the dreams. The ultimate dream was the magic Land of Cockaigne, where no work needed to be done, and where food fell from the trees to eradicate all hunger. In Dutch this land was better known as “Lazy Tasty Land” (Luilekkerland). Having food and rest was considered enough to fulfil all desires; travelling would not have made any sense for the inhabitants of the Land of Cockaigne. Yet medieval people would consider today’s vacation resorts as lands of Cockaigne, as food and rest seem to be available there abundantly.

Every new year again, vacation time promises us a Land of Cockaigne, but does it also keep that promise? When we look back, we often notice that we can only enjoy vacation time in rare moments. What we do in reality is quite different from what the peasant, the soldier and the clerk are doing in Pieter Bruegel’s painting above. Let me give an overview: we burn fuel in traffic jams on the highway. We pay for using dirty lavatories, overloaded highways, scarce parking spaces and for all types of limited validity road vignettes. We get stressed from missing connections in railway stations and from unexpected strikes. We fill in forms for missing luggage and discuss visible and invisible scratches in recently hired cars. We get irritated from the selfie takers who didn't notice our intention to take that same shot. Let us thank God vacation time is almost over, and we can soon go home.

And then, amidst all the horrors of vacation, something unexpected happens. We discover a quiet place. We have a pleasant evening dinner with a glass of local wine. We take our best picture. We have an interesting chat with locals or with colleague-tourists. Then, and only then, we know why we came in the first place and why we may travel again next year. And we might recognise that travelling is a privilege, as it reveals that the magic of real places is no less than the magic of the Land of Cockaigne.

Picture 1: Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.
Picture 2: Wim Lahaye, taken at Zadar, Croatia

The Art of the Good Life – Rolf Dobelli

This book carries the ambitious subtitle “52 Simple Shortcuts to Happiness”. When I see such a title in a book shop, I usually look away and don’t touch it. The book may fit well in a typical American book store. People may believe I can’t manage my own life and I may need help.

I had however heard at work of the author Rolf Dobelli and his first book “The Art of Thinking Clearly”. When you open the book, you notice the chapters are short and beautifully illustrated with colourful drawings. It contains a lot of simple but wise advice and it easily invites to further reading.

The book is written from a ‘high society’ perspective and some examples given may not appeal to everyone. With some of the 52 recommendations, you might even disagree, but I bet most people will agree with at least 48 out of 52 recommendations. I discovered that the joy of reading is also related to the fact that you were already aware of some of the pitfalls of postmodern life and you might even have taken measures already to overcome them.

You will find some of these pitfalls/ recommendations in previous blogs “The Delusion of Immanent Justice”, “Status Anxiety”, “Meritocracy”, “On Optimism and Pessimism”.

Ode to Audacity

“Quantum potes, tantum aude”, As much as you can, so much you should dare. It is a sentence written around 1264 by Thomas Aquinas in his sequence  Lauda Sion Salvatorem. In the next sentence he explains the reason why: “because you can never praise God enough”. Thomas suggests it takes a certain audacity –against God and man- to pay a tribute to God. But he also suggests that God likes those who dare, those who show audacity.

Medieval man was not so different from postmodern man. Perhaps all virtues seemed more divine in those days, but most of them still stand today. We feel intuitively that audacity has a certain value, as it is also related to courage. If we don’t dare, we achieve less than we can, and this feels like a sin, although we don’t call it a sin anymore. Sometimes, audacity requires the fight against fear. Darers deserve praise. Entrepreneurs accept high mental risks and deserve to be praised by society. There is however an unclear boundary between audacity and recklessness. According to Thomas Aquinas, you should only dare as much as you can. Yet audacity is often needed when you can’t know very well what you can, and our aviation pioneers could not have brought us the wonders of flying without a certain recklessness.

Our society has paradoxically become extremely risk-averse in a number of things. We could even discern a certain lethargy in a number of areas, probably because we have become too attached to our image and to a number of realisations of the last century, and we refuse to adapt to new times. We tend to draw all benefits of the modern world to ourselves, yet at the same we push back all risks of modern life to the public authorities, who are always to blame if something bad happens. We fail to see our world will only be safe with world-wide social justice.

Let us therefore show audacity and courage in realising this worldwide social justice. Perhaps our audacity will encounter resistance – also within ourselves – but it will finally deserve praise and God will like it, according to Thomas Aquinas.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Many people know this fairy tale from the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Two crooks succeed in convincing the emperor, his court and the whole country that they made magic clothes for the emperor, clothes which are invisible for stupid, incompetent people. All countrymen are afraid to be unmasked as stupid and stand in awe for the emperor’s new clothes. Except one little boy who was unaware of the magic property of the clothes and shouts in the crowd that the emperor is not wearing any clothes at all.

We may identify ourselves with the cheering people, who turn with the wind when suddenly everybody else does. This is the so-called mainstream. We should identify ourselves with the emperor. No one really escapes from the position of the emperor. Our idleness and fear of appearing stupid continuously blackmail our reason. This doesn’t happen occasionally, it happens continuously. We are forced to live a life of rational denial and self-deceit as we are blackmailed by others on our intellectual capacities. This, in a certain way, tells us something about society as a whole. Our society is trapped in a number of self-constructed paradigms. Some of these paradigms are absolutely foolish. We don’t question them as we don’t want to be considered a fool. How can we get rid of these paradigms? We need to listen to ignorant little boys and girls.

Let me give some examples of foolish paradigms. We all believe that working from nine to five is actually a smart thing to do. We drive ourselves, always at the same time into massive traffic jams. Is that so smart? All these office jobs, are they really so meaningful that we all have to be there at the same time? Is it really needed that we all drive hundreds of kilometres, daily, alone, crossing thousands of people who do the same in the opposite direction? When vacation time starts, we drive ourselves into traffic jams on the highways to the south, every year again. Is that a smart thing to do? Or we take the plane and spend our precious free time in front of security gates at the airport? I want to be the little boy who says this is not smart.

The Emperor’s New Clothes  was wonderfully narrated and sung by Danny Kay in his movie Hans Christian Andersen and it was recorded for eternity on this wonderful vinyl record, which I remember so well from my childhood. Enjoy the song.

Picture: from the book Andersens Sprookjesschat, Zuid-Nederlandse Uitgeverij – Antwerpen/Amsterdam 1966

Believe in Personal Progress

When we are young, we are usually highly motivated to study new things. This may be applicable to purely scientific knowledge, languages, soft skills, physical performance, power and endurance. When you get somewhat older, say +50 years, you might be tempted to think that such high investment in personal progress makes less sense. Why is that? Because the ROI, the Return on Investment seems to go down with age. The investment tends to go up, as the required effort seems to increase with age. At the same time, the direct benefit tends to go down, as the remaining time to benefit from the acquired skills goes down as well. We tend to think: this is not going to work and if it does, it will not bring anything.

Recently, we had the pleasure of receiving training from a Shaolin monk. At some point in time, we stood in awe for the exceptional skills he had acquired in his life through physical exercise. He pointed out: even if you don’t believe it, if you practice, you will increase in strength, whether you like it or not and whether you believe it or not. Practising increases your strength, independent of your belief whether your strength will finally increase. This is an interesting thought.

So it could be worthwhile to abandon all cynicism and worrying and acquire new capabilities altogether. We will benefit from it, even if we don’t notice at the beginning. We may notice after a month or a year, that we have increased our capabilities, whether we believed we could do it or not.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Belief creates the actual Fact”, “The Virtue of Patience and the 10 000 hour Rule” and "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano".

Picture: Seneca statue in Cordoba, Spain

Hygge or hyperactivity?

The word Hygge became popular in Denmark to indicate a Danish flavour of cosiness and relaxing lifestyle. It can be a social sense of togetherness -spending time together-, or it can be a more solitary version with books, sofas, fireplaces, cats and cups of tea. Hygge expresses a kind of well-being, of harmony with other people without looking at the clock. Hygge may well be the opposite of hastening and hyperactivity.

Hygge was originally a Norwegian word, which meant something like consoling or comforting. It is related to an English word we all like: to hug: to embrace, literally: to build a fence or form a hedge ('haga') around someone. (The word Hygge is therefore etymologically related to my family name Lahaye.)

It is clear that there is a growing market for Hygge. We have all become restless and hyperactive. The reason may be the earlier discussed Beschleunigung of life. Hyperactivity brings us in a vicious circle. It creates restlessness and stress. We long so much for rest that we become restless in trying to achieve it. We can’t even wait for anything anymore. As soon as we are kept waiting, we take our smartphone and make other people wait for us.

Let us be restless in fighting hyperactivity and let us leave no opportunity unused to bring more Hygge in our daily life, be it with colleagues or with family members. Let us get rid of the smartphone and let us hug our dearest and nearest a little more. I refer to my earlier blog Lifestyle.

Crony Capitalism and Comrade Communism

In 1992, Francis Fukayama wrote about the end of history and the last man. His thesis was that liberal democracies and free market capitalism finally proved to be superior to other economic systems like communism and socialism. The background in which his essay was written, was the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, after President Gorbashev had conducted a policy of Glasnost and Perestroika in the moribund communist Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama could be considered the ultimate counterpart of another famous intellectual, Karl Marx, born 200 years ago in the town of Trier.

Francis Fukayama was not all wrong. In Europe, all countries have moved to some form of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, although not all problems are solved. China, which was originally a communist regime, has successfully introduced capitalist principles, but doesn’t embrace democracy yet. In fact, the current Chinese model is so successful, a Chinese man told me, that the people are anxious to embrace democracy.

On the other hand, Francis Fukayama could not be right either. One reason is cultural. We live in an age of postmodernism. Therefore, if someone claims to have found the ultimate economic and political system, he must be wrong. Postmodernism, born from the disappointments of the 20^th century, denies any of us the right to proclaim a superior system. A pessimistic postmodernism resides deeply in all intellectual thinking of our time. In a certain way, postmodernism proved its correctness by noting the American capitalism, the purest of all capitalist systems, has gone astray as well.

On the one hand, the USA suffered a lot from the major financial crises in the economy. On the other hand, now that its economy is slowly recovering, the country is paradoxically opting for a more protectionist policy. But there is much more reason to be concerned about capitalism. Capitalism often evolves in a direction of crony capitalism, with a lot of government involvement and with similar tendencies towards corruption as in the comrade communism, which was so well described in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Capitalism also tends to graze all green pastures, leaving nothing but deserts behind. Capitalism is very bad at protecting general interests like the environment. But this can also be said from communism.

It seems like postmodernism may have some truth in it. All economic systems seem to bite themselves in the tail after a while and for all economic systems,  some form of ‘reset’ is required, usually preceded by social revolt. This is well described in Tomas Sedlacek’s book the Economics of Good and Evil. Other essays about economy  can be found by clicking the economy label below.

Picture: House where Karl Marx was born, exactly 200 years ago, in Trier, Germany.

Visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center

This is a wonderful museum, next to Washington (Dulles) airport, a real child dream come true. I insert my best pictures. I'm well aware that the display of some of these machines may and should raise ambiguous feelings. The Enola Gay (picture 4) threw the first atomic bomb on Japan and it is really one of the major showpieces of this museum. It may inspire me to new blogs later. The song already exists.

I also refer to my blogs Ode to Aviation and Gute Technik ist immer schön.

The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker

The Effective Executive is perhaps the world’s most renowned management book and you will find plenty of references on the Internet. In this blog, I only wanted to share my favourite quotes:

• Establishing priorities, and concentrating your efforts on them, is a skill that requires foresight and courage.
•  There is one exception to the rule of building on strengths and covering weaknesses. Character and integrity do not accomplish anything by themselves. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Seven Golden Rules of Management” and “The Knowledge-Creating Company”.

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

In this time of the year, when the tough winter loosens its grip and light is coming back, you see people crawling out of their burrows. Young and old, men and women, terrorise the streets with their colourful T-shirts and their white legs. Jogging, skeelering or biking, they all want to fulfil their New Year’s resolutions, work for a slim line, a better health, or a better performance in the next race with friends. I am one of them.

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano is Latin for “a healthy mind in a healthy body” and is an excerpt from a poem of the Roman poet Juvenal (Juvenalis). At secondary school, we ironically adopted the phrase as the non-official motto of our school, because of the relatively extensive sports programme we used to have there. The phrase would fit well into a Spartan gymnasium and suggests a healthy mind and healthy body need to be obtained by hard work. Some fitness rooms indeed resemble an industry hall, not to say a medieval torture chamber. The poet Juvenal however, indicated we have to pray (orandum est) for a healthy mind in a healthy body, (rather than for wealth, power, eloquence, or children). Health of body and soul is therefore not only a task but also a mercy and the lesser sportsmen among my friends will welcome this view.

It needs to be said that sports has never been as necessary as today. Working 40-hours a week behind a computer in a landscape office is not good for your mental and physical health. Our work biotope does not evolve in a healthy direction and the longer we stay in this biotope, the more Juvenal's recommendation becomes valid.

In Search of Praise

March is Compliment Month, therefore we could elaborate a little theory on compliments before moving over to well-founded practice. After all, we had made a New Year’s resolution that we would work on our mildness. Lent is a good time to implement change in our life.

In a time where expectations tend to be sky-high, we may get a little depressed from the difference between these expectations and our realisations. It may become difficult to maintain a positive image of ourselves and we may start longing for a little compliment for the hard work we have been doing. But praise is a scarce good and our work environment sometimes resembles a desert where the dwellers are all desperately looking for a little drop of recognition. A compliment is therefore very powerful and if you give someone a compliment, that someone may be eternally grateful. And compliments can be given for free, so why is it so difficult to give compliments?

One answer is that it is difficult to mean compliments. It is difficult to sound honest because it is difficult to be honest. In a time like ours, where our self-esteem is at stake, we may be too busy with our own image and we may expect too much from others, therefore tend to focus on their weaknesses. Giving compliments requires modesty and modesty paradoxically, requires a positive self-image.

Giving compliments is good for your own recognition. You don’t expect reciprocity though, and you shouldn’t. You will somehow always share in the joy of your praise. The receiver has all interest in returning some esteem to you. After all, the value of your compliment does not only depend on its content, but also on your credibility as a giver, therefore the receiver has a clear interest in supporting your credibility. Other people may not always agree with the compliment you give and they might even become jealous, but at least they realise that you sometimes praise someone. And someday, they may also enjoy such a rare moment of praise. They may even want to become your friend.

I also refer to my blog: “The Importance of Being Gentle”.

Economic Justification in a Culture of Scarcity

In this decade of financial crisis, we are increasingly forced to justify the living that we believe to earn. It started in 2008 with the bankers. The rich obviously have to justify why they make so much money. But don't think the poor remain exempt from the duty of economic justification. If they touch an allowance, everybody wonders if they ever contributed to society with decent work and how our social security model will survive with all these allowance right holders. Economic justification is not easy.

But even in the middle class, among those who believe to be hard workers, there is an increasing justification problem. Are we sure this hard work really contributes to the economic bottom line? Perhaps middle class people still earn too much for what they contribute. And the worst of all is, if they live too long, they ‘undo’ the positive contribution to society by requiring  too much pension and health care money in the second half of their life.  You may think I’m serious in this reasoning but I’m actually trying to prove the senselessness of this type of reasoning. Individual economic justification is not a good idea; it can’t be done well, and it is not fair.

Compare the optimistic 196x’s with the 201x years. Life seemed so easy 50 years ago. In those years, everybody expected to have a better life than his parents. Today we seem to live in fear that the economy turns its back at us. As indicated in my July-2017 blog, we have sunk deeper into the vicious circles of the Matthew Effect. It started in the 1980-ies when everybody started believing we needed more competition. As a result, we maintain a culture of scarcity, as if we were poor and as if everything has become scarce suddenly. The fear of scarcity has become self-fulfilling, the day the financial crisis erupted. We have become hyperactive and suffer from status anxiety. What we need is better and smarter collaboration.

Looking for a New Year's Resolution

If you are looking for a new year’s resolution in this year 2018, I could recommend mildness. Mildness is a special type of generosity, and generosity was already our 2017 resolution.

Mildness is also a special type of moderation or moderateness. We deliberately decide not to judge too fast. We decide to be modest in our judgement. There are several reasons for this. First, we know we may also become subject to the judgement of others. If we could only experience the harshness with which we judge others, we would realise we would all fail in our own exam. The only reason we can live with this thought is that we know internally why we fail in the expectations that have been put on us. We forget that others also carry internal reasons why they can’t fulfil the expectations that we have put on them.

I am sometimes totally stupefied by people’s judgement harshness in the social media. It seems as if people feel better about themselves if they can collect likes by judging people very severely. If our society is plagued by stress, it may be an indication that we tend to judge too severely, or at least that our expectations are unfairly high. Perhaps we dream too much or we don’t perceive the difficulties of others sufficiently. Lack of mildness is the largest impediment to good collaboration in teams, between companies and between political parties.

Judgement and lack of mildness is also a hindrance to friendship and love. We tend to believe it becomes more difficult to acquire friends when we get older. This is not true. We have just become too good and too fast at judging people. With a little mildness we can allow more people into our circle of friends. A friend is simply someone for whom you have given up judgement, because you found out his/her qualities were much more useful and interesting. Perhaps we need to practice more in perceiving and mentioning our friends' qualities. This would make much better content for the social media!

This topic can be found on my dutch blog, under the name Nolite Iudicare (don’t judge). If you doubt about the usefulness of a new year’s resolution, you should read the book of life. 

Picture taken at the town of Haarlem, the Netherlands