A true democracy has no government. It is government

To put it radically, a true democracy has no place for politicians. People rule the country. 

Anything that brings this closer to reality, I welcome.

A true democracy structurally undermines leadership and generates management tools and knowledge needed to arrive at best compromise decisions, to be enacted by employees.

A true democracy structurally generates broad and free sources of information, and human capacities to aquire information and turns knowledge into compromise decisions.

What we want comes closer if we formulate it clearly.

How to explain and redress the matreatment of women?

If a society wants to reduce the maltreatment of women by men, it may look at how its child rearing turns the sons into cocky machos, male chauvinists, frontier cowboys, eternal Casanovas or habitual rapists.

This approach does not blame, it explains. It does not see mothers or fathers as causes, it sees kinship systems as causes. In that way it can be tremendously helpful. But it is not for sissies.

This does not mean anyone is to be blamed. It means we may look for an explanation. It does not mean to see women as the cause, it means to see kinship systems as the cause. In that way it is tremendously helpful. But it is not for sissies.

If mothers, in the emotional or physical absence of their husbands, have unhappy marriages, they may direct their love and admiration to their newborn sons. The baby boy may feel like a god who enjoys all admiration and servitude from women and takes it for granted.

But he may also feel unshielded against the overwhelming presence of his mother and builds up fear about her and other women. That fear can turn into rage against her and other women in later years. There you have the wide-scale maltreatment of women.

Once married, the man may try to stay away from an intimate relationship with his wife, and the causational cycle starts again.

Many societies show such a pattern, be with variations. Think of the matrifocal family in the Caribbean, soldiers or fishermen and their left alone families or widows, and the proverbial American cowboy leaving the woman he rescued for a horse ride to next adventure. Or consider symbols such as the both loving and murderous goddess Kali in India and the Madonna-whore complex in southern Europe.

So what to do? Zee that maltreating men live in fear. Disrespecting men cannot respect themselves, cannot love themselves. See and feel the kinship system as the repeating source of their fear or lack of self-respect and self-love. Improve their upbringing by breaking the vicious cycle. It’s up to the fathers and the mothers to change the future.

The call for strong leaders and looking behind screens: child rearing shapes politics

As long as parents and teachers install more structure, obedience and fear in children than required, instead of encouraging independent thinking and curiosity, the world will be populated by fearful followers.

Or the future adults will reverse the learned obedience and copy their bossy parents and teachers to, in turn, become restrictive bosses. The risky call for strong leaders and the shouts of would-be leaders will echo around at the globe.

But less noticable is the effect of discouraging independent thinking and curiosity in children that makes them reluctant to look behind the screens and under the surface. They will not see that successions of dictators or democratic elections do not change the power system.

Presidents of Egypt, Russia and Pakistan are rarely better than their predecessors. The Clintons and Donald Trump belong to the same elite who enrich themselves at the cost of the common citizens who mostly remain silent while obediently go on voting for one or the other member of the elite.

Trump a blessing, Clinton a curse

The emergence of Donald Trump is a blessing, because he is busy ruining the Republican Party and bringing the poverty, discontent and fear among masses of people to the fore.

The emergence of Hillary Clinton is a curse, because she looks good compared to Trump while she herself and many democrats are part of the power system that creates the poverty, discontent and fear among masses of people as revealed by Trump.

Olive oil, stomachs and Black Pete

When the Dutch went on holidays in southern Europe for the first time, in the 1950s and 1960s, many complained about the food prepared with olive oil. They really got stomach problems.

Nowadays we don’t hear of this massive complaint anymore. In fact, olive oil is used in many kitchens and sold in every common supermarket in the Netherlands.

Did the Dutch stomachs adjust to olive oil or did the Dutch lose their fear for something new and are their stomachs no longer affected by that fear?

The Dutch resistance against letting go of Pete’s blackness sometimes reminds me of the Dutch reaction against olive oil and the later incorporation of it.

Black Pete in the wide world

We Dutch have a lot of racism. A number of studies are showing this.

However, in that sense we are not an exception. The surprise is that Dutch racism runs counter with our name of aiming at equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy. This idea seems to be false.

Equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy are reserved for the original Dutch population. If newcomers do not assimilate into that Dutch culture they run the risk of getting socially excluded or seen as inferior. This is the paradox of Dutch culture.

In contrast to tendencies of exclusion and stigmatization, official policies were to ignore cultural differences and hope for foreigners to smoothly assimilate into the Dutch culture. But this assimilation did not work out fast and smooth and with the population becoming vocal, racism exposed itself more publicly.

Along with this change in Holland, there is a worldwide reaction against global integration, disregarding its material and immaterial benefits. The explanation may be that the reassuring sense of national identity gets undermined. Moreover, international affairs grow both beyond our understanding and beyond the control of national governments.

This creates all over the planet a rising fear. It is this fear that spurs nationalism and racism that, in Holland, disregard the culture of equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy.

And, in the next step, it spurs reactions against nationalism and racism. That is why radical social currents in favor and against the blackness of Black Pete are fiercely battling now.

Black Pete in the wide world

We Dutch have a lot of racism. A number of studies are showing this.

However, in that sense we are not an exception. The surprise is that Dutch racism runs counter with our name of aiming at equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy. This idea seems to be false.

Equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy are reserved for the original Dutch population. If newcomers do not assimilate into that Dutch culture they run the risk of getting socially excluded or seen as inferior. This is the paradox of Dutch culture.

In contrast to tendencies of exclusion and stigmatization, official policies were to ignore cultural differences and hope for foreigners to smoothly assimilate into the Dutch culture. But this assimilation did not work out fast and smooth and with the population becoming vocal, racism exposed itself more publicly.

Along with this change in Holland, there is a worldwide reaction against global integration, disregarding its material and immaterial benefits. The explanation may be that the reassuring sense of national identity gets undermined. Moreover, international affairs grow both beyond our understanding and beyond the control of national governments.

This creates all over the planet a rising fear. It is this fear that spurs nationalism and racism that, in Holland, disregard the culture of equality, freedom, tolerance and democracy.

And, in the next step, it spurs reactions against nationalism and racism. That is why radical social currents in favor and against the blackness of Black Pete are fiercely battling now.

Pain as fatherly love

Peter van der Werff: Pain as fatherly love: When the pain is stored In your unconscious Or in your body And becomes too much Your mind will deny And your body faints...

Pain as fatherly love

Peter van der Werff: Pain as fatherly love: When the pain is stored In your unconscious Or in your body And becomes too much Your mind will deny And your body faints...

Pain as fatherly love

When the pain is stored

In your unconscious

Or in your body

And becomes too much

Your mind will deny

And your body faints

The pain protects you

From more you can take

Like a kind father

Leading you outwards

But protecting you

From too much hardship

Embracing your fear

While wiping your tears

Preparing next step

Deforestation, stars and straight lines

Peter van der Werff: Deforestation, stars and straight lines: Peter van der Werff: Deforestation, stars and straight lines : It’s not easy to find straight lines in wild nature. If we see straight l...

Deforestation, stars and straight lines

Peter van der Werff: Deforestation, stars and straight lines: It’s not easy to find straight lines in wild nature. If we see straight lines they may be added to wild nature by humans. They do so, a...

Deforestation, stars and straight lines

It’s not easy to find straight lines in wild nature.

If we see straight lines they may be added to wild nature by humans. They do so, as is commonly thought,  since they started with agriculture and made irrigation canals, stone houses and storage buildings about 14,000 years ago.

But before they added their stone constructions with straight lines, to provide for more food and shelter, they started to make, it seems, stone buildings out of spiritual motivations.

Instead of just experiencing spirits or energies in natural objects such as trees, mountains, rivers, they built a temple on top of a hill, perhaps to get closer to spirits they felt in the moon, the sun and stars. This shift may be related to widespread deforestation that occurred in West Asia at the time and made the sky more visible during the days and nights.

The oldest human construction found so far shows little proof that people had agriculture or stone houses to live in. At the pillars they did not carve out wheat plants or farmer tools but wild animals that they encountered in the open landscape.

Likely, these humans were gathering and hunting in the local area, while building a sanctuary on the hill to express their felt connection the now everywhere visible stars high up in the air.

Their place is in present-day Turkey and called Göbekli Tepe.

See proportions and fear cars that are going to kill 3,000 people

Today I mourn for the 3,000 people who are going to be killed by cars within 24 hours.

They remain uninteresting for sensationalist media and opportunistic politicians who warn for bombs and guns.

And they remain unnoticed by the wider public who led themselves be guided by media and politicians and go on fearing bombs and guns.

But not bombs and guns are mass killers. Cars are mass killers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOd_fw6qWDY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVl-6-A9ZO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQveo1tpD8

Save the planet? See proportions and causations

If we want to preserve the planet for humanity, we first need to understand the proportions of forces involved and the cause-and-effect chains between those forces.
The number of children per family decreases when women get more literate. We see that while in the world the number of literate women increases, the growth of population decreases.
But along with a growing level of education there is a growing level of consumption, economic growth being accelerated by literacy.
Now, because in the world, consumption growth is three times faster than population growth, consumption growth is three times more dangerous than population growth for the preservation of the planet.
Although the western economy puts an extremely high pressure on the physical environment, quite fortunately its growth is slowing down to 0-2 %. This stability may not only exists because of the current financial and economic crisis, but remain as a structural phenomenon.
But the reduction of western production and consumption is most important if we want to avoid the depletion and pollution of the planet before it has reached a point of no return.
At the same time economic growth in Asian countries is high, up to 5-6% even. If there is a slowing down of this growth rate it may not be structural but more part of the wave movement of capitalism and return to 5-6% again.
The main question to answer here is about a timely decrease of this economic growth before the depletion and pollution of the planet has reached a point of no return.
Meanwhile, nearly one billion poor people in Asia, Africa and Latin America are eagerly trying to join the growing economies in their countries.
Here the main question is about a timely start of consumption growth and a following timely stabilizing of consumtion among those near billion poor millions.
Environmentally friendly technologies (EFTs) have their positive contributions. New cars, for instance, use less energy and exhaust less polluting gasses. But the number of cars grows fast, by far undoing the benefit of greener car technology.

EFTs reduce but do not prevent the negative effects of economic growth on the physical environment. For decades we see a steady increase of global warming, depletion of fossil fuels, groundwater, ocean fish stock and forest cover, and pollution of air, water, soil and food.

Nepalese girls on their way to school

Expanding energy supply in Africa

    Sao Paulo: the poor on their way to prosperity

A call for proportions, perspective and balance

At the day loud headlines and breaking news report that terrorists perhaps killed 10 people in Germany, 10 people in Germany died in the traffic and 1,000 from diseases.

Where are the headlines that daily report on those one hundred times more often occurring tragedies, every day, all year round?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for fear and chaos that terrorists are eager to spread while cheering the disproportionately large media coverage that generate more fear and chaos?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for the politicians and secret services eager to exploit our emotions in order to further reinforce their control over us?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for oil companies in areas those governments conquer in their artificially created wars?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for the corporations selling aircraft, shotguns, listening devices and other equipment to governments that they bribe into warfare in the name of fighting terrorism?

Where are the headlines to daily help us keep perspective, see proportions and hold balanced opinions?

Ominous news, worldwide improvements

Disregarding ominous feelings created by regular media, a number of worldwide improvements occur:

• In Europe homicide rates have dramatically decreased over the last millennium.
• In the USA the number of casualties from gun violence is declining over the last twenty years.
• People live much longer worldwide than they did two decades ago, as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen.
• The number of people living below the poverty line declined from nearly 2 billion in 1990 and to less than 1 billion in 2012.
• Casualties from natural disasters declined from an average of 100,000 to 20,000 per year.
• Casualties from warfare are spectacularly declining since 1945.
• Literacy rates all over the world are increasing steadily.
• The number of mobile phone users has gone up to 4.6 billion.

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why/
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
http://www.healthdata.org/news-release/life-expectancy-increases-globally-death-toll-falls-major-diseases
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/07/natural-disaster-losses-declined-in-2014.html
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-highest-literacy-rates-in-the-world.html
http://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/

Outer jungle, inner balance: The challenge of postmodernity

Yes, our jobs are less certain than in the past. Messages about climate change, shortages of natural resources, food pollution, improper diets and wifi radition can be disturbing or confusing. Social media and Google bring information that we did not learn from regular media, school teachers and home doctors.

Trade unions, welfare arrangements, retirement funds and customer banks become weaker, unstable or outdated. Migrants, tourists, terrorists, goods, services, economic booms and depressions, money and exchange rates cross national borders like nation states hardly exist anymore and make national governments fairly helpless in coping with excesses.

All this and more, clubbed together under the heading of postmodernization, requires fundamental reorientations for large numbers of people.

We may consider that the certainties many of us are accustomed to, did not always exist. Oh no, not at all. In the human evolution of seven millions years, those certainties arose with agriculture only some 10,000 years ago and became stronger with the modern nation states just a few centuries ago.

That means, the collective certainties that we know exist for only about one-thousandth of the entire period. The other period we managed to survive in other ways and that survival management may still be very much in our DNA.

Perhaps we will revive those capacities and adjust them to present-day conditions.  Like our long gone ancestors we may become constantly alert again, always aware of details in our environment, with all senses and energy frequencies relating to what happens around us. For us, like for our ancestors, and for animals and plants, it will be a matter of life or death again to stay in contact with the environment.

This state of alertness is also called situational awareness. Most of us have lost that capacity as it was not direcly needed for survival anymore. We will have to rediscover it through deliberate efforts of overcoming our resistance against it.

Awareness training in spiritual circles may be rejected as unrealistic, but become seen as plain awareness needed to deal with the reality of growing uncertainties. It helps to regain inner balance in the face of outer dangers and uncertainties like in the old days of jungles and savannas. That opportunity is also the fruit of postmodernity.

Humanity needs a second pioneer revolution

Tribal communities have migrated to new frontiers for millions of years, until they arrived at all corners of the planet and just could not move further.

Meanwhile, the spirit of pioneering made humans move to new frontiers in social organization and technological innovation as well. That was the first revolution in human pioneering.

In their social organization and technological innovation, however, humans cannot rely on external, physical edges to hold them back anymore. But without such limitations we are heading for structural disaster.

If humans want to survive on this planet, they will have to reorient their pioneering spirit towards learning how to build limitations themselves. But can they build sufficiently strong systems of personal limitation and social restraint in time?

To create this second pioneer revolution is the present-day challenge of humanity. If this revolution will come at all, it is likely to arise bottom-up.

The lost boat from India

Kuttanad has wooden snakes competing in boat races. They are long, narrow ships rowed by dozens of deep dark men wanting to win the Nehru Trophy. They create an unparalleled excitement among the local spectators and increasingly so among foreign tourists.

For me and the Dutch a drinking water engineer, they organized one extra time of that boat race. Yes, they did that. In 1980.

Well, was it really for us two? We were delegated by the Dutch government who had in mind sending millions of guilders for the construction of the three large drinking water projects. We had to find out the soundness of the submitted plans and the social needs of safe drinking water in this South Indian state of Kerala.

Each of us received two miniature snake boats. One, presented by the local engineers who smelled money, was made of black mahogany wood with rowers carved out of white ivory. I received that boat with mixed feelings. The other boat was made of cheap wood and had the text: ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’. I took to it immediately.

On our journey back home, it appeared that the mahogany boat fitted well in my suitecase, but the People’s boat was too long. The only available solution was to keep it as hand luggage.

At Kochi Airport I had to explain how I got that long snake boat. Security officers remained busy assessing the danger, worried as they were about the sharp yellow point it had. We found out that point could be removed and I had to put in my main suitcase. Thus the problem was solved and we departed.

In Mumbai I spent a night at the house of my colleague Dr Pillai and his family. Next evening Pillai walked me, through the homeless families that peacefully prepared for the night on the pavement of his street, to a taxi. The taxi took me to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

Once in the Swissair plane above the Indian Ocean I reflected on our mission in Kerala, the bad drinking conditions, the local poverty and the boat race they nevertheless held for us. But, hey, where was my People’s boat? It was lost. Where did I leave it? I could not remember.

It was three years later that I made a stopover in Mumbai again and visited Dr Pillai in his rather well-to-do neighborhood. We discussed life and the world at his balony, with the homeless families peacefully murmuring on the pavement.

Back inside, Pillai went up to a cupboard and came back with something I recognized. It was the Kuttanad boat. It still had ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’ painted on it. I was stunned.

‘Yes’, Pillai said, ‘you left the boat by mistake at the back seat of the taxi. The driver was from nearby here, remembered my street, asked around among the pavement dwellers and brought the boat back to me. Some people in India are unreliable, others have a good heart.’

From that journey I brought the boat safe and sound back to Holland and still have it.

Snake Boat Race 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ASLLcLb9LY

The evolutionary stage of constructive action: overcoming muscle power, ignorance and passivity

During most of the evolution, the power holders used their larger physical strength. It was hardly possible to change the difference in physical force between people.

With more education and larger-scale social life, differences in knowledge came to count and knowledge became a tool for power holders to exploit the ignorance of the majority. But that ignorance is on the decline with more education and access to information.

What remains for the power holders is the exploitation of our passivity. Therefore, we are at a stage in the evolution where we are learning by trial and error to use our knowledge, take responsibility and turn emotional behavior into constructive action.

Nappies and better worlds in experimental Amsterdam

She started her day-nursery life in the large office room of a professor. That was sociologist A. den Hollander. He had an authoritarian personality and could not cope with the democratization at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1960s.

He refused to teach anymore and left his office unused. With a group of assistants and students I encroached his room for our infants. Each long morning two parents too care of the children.

The nursery got a permanent status when the professor came to collect a book and found a bunch of undisciplined, shouting infants crawling over and under his desk and smelled some dirty nappies in one of the corners.

But, alas, the remaining authorities at the university wanted to get rid of us. Right in the city center of Amsterdam we found shelter in a monastery of nuns that ran out of nuns and needed some extra income.

The culture gap was not much of a problem. The aging nuns were tolerant and appreciated our attempts to behave. But the noise level produced by our infants became too much for the nuns in the otherwise so silent monastery.

With decency and determination they told us we were out again. That was in the summer of 1972.

One of the mothers knew another group of parents who had run a nursery under the bridge on Vondelpark but were also ousted. As a compensation, the municipality had offered them a place at the workshop of the park, next to a pathway called Kattenlaan. That is where I live now.

Their group was too small. They merged with us and we settled at the workshop for a long summer. In the construction shed on wheels we could keep some stuff and find shelter during rain showers. A large pile of white sand was the children’s paradise.

After bringing our children to the improvised nursery, many of us met again at the terrace of Groot Melkhuis café. We had horror conversations about stinking nappies and dream conversations about better worlds.

We even stayed at the terrace until it was time to pick up the kids again. Some returned to the terrace to let the children play in the bordering playground until tiredness turned into crying and it was time to go home.

In the evenings we had hippy-styled barbecues in the park, with the children running around in the grass and weeds clouds hanging in the bushes. At home we held meetings to brainstorm about new ways to raise children, communicate among parents and change wider society.

I loved the experimental, creative mood but was too pragmatic about organizational and financial matters for some. Friction between the goals of solidarity and idealism arose.

One of the fathers said he came from Yugoslavia and wanted to go there with a group of parents. I was to be the anthropologist explaining the Yugoslavian collective enterprises that had been started. But the father appeared to come from Amsterdam and the expedition was called off.

By the end of the summer the Vondelpark manager had enough of our nursery. For our daughter we found the nursery in the wooden barracks of the Theosophical Society, in the garden behind their former temple. There we stayed until our daughter reached pre-school age.

I don’t think she was much aware of the societal upheaval of those days. But from the nurseries she kept two girls as friends, likely because the parents got along quite well and agreed on a certain balance between dreams and nappies.

Her dreams of travel coming true in others

Her dreams and what she learned about the outside world fed her intelligence and kept here alive under restricted circumstances. As most housewives, she had to manage with the modest income her husband earned.

She worked very hard in order to bring up her seven children in style. And she inspired them with ideas about the wider world that she found tremendously fascinating.

The information had started to spread in the middle of the nineteenth century already. Newspapers and books appeared, and photos, and stories by the rich who could travel by train. In the twentieth century movies and radio increased the flow of news from far away.

She felt it became within reach for common people to go out and discover the planet. Her eldest daughter, my mother, got infected by her travel fever and did what her mother could not have done.

In the 1920s she and her girlfriend boarded a train to a completely different country. It was Germany. Back home she found an eager ear in her mother who wanted to learn about what happened abroad. It was more than that. My mother extended the life of her mother into foreign lands.

Next summer the two young women took a train to Belgium and in another year to Echternach in Luxembourg. In the 1930s they crossed the North Sea on a steamboat to London and proceeded by train to the beach resort Torquay. Next year, at a London hotel, she met the Dutch man who became my father.

‘You have a karmic link with your grandmother,’ a perceptive person once told me. The thirsty drinking in of knowledge and the wanting to understand the wide world is certainly mine too.

Black Pete: Dutch Norm of Equality Conceals Practice of Inequality

Why do most Dutch people do not see a problem in the traditional figure of Black Pete? Surely, there is a lot of racism in my country. Stereotyping, overgeneralizing, fearing the foreign, job discrimination, verbal insults, physical attacks and support to extremely rightwing politicians are all over.

But also the sensible, broad-minded, decent people keep defending the blackness of Pete, the servant of a white master. How can they do that? The answer may be found in the accepted gap between norm and reality. In Holland we have the opinion that, disregarding inequal positions, we should feel equal and behave acccordingly. The expression goes that you should not stick your head above ground level and ‘be normal.’

If you have a high position or much wealth it should not go to your head. That the prime minister comes biking to his office, contributes to his popularity.

If you have a low position or no money, you should not feel inferieur. You have to stand up for yourself and be frank. 'If your skin is dark, don’t mind. Be assertive!' With the accessibility and safety of social media, the assertiveness now even turns into widespread rudeness.

But frankness or not, our biking ministers take measures that increase inequality in society. And many feel, justified or not, superior or inferior. In reality and like elsewhere, Dutch society has many inequalities.

Perhaps there is the fear that if we acknowledge those inequalities as they are, we will accept them, give up opposing to them and bury our frankness. In order to avoid that risk, it can be tempting to keep seeing the ideal as the reality:

‘Don’t see the heads that stick up high above ground level. Don’t see the people pushed underground. Don’t see the blackness of Pete as a sign of inferiority. We are all equal. We love Black Pete. We wish him the very best.’

In reality the blackness of Pete contributes to inequality. Small children, black and white, see the white bishop Saint Nicholas high on his horse with black servants walking at the pavement and doing the menial jobs. In this way, children receive and store the image that white people are superior and colored people are inferior. As they they take that skewed image with them later in life and into wider world, it generates racism. 

And don’t be mistaken, also in Holland racism brings expressed and unexpressed suffering. But whereas in reality a black skin can create pain, the norm is to ignore that blackness. In this way, racism becomes a black spot in Dutch perception. The emperor is quite naked.

Saint Nicholas and two Black Petes

Prime Minister Mark Rutte

Count on yourself and the people you know

Don’t count on regular media, governments, corporations, legislation or the police to improve the world. Count on yourself and the people you know. Count on jointly search for what causes our fear of the unfamiliar or of losing control. Count on seeing our urges to oppress others and wage war, to exploit others and create poverty, and to be shortsighted and destroy the planet.

Count on understanding how subconscious abuse of infants perpetuates misery in their later lives and as a consequence brings misery to others. Count on jointly learn how to reduce that cause of misery. Count on jointly learn how to take responsibility for that reduction. Count for that reason on jointly let love surface and integrate it with practical thinking and acting.

Don’t count on the pundits of ‘hardware’ or ‘software.’ Learn to see the connection between the 'soft' and the 'hard.'