Trial by Trolls - is there hope for our world?

Isn't it time that each and every one of us started bearing our own share of responsibility in the shaping of our world?

I know that it's 23 years since His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989, but what he said has as much relevance today as then. He emphasized that responsibility doesn't only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. The next day in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he elaborated on the theme:

"The realisation that we are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering, is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood;
a warm feeling of love and compassion for others.
This, in turn, is essential if we are to survive in this ever shrinking world we live in. For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves. This fact has become very clear during the course of this century. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that by polluting the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, we are destroying the very basis for our survival. As interdependents, therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility."

Where are we 23 years later? Not in a very good place from where I'm sitting.

I read a piece in yesterday's Sunday Times about "The Torment of Trial by Trolls." For the uninitiated a "troll" is technically someone who deliberately disrupts online commentary with assaults on other contributors or by repeatedly taking threads away from the topic. But as the article points out it has become shorthand for all kinds of internet abuse. First we had road rage. Now it seems that many people are prepared to be abusive, obscene, insulting, mocking, bullying, and so on towards other people when they can hide behind the anonymity and distance of Twitter and Facebook and other social media. What is going on here? Why do we abuse strangers so freely?
Have all these people really nothing better to do with their time than abuse strangers? It seems that some of these trolls are perfectly decent people when met face to face.

Where is that " warm feeling of love and compassion for others" within this kind of beahviour? Is there hope for our world? What about empathy for our fellow beings? And what about the Golden Rule? Treating our neighbors as ourselves?
And not only should we confine the scope of our responsibilities to our own home patch. It is a matter of global justice that we have equal concern for the conditions in which our brothers and sisters live in poor parts of the world.
In December 2001 a Statement was issued by 110 Nobel Laureates on the one-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Nobel Prize. It included a plea for us all to reassess our global obligations to one another. Again it's eleven years ago but it seems we don't learn anything with the passage of time. This is what those Laureates said:
"The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate, and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor."

Eleven years later has much changed? It is a fact that we have the technology and productive resources to eliminate worldwide misery, poverty and injustice. Consider the power of the internet in the Arab Spring, in mobilizing the Occupy Movement.

And it seems that all many of us can do is waste precious moments, hours, days, weeks of our lives in abusive behaviour against our fellow brethren whilst hiding behind the anonymity of that same technology!

Sometimes I feel real despair, ashamed to be a part of the same human race.
Can anyone offer any words of hope?

More about the Occupy protests

I am leaving the photos of Occupy…up on my blog for the time being because I support much of what their protest is all about. So much so in fact that I visited the tent city in London outside St Paul’s Cathedral to chat to some of the occupiers and to see for myself what they are doing and the way they are thinking. I even left a copy of my book at their library, because it addresses the issues with which they have so much concern. This is not just about "fat cats" and bankers bonuses, although these do signal a malaise in our society. This protest is about sustainable living, looking after the environment, and justice for all.
Perhaps we really are now in a slow paradigm shift, when realization is at last dawning that we simply cannot carry on the way we have done to date.
Three quotes I have come across in my reading over the last few days sum it up neatly I think:

“People have had enough of the current economic model. The current political system has failed to deliver on its promise of prosperity for all.”
Richard Murphy founder of The Tax Justice Network

“…people are being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.”
Tim Jackson Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prosperity-without-Growth-Economics-Finite/dp/1849713235/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324478109&sr=1-1

“Money is not wealth; real wealth is land, forest, rivers, animals and people…Let us respect the generous Earth and wild Nature, the eternal source of wellbeing and prosperity. If we take care of people and Nature, then the economy will take care of itself…Some people might say that this is too idealistic; but what have the realists done? They have made a complete mess of the world economy…”
Satish Kumar Resurgence

Richard Murphy in The Courageous State calls for governments and courageous politicians to deliver real transformation in people’s lives. I agree to an extent, but they cannot do it alone. They can only change things so far. Real change for a better world needs us to change our own hearts and minds as well, something I explore in some detail in Healing…, not only in connection with our failed economy, but in many other facets of life as well where we have current concerns.

It’s only because Gandhi was so right that he is quoted so often:

We must be the change we want to see in the world.

What is money? Why do we need it?

It is difficult to define money. We have ingrained within our deepest psyche a sense that our monetary wealth reflects our success and affects our happiness.
But we know from studies that once a certain and fairly modest standard of living has been achieved any further increase in wealth does not improve our happiness. It is then influenced more by our status in society, the quality of our personal relationships and our physical health.(1)And status emphatically does not mean celebrity status. It means being valued for our own unique gifts and qualities, whatever those may be.
And if we still think that an accumulation of wealth can give us longer-term security we are deluded. Monetary wealth is a very poor long-term investment. It cannot guarantee long-term security and no investment is totally risk free. We saw this only too clearly during the global banking crisis that began in 2007 with problems in the United States over ‘sub-prime’ loans. The effect was soon felt in the UK as they reeled from the Northern Rock building society debacle, the first ‘run’ on a bank in that country for 141 years. Now we have the Eurozone crisis and the global stock markets move dizzily up and down fuelled mostly, it would seem, by alternating cycles of fear and greed, and the longer-term effects of this financial tsunami remain uncertain.

Why do we need money?
The Greek Philosopher and scientist Aristotle explained in his Politics in c 330BC why money had been invented. The art of acquisition, he said, for which a currency was required, arose out of the simpler barter of goods, and he saw this as quite natural and healthy. But when ‘The supply of men’s needs came to depend on more foreign sources, as men began to import for themselves what they lacked, and to export what they had in superabundance: …in this way the use of a money currency was inevitably instituted.’(2)
But Aristotle made the distinction, between essential and therefore laudable expenditure for the daily needs of food, shelter and clothing, and the acquisition of money for acquisition’s sake by profit associated with retail trade. The latter he censured,

because the gain in which it results is not naturally made, but is made at the expense of other men. The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Currency came into existence merely as a means of exchange; usury tries to make it increase.(3)

Aristotle did not trust money because he could see that it could feed an insatiable desire way beyond what was necessary for our needs and he saw this as unethical.
In addition to life’s basic survival necessities of warmth, clean air, medicine, clean water, food and housing, all human beings worldwide have a need and a human right to be free, to be respected as equals, able to choose their own destiny and to fulfill their full emotional, intellectual and spiritual potential. We are all entitled to the five basic human justices, of monetary and social justice, economic and environmental justice and of the right to peace.(4)
I believe that to really achieve such justice in our world we need to allow the healing qualities of compassion and vulnerability and spirituality to infuse our lives and our actions in our financial housekeeping.
Our present economy is flawed - in many ways. That is why I have a sympathy and empathy with the real underlying gripes of the Occupy movement.

Probably the most important flaw is that Humans are not valued
A very large number of people in our society are presently undervalued or not valued at all in monetary terms. These include the old and young, the infirm and disabled, the housewives and the many community and charity volunteers without whom many organizations would simply not survive. All of these people outside the conventional workforce often work very much harder and longer hours than many in full time employment. But they gain no financial independence or recognition within the economic framework from their toil. I know of a wife who for two decades has selflessly cared full time for an increasingly and profoundly disabled husband. Or I think of the mother who takes a career break to raise her own children. These women both lead enormously valuable lives, but feel undervalued.
We measure a ‘healthy’ economy in terms of the material wealth or prosperity that is created by and for its working citizens, expressed in terms such as the gross domestic product (GDP), gross domestic income (GDI) or gross national product (GNP). Whichever measure is used, they all put a zero valuation on the environment, on healthy citizens, social cohesion and cultural values!(5)As Robert Kennedy said:

…the (Gross National Product) does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages… It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. (6)

1. Schluter, Michael and John Ashcroft, Editors, Jubilee Manifesto: a Framework, Agenda and Strategy for Christian Social Reform, Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005, p. 217.
2. Aristotle Politics, translated by Ernest Barker Revised R F Stalley 1998, 1.9 1257a 5 p.26.
3. Ibid., 1258a 35 p.30.
4. Based on the principle of global justice taken from the five principles of the Global Justice Movement
5. Hazel Henderson, 2001, Mapping the Transition from GDP Growth to Rising Quality of Life, in Nikkei Ecology, 2001, cited in The Path to Living Economies – a collaborative Working Document of the Social Ventures Network
6. Robert F. Kennedy, 18 March 1968.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011 Adapted from Healing this Wounded Earth