Tuesday, June 8, 2010

BP, the Wedding, and the Lesson.

BP.

When it comes to the unfolding catastrophe, known deceptively as the "BP oil spill", here are the common subject tags. Katrina, Obama, Gulf Coast, tourism, off-shore drilling, corporate greed, economy, environment, and environmentalist.

You can easily discern the thesis of each tag, and how each tag is a brick (or floor, insert your own analogy) in the larger, depressing, narrative.

Thus this is Obama's Katrina, caused by corporate greed which motivated the search of oil off-shore, where it was not made illegal by environmentalists and led to the destruction of the environment and negatively affected tourism and the economy on the Gulf-coast.

Of course a predictable mosaic of agendas informed our beloved main stream media -and their disgruntled children in the blogoshere- decision to focus on specific elements/tags. Why it happened, who is ultimately responsible, and what should our policy be in the future, are questions that I will leave to the usual "experts".

What I like to ask is what lesson can we the average person learn? I do not mean an insight into human greed, that has already been covered, nor do I refer to a lesson in mob-psychology ,that too has been discussed -politics as usual. I refer to a universal lesson, one that can inform our larger understanding of what we are and our limitations, not for the sake of blame or even human elevation, rather for the sake of intrapersonal communication ( the language use or thought internal to the communicator).

Human collective political/social innovation is aimed at perfection. So we had empire, when that didn't work we said oh the problem is in the system. Then we had feudal fiefdoms, they failed to bring perfection and again we shouted “this system is flawed”. Then we built Democratic-capitalism, and communists responded with a revolution, pointing to its imperfections. Then communism fell, because of its own failings.

The point is that we humans justify our pursuit of perfection, by arguing that the flaw is in the system, and it is only a matter of building the perfect system. This means that whenever something doesn’t work as planned, we retrospectively claim we could have prevented this -“the problem is our approach not us”!

Yet I wonder, could it be that we are inherently imperfect and therefore that which we create will always reflect that imperfection? For those who wonder why I do not separate the creator from the created? I respond, who or what is perfect?…

Then again it may difficult for certain elements of humanity to accept this notion. Probably because it takes away our absolute control of our environment, and places it in the hands of a higher force -call it nature, G-d, the universal subconscious, or Gaia. This does not mean that everything is out of our hands, only that we cannot help but use our hands in a way that creates, the law of, unintended consequences (see The Black Swan, 2007 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for more on this subject).

So how does the individual and society as a whole prepare for manifestations of our imperfection? How should society respond to BP, the economic meltdown, and the unexpected death of 9 violent activists?

The wedding.

My younger sister recently got married. At the conclusion of the Chupa ceremony -wedding canopy under which the the groom places the ring on the bride and the union is publicly affirmed- the customary vessel was broken and all the guests exclaimed "mazal tov"!

My uncle, at the weeding, offered two explanations for this tradition.

Here is the relevant interpretation.

“In the process of marriage, the bride and groom will sometimes break things (literally and metaphorically), remember your response should be mazal tov”!
But you just lost our entire financial nest egg? You just destroyed the livelihood of 1000’s?

Mazal Tov?

Let us remember Mazal Tov means good luck. Should we launch an inquiry, investigate what happened, try to prevent failure in the future, of course. Will our retrospective actions, unpredictably create unintended consequences, YES.

The lesson.

THEREFORE.

Accept what happened, mourn, cry, express anger but remember you/we cannot control everything -we need the higher force to bestow good luck on us and our future. Let the unintended consequences be positive.

So I say to all of you reading this post “MAZAL TOV”!

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