uplifting

[miriam_e]

Want to hear some good news for a change?

Listen to this amazing talk by Dr Rowan Gilles who is the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbg_20060625.mp3 (it is about 22MB)
The text transcript will be up there too in a few days. Check http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/ around the middle of the week.

One of the things I loved about this talk is that he refuses to have anything to do with politics. I have a fervent hope that one day politicians will become irrelevant because people simply won't listen to them anymore. This is a good model for that kind of thinking. Dr Gilles is a very smart man with a lot of experience and he speaks frankly of his experiences in many troubled places around the world.

Hard to imagine that a talk which hinges upon disasters can be so uplifting and be such a cause for optimism. It helps me admire my fellow humans again.

Some of us are so incredibly wonderful!!

Comments

[sleepyaardvark.livejournal.com]

I'll reserve judgment on his particular comments since I don't have the time to listen right now. But in general, I consider people who "refuse to have anything to do with politics" to be somewhat suspect and naive. If you're going to have a society, there has to be some way of making decisions about how it should be run--and that's really all politics is. Politics isn't this ugly shadowy mysterious thing that is totally seperate from everyone's lives. Lives are affected every day by what are essentially political decisions.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean.

I vote because I feel I haven't a right to complain if I don't try to do something about it... but at the same time as things gradually sink further and further into Orwellian corruption where votes get altered and the politicians look after themselves and their rich buddies while sucking the poorest dry and trumpeting through co-opted big media what a good job they're doing, it all starts to feel a bit futile.

For some time now I've been interested in emergent intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and self-organising systems. Each of those has very cool things come out of the group as a whole, without a leader organising it. In fact introducing a leader or conformity destroys crowd wisdom. It makes me question whether we need leaders and politics at all. Sometimes it feels that leaders simply act as a lightning rod for mankind's worst attributes. Occasionally a good leader comes along and it seems worth all the trouble... but is it really? Wars, witchhunts, megalomania... but what can you expect of a system where the qualifications to become a leader seem to hinge on the ability to lie well and an obsessive desire for wealth and power.

I know that there is no guarantee that a leaderless society would work either, but the few times something like it has been tried it does actually seem to work quite nicely. Open-source development systems, the structure of the internet, the bit-torrent filesharing system, some of the more effective aid groups, and so on.

By definition you can't impose a leaderless society. The only way from here to there is for people to become sufficiently aware of the dangers of politics so as to ignore them -- cut them out of the scene. While it seems laughable that this could ever happen, it seemed impossible that the Soviet Union would crumble with virtually no blood spilled, but it did, quite suddenly in the space of months. If someone had predicted it they'd have been called a fool. I'm not predicting that we will ever have a leaderless society, but I am interested in understanding what might help bring it about and whether it has dangers like the current system.

The doctor giving the talk had a more pragmatic reason for not getting involved in politics though. If he became entangled in one side's issues the other side tended to shoot the doctors, so they stay out of it and concentrate on helping sick people.