Mobile Ideas

By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

a. The atmosphere within which individual and collective thoughts tend to flourish faces unwelcome challenges when the matrix of thought happens to have its home outside the existing culture. This will mean cultural invasion has had an overpowering influence on the local culture and has, as a consequence, brought about a new direction in thoughts and actions. If the acquired development fits the existing cultural framework, one can be sure of a new style of development that is not merely momentous but praiseworthy.

b. The fanaticism that could arise from science and technology proves that culture is wedded to these two keys of development. It is as if science and technology are saying: pay heed to my superior culture because it has what it takes to make it superior: science and technology. This kind of fanaticism is thus stirred by science and technology, not the general characteristics of culture; so in many important instances, science and technology cannot be said to be neutral of culture.

c. A very materialistic society may fail to function well in the moral and scholarly domains. It so happens that the people are far more interested in material pursuits, not other elements necessary for personal and professional development. It has been said many times that a knowledge-based economy is more realistic and far more sustainable than a wealth-based economy. The reason is that the strength of the former is used to hold up and advance the strength of the latter.

d. The doggedness of an unalterable cultural system may prove the entrenchment of tyranny, both in the political and economic structures. The problem in such a system is that innovativeness hardly thrives; and if innovativeness could be realized, it is arbitrarily owned by those who are wedded to the tyranny. Thus, the greatest number of the people experience stunted mentalities. It may well be that cultural sterility grows and terrifies the society. Unless this absurdity is corrected, life could end up with the flourishing of gutter consciousness.

e. Nature keeps warning the advanced society by stating: Be careful about the way you use me. Show some modicum of sympathy regarding how you live in my midst or with me, else I shall, in return, pour my indignation on you. The entire drama in the relationship between nature and the said society seems to be more of a combat than reciprocity. Suppose humans win – precisely because they wrestle from nature her resources without the desired compromises – nature suffers; when nature wins, humanity suffers, for nature may let lose its natural disasters. It can be seen that a shared relationship between nature and humans is the most desirable; but this could happen at the cost of putting brakes on the immoderate production of goods from the immoderate advances in science and technology.

f. Contradictions in life are stark when excessive materialism clash with the intellectual and moral enterprise for pride of place in the society.

g. Intellectual sterility flourishes in an environment when ignorance and arrogance direct a lot of people’s courses of action. The problem may not be lack of knowledge about human affairs and other things. The problem may arise from fuzzy knowledge that unbendable authorities approve and release for public consumption. It is as if the prevalent culture sanctions such unwanted human flaws without professing them. Here, what is lacking is moral preparedness of the form: do what is right in accordance with the conscience and the good of the people.

h. There is not much relevant style in planning; there is little creativity and unappealing mental effort when excessive materialism defines the direction of production. People rush to create and create in a rush. But, then, the rush syndrome generates massive duplicity even though it can equally generate massive production; yet, quality grows at a pace much slower than cheapness.

i. The fruits of professionalism diminish when professionalism is tailored to bring about stiffened specialization. Here, innovation tends to be the dull repetition of stuff that may end up being shunned; so following some setbacks, the professional in question panics and is bound to function in a very aggressive fashion unacceptable even within the parameters of his/her profession.

j. The world stage is now proliferated with the concept and practice of quantity far more than quality. This shows that the triple terms, what, how and when, govern the process of production far more than the singular term, why. The because answer inferred from the why question is precisely the one that encourages social and economic planning so vital for arresting or avoiding chaos. One could also see the why question stimulating a call to analyze issues well before implementing or discarding them.

k. The problems about honesty and dishonesty strike at the heart of business in particular. In the present world, difficulties face honest people while dishonest people face difficulties. Honest people find themselves traumatized by the manipulative instincts and practices of others; dishonest people surmount their difficulties by applying gimmicks and mere strong-will talk to win. The honest person may say: I must win the trust of people by sticking to the truth; the dishonest person may say: I must win the trust of people by sticking to deception, which is the spirit of courage. The persistence and growth of acquisitiveness reinforces the principle of dishonesty, and honest people are at the losing end. Thus, there is a scarcity of virtue in a world that operates with the fuel of acquisitiveness.

l. Creative thinking has come to suffer from the dearth of abstract analysis, and the cure for this sickness may be found from a restructuring of the academic enterprise. The solution may be of the form: reduce the emphasis on tiresome details in narration and compensate for this shortfall with the lengthening of analysis that arises from imagination. Here, originality is likely to develop at a pace faster than was intended.

m. It is good for the logic of the past to teach the present. While the present goes through changes, in whichever form, the past presses its connections onto it, which is a natural thing. The past seems to say to the present: “let us connect our cultural forces, so that the character of growth and development does not get debased.” Thus, disorderliness is the outcome of a culture that servers this connection; and the dignity of the people, in terms of social, economic and political arrangements, sees a new quality that is all too fictitious. Without addressing this anomaly, there could be cultural tragedy, which may, in turn, dislodge the engines of growth and development.

n. Despair drives the consciousness and sentiments of a people who believe there is nothing proud to show except for a dying culture, a corroded social-economic framework, and a weakening individual and collective psyche that holds the breath of the society. Here, one must trace the causes of these disarrays and would realize that the ingredients of autochthony have been powerfully eroded by external forces. But why this erosion if the conscience readily suggests that the contrary is to be preferred? One needs to go back to the point that excessive human greed that go unsatisfied of an indigenous culture prompts a massive adventure into external territories. The culprits here would have rejected the dominating exercise of conscience in favour of a wandering passion.

o. The habit of redeeming consciousness through the breath of technology and technological products yields a new personality: the technical person. All too often, he/she is advanced in lifestyle, but his/her conscience tends not to be calm, so too his/her personality. If calmness could be seen, it may have been an invented one.

Commonsense Claims

By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

1. The appeal of developed societies is in the splendor of their science and technology, not in moral and social decorum. Social and moral decorum guard against excesses in the doing of things.

2. Nature gets enraged when its elements are raided to please humankind’s material cravings. One can see this anomaly in reckless production and consumption of goods. Here, production needs the service of nature in terms of resources; consumption needs the unfailing overindulgence of humans. Either way, humanity is losing its grip on the logic of moderation and the principles of social and economic planning.

3. In so far as the principles of morality, of social ethics are relegated while science and technology are constantly elevated, the pulses of the society function without the desired cultural prudence.

4. Two principles tend to give silent instructions to humans in their pursuit of hodgepodge or specified goals: attain intellectual excellence or attain the highest level of wealth. As both principles are extremes, it may be asked: which is better? The former may be a better option if it does not invade the conscience of others and manipulate the engines of growth and development to suit personal whim.

5. Ask yourself: how do you fulfill your defined goals when new goals enter into the cycle of your life as soon as previously defined goals are met? The infinitude of goals is proof of the ambiguity of the human character.

6. The nature of humans is given a new twist once a standard estimation of human nature is abandoned and replaced with that of the appetitive human. But modern appetitive humans usually prefer to remain overambitious in their bid to do or get what the conscience and passion dictate. This marks the ascent of an unsteady soul.

7. The mistake in the judgement of crass supporters of individualism can be seen in their missteps whenever they need to address the issue of moral and social order. They are caught on the ropes when they are made to understand – or see for themselves – that the individualism they espouse is particularly inconsistent with how to please nature and get egalitarianism strengthened. Time and again, we need the unbroken service of moral and social order to direct the tempo of economic progress.

8. The point that the wealthy should help to raise an economy that is drowning in the sea of inequity does not strike a chord to those who believe personal wealth ought to retain its immunity from public interference because such wealth comes from hard work. Their argument could be countered by stating that some people have worked so hard but have very little to show. Here, one must battle with the issue as to why hard work gets rewarded with punishment, so to speak. Those who hold the view that a person is responsible for his/her poverty despite his/her hard work do not recognize they are being mean-spirited. This kind of closed mentality, if it should capture the spirit of a civilization, eventually generates a culture of despair by supplanting a previous culture of hope.

9. The mystery in modern civilizations has been nurtured largely by the wonders of science and technology. Yet, such civilizations tend to yield a large portion of their vitality to the calculations of enviable machines, in that area of human life that insists: let machines and technical computations determine the mode of development! Thus, one can find terms such as “balance of trade”, “balance of payment”, “budget surplus”, “budget deficit”, and so on used to measure the value of human life. Then is applied the indices of money to buttress the results of computations. Computations fulfill the needs of generalities and may not be able to account for the rate of success or failure of, say, peasant farmers in the remotest parts of the society or how wealth is distributed – evenly or unevenly.

10. The Liberal may say: show me the changes in the structures of the society and I shall change ideas and ways of doing things accordingly. The Conservative may say: show me the changes in the structures of the society and I shall retain traditional ideas, values and the essential ways of doing things accordingly. The Conservative’s position embraces a tacit contradiction; for if there are structural changes, then the retention of the said things do not follow the principle of correspondence.

11. A mean-spirited man gets himself trapped in a narrow vision of a society. He thinks stinginess is a new version of virtue derived from an ignorance of a neighbour's plight. But what the mean-spirited man does not understand is that a society, by its definition and application, is born and bred from the concatenation of group activities and support systems.

12. The road to a great civilization ought to include the indispensable service of moral codes and the enforceable tenets of egalitarianism.

13. The overcrowding that is generated by the profusion of automobiles on streets is the work of blossoming technologies. We derive comfort, luxury from this marvel. The downside is the pollution from automobile fumes that continue to fight with nature and, thereby, erode the concatenation of the elements of nature. The outcome is the propagation of chemicals to humanity’s niches and the evolution of weird catastrophes. By working this way, nature hopes to win back the links in its elements as well as its original liveliness.

14. The great error of a modern civilization is to promote its insularity even as the civilization undertakes a massive role in international relations. The risk here is that a large class of the citizenry get misinformed or are trapped in some kind of wrong cognition when international relations goes the incorrect direction. Insularity, in any case, breeds needless patriotism and ignorance, and it tends to submit the conscience and willpower to the paradoxical claim that “might is right”.

15. Those who claim that there is no meaning to life may be right on one point: that it is just not feasible to define life in terms of the totality of its elements; but take a specific element of life, then narrate and analyze it. After that, it may be feasible to define life through some kind of a summary of the narration and analysis. This definition, as one can see, is not exhaustive but a narrow one.

The Ugliness and Beauty of a Modern Free Market

By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

A market that is free for all to tap into has been the hallmark of those who claim that individual freedom should not be restrained by authorities who govern. Such a market is widely called “a free market”, and its economic application is aptly styled a free-market economy. It is claimed that a free-market economy is available for everybody to perform assorted, unrestrained economic activities though it could also be a market for individuals to exercise their respective non-economic functions unless they could pose harm. The freedom of a person is held to be a basic element of personal progress; but the problem arises when one attempts to explain what freedom consists of. It may be stated from the foregoing that one is free if the urge to do what one wanted or pleases was not controlled by others or obstructed from happening. Often, this point does not work for all, especially when it comes to using freedom to achieve a goal either by the person in question or representative(s) of the person.

Entertain Mike who wants to be a doctor. He thinks – and rightly so – that he has the intellectual ability to enable him pursue his goal. But, then, he does not have the financial means to do so, nor do his representatives, namely his parents. He and his parents naturally end up deserting this goal. The multiple disquietudes that may befall Mike and his parents could frustrate their individual and collective determinations to aim at other viable goals. Here, the freedom of the person does not seem realistic unless further qualifications are made to the concept, so that it can include the case of the ability to actualize what one wills without the terrible constraints of finances and other structural barriers. Suppose one is born into, and trapped in, poverty, one faces an arduous task in trying to achieve significant goals despite one's untapped high intelligence; and this presupposes that another person born into wealth – or nearly so – has the easy task of succeeding in life from the perspective of, particularly, wealth. The prior points are not usually explicated by avowed proponents of the free market.

Followers of an unfettered free market arrangement do not address the issue of diverse human aptitudes and initiatives and how a representative government that they, nevertheless, support has to function within that market. They claim that a small-size government and allied structures functions best. They think the least possible interference of governments in individuals’ efforts to create and succeed is the best scheme. And they want government to have the slightest roles in the workings of institutions, bodies. These positions do little or nothing to enable people such as Mike, his parents, and so many other people in similar situations to achieve their defined goals. A man of wealth may have gambled his way to reach his present state; and a man who has had little or no impediments in his drive to attain wealth could claim he has worked hard to reach where he presently has, knowing not how illogical his claim is. There is another man whose success has come about from the mere fact that his relations have bequeathed a large sum of money to him, so his social-economic status has surged. Lastly, there is this man whose relatives are wealthy because they were just lucky to position themselves in life in a fashion that generated unexpected wealth from the family business. This last man was a child when the business had already matured. He has been pampered from childhood up to the present; and his present position - in terms of wealth and unproblematic access to social goods – has not been his own making but delivered to him on a silver platter by his wealthy parents. Yet, he brags around that he has worked so hard to reach his present position and that those who are not like him just prefer not to work hard but expect his wealth to be redistributed by way of a progressive tax system, which he would oppose to the hilt. He fumes when he sees poor people. He considers them to be lazy and social undesirables.

In general, these kinds of privileged people tend to believe – and support the view – that a government's intrusion into personal lives insults personal freedom and could threaten the free market. But it seems to me that their respective arguments have wide gaps since they do not realize that personal wealth, in the first place, requires all kinds of support from others to help in creating it. For instance, the activities of individuals in the free market are interdependent. For Mr. Q and Mrs. Y to succeed in this market, they have to sell their products, whether in the form of services or commodities, to others; others simply have to contribute or participate in Q's or Y's respective successes. In fact, Q and Y would fail if they choose to isolate themselves or keep to themselves. If the impetus to undertake wealth-generating activities is unavailable because one was initially not in a fortunate or favourable position to access the market, then the dream of being successful could get killed.

In the nature of modern societies, people are fond of judging the course of development from the perspective of budget surpluses. Budget surpluses show, according to the popular view, that there is the prudent use of money and the control of human excesses. It would be unwise, so it may be claimed, for government and other stakeholders to put in place programs to enable all individuals in the position of Mike to achieve their set goals. Such government doings wastes money, dries up created surpluses and is proof of misguided government policies and programs, says strong lovers of the free market system They are wrong! An economic system that is not cautiously guided by the hand of government breeds moral and social emptiness that is hard to redress. But a mean-spirited man brought up to hold the inexorable view that life is successful due to one's personal strivings does not understand the purpose of government. His views, if applied, leads to a kind of social-economic arrangement that reinforces the deadly existence of classes.

So proponents of deregulation, of an unfettered free market, tend to dabble in abstractions. Ask them: should there be a representative government? Their answer would be in the affirmative. But ask further what the precise job of government has to be, and no encouraging answer would be forthcoming. In principle, governments are the supreme parents in a civil society. Disenable a government, then individual selfishness would reach a mindless level; the powerless could be crushed by those who wield power, and the limbs off civility would eventually be sawed off. A government is there to guide and promote moral, social and economic decency. One of its major purposes is to give an egalitarian character to the society, so that the society does not degenerate into a dangerously class society. Those who espouse the least possible government and governmental guidance in individualistic human affairs want to seize the fruits of an organic society for themselves in order to eventually render the society free for all to exploit. Thus, the central issue of our time revolves around the question of how to accommodate selfish personal lifestyles with the unanimous consensus that the society ought to be free from moral, social and economic inequities. To attain this goal, the right economic and social principles have to be put in place. But moral and social egalitarianism, which are keys for the suppression and, perhaps, elimination of economic classes, do not arise from the least possible guidance of government in the free operation of market forces.

A representative government fulfils its rightful duties and responsibilities when it cares to oversee and organize personal initiatives, business affairs and practical intelligence. Even with unrestrained practical intelligence, it has the tendency of getting abused whenever it is used to manipulate and seize the dominant elements of market forces for personal – not collective - gains. Cooperativeness together with governmental supervision and management is far more consistent with a free market than anything to the contrary. If this could mean socialism or a species of socialism, so be it!