WHO ARE THE GLOBAL DELINQUENTS?

Most people on this planet orbiting an average star stranded far out on a spiral arm of one galaxy among many millions, get on with their lives and with others of their kind tolerably well.

We are the primary life form on this planet in the estimation of ourselves and as we all know come in various shapes, sizes, mentalities and attributes.

Most have found that the most agreeable form of life is to cooperate to a high degree with those living around us. This spirit of minding your behavior to some degree has been found useful in the primary goal of all lifeforms, to continue our existence in the best form we can manage. This means in the view of most of us, a decent place to stay, sufficient food, as good an education for our children as possible, access to high standard health care, an income that provides for our needs, enough free time to spend with family and friends, sufficient hobbies and interests and the time to devote to them and as little stress, aggravation and conflict as possible.

It’s not rocket science.

In what are known as developed nations these virtuous circumstances are broadly achievable to many, though of course in variable quantities and qualities. In countries given the name developing nations and those in lesser categories many of these attributes of ‘The Good Life’ are unavailable or attainable only by the very few.

But still, in every nation of every type and condition the benefits of cooperation far outweigh those of conflict. This cooperation is seen in many way, indeed in innumerable ways. Just think of an average journey to work and the social codes that prevail. Whether by public transport or our own we abide by the social niceties that reduce chaos to a minimum. We wait patiently in line, we drive carefully in traffic, we pay our fare, we park correctly. In myriad ways we observe what’s expected in a communal effort to make like as amenable to all is possible.

This can be overlooked when we talk about cooperation versus competition. Competition is lauded as if it is the primary rule of a good and productive existence. At times the concept of competition is pitted against that of cooperation. Cooperation gets lumped in with pejorative labeling in a dogmatic context where agendas that are not always clear are being promulgated.

This as in the ‘Socialism Bad : Capitalism Good’ debate which is one of the endless semantic dichotomy quarrels that exist overlaying political life. Socialism and Communism are compared with capitalism in terms of the virtuous circumstances listed above. The comparison is unfair however due to the distribution of these circumstances among the populations they affect. Capitalism tends to work for a proportion of the population far better than for most but to be fair it does work tolerably well for a proportion somewhere just over a majority, those in work and those who benefit from that work. Socialism/Communism has the goal of working for all, not just for a percentage of a population. This form of collective cooperation however ran into major problems from one source of another and has generally been declared somewhat of a failure. It is my contention however that a hybrid combination of capitalism and competition as seen in China and elsewhere in the far east demonstrates that competition and cooperation can work extremely successfully in tandem.

We are a world in transit I would contend, with a people searching for a unified system of existence worldwide which enables humankind to benefit from the pluses and eliminate the negatives to create a decent, stable, secure life with as many virtuous circumstances as possible for the maximum number of us as possible.

It may be difficult for those struggling to achieve these for themselves and their families to sign on to this broader aspiration however, I feel that somewhere in each of us there is this nascent idealism, perhaps felt only momentarily at certain times in our lives. I am talking of for example, that widening out of compassion I suspect we have all felt on New Year’s Eve at midnight when the world comes together in celebration and hope. Or perhaps when someone close to us dies and we feel a welling from deep inside of a compassion that we are unaware of us in our normal, everyday lives.

So, why don’t we feel that we are approaching the world we want to see and be a part of?

What are the factors that mitigate this coming together of the world where problems are resolved, differences are reconciled, animosity eliminated and peaceful cooperation generated?

Who could want to retain those problems, differences, animosities and see cooperation on them as negative?

What kind of mentality is more interested in widening the gap between peoples and nations?

What would be in it for such people and at what level of status in society would we find them?

These individuals, for they are individuals, are not among the vast mass of working populations and certainly not among those who can find no employment. These individuals are of a relatively or distinctly high status. They have found that creating a gap between themselves and others works for them.

What are the types of individuals I mean?

This type of mentality sees benefit in keeping their distance.

It may be a manager of a workforce who feels the need to be able to command others and negates their ability to organize themselves efficiently. This is not to say that all men and women are able to perceive the best ways to organize themselves however, I am talking of a certain type of management where an aggressive superior mentality is applied to a workforce.

It is all too easy to negate the talents of others when there is a psychological (perhaps totally unconscious) need to dominate and preserve a perceived superior status. This tends ultimately to have a corrosive influence where loyalty is not felt, only a begrudging attendance to an enforced duty. Where however, both management and workers work as a cooperative unit where status is not an issue there can be developed true loyalty, even, strange as it may sound, a degree of love.

Looking to a wider sphere altogether, why is our world still riven with constant and very serious disputes at a point in our collective history when much of the world is technically and socially so much more advanced than ever before?

If we can’t sort out our differences at this advanced stage that we have reached where any number of powerful technologies and capabilities have been developed and honed to perfection when can we ever? We have the capability, if we work together to resolve most of the problems that have inflicted humankind for the countless generations who lived before us?

So why is it not happening? Why do we see so much division, dispute and threats flying in this direction and that with aggression and accusation far outweighing any attempts at agreement.

What is happening and who are those making it happen?

My take on what is happening is that certain individuals inside the world’s most dominant nation have decided that they have developed the form of society, societal norms and modes of governance that are the highest ideal possible and that for certain reasons must be transferred to all other nations, and by almost any means necessary. A secondary impulse which has taken the place of the first for the moment is that these attributes must be transferred to all nations for the protection of their own.

Due to the convictions delineated above the individuals above do not respect the modes of governance of those nations who have developed in a different way to them via a range of cultural, historical or political pathways. The policy then is to keep them at arm’s length until they can be made to adhere to the most dominant nation’s determination of the ideal. Meanwhile a frozen situation exists where both sides jockey for the best position to safeguard their desire for compliance on one side and retention of their chosen pathway on the other.

The dominant nation does not recognize any validity in these latter motivations however and frames each move by the target nations for modification as an abuse or threat. Thus we have a world essentially at war, though better said, it is one nation plus its allies that is at war with all nations unwilling to accept its systems as theirs.

Who are the people who are holding this situation in place?

As I suggested earlier, these will not be found among the vast majority of citizens, either working or jobless. They are not the middle or upper management of companies and concerns either.

The responsibility lies at the very highest positions within the world of politics.

If cooperation was the goal, with all present systems of governance pragmatically recognized as valid, the progress we could make as a species would be immense. Humans, though retaining a capacity to be immensely and destructively competitive have the capacity to be immensely creatively cooperative also.

It is far and away the obvious truth that there is only one nation with a consistently one-sided view of its destiny that pushes it always to assert its rightness, superiority and exceptional destiny. It does not need spelling out as it comes into your mind immediately without the need to name it.

Until the elites of this nation recognize that it is not in their gift by any means to force other nations to govern themselves as they do we will remain a divided, disputatious world riven by constant antagonisms, threats of war and acts of war.

When members of any society act against its well being they are given a name that describes this effect. Such people deign not to be cooperative but to be destructive. They see themselves as being in competition against an enemy to them, even though that enemy is the very society they exist within and must survive within. Such people, whatever their motivations or psychological problems may be, are called delinquents.

We live on a planet that as far as we know is alone in harboring the kind of life of know. In many ways our planet is strong, it has lasted through unimaginable cataclysmic events in its lifetime. It has through the millennia reached a position of relative stability. However, there are excesses and deficiencies, lush pastures, jungles and deserts of both ice and sand, mountainous areas and barren wastes, rich prairies and rice paddies all that comprises the rich diversity of our planet, along with the almost infinite variety of lifestyles and cultures.

Is it not possible and indeed advantageous to put aside our differences of geopolitical, cultural and national differences to come together in a cooperative spirit that has shown us at our very best in the past and that is indeed the hallmark of everyday life for the vast majority?

Why can’t we work this out? Why cannot the nation demanding we all conform to it be assuaged and convinced of the perpetual negativity of its quest to enforce its monopoly on rightness?

If we cannot bring this recognition about what future have we on this planet?

What sustainable future can any life form or ecosystem have?

Unless there is a way, we are all collectively at the mercy of what I consider to be ‘The Global Delinquents’.