Particularly about Politics

Perhaps you think it is unnecessary, or even unhealthy, to learn about political truth.

How do you usually try to educate yourself about pleasantness and unpleasantness?

How carefully do you distinguish between philanthropic intentions, business intentions, political intentions and other intentions?  

It is always wise to think about important matters carefully, and accurately, before entering important discussions on those matters.

That is a basic statement of fact for any good philanthropist, and any good investor, to acknowledge.

There is nothing greedy about investing in suitably pleasant certainties in philanthropic ways.

Politics, like religion and philosophy, reflects claims about certainty and uncertainty, pleasantness and unpleasantness, and the necessary and unnecessary.

Perhaps you regard politics, religion and philosophy as unnecessary.

But where do you locate wisdom, particularly about politics?

Good manners form the basis of mutually beneficial pleasantness, of course.

Yet mutually compatible assessments of manners are dependent upon other mutually compatible cultural expectations.

Both compatibility and incompatibility are political matters.  They may also be economic matters and artistic matters and technological matters.

What is your acquaintance with the psychology of compatibility and incompatibility?

With whom have you experienced mutually beneficial pleasantness this year, and in previous years, and how, and why?

How have you experienced intrusiveness and other forms of impertinence this year, and in previous years, and how have you responded to such unpleasantness? 

How are you providing pleasant continuity if not through well-informed kindness?

While ambiguity often adds interest within the arts, it adds confusion to politics and deception to economics. 

How do you attempt to avoid political and economic ambiguities?

When people are incompatible with one another, much more effort is required when seeking to achieve mutual understanding, suitable societal outcomes and appropriate international goals.

As most people have more than enough unpleasantness in their lives, and in their imaginations, they therefore have all the information they require in order to contrast pleasantness with unpleasantness.

They do not require more exposure to unpleasantness.  That would most likely increase their suffering and powerlessness.  They mainly require exposure to the truth about possible future pleasantness.

Truthful possibilities are the only source of real hope.

Perhaps you have highly advanced skills in the development and maintenance of pleasant online and/or physical environments.

If so, how do you define the basis of that pleasantness?

Trustworthiness combines knowledge, reasonableness, honesty and certainty.    

Perhaps you really have no interest in investing time in suitable continuity, adequate reasonableness, honesty, freedom, security and certainty. 

Perhaps you are unsure of who you happen to be in terms of community and goodness and wonderful possibilities and lovely opportunities.

Perhaps you have never had a sense of belonging. 

Perhaps you are excessively wealthy.

Perhaps you are excessively poor.

Perhaps you have received advantages through ill-gotten gains, without becoming excessively wealthy as a consequence.

Perhaps you have attained considerable wealth without doing anything unethical, and possibly even without doing much at all.

Perhaps you treat friendships as projects.

Perhaps you treat people as objects.

Perhaps you are a hypocritical recluse rather than a conscientious reformer or moderately enthusiastic revolutionary.

The excessively wealthy tend to be arrogant, as do people pretending to be wealthy.

The excessively poor tend to be excessively ignorant.

Informing people about the truth, particularly about politics, is an important responsibility. 

Perhaps you are currently feeling loveless and friendless and frightened and possibly even homeless. 

If so, how are you using your experiences of misfortune to educate people about politics?

Perhaps you are feeling loved and safe and you have a good home and good friends.

If so, how are you using that good fortune for good in the world?

Perhaps you have mainly devoted your attention to the history and theory of good politics rather than the future and practice of good politics. 

Perhaps you enjoy the camaraderie of unenlightened political activity more than the possibility of improving the compatibility between culture and nature.

Perhaps you are not really interested in experiencing further freedom, additional security and certain certainty.

All truly good investments provide those outcomes.

When have you noticed that behaving seemingly unreasonably can be perfectly reasonable in particularly difficult circumstances?

Suffering prevents suitable independence, particularly independence of thought.  It prevents peace in the world.  It destroys the delights of adequately ethical compatibility.  It does so by eroding the mental health upon which that compatibility so often depends.

How are you attempting to prevent suffering, for yourself, other people, and other species?

How do you distinguish between your problems, other people's problems, community problems and societal problems?

How do you distinguish between your needs, other people's needs, community needs, societal needs and global needs?

It is quite easy for purported reformers to find particular faults in a political system.  It is usually much more difficult to encourage the correction of those faults.

How do you currently distinguish between political philanthropy, philanthropic politics and other practices relating to politics and/or philanthropy?

Political debates are usually expressions of conflict, not consideration.

Good politics is an intellectual experience.  That does not mean it is an elitist one. 

What is political competence, and how do you know?

The members of most political parties are rarely adequately reasonable.  They are enthusiasts.

The donors to political parties are rarely properly charitable.  They are vested interests.

The people who foist their enthusiasms and other interests onto other people are exceedingly tedious and extraordinarily rude.

Revolutionaries are, by definition, enthusiasts.

Unethical political parties, like unethical charities, rarely act primarily as providers of anything of public benefit.  Like unethical businesses, they act primarily to acquire money.

Most existing political parties in the world, and authoritarian governments and other self-serving groups, are mostly involved in marketing and celebrating themselves, as are most "charities".  They are so blatantly cruel and self-serving that no real good arises from them at all, no matter how much they spend on "public relations" and "advocacy".

Most charities offer little more than platitudes to everyone except the people with highly regarded reputations and/or prestigious careers associated with those organisations.  They even abusively persuade the poor and the soon-to-be-poor to provide "donations" of time and/or money.

Why does political activity so rarely provide comfort or pleasure or certainty or any sort of improvement in relation to distressing experiences?

How do you tell whether political practices are improving or not?

How do you tell when political practices are worse than before?

Political philanthropy is not about the acquisitions of political power.  It is about contributing to the improvement of politics, particularly through the provision of suitable education, hence this blog.

How do you research political philanthropy and how best to supply it?

All reasonable research processes are meant to provide information with which to solve problems.  The first step, of course, is to identify solvable problems and separate them, intellectually, from unsolvable ones.

Do you have an acquaintance with politicians of any sort? 

Have you noticed problems associated with the personalities of persons attracted to political careers, and other careers, for which they are temperamentally unsuited?

People unsuited for positions of responsibility tend to transform the situations for their own benefit rather than the greater good.  They usually gain positions of responsibility through deceptive means and then attract like-minded persons to join them and support them.  Yet the supporters are usually sycophants, selfishly seeking opportunities for themselves.

Perhaps you are well acquainted with political racketeering.  You may even be acquainted with other forms of racketeering.

Election campaigns have long been rackets for unscrupulous politicians and their financial backers.  The main aim has been to gain access to public money, and power over legislation, so that conflicts of interest can continue unhindered.

There is obviously nothing reasonable in racketeering or any other greedy practice, even though the practitioners often claim otherwise, particularly after gaining political and/or corporate power rather than prison sentences.

There is a considerable difference between investing time in the initiation of  improvements to political practices, which can often be futile, and investing time in political practices when they already happen to be improving. 

How do you attempt to ensure your apparent investments are unlikely to be futile?

How do you educate the public about political futility and political possibilities?   

How, if at all, are you investing in a comfortably pleasurable feeling of certainty, and why, and with what evidence?

Political philanthropy can only be truly understood by practicing it.

What value are emotions when they can so easily be changed through music and other experiences of art, and through experiences of politics and economics?    

How do you usually prefer to retreat from political problems, and why, and for how long, and where do you prefer to go?

 

How do you usually prefer to retreat from economic problems, and why, and for how long, and where do you prefer to go?  

 

How do you usually prefer to retreat from noise, and why, and for how long, and where do you prefer to go? 

Perhaps you regard this indirect questioning process as an expression of political philanthropy.

How well do you know yourself at present, and where is your proof?

How well are you at present, and how do you know?

How can you prove that your authenticity and philanthropy are adequately associated with peace?

How do you ascertain certainty if not through the acquisition of evidence? 

How do you ascertain necessity? 

Do you always use social media philanthropically?

Do you always communicate philanthropically?

There is much hypocrisy in the minds of people with considerable and possibly excessive power and/or money, as any quality analysis of events will reveal.

 

Excessively wealthy people are always hypocrites.  They fail to understand the moral purpose of surplus wealth. 

If you have surplus wealth, how have you defined its moral purpose?

 

If you have adequate wealth, how do you use it for good in the world?

If you are inadequately wealthy, how do you know that to be true?

All enlightened philanthropy helps people to discover ways to experience suitable independence, and suitable interdependence. 

What is your current understanding of the relationship between compatibility and philanthropy?  

What do you know about political philanthropy in relation to investments?

How do you define a philanthropic investment?

How philanthropically do you share your knowledge and experience?

Perhaps you would like to provide a demonstration of your philanthropy here.

What is political philanthropy, from your point of view?

Only long-term practitioners of political philanthropy have the knowledge with which to define the practice with adequate accuracy.

How do you know when your own initiatives are compatible with your values, interests and available time?  

How do you know you have not been working too hard or too unreasonably in other ways?

How do you know whether anyone's politeness is a genuine expression of kindness or not?

What do you know about the inhabitants of various cultures?

Which cultures do you inhabit?

Are those cultures compatible? 

How do you usually attempt to critique yourself and your own opinions, and for what reasons, and how often?

How much time do you usually devote to answering important questions about yourself and your opinions, and for whose benefit?

How do you know when a cultural system is harmful rather than harmless? 

What do you do with that knowledge?

Are you sure you know the difference between a public mission, a community mission and a personal mission? 

Do you usually associate your talents with your creativity or your skills or your financial assets?   

When people possess no wealth, unscrupulous persons expect them to comply with unethical demands out of desperation.

But what do scrupulous persons do?

When people possess wealth, unscrupulous persons seek to take it from them.

But what do good people do?

How have you made decisions in order to gain money or gain support or gain nothing at all or possibly even to cause harm or create goodness in the world? 

How do your doubts affect your decisions?

How do you decide whether to invest in new activities, new opportunities, new places, new communities and/or apparently improved ideas?

The experience of magnificent maturity involves a deepening understanding of both the self and society.  It ensures decisions are made on the basis of good evidence, not mere opinion or the desire to please people or the desire to harm people.

How do you know when attempts at simplification are likely to cause more problems than they will solve?  

How do you know when additional complexity is the only reasonable approach to addressing a problem?

What do you know about elegance in relation to necessity?

What do you know about egalitarianism in relation to necessity?

How do you usually think about elegant egalitarianism in relation to privileges, and in relation to serendipity?

If you regard civility as an important contribution to improving political practices, how do you express it? 

If you ever associate the ethereal with a beautifully artistic approach to the digital, and the political, how is that experience most likely to be expressed?    

There is nothing lazy about experiencing, and participating in, an intelligently kind, evidence-based culture.

Nor is there any acceptable excuse when claiming to be too busy to assess evidence whenever necessary.

Perhaps you do not know how to define the ethereal in terms of the real, the physical, the psychological, the sensible, the eternal, the mathematical or the sustainable. 

How have you sought to gain enlightenment over the past twelve years or so, and where? 

How often have you thought of the past as a narrative?

How often have you thought about the future as a narrative?

The people in current governments, like past governments, are incompatible with the requirements of good governance.

It is only possible to invest wisely in societies with good governments. 

There is nowhere in the world with a good government. Nor has a good government ever existed anywhere, in fact.

For ethical reasons, tampering with the past should be avoided.  

For similar reasons, tampering with the present and future should be encouraged, preferably through the philanthropy of well-informed kindness. 

How clearly do you distinguish between false narratives and authentic ones?

It is only possible to invest wisely in organisations with good governance.

What do you know for certain about good governance, and how do you know it?

How far back in time do your historical comparisons usually go, and for what reasons? 

Recorded histories tend to destroy imaginative links with the oral cultures from which original ideas arose.

Do you gain considerable pleasure through the exploration of history and/or art? 

Do you gain considerable pleasure through the exploration of science and/or biographies? 

It is always important to thinking carefully about whether a distortion of fact is self-evident or deceptive.

People with inadequate cognitive abilities and/or insufficient moral maturity, regardless of age, often mistake fiction for fact and make disastrous mistakes as a consequence.  That is why they cannot be trusted.  They do not have real leadership abilities.

When attempting to express your cultural leadership in the enlightened best interests of everyone, how do you ensure the people with whom you associate are not excessively gullible or lonely or sleazy or arrogant or greedy?

Political philanthropy is a form of cultural leadership.  It is not a form of political leadership.

How do you tell the difference between cultural leadership and political leadership? 

You may already be aware that all real leaders are intelligently frugal.  Any other sort of person in a leadership position is a charlatan and therefore a trickster and thief.

You may or may not be aware that some people distort reputations for their own purposes.

How can you prove you are not such a person?

As you may know, trickle down economics does not work.  It is merely a trick. 

What is your acquaintance with political economy and how do you compare it with your knowledge of political science, political philosophy and political philanthropy?

Authentic intellectuals have a legitimate leadership role in the development and implementation of quality public policies.  Charlatans and bullies do not. 

Only authentic intellectuals are genuinely capable of contributing appropriately to the expression of political philanthropy.

If you are not an authentic intellectual, you are likely to behave inconsistently across time, from one situation to another, attempting to adapt to whatever circumstances arise, rather than upon the basis of firmly enlightened moral principles.

Authentic intellectuals are always careful about the ways in which they communicate, and what they communicate, and why they do so, and for whose benefit. 

Are you sure you are adequately competent as a researcher in relation to justice and injustice?

 

If so, how do you ascertain risk?

How much money do you personally spend on research and development each day, and for what reasons?

How would you describe your sense of duty in relation to the truth?

What does your political philanthropy seek to achieve, and how, and where, and why, and with whom?

How do you usually ascertain quality in various contexts?  

What have you discovered about quality political satire as philanthropy?

Like quality political satire, you may have discovered another powerful tool for good in the world.

Maintaining adequate privacy will obviously be of paramount, ongoing importance to you as a political philanthropist: from your own point of view and from the point of view of other people, at least if you are an enlightened being.

Maintaining adequate self-respect and interpersonal respect in other ways will also be important to you.

The difference between enlightened philanthropy and ordinary charity is quite simple.

Enlightened philanthropy does not involve making requests for money and other resources in exchange for alleviating guilt.  It involves creativity and frugality instead of money and it is not associated with guilt or any other negative emotions at all.

As a political philanthropist, you are likely to express enlightened benevolence through appropriately humane principles, policies and practices. 

How, if at all, do you already practice simple living through intelligent frugality and how are you attempting to improve your knowledge of the subject?

How consistently, if at all, do you practice intelligent frugality?

Perhaps you do not associate the encouragement of simple living and intelligent frugality with politics and/or philanthropy at all.

Authentic intellectuals are devoted to establishing and implementing anti-establishmentarian necessities for the greater good.

Anti-establishmentarian necessities are mostly associated with voluntary practices.  They are never associated with coerced ones and they are rarely properly paid pursuits, even when practiced through the arts.

Political philanthropy is an anti-establishmentarian necessity.

It is not possible to converse satisfactorily with people when they misinterpret intentions, fail to listen attentively to a point of view and seem unable to reflect reasonably on words, including their own.

Thoughtful discussions improve health.  They do not erode it.   

Have you thought much about the meaning of the word 'home' recently?

Do you usually associate compatibility with privileges?  

Do you usually associate incompatibility with an imbalance in cultural capital, social capital and/or financial capital?

Conflict is so much easier to prevent and overcome when people are compatible with one another.  That in itself makes pleasantly simple living possible.  

Without peace, no good investment is possible.  Only unethical investments are possible in such circumstances.

But different persons and different communities define peace and goodness differently.  Being in the wrong community, and other incompatible situations, can therefore cause a great deal of distress, and possibly even civil unrest and military conflict.   

Authentic intellectuals know there is a considerable difference between essential disobedience and aggressive unrest. 

What do you know about essential disobedience, particularly in political situations?