The financial crisis was actually only one of three social earthquakes that shook the world simultaneously in 2008. Between January and June of that year, as the US sub-prime mortgage crisis was reaching its climax, world energy prices soared— the international price of light crude oil rose more than 60 percent to over $140 a barrel— and the price of grain worldwide shot upwards too, triggering food riots and violence in dozens of poor countries. Few commentators or analysts have noted the extraordinary synchronicity of these three crises; but they were intimately related to each other.
So what is the connection between these events?
[C]ascading failure is an example of contagion. More connectivity enables change in one element to more easily cause change in another, so it’s easier for the pathogen [actual or figurative] to jump between elements; and greater uniformity among the elements makes the pathogen’s effects more consistently harmful.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas. Commanding Hope (p. 202). Knopf Canada. Kindle Edition.
Our e-mail messages are stripped of nuance and texture and reduced to Morse-like staccatos of data; we drop punctuation, capitalization, and proper spelling, and we adopt an impoverished symbolism of emoticons.
Values are meaningless without stories to bring them to life and engage us on a personal level.
An important characteristic of cooperation is that while the benefits are typically shared among all, such public goods are costly. For example, maintaining internal peace and order, something that any decent society must do, requires a lot of work.
“Mindfulness means being present to whatever is happening here and now - when mindfulness is strong, there is no room left in the mind for wanting something else. With less liking and disliking of what arises, there is less pushing and pulling on the world, less defining of the threshold between self and other, resulting in a reduced construction of self. As the influence of self diminishes, suffering diminishes in proportion.”
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