Is Centralisation of Power Inevitable?

Keeping citizens physically ill and badly educated, clouding their mind with religious dogmas is one way to centralise political power.  The other one is terror. This formula serves dictatorships in the Middle East and around the world, and seems to be successfully applied in the so-called World’s ‘greatest democracy’, the USA.

Lack of access to education and health care isolates groups of the population from the democratic process, and propels others into the hands of rich evangelists, preaching the “wealth Gospel”. Terror justifies total surveillance and giving up of personal independence. These components combined and promoted through the media are a weapon for centralising political and economic power in the USA.

But most alarmingly, reduced critical judgement and as a result – the plane stupidity and ignorance of the average US American has spurred religious fundamentalism to the point, when science and objective view of reality, a concept of fairness and justice, cannot be evaluated. Those caught by it, are unable to resist. Religion has always been a profitable business, because it cleverly exploits people’s weakness: the need to belong and the need to make sense.

The USA state wants to take control of the citizens, but not to cover their basic needs. It wants to surveil, but not give access, it wants to transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy and their companies, but does not want to reduce the gap between wealthy elite and the poor, it does not want to even provide for basic needs of large parts of the US society. Power is not given, it is taken. In this case it is transferred bit by bit from the weak to the smart.

Naturally in a world as ours, weak minds (and their money) will be drawn and controlled by strong minds. A strong mind is built in education and intellectual independence. Strong will is hardened in setting your own goals, searching for your own knowledge and making these goals happen. The child’s strong will is nurtured by the parent’s love. Some say it is genetical.

The fundamental problems and ‘systemic failures’ of US and other democracies is the inability to stop the accumulation of power, the sneaking concentration of wealth, the inequal access to a meaningful life. Is this accumulation inevitable?

Is Knowledge Vulnerable?

What we used to take for granted, namely that science can deliver clear cut and rational answers, is too constraining to be called knowledge.

Knowledge is about the perception, and perception – about how things appear to the one observing them. Things do not exist isolated from the observer, but the observer takes active part in shaping them. Thus, how can we know objectively, if we are part of the process creating that knowledge?

We cannot.

During the course of our history there have been many other ways of knowing – magic, mythology, arts (in the Greek sense of astronomy, mathematics, story telling, architecture), religion etc. Sometimes the limiting of the Western mind is done precisely through the methods and tools meant to free us: through the dissecting, structuring and rationalising. This blocks the flow of natural creativity. This creativity is channeled through what science thinks possible.

Knowledge can fall apart at any point of the extraction process. It is vulnerable.

Here is an analysis I wrote on the vulnerability of knowledge. Vulnerability of Knowledge

Enjoy!

How to make public policy work – my PhD thesis

How do we think about policy making?

What is exciting about policy is that it provides with a leverage – people, capital, new laws and rules, media attention can be focused towards a goal, to change the way people live and create new possibilities. How this happens: policy instruments – for example programs for investment in research, providing new grants for students, making new exchange arrangements, scientific collaboration etc. – are capable of making people spend their time differently (on new projects, labs, universities, together with others they would not have been able to work with otherwise), of changing the way they move in space (travelling on exchange, conferences, workshops, discussions, project meetings) and create relationships.  This means that policy is about creating the time-space framework of how people spend their time and use their creative energy. And this is a process rather than a final state.

But for decades, fragmentation has been seen as the main problem of European policy making and the main goal has been to integrate: countries, people, universities, research laboratories, etc. This is the goal of the 7th Framework Programme (FP). Fragmentation is the worst enemy, because it is the cause for declining European competitiveness. Therefore the main instruments the Commission is using are about putting people together and pouring a lot of money into their projects. Unfortunately, there is no way to control how and when results are delivered. Briefly: the problem is to measure the success of these instruments in concrete and direct results.

I suggest a different way of thinking: That fragmentation is useful, because people use it to put the pieces together to achieve their goal. Therefore, the focus on creating policy instruments should be on the process how people put the pieces together rather than combating the final states of fragmentation or integration. Going for the final state, policies are bound to fail, because the simple observation is that people or their organisations use fragments simultaneously to achieve their goals. Thus, fragmentation is useful.

Instead of seeing fragmentation and integration as mutually exclusive states, policy makers should focus on how to help people mobilise the pieces more productively in the direction of their own goal.

This way of thinking is about flow: how people go about their daily activities to achieve their goal in a world that is seamlessly interconnected. Therefore, policy making is about providing access: to knowledge, capital, laboratories, scientists, media attention, etc. An example: a scientist knows that by participating in a European project he will access knowledge even in competitor’s research lab, capital to pursue his own research, hire new phd’s and publish. Policy makers would then create a neutral space, where participants in the scientific project will be open to share knowledge. In this knowledge commons, tools from science, policy and business will be used to leverage the tacit knowledge in individuals, distant and inaccessible in a fragmented world.

Thinking of the process of mobilising the pieces can actually make policy work in a knowledge-based society.

Innovation policy – how to make it work