Urgently Addressing Immorality - Part X

You may have noticed that this series of documents is labelled in alphabetical order.

 

 

How attentively have you been examining these documents, and for what purpose?

How do you usually assess whether your purposes are moral or immoral? 


 

How do you usually assess leadership, including your own?

 

 

Who has a right to assess the leadership of anyone, and who has a duty to do so?


 

Gaining an understanding of how and when cultures emerge will most likely enlighten you not only to the emergence of enlightened cultures but unenlightened ones, historically and now, and possibly even into the future.

How have you already attempted to gain that understanding?

Perhaps you are aware that attentively investing in the delights of adequately ethical compatibility requires considerable, prior investments in logic, as does attentively investing in improving political practices. 

How do you label your priorities?

How attentively are you investing in appropriate priorities, and how do you know?

How purposeful is your sense of priorities?

How attentively are you investing in purposeful reviews, and how do you know?

How productively do you implement your priorities?

How attentively are you investing in enlightened productivity, and how do you know? 

How well do you govern yourself, and how do you know?

Training to become a better philanthropist is a quaternary educational practice, not a tertiary one.

Perhaps you are not interested in becoming a better philanthropist.

Perhaps you are not even interested in becoming a better advocate, a better activist, a better patron and a better leader.

How attentively are you investing in better governments, and how do you know?

Either you wish to be involved in establishing, developing and maintaining non-problematic community possibilities and non-problematic organisational structures and non-problematic societal systems or you do not. 

Perhaps you do not regard the prevention of problems as a particularly urgent priority from your point of view.

If you think politics is meant to be about improving people's lives and/or improving the places in which they live and/or improving the planet, then politics itself must urgently improve.

Everyone has a duty to contribute to that improvement, including you.

How do you intend to do so over the next few weeks?

How have you been doing so over the past few week?

All good leaders would, in fact, encourage improvements as urgently as possible.

But what is a good society in practice, from your point of view, and who are its leaders?

Most people apparently prefer to seek physical or vicarious thrills or the maintenance of their own self-indulgent privileges.  They are not interested in contributing to a better world.

When courage is most urgently required, very few people express that courage appropriately, if at all.

How attentively are you investing in urgent reforms, and how do you know? 

There are many dangers for tellers of truth to consider, particularly when the ordinary public becomes at least slightly aware of that inevitably frightening truth.

Even so, the ordinary public would much rather be entertained commercially and politically instead of being actively involved in reforming government structures, systems and practices.

And few people are actively involved in improving economic systems, or cultures more generally.

A good society, and a good government, would never discourage peaceful desires and sensible suggestions for societal improvement.  In fact, good societies and good governments, by definition, actively encourage societal improvements.

What, then, is a societal improvement, particularly in terms of morality?

Reasonable people regard aggression as immoral.

Why, then, are so many moralists aggressive, bigoted and uninterested in the truth?

Aggression, bigotry and ignorance provide no reasonable basis for upholding morality, or for addressing immorality.

Throughout the world, far too many women are abused.

Far too many girls are frightened.

Far too many men are aggressive.

Far too many boys behave dangerously.

And far too many children are unwanted by anyone except abusers.

What are you doing to eradicate cycles of abuse, fear, aggression, recklessness and negligence, and where is your evidence?

Preventing emergencies from arising is an important contribution to enlightened productivity, of course.

How urgently are you attempting to prevent emergencies from arising, and for whose benefit?

How attentively and philanthropically are you investing in thorough assessments of well-informed kindness, fake kindness, indifference, incompetence and cruelty, and how do you know?

In most cultures, most people mistake over-privileged bullying for leadership.

Such cultures are therefore corrupt.

Any culture in which bullying is normalised is corrupt.

What is your currently preferred approach to investing in the quality analysis of events, and for what reasons?

And how attentively have you been implementing and reviewing that approach?

The members of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee certainly hope your expression of leadership is not indicative of hubris.

No enlightened leader expresses hubris.

The best way to preserve and protect ecosystems is by preventing hubris.

The best way to preserve and protect any sort of heritage is by preventing hubris.

All genuine philanthropy is associated with investing in hope, whether directly or indirectly, with proper attention to reality.  

Genuine philanthropy is never associated with hubris.  Yet hubris is commonly practiced by moralists claiming to be philanthropists, advocates, activists, journalists, politicians, religious leaders and/or business leaders.

When do you know a society urgently requires a new and/or improved constitution?

What should such a constitution contain and why, and who should help that constitutional improvement to happen?

While revolutions are often experience of chaos, reform is often an experience of liminality.

If you are a relatively enlightened being, at least in your own mind, you will know that many problems in the world cannot be solved with money.  They can only be solved with well-informed kindness.

But what does that really mean in practice?

Hubris is often associated with the preservation of inappropriately linear systems, such as unjust social and political hierarchies.

Real world leaders act to dismantle those systems with appropriate care and appropriate urgency so that better systems can replace them.  

What have you been learning about constitutionalism and constitutional reform whilst attentively investing in improved constitutions, and how do you know?

Wastefulness is a form of bullying in itself.  It causes much distress to the people who have nothing.

When, if ever, do constitutions help to prevent wastefulness?

When, if ever, do constitutions help to prevent societal unrest?

When, if ever, do constitutions help to prevent wars?

When, if ever, do constitutions help to prevent any form of injustice?

Only the exceptionally privileged are usually protected by constitutional measures.

How have you most recently been attempting to invest in the provision and improvement of justice, pleasure, simple living and suitable independence, and how attentively? 

Perhaps you would rather not pay much attention to anything, but what does that mean in terms of future problems?

Perhaps you are not interested in paying the true cost of anything at all.

Perhaps you do not even think much about what is healthily pleasurable and what is not.

Simple living and beautiful love both involve investing in security properly, hence attentively.

That is only possible when investing in good people, not selfish ones.

Perhaps you would rather not invest in people at all.

How attentively have you been investing in awareness recently, and how do you know?

Your leadership must urgently be improved, as a priority.

All people unwilling to acknowledge the facts about corruption and deception either lack intelligence or compassion or a responsible sense of priorities.  They may even be lazy.

How have you been attempting to overcome your own laziness?

Perhaps you have been doing so by pretending to be busy, or caring, or by genuinely believing you are in love, or unwell, or incapable of addressing societal, and global, problems.

Perhaps you have at least once sought to experience friendship and/or romance and/or sexual intimacy, not knowing that the object of your desire was merely an image.

Behind every social image each person portrays may have been an authentically pleasant person or a predatory, arrogant, rude and uncaring bully.

Friendship is meant to be a private experience, in much the same way as romance and physical intimacy. 

Friendship is not meant to be mistaken for community volunteering, or professional therapy, or public education, or popular entertainment, or performing for the benefit of colleagues, or customers, or clients, or patients, or students, or family members.

How imaginatively and attentively have you been investing in thoughtful reciprocity over the past few years, and even the past few decades, and how do you know? 

How do you distinguish between friendliness and neediness?

People with an absence of guilt in their conscience tend to lack insight into the detrimental consequences of their own thoughts and actions, particularly from the point of view of other people.

An absence of guilty feelings tends to be associated with psychopathic tendencies.

And psychopaths cause even more harm to the mental health of their victims than narcissists tend to do.

Yet many narcissists are also psychopaths.  They have an inflated sense of self worth while having a dangerous disregard for the needs and rights of other people.

Good people are incompatible with narcissists, psychopaths and Machiavellian manipulators, and all other practitioners of psychological manipulation.

Incompatibility is the cause of many reductions in productivity.

Frugality Cottage is now the only official location in and from which ordinary members of the public can directly experience quaternary education and training.  

Much of that education and training has been philanthropically provided, free of charge, for quite some time now. 

How attentively have you already been investing in quaternary possibilities, and where, and how do you know? 

Perhaps you do not usually associate cottages with productivity.

Perhaps you do not even associate politics with productivity.

Appropriately registered patrons have access to many locations, resources and opportunities unavailable to non-patrons.

Only appropriately registered patrons are eligible to apply for official memberships associated with the Adelaidezone. 

You have long had the chance to register your enlightened leadership within the Adelaidezone, through a wide range of non-monetary investment practices, either in lieu of financial contributions or in addition to those contributions.

There are no selfishness-related incentives permitted within Frugality Cottage, or anywhere else associated with the Spirit of Enlightenment and/or Council of Enlightenment.  Nor are any other conflicts of interest permitted.

You apparently have no interest whatsoever in improving the productivity of your leadership.

Why do you apparently fail to value the truth highly enough?

An enlightened patron merely seeks to improve services and manners, and possibly even products, through the provision of financial and/or non-financial assistance, whether through trade or philanthropy or both. 

How attentively have you already been investing in enlightened philanthropy, and how do you know?

Enlightened leaders rarely have any influence in politics or the media or in academia or business or in the minds of most members of the public.  They do have influence in good communities.  They know how to develop and maintain the good relationships upon which good communities are based.

That is why they are enlightened beings.

Perhaps you mainly have a speculative approach to investments rather than a reformist approach.

Perhaps you are not a good person.

Perhaps you are not really interested in contributing to a good world.

But what is a good world?

What do you believe you know about moral courage?

How do you know you are not an unreasonable moralist?

If people involved in the practice of marketing regard you as part of Generation X, what does that really mean from your point of view?

Perhaps it means you are middle aged and/or magnificently mature.

Regardless of the point of view of assessors of generations, and regardless of your current age, what do you regard magnificent maturity to be in terms of leadership?

How do you usually assess duties and priorities in relation to leadership and maturity?

Perhaps you have explored the Epic of Gilgamesh, or not as the case is more likely to be.

You may or may not be acquainted with Sumer or Uruk or Inanna.

Perhaps you do not regard Twaklin as the ancient and ongoing Queen of Heaven.

You may or may not associate Twaklin with Inanna.

You may or may not associate the Council of Enlightenment with Utu/Shamash.

You may or may not associate the Adelaidezone with the Cedar Forest.

How do you usually identify and assess the ancient and the modern, and why, and in which contexts?

What do you know about the ancient origins of your mental, cultural and neurological experiences, and how did you acquire that knowledge?

The orthodox within one culture is unorthodox within another.

Yet there is nothing natural about cultural practices. 

Nor are most cultural practices adequately reasonable.

Bullies continue to be in possession of too much power within most cultures.  They continue to demand conformity to their own unreasonable desires.

What do you know about ethics in relation to the current average human lifespan in various cultures and societies and geographic regions? 

What do you know about the history of gerontocracy?

What do you know about the consequences of gerontocracy in terms of public policy?

What is the median age of humans within the geographical region you are currently experiencing, and why?

What do you know about emerging leaders in the political kindness movement?

Perhaps you regard yourself as one of those leaders.  

Perhaps you regard political kindness as nothing more than an opinion.

Perhaps you regard political kindness as having no basis in fact.

Politics is all about deciding whether something is satisfactory as it is or whether it needs improving. 

Politics itself, in an ever-changing world, should be a continual improvement process. 

But the past should never be ignored.

Making accurate comparisons between the past and the present is necessary in order to measure progress accurately.

How far back in time do your measurements usually go?

Many physical environments are best for other species when humans do not attempt to "develop" those environments at all.

A "development" in such contexts is merely a human-directed change.  It is not necessarily an improvement, particularly from an ecological perspectives.

What do you know about Paleolithic interbreeding between archaic humans and modern humans? 

What do you know about the science and history of evolution?

What do do you know about the history of evolutionary thought?

What do you know about geology and archaeology?

Perhaps such questions make you feel uncomfortable.

Perhaps you feel most comfortable when adapting ideas to fit your existing beliefs.

What is your acquaintance with cuneiform?

What do you know about cradles of civilisation in the Old World and New World, and from which point of view?

What is your acquaintance with narrative art, and narratives more generally?

Perhaps you have been seeking to experience narratives associated with the work of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee.

If so, why do you believe you deserve to experience such a privilege?

When, for example, have you sought to assist the committee with its work, and how, and where is the associated evidence?

You have apparently not been investing in magnificent maturity particularly attentively.

There are many ways to assess maturity, depending on the context.

What have been your experiences in that regard?

How do you compare the words mature and nature, in relation to problems, including recurring patterns of problems?

What do you know about etymology and other studies associated with origins and histories?

Many cultural groups, all around the world, associate the consumption of a particular type of food, or a particular type of drink, or a particular type of drug, with group and/or community activities, whether the food or drink is healthy or not and whether the drug is nicotine or caffeine or alcohol or some other substance.
 
Many cultural groups, of the past and present, have associated the consumption of animal products with group and/or community activities, sometimes even when voting.

If you are actively involved in a conservation movement, what do you actually do, and how effectively do you do it? 

If you are actively involved in any other social movement, what do you actually do, and how effectively do you do it?
 
If you are actively involved in a cultural movement, what do you actually do, and how effectively do you do it?
 
How do you measure your effectiveness in various contexts, and from whose point of view?
 
As investing in good relationships is about investing in well-informed kindness, there is no point in investing time in relationships with unkind people, including those who pretend to be kind for extrinsic reasons.
 
Even if they happen to be family members and possibly even spouses, employers or wealthy potential investors, unkind people are unworthy of attention, even if they occasionally behave helpfully.

Part of the tragedy of the commons is that unkind persons, and ignorant ones, have as many rights to use the associated resources as kind and knowledgeable persons. 

What do you know about digital commons and digital commonplaces, and how do you tell the difference between the two?

What is your acquaintance with information architecture, whether associated with an ethereal villa, a digital cottage or a virtual tower of truth?

What do you know about the history and prehistory of the Fertile Crescent?

What is your acquaintance with the Natufians and the prehistory of the Levant?

What do you know about the history and prehistory of the Sinai Peninsula? 

What is your acquaintance with origin myths and creation myths, and through which cultures?

What is your acquaintance with philology, philosophy and parapsychology?

What are your policies in relation to your patrons?

What are your policies in relation to non-patrons, including potential patrons?

How attentively have you been investing in good policy, and how do you know?

There is currently very little good policy or good faith in politics, or in any other context, anywhere in the world.

There is none at all internationally.  There are only small pockets of good policy and/or good faith in various localities, but usually only temporarily.

How attentively have you been investing in good faith, and how do you know?

Early each Monday morning, for many months now, you have been indirectly invited, by the Council of Enlightenment, to learn a little more about the structured quaternary training activities conducted scientifically from Frugality Cottage, its gardens and the surrounding ethereal neighbourhood.

The initial notes to assist you have been placed on the little kitsch noticeboard inside the entrance of the cottage.

The purpose of those notes has been to assess your responses to science, mathematics, ethics, aesthetics, history and politics in the context of everyday life.

The entrance itself is really too small to be considered a room or even a hallway.  There is barely enough room there for one person at a time.

The library is not much bigger.  The documentation you are currently reading is currently located in the library of Frugality Cottage, along with a few additional records. 

What do you know about library science and archival science?

What do you know about the conservation and restoration of books, manuscripts, documents and ephemera?

What do you know about digital preservation?

How have you interpreted the digital images associated with various documents in this part of the Internet?

You may be aware that Uruk was also known as Warka.

What do you know about the Mask of Warka?

What do you know about the Warka Vase?

What do you know about the informed interpretation of ancient artifacts?

What do you know about the informed  decipherment of ancient languages?

What do you know about the informed study of ancient beliefs, including ancient religions?

What do you know about the Sumerian language and Sumerian literature?

What do you know about Sumerian religion and Sumerian politics?

How carefully do you distinguish between the history of cultures and the geography associated with their presence, influence and decline? 

What do you know about the climate of Mesopotamia at various times in history and prehistory?

What do you know about environmental science and nature conservation?

What do you know about conservation science in relation to cultural heritage?

How attentively are you investing in conservation, and how do you know?

Life on Earth in interdependent, as indicated by the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, other biogeochemical cycles and various ecological and biochemical processes.

How carefully are you investing in pleasant interdependence, and how do you know? 

How imaginatively, attentively and scientifically are you investing in health in its various forms, through its various sources, for the common good, and how do you know? 

What do you know about agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia?

How do you compare your assessments of prehistory with your assessments of history?

What do you know about alluvium and alluvial plains?

What do you know about radiocarbon dating and radiocarbon calibration?

What do you know about other approaches to chronological dating?

You may be aware that the Last Glacial Period ended around 11,700 years ago, and so did the Pleistocene geological epoch.

The world has since experienced the Holocene.

On a geologic time scale, 11,700 years is a very short time.

The Neolithic began in the Levant about 10,200 BC, hence around 12,200 years ago.

The Neolithic Revolution allowed civilisations to develop. 

How do you distinguish between a civilisation and a non-civilisation?

What do you know about the art of Uruk, including the Uruk Trough?

What do you know about protohistory and the Uruk Period?

What do you know about the architecture of Mesopotamia, including houses in ancient Sumer?

What, if anything, has history taught you about investing in better communities? 

What, if anything, has the history of beliefs in Earth gods and Earth goddesses taught you about such communities, and how?

How do you prefer to assess complex societies, and why?

What do you know about the ways in which the planet Venus has been interpreted by various cultures?

What do you know about the Star of Innana?

What do you know about the ways in which various cultures have used star and crescent symbols?

Perhaps you have been wondering how these questions relate to the activities of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee.

What do interpretations of archaeological cultures tell you about patterns of political problems in the past and present?

What does recorded history tell you about patterns of political problems in the past and present?

What do you know about the recorded history of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee?

What do you know about records of real estate transactions and the transfer of land tenure and land ownership throughout history?

What do you know about clay tablets, cylinder seals and kudurrus?

What do you know about the Land grant to Ḫunnubat-Nanaya kudurru?

The Mask of Uruk/Warka dates from the 31st century BC.

How do you imagine the mask as it may have looked when completed?

How do you imagine the person or people who made it?

How do you imagine the various people who many have seen the mask at various times in history?

The Land grant to Ḫunnubat-Nanaya kudurru was produced in the reign on Meli-Šipak II, a Kassite king from the 12th century BC. 

How do you imagine the kudurru has been interpreted in various centuries by various people? 

What do you know about time and fate deities, such as the Anunnaki?

What do you know about E-anna, the temple of Innana in Iruk?

What do you know about Assyriology?

What do you know about ziggurats?

What do you know about Abzu and various beliefs about cosmic oceans and celestial rivers?

What, if anything, is sacred to you about aquifers?

How do you interpret narratives associated with mythological kings, including Meshkiangasher?

The cylinder seal associated with him is from around 3200 BC.

What do you know about various beliefs regarding sacred cattle?

What do you know about the history of theocracies in various cultures?

What do you know about deity Anu and the Sumerian creation myth?

What is your acquaintance with stories about the seven heavens? 

What do you now know about Sumer and the subsequent Akkadian Empire, which was itself followed by Assyria and Babylonia?

What do you know about COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009?

What do you know about COP26 in Glasgow, which ended yesterday?

What do you know about the stability of the Earth's climate over the past ten thousand years or so?

What have ancient cultures and civilisations taught you about that stability?

What do you know about recent climate disasters and the social cost of carbon in the atmosphere?

In how many ways are you attempting to slow down climate change?

What do you know about the the 7th century BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire?

What do you know about the expansion and collapse of that empire?

What do you know about Enki and Enlil and various other Mesopotamian deities?

What do you know about the Adda seal from around 2300 BC and its interpretation?

What do you know about the contributions of climate problems to the ongoing Syrian civil war?

What do you know about the Iraq Museum and its collection?

How attentively have you been investing in the experience of art, and how do you know?

All art is a form of communication, even without the presence of symbols interpreted as writing.

How attentively have you been investing in good patronage over your lifetime, and how do you know?

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