Ideas and proposals for a just, sustainable and happy society – in the European Union and beyond
I identify two very different types of debt:
Debt towards human creditors is the most visible form of debt. It is recorded in public or private accounts, and is the purpose of active monitoring, in order to ensure that the debtor keeps a sustainable capacity to pay the creditor back. The rights of creditors are defended by national and international law.
However, debt towards humans is not as hard as what could appear prima facie.
(Figure: Media Respect Cube, displaying the level of respect of the receiver, per technical feature of the communication medium. The higher the score, the higher the respect. Author: Sergio Arbarviro, under licence Creative Commons)
(Follows the previous post)
Regarding now the technical medium, I would have the following considerations:
Social medium Facebook and “big data” firm Cambridge Analytica have broken the news in March 2018 when their methods of political manipulation in the electoral campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 were made public. Why is it that the revelations on the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica affair appear morally so unacceptable?
I would like here to suggest a method, based on the well-established layer-based model of the human brain, to trace a moral distinction between tools used in political communication.
The Swiss translator and then psychotherapist Claude Piron spent his 20 years of activity at the Department of Psychology of the University of Geneva understanding the psychology of international linguistic communication, of which he had a direct experience by working for 17 years at the United Nations Organisation (UNO) and at the World Health Organisation (WHO). He summed up his reflections in a book (unfortunately only in French and in Portuguese), “the language challenge”, which he summarised in a very concise video and in several articles (check those in English).
Claude Piron argues that the existing mainstream systems for international linguistic communication don’t work, and that the (definitely not mainstream, but efficient) alternative, the international communication language Esperanto, is the purpose of neurotic resistance. His main arguments are the following.
“The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone” was published in 2009. Written by [British epidemiologists and economists] Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the book highlights the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption“. It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries [than in equal rich countries]. (Excerpt from the Equality Trust website launched by the authors, with links to further details on each of the “health and social problems” listed).
The man planting trees 