Urgently Addressing Immorality - Part I

The development of any community, or organisation, or political campaign, must take all sorts of possibilities into consideration very seriously indeed.

That is particularly necessary when persons with political power have either never had, or no longer have, the essential intellectual, emotional and moral skills suitable for developing and maintaining good public policies and good societies.  

Most of the people attracted to acquiring powerful political, bureaucratic, media and/or social media positions do so as a consequence of selfish ambitions.  They do not have a genuine desire to prevent and address suffering.

If they truly wanted to address suffering, and had the ability to do so, they would have identified and prevented the structural problems allowing indifference and cruelty to become normalised.  They would also have defined the associated problems accurately and addressed them in timely ways.

How do you address suffering?

If you are not doing so sufficiently well, how do you account for your lapses in that regard?

Quality cannot co-exist with corruption, even when corrupt persons claim to sell quality products and/or quality services, such as quality university courses and quality apartments. 

How do you know when claimed productivity is actually associated with corruption?

Perhaps you are aware that COP26 begins in Glasgow tomorrow.

Where will you be?

And what will you be doing?

Urgently addressing immorality is a task for real leaders, especially real world leaders, not narcissists or magicians.

The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee only assists real world leaders, hence the information you are currently privileged to read.

Real world leaders understand and express amazingly successful planning and wisely invest in it.

What have you discovered about enlightened cultural leadership through the ongoing work of the International Training Centre for the Harmonious Interplay of Beauty, Understanding and Magnificence?

All the world's finest and most enlightened quaternary education services are exclusively provided from the Adelaidezone, of course.  They supply essential training for anyone with a talent for real world leadership.

You apparently have such a talent though the evidence suggests you have merely developed it superficially.  You may wish to prove otherwise.

How are you attempting to support the second Age of Enlightenment if not through the harmonious interplay of beauty, understanding and magnificence?

Perhaps you spend much time daydreaming instead of actively improving the world.  Yet healthy daydreams are a wonderful resource.  They help to enhance problem-solving, decision-making, creativity and morality.

How do you know whether your daydreams are healthy or not?

Perhaps you associate daydreams mainly with fantasies rather than the improvement of real life.

Perhaps you regard daydreams as entirely escapist.

But what do you know about daydreams as motives for societal goals, and personal goals?

What do you know about the normality of daydreaming and mind wandering? 

How do you know when the desire to turn a dream into reality is potentially dangerous and possibly even likely to be abusive?

You may associate impulsiveness with an absence of daydreaming, particularly as daydreams fill the mind in much the same way as meditation and premeditation.

You may associate attentiveness with the absence of daydreaming, too.

Perhaps you are often annoyed when people attempt to interrupt your daydreams, and your other preferred thoughts.

Perhaps your daydreams help to prevent you from dwelling on unpleasant memories and various worries.

You may associate daydreams with relaxation, and possible even with relaxation techniques.

To relax is to be in a non-strenuous situation, physically, emotionally, intellectually and financially

How do you attempt to avoid straining yourself? 

Strain is, by definition, stressful.  Yet boredom is also stressful.

Perhaps you mostly daydream when you are bored.

Perhaps you daydream mainly about the achievements you would seek if only you had the chance to make them come true.

Perhaps you are bored with the work you do yet think you do not have the financial resources or the skills to improve the situation. 

How do you usually prefer to spend your leisure time, and why?

How would you prefer to spend your leisure time if you had more choices and resources available to you?

Perhaps there is too much tension in your employment situation and/or in your residential situation and/or in the other situations you face.

Perhaps you have a tendency to seek excitement and/or challenge as a way to overcome feelings of boredom, and possibly even meaninglessness and/or loneliness.  You may even do so in workplace situations.

Perhaps you think you need the money you acquire through a boring job in order to put your daydreams into practice in the physical world.

Perhaps you already have the money you need to make your dreams come true but think you lack the time or the talent or the information with which to act.

Perhaps you prefer to spend your time procrastinating and/or absorbed in fantasy.

Perhaps you would rather avoid effortful experiences, whether physically or mentally or interpersonally or politically. 

Perhaps you enjoy escapism much more than reality.

Perhaps you prefer to avoid social interactions with real people and imagine yourself with an ideal person and/or as an ideal person.

Perhaps you have idealised a real person, whether you interact with that person socially or not.

Perhaps you prefer spending time with a companion animal instead of a person.

Perhaps you much prefer to act a part than express yourself authentically, possibly through fear of revealing the real you in uncomfortable situations.

What does recreation mean to you, and why? 

What does a duty of care mean to you, and why?

You may be aware that professional associations are much more interested in advancing the societal status, reputation and financial rewards of their members than in acting in the public interest.

Acting in the public interest, in a profession and/or through a professional association, is often regarded as a public relations exercise, not as an essential activity.

Professions are economic practices, and political ones. 

Perhaps you joined a profession for reasons of vanity rather than through a desire to support and advance the common good.

Perhaps you are currently bored in the profession and/or frustrated by the lack of morality within it and/or exhausted through overwork and/or suffering from vicarious trauma.

Perhaps you feel your training for the profession has been inadequate, or you feel you are overqualified and/or underpaid.

Perhaps you have been unable to find employment of any relevance to your qualifications and/or interests and/or values.

Perhaps you have been absorbed in maladaptive daydreaming in an attempt to cope with an unpleasant situation beyond your control.

Perhaps you have been trying to avoid reminders of the relationship between emotions and memories. 

Perhaps you have been attempting to improve your health and/or finances and/or morality yet the people in your life have been encouraging you to act otherwise.

Perhaps you have a fantasy prone personality and a tendency to be absorbed in imagined experiences rather than actual ones.

If you have access to large sums of money, you may even spend a great deal of it on grandiose projects.

But what is the difference between a grandiose project and a reasonable one on the long term?

Perhaps you have difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction.

You may have difficulty in telling the difference between truth and fallacy.

You may not know the difference between reasonableness and bias, especially when the biases are within your own mind.

Perhaps your mind is happy to think in terms of heuristics rather than causality and consequences.

Perhaps you prefer to live vicariously through the life of another person, or even through the lives of several other people, and possibly even through imaginings about fictional characters.

Perhaps you enjoy looking at artworks of one sort or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another to image yourself in a similar scene, or in the locations in which the artworks are currently, or were formerly, situated.

Perhaps you spend much of your time online in search of aesthetically satisfying music and/or visual images rather than reasonable ideas and/or accurate information.

Perhaps you spend much of your time intoxicated in one way or another, or seeking to become so, whether chemically or otherwise.

Perhaps you feel sexually intoxicated more often than not, regardless of the potential detriment to yourself and other people from such experiences.

Perhaps you have no interest in learning more about logical consequences or differential psychology or parasocial interactions or unintended consequences or eudaimonia or consequentialism or deontology or your typical intellectual engagement or your level of moral development or the value of the cultural capital you have acquired. 

Perhaps you have much in common with Narcissus.

Perhaps you are not interested in learning more about quality democracy as political pleasantness.

What are the rules by which you choose to live?

How do those rules help you to maintain the moral high ground in various circumstances?

How do you measure success?

Your answer to that question will probably relate mainly to your moral reasoning and culturally-acquired beliefs.

How have you developed your moral identity?

How does your sense of identity relate to one or more places?

What do you know about the boundaries of your mind?

What, if any, have been your experiences of identity fusion and identify confusion, and at what ages? 

What have you discovered about yourself through experiences of liminality?

What have you discovered about yourself, other people, other creatures, and the world, through observational learning?

What have you been learning about obsession and preoccupation and superficiality and authenticity and boredom?

What has most recently enthralled you, and why?

What has most recently frightened you, and why?

How have you been preparing for tomorrow and the subsequent days?

There is much to consider, of course, as the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee hopes you are well aware by now.

Perhaps you enjoy being spellbound by a fantasy of sorcery or by a fixed idea in your mind like obsessive love or a conspiracy theory or celebrity worship or political extremism or religious fanaticism or an addiction or gambling habit.

Perhaps you are fascinated by the processes of nitrogen fixation and/or carbon fixation.

Perhaps you daydream about sitting in a sycamore tree on a pleasant summer day with an enchanting book and a sprig of honeysuckle, recreating a work of art. 

Or perhaps you daydream about sitting on the deck of a lovely yacht with lovely people in lovely weather wearing lovely clothes. 

But do you ever daydream about solving the world's most difficult and urgent problems?

If you do, what has been preventing you from making those dreams reality?

There is much to learn from one picture and another and another and another and another and another.

How do you attempt to learn from contrasts and comparisons and images of early times, and more recent times?

What do you hope you will learn tomorrow?