HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

In Republic, Plato tells the story of the Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a corpse in a cave with a golden ring that gives him the power to become invisible. He uses it to seduce the queen and murders the king to take his place.

The question about morality presented thus by Plato is whether any man could resist the temptation of being able to perform an objectionable act without being known or discovered.

“The Invisible Man,” “The Lord of the Rings”...

The story is later recycled in various forms such as “The Invisible Man” and “The Lord of the Rings”.

[French thinker Jean Paul] Sartre puts the same question in a slightly different way.

A man is peering through a keyhole into a room, when he hears steps. Nervously he withdraws and feels shame at being discovered, but if he sees that the steps belong in fact to a dog rather than a person he continues his Peeping Tom activities unconcerned.

“External” constrains are well known and agreed by convention, in the form of Laws, Moral Codes, Rules and Regulations. The problem is that a situation exists in which these Laws are made to serve a power structure that concentrates economic power in fewer and fewer hands. But who is wearing the invisibility ring?

The Consequences of Economic Violence

The consequences of economic violence are visible enough. People starve to death, children die of Malaria and other treatable diseases, “austerity” measures destroy livelihoods, healthcare, education and welfare for millions of people whilst others flaunt their hugely disproportionate wealth without shame.

The trick not to suffer the possible critical external look is to surround oneself with sycophantic Yes-Persons whether one is a Banker or an autocratic leader. But politics makes you visible and these days Tony Blair cannot make a public appearance without being hounded by a crowd of booing and hissing Iraq War protesters.

It’s all Confidential, Secret, Invisible

The mechanisms that allow growing concentration are less visible. We know of course that banks gamble at the stock markets with our deposits and that countries miss out on about £121bn in revenues – more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world each year – (The Guardian) via the tax avoidance of the offshore havens.

It’s all confidential, secret, invisible, it’s the Ring, it’s the failure of morality imposed from outside.

The Internal Guides

Plato’s point was that one needs a moral person to guide us, in his case Socrates. But who was Socrates’ moral lead? In fact he had an Internal Guide, that he called his daemon(1), an inner voice that warned him when he was about to stray or err.

Examples of such Internal Guides are common in history: gods, angels, dead relatives and ideal constructs, all respond from within the consciousness with wisdom, kindness and strength.

Religions prescribe God as the ultimate internal moral guide. Freud calls the introjection of parental and society’s moral codes Super-Ego, with a little problem: like the Judaeo-Christian deity, it guides but also punishes.

Guilt after the wrongdoing is too late. The Gordon Gekkos of Wall Street rebelled and Neo-liberalism came to the rescue: “greed is good”, accumulation of wealth will “trickle down” (it doesn’t), so no need to feel guilty. The freshly de-regulated financial system is spiraling out of control in suicidal triumphalism.

A Nonviolent Revolution Is Possible, But…

Reversing these trends cannot be just a matter of making a few adjustments here and there. A nonviolent revolution is possible but it needs both external and internal changes in the human being, in us, because ”one sees the wider destiny of all as a simple extension of one’s own destiny, rather than one’s own destiny as a particular case of the wider destiny”.(2)

This vision can change if we choose to develop an Internal Guide as an intentional image built on wisdom, kindness and strength to inspire and impel us. More importantly the discovery that every perception of other people’s suffering forms an image in our consciousness which acts upon us, psychologically and physically, can help us understand not only why we feel sick or faint when we see an accident in the street, but also how to strengthen empathy and solidarity.(3)

The Dehumanization of “The Other”

Empathy and solidarity are not guaranteed by such images, that is, by the internal representation of the other’s pain, because a society may choose to educate its young in the direction of attending to such registers or anaesthetizing them to desensitize us.(4)

This is being successfully done through the Mass Media, the video-game and values taught by the education system: Individualism and competition, the neoliberal dogma. The resulting dehumanization of “the other” creates the fertile ground for the rise of new-fascisms, wars and offshore tax havens.

“I’m Not a Joiner”

One of the consequences of a New Humanism inspiring changes would be that people would feel physical revulsion in front of violence, any type of violence, including economic forms, reinforcing the virtuous circle towards empathy. Would this take a long time, generations even? Does it require genetic changes?

May be not, if we observe the speed with which many vegetarians have developed revulsion at the idea of eating meat. It seems that a firm moral conviction is all that is needed. And a group of like-minded people to strengthen ones own images and cushion the violence. Otherwise we run the risk of falling again into the system’s mindset in less time it takes to say: “I’m not a joiner”.

1. In his case a benevolent spirit. Having been in general “good”, daemons in Greek mythology appear later as both good and evil, and by the rise of Christianity the concept of demons as malignant entities become consolidated, with Guardian Angels as the accepted benign influences.
2. Silo: Letters to my Friends, Letter Seven
3. Recent discoveries in Neuroscience Research seem to confirm these observations: Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that fire when another person is observed doing a certain action. The neurons fire in imitation of the action being observed, causing the same muscles to act minutely in the observer as are acting grossly in the person actually performing the action. Research on mirror neurons, since their discovery in 1996, suggests that they may have a role to play not only in action understanding, but also in emotion sharing empathy.
4. Conduct your own experiment: carry out a “body count” of how many people you see killed in your TV screen or video-game in a day.