THREATS
No this is not the latest Hoppy-Comms App. It is a concern that uneducated comms lead
to fakes – even ‘fake fakes’ – and dangerously distorted emotions, generated by excess. People
who want to do you harm excite your anxieties, making you unguarded and vulnerable. Trump
uses the technique all the time and looks like an idiot for doing so. Unfortunately, it works. A
cure of ‘Regulation’ is being suggested as the answer. Regulations of all sorts come too late
and are rapidly out of date. And there are so many regulations that most are ignored. Fines for
breach of them are derisory. The problems were thought to be small scale, based on ignorance.
They have turned out to be issues of survival, of comfortable living, of happiness.
Freedom of speech is a tenet I hold dear, as do many people. All freedoms bring with
them responsibilities and obligations that are outside the reach of prescriptive law. However, we
have slipped increasingly into ‘process’ as a way to run our lives – convenient for the genuine
routines of existence, fatal when applied to the development of human consciousness and
conscience. Matters of conscience still lie with the individual who, in trying to exercise them,
often battles overwhelming inhumanity and uncivilised behaviour bereft of the things that make
life tolerable. The desire to retain freedom of speech is good; the education required for doing
so is lacking. The self-discipline essential to succeed is often forgotten.
How are we to deal with unfettered communications in a world of standards based
mostly on material greed? Education is the long-term answer. It should be addressed more
rigorously than at present. Most education today is leaning towards the very thing that holds
back the development of personal conscience. Take court behaviour. The oath of truth is
ignored without the bat of an eyelid. The legal rules against lawyer coaching are often breached
rather than observed. Take sports. ‘Getting away with it’ is usually more important than playing
an honourable game. Winning is becoming more important than being who we are.
Truth is the basis of trust. Has ‘Trust’ now become a tax-avoidance scheme instead of a
standard for dealing with people? We have seen enough to know that law is not the basis of
civilised behaviour. Love and law meet mostly in the divorce court. These are sad accusations.
They ignore the fact that many people devote much of their time, and, often, of their money, too,
to helping those less fortunate than themselves. They ignore the billions of human transactions
that take place hourly between honest and decent people. They fail to recognise that our lives
would be intolerable if 95%+ of our dealings were anything other than in good faith.
We need to look at every development we launch, every forward step we try to make, to
see how our moderate and self-disciplined use of it can benefit people. And we need to teach
that at the same time as we launch our amazing new concept. Given a chance to say what their
view of our world should be, most people would agree with this, I think. In the area of climate
disaster it is beginning to happen. In the area of personal standards it seems stuck in a weekly
sermon for the pulpit or a philosophers attempt to create a new religion. What we need to build
is not outside us, it is within.
Ironically, our inherent, ‘survival’ selfishness is an asset. To discover who we are and,
from that, to set out who we want to be is an exploration beyond scaling Everest, greater than
landing on the Moon. Achieving our hoped-for self image involves the opposite of what a purely
material world suggests. You do not ‘acquire’ your personality, others build it for you based on
your treatment of them. Your possession of beautiful things, of stylish living, of fame and fortune
become rewarding only when their benefit to others exceeds their apparent benefit to ourselves.
Our satisfaction with life comes not from winning ourselves but from seeing others win.
THREATS can only become THREADS when the receiver is happier than the sender.
Good morning
John Bittleston
john.bittleston@terrificmentors.com
Please improve on these thoughts. Your doing so is the only way I learn.
mentors@terrificmentors.com Thank you.
AD-endum: PASDAQ® is still the best tool to discover who you are.
09 July 2023