Up to that day, as far as we know, the Australian Aborigines had lived for tens of thousands of years largely undisturbed by people from outside their island continent.  There was some trade with peoples from the islands to the north, and there were (more recently) some random visits from hapless Europeans.  The eleven sailing ships that came to the east coast changed all that.  They carried thousands of people from half-way around the world and those people came with the intention of staying – if not their intention, then certainly the intention of those in power in England.

The millennia during which the Aborigines had occupied this continent had allowed then to reach an equilibrium with the land and all it offered.  They had an intimate knowledge of what was beneficial and what was harmful or malevolent.  While they may not have always lived in harmony with each other, they lived in harmony with Country.  Most of those who came here in 1788 saw the country as alien and hostile and they set about to bend it to their will.  As a consequence, they felt separate from the land and could not recognise all it had to offer, if any of it.

For the Aborigines, late January 1788 marked the beginning of a process through which they became ever more separated from their land and their culture.  Most Englishmen had no notion of what the land meant to the Aborigines – how the two were one.  Even if they had, they wanted the land for themselves to build settlements, grow crops and raise sheep and cattle.

Most of the white settlers also failed to recognise that the Aborigines had powerful spiritual lives, probably more powerful than those lived by the settlers.  As a consequence, the clergy felt it incumbent on them to teach the Aborigines a spiritual life which was full of inconsistencies and which the settlers largely failed to live up to themselves.

For those who had sailed from England, January 1788 marked a finality – they had left everything they were familiar with (harsh as it may have been) and landed in a place as unfamiliar to them as anything could be.  For many, especially the convicts who had spent years in gaols and in pestilent prison hulks on the Thames, the fresh air and open spaces may have been like entering Paradise.  I assume most passengers – convicts, free settlers and soldiers alike – would have felt relieved after many months in smelly, overcrowded, heaving ships.

For many, even most, of those who arrived here for the first time, this was an opportunity to create a new life.  Even though there was a tendency to recreate much of what had been left behind, change was imperative to ensure survival, although survival was never assured.

Amongst the Whites, there were all manner of responses and reactions to the Aborigines: hostility, suspicion, interest, revulsion, compassion, lust, fascination and pity.  The interactions between the two cultures resulted in one losing most of what identified its members as being who they were and in the other largely failing to learn what had allowed maybe one million humans to live off what seemed to be an unforgiving, hostile and barren land.  If the wise and tolerant individuals amongst the Whites had been able to hold more sway (and if very clear instructions from London had been honoured), the Aborigines may have had a chance to keep their culture and identity intact and the Whites may have found settling a lot easier than they made it.

Over the intervening 224 years, there has been a blurring of edges, with most Aborigines joining the White settlements, whether by force or by choice.  There are precious few Aborigines left who still have an unbroken connection with their roots, with Country.  As they work hard to pass this on to their youngsters, there is a growing number of non-Aborigines (Whites, Yellows, Browns, Blacks form elsewhere) who feel an urge to learn as much as possible of and from this ancient culture which allowed its people to survive so well in this land.

There are aboriginal peoples on most continents who still have knowledge which, if we took it seriously and took it in, might help all of humanity to survive on what is fast becoming a hostile and barren planet.  Sic fiat¹.

Goron mahan weng-nga ga-yu. Nu-naw-ma watj-ja ba-ya-nggi. Goron-binyju ga-yu weng-nga.²

1. ‘Let it be so’ (Latin)
2. ‘This house is empty. Everyone has gone. There’s only an empty house.’ (The Wagiman Online Dictionary)

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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An increasing number of people is contemplating or already experimenting with the idea of self-sufficiency.  But can there be true self-sufficiency without recourse to goods and services from ‘outside’?  Is it even desirable to have a large number of people be self-sufficient? On the other hand, do we want to continue on the path of ever-increasing and almost total interconnectivity?  Is the phenomenon of the ‘global village’ the driving force behind our increasing pillaging and degradation of everything around us, or is this a separate, unconnected development?  Or do both come out of a common origin?

Are we, as some spiritual teachings would have it, all one, or are we basically alone, individual and unable to truly connect?  It is possible that wealth for the individual can be measured in terms of the ability to feel at-one with all that exists, that it has nothing to do with external objects or how we are considered by others.  According to some teachings and supported by quantum physics, everything we apprehend with our five ‘normal’ senses is an illusion.  What is ‘real’ is to be sensed and interacted with in a different way.  The question then arises, does everything in the ‘real’ world actually matter?  If the material world – the world we commonly interact with – is an illusion, is there anything of value to be found there?

If our physical universe is only a part of ‘all that is’, or one aspect of it, or a projection of it, how important is it?  There are many and disparate beliefs about who we truly are and what our relationship to everything ‘not us’ is.  Many of these beliefs involve the notions that we (humans) are soul or spirit inhabiting a physical body.  Because these beliefs are held by humans with physical bodies, they are mostly predicated on our being in this physical world, in physical bodies.  They differ in their notions of where we would be if we could no longer exist physically.

To many people, all this would be very esoteric, if not irrelevant.  They ‘exist’ totally in the physical world and this informs how they live.  Their notion of value comes completely from their relationship with the physical world and with the other people who inhabit it.  They appear to have no notion of the world around them other than in terms of how it impacts on their personal value.  Exploitation is normal and conservation is irrelevant and even damaging to their won value in the world.

I would argue that, the less that people believe there is anything other than the physical world, the more they are bent on exploiting that physical world and the less they have a notion of an essential interactivity and interdependence of everything in that physical world.  They are, therefore, prepared to destroy the world around them in order to survive.

I do not think that it can be denied that there is an increasing degradation of our physical environment on this planet and I think it would be difficult to argue that the behaviour of humans is largely responsible for this.

Even those people who believe that the physical world is all we need and all that there is, seek environments – whether periodically or permanently – that nourish them in a largely indefinable way.  They try to surround themselves with things of beauty and pieces of ‘nature’; or they go on holidays into the mountains or by the sea or in the forest or on farms; or they simply seek to escape from the day-to-day effort of adding to or maintaining their perceived personal value.  Yet, the gaps in their struggle for material value are where they nourish themselves: the moments of stillness; the periods of daydreaming; the annual holiday away from home; the walks through an art gallery or a park; the few hours at a concert or at the pub or in a restaurant; planting flowers or vegetables; spending ten minutes reading someone’s musings on a blog.

For many people it is the gaps that make the relentless pursuits and activities bearable.  Some people have cottoned on to this conundrum and have inverted their lives, so that their sense of value lies in what others would consider a ‘hippy’ lifestyle and they pursue monetary value only in order to support their choice of lifestyle.

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Value is most commonly expressed in terms of money.  Money has no intrinsic value – only the value we place on it and this is volatile.  Much of the value assigned to money is dependent on how people feel and on their nerve (for instance, when investing).  The value placed on money is also affected by pronouncements of governments and credit rating agencies.

The fluctuating value of money and the things it relates to can wreck economies and people’s lives.  The value of a corporation depends to a large extent on people’s perceptions and can plummet without warning.  Most people base their hopes of being able to live well in their retirement on the fickle values of corporations.  A few years ago many people lost half their retirement nest eggs because of this volatility.

Money is designed to represent the value of the exchange of goods and services.  When we do work for someone, we do so in the expectation that this will allow us to house, feed and clothe ourselves and our families.  To quantify the value of the work and the value of the essentials of life, we replace the value with money.  This allows individual choices in managing the exchange – within limits, we can choose where to live, what to eat and what clothes to wear.

There have been (and still are) societies and communities within which such choice was absent.  People worked for the community and were fed, housed, clothed and educated by the community.  There was little if any effective choice.  There was no money involved and none needed.  People were expected to contribute their labour to the extent of their ability and those who couldn’t contribute were looked after (in a manner).  That is one way of managing to do without a symbolic representation of our worth and the worth of goods.  Can you imagine any others?

Many years ago I was a member of a community that set up an internal trading scheme that operated without money.  People offered goods and services and the respective provision and consumption of these was represented by tokens in a computer system.  The initial aim was to value every person’s contribution as being the same number of tokens per hour.  Thus, someone weeding a garden would receive the same exchange for two hours as someone giving a massage or repairing a car or drawing up a will.  However, many people insisted that their time was more valuable than another’s and the community split into two groups: the equal time-value group and the variable time-value group, with some cross-trading between them.  And then it was decided that the tokens were to have the same value as that of dollars in the ‘outside’ world.  Most people found it difficult to think outside a money system.

Is the disparity between poor and rich people brought about by this system of replacing value with symbolic artefacts?  In societies where real objects (such as shells or beads or grain) are used as a means of exchange, there are still rich and poor people and, as in our society, these often equate with the powerful and the powerless.  Is it power that attracts money (or shells) or the money that creates power?

Going back to the initial question: how much are you worth?  You could count your worth in terms of your accumulated wealth but, then, if you lost it all, would you be worthless?  Do you value yourself on the basis of what you can contribute to others?  If this is the case, your worth has nothing to do with what you can accumulate and your accumulated wealth (if any) becomes irrelevant.  Some people purposefully accumulate huge fortunes in order to then use these to contribute to others.  It is said that the industrialist Andrew Carnegie left a piece of paper in his desk drawer on which he had written, “I shall spend the first half of my life amassing a fortune and the second half of my life giving it away.”

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We have a need to measure our existence in periods of time: from seconds to millennia.  We treat many of these periods as affording us opportunities to start afresh.  The start of each day allows us to pretend that we are reborn; Monday mornings allow many people to launch into a new week with new potential; the start of new years allow the wiping clean of slates; and centuries and millennia bring hope to many that everything will be better.

The flipping over into the ‘new’ period also gives comfort to doomsayers, although why they keep believing their own misguidance is a mystery to me.

Having an excuse to turn over a new leaf can be useful.  We accumulate baggage at an alarming rate – attitudes, memories, grudges, likes and dislikes.  The enlightened Masters tell us to live in the moment, to not be bound by the past.  Most of us find this a challenge and having an excuse, such as the flipping over of a calendar page, can help.  If we can progress from new year to new week and, eventually, to new minute, we may achieve a state of not even needing a new second – every second will be new, as if we haven’t lived before that moment.

Some luggage is useful and carrying it from second to second, year to year, enhances our life: wisdom and experience are two bags to bring along and add to.

How do we distinguish between the debilitating baggage and the useful luggage?  The distinction is probably to be found in the accompanying feelings.  Does an action or reaction feel good, right, empowering or does it feel like a weight or something being dragged along?  If the ‘bad’ feeling can be identified at the time, it is possible to drop the bag and leave it behind.  This takes awareness (of the feelings and what they are linked to) and courage (to drop the past and leave it behind, where it belongs).

A newspaper columnist recently wrote about having a ‘to do’ list and a ‘will do’ list.  Both are useful – the first as an indication of changes we are determined to bring to our lives and the second as recognition of those things that may enrich our lives.  The two lists can overlap.  The ‘to do’ list can be a shopping list or a list of ‘past’ things we want to do something about, or some of both of these.  The ‘will do’ list is more a recognition of what we are going to do because we want to and it may include ‘self-indulgent’ activities like reading, having a massage, going for a walk or lying around doing ‘nothing’.

We need, however, to be careful how we handle such lists.  It is easy to turn unachieved items into baggage: the should-haves and could-haves of life.  There is magic in having intentions, whether written down or not, and letting the unrealised intensions slip down the ‘oh well’ drain.

It would be wonderful to sing along with Edith Piaf and mean it: je ne regrette rien.  I acknowledge that Piaf failed to live up to this herself, but it is a powerful sentiment that, if manifested, frees up energy to apply to those things that enrich our lives.  There is an aphorism: it is not what happens to you that is important, but what you do with what happens to you.  How you respond to circumstances depends a lot (perhaps even entirely) on the respective contents of your baggage and your luggage.

In The Colour of Magic (1983), Terry Pratchett invented an item of luggage that followed its owner on its own set of many legs.  It required no carrying or other intervention from the owner – it was simply there when needed.  It can be seen as representing the useful tools we accumulate and carry through life, lightly, to be applied as needed.

How can we mere mortals deal with the past that we drag along?  It is a process.  Become aware of patterns of behaviour that don’t serve you well.  Recognise reactions that seem out of proportion to the stimulus, or simply don’t fit the stimulus.  Monitor the feelings that come with the responses or linger afterwards.  Then choose to drop what is not useful or causes unnecessary pain.  You probably won’t drop your bundle in a single act, but you can reduce the baggage bit by bit, leaving it behind.

Happy New Year.  Have a nice moment.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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The normal situation in criminal matters is that the state has to convince the judge or jury that the defendant did what s/he is charged with, beyond a reasonable doubt.  In other words, if there is any doubt, a finding of ‘not guilty’ should be returned.

There is an increasing number of offences in which all that is needed is for the state to provide a strong case against the defendant and the defendant has to prove that s/he is not guilty.  There is an increasing number of offences for which the right to appeal has been reduced or restricted.

In matters defined as involving terrorism or potential terrorism, the accused person: may be held for a long period without charges being brought; hearings may be held in secret; the accused may be denied access to the evidence the state is relying on; there may be restricted access to appeal against outcomes.

Under the new laws relating to terrorism, a person suspected of having links with a terrorist organisation may be placed under effective house arrest without ever being found guilty of an offence by a court.

The Federal Government, which has been the main proponent and initiator of anti-terrorism laws, has argued that these more restrictive laws are necessary in order to protect ‘law-abiding’ citizens and that we need to trust that it will not use its greater powers in inappropriate ways.  However, we have witnessed a number of instances of potential abuse – for instance, the incarceration in a migrant detention centre of Dr. Haneef, after a magistrate had seen fit to release him on bail.¹  In other words, the government overrode the courts.  The security authorities later admitted that Dr Haneef was not a threat to the country.

If you are not healthy and relatively financially secure, are you still important?  Does our society adequately look after those who have difficulty looking after themselves?

People with sub-optimal mental ability used to be kept in institutions.  There they were sometimes ill-treated and occasionally even abused.  Existence in any institution tends to dehumanise people.  The modern trend is to deal with this dehumanisation by closing institutions for the mentally ill and housing them in the community.  Potentially, this would facilitate a more individual caring for these people.  However, many of them now have no proper care and end up wandering the streets and even sleeping in the streets.

There have been recent instances of Australian citizens who were found wandering and not able to explain themselves, being extradited on the assumption that they were illegal immigrants.²

When did these people stop being important?

Australia had an international reputation for welcoming refugees and they came here in their tens of thousands.  Something changed in our national attitude (led by the Federal Government) and many refugees are now regarded and treated as if they are criminals. When people come to this country seeking asylum, but not through ‘official’ channels, they are likely to be incarcerated in detention centres.  They are often there for years before any decision is made about their future.  Their children are locked up with them.  The adults and children often develop emotional and psychological problems from their detention.  When did they stop being important?

Australia is the only democratic country that has no national Bill of Rights or Charter of Rights.³  Victoria and the ACT have enacted legislation guaranteeing the protection of individuals’ rights and some other states are making moves to do the same.  But, even if all states and territories enacted such protection, there would still be a gap at a national level when it involves federal laws.  A Bill of Rights or Charter of Rights is an indication that a country values its citizens – that it finds them important.

For more than one hundred years, workers in this country have had basic entitlements protected.   They are often represented by unions, which can bargain collectively on their members’ behalf.  With the introduction of changes to workplace relations laws, workers are now more expected to negotiate individually with their (potential) employer, on the assumption that this is a negotiation between equals.  But employers usually have large resources at their disposal and the services of lawyers.  Workers can rarely match this.  Many workers have been forced to fend for themselves.  If you are a worker, when did you stop being important?

Almost everywhere you look, you see the idea of individual importance being eroded in favour of some questionable ideology.

1. See, for instance, Sydney Morning Herald article on 17 July 2007.
2. See, for instance, Sydney Morning Herald article on 4 May 2005.
3. “Thawing the frozen continent.” by George Williams, Griffith Review 19, Autumn 2008, pp 13-37.

© 2011 Daan Spijer

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The growing complexity of medicine and the need to make ever greater profits, militate against the needs of individuals.  While there are still doctors who are truly healers and who will in all cases seek the best treatment for each patient, many people who need medical assistance are no longer seen as individuals.

When someone is ill, they ‘present’ with symptoms – the outward manifestation of what is going on.  Healing is possible only if whatever is causing those symptoms is addresses.  However, in much of modern medicine the treatment is for the symptoms only and the causes may be ignored completely.  The result is often that something which could be treated effectively in its early manifestations becomes chronic, and the medicines given to deal with the symptoms have to become increasingly powerful and, often, nasty.

Films sometimes make light of the approach in hospitals, when patients are not referred to as people, but as symptoms.  “The liver in bed five”, “the stroke in room twelve” are examples of this.  That this is used as comedy in films indicates that it is happening frequently in real life.  When did these people stop being important?

Several films have sought to bring attention to the iniquity of this attitude.  One such was The Doctor, starring William Hurt.¹  A doctor who works in a hospital and shows all the impersonal attitudes I mentioned above, becomes seriously ill and discovers first-hand how his hospital deals with patients.  On recovery, he institutes changes to teach the hospital doctors to treat patients with more compassion and humanity.

There is also a growing group of doctors who are using non-pharmaceutical medicines to tailor treatments to each individual patient in a way that deals with the underlying causes of their symptoms.  They will work with each patient and they expect each patient to be fully involved in the process.  The individual is honoured by this approach.  The individual is treated as being important.

One reason so many people opt to go to naturopaths and other ‘natural’ therapists, is that they routinely tailor their treatments to the individual’s needs and they are more interested in identifying and dealing with causes than alleviating symptoms.  Also, a patient’s history is more important to these therapists than it is to most doctors.  As a result, patients feel more listened to and, therefore, more valued and, as a result feel more involved.

To move away from medicine, let me look at the area of the individual in society.

There has been a growing trend to restrict individual rights and freedoms in the name of protecting us from terrorists and other criminals.  There has been little debate about the need for this or, if there is a need, about how we can best be protected.  The easy options are usually chosen by governments and these result in the individual losing something important.²

How important to you are the freedoms you have?  What about freedoms you used to have and which have been restricted or taken away completely?  What freedoms do think you should have, that are not there?

How concerned are you about the level of criminal activity in your community?  Is your concern high enough that you are willing to have your freedoms curtailed?  Is your concern in line with actual crime rates?

[to be concluded in the next post]

1. The Doctor, 1991, Silver Screen, USA
2. In The Quest for Justice (Scribe, 2010), former judge Ken Crispin devotes a whole chapter to this issue.

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Many doctors assume that a drug they prescribe may be beneficial to the patient in front of them, because trials have shown that it was effective for a sufficiently large number of people in clinical trials.  The doctor has no idea whether that drug will be of any benefit to that patient in that particular instance.  A doctor will often give a patient a prescription for a drug with the rider: “See if this helps and let me know.”  Allen Roses was a marketing manager for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.  He is on the record as saying that “over 90% of drugs work for only 30% – 50% of patients who take them.” ¹  To put this another way, fewer than 10% of drugs work on 50% – 70% of patients who take them.

As a patient, you are asked to take part in an ongoing experiment to see which drugs work for which people in which circumstances.

When did you stop being important?

The name William Coley probably doesn’t mean much to people today, some 75 years after his death.  He worked as a surgeon at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York towards the end of the 19^th Century.  He was frustrated at losing so many bone cancer patients, despite early diagnosis and prompt surgery.  Being an avid researcher, he trawled through the hospital records of bone cancer patients, going back over 15 years.  Most records indicated failure and death.  However, there was a record of one patient who was considered to be close to death, but who made a seemingly miraculous recovery.  What set this patient apart was that he had suffered two attacks of infection from Streptococcus pyogenes.

True scientist that he was, Coley sought to learn from this one case, and started injecting cancer patients with Streptococcus cultures, but without success.  Only when he was able to obtain a very virulent strain from Germany, did he have success.  The patient had tumours on his tonsils and in his neck.  When injected with this virulent strain, the patient developed a high fever and the cancers completely disappeared.²

Eventually, Coley moved to using the toxins developed by the Streptococcus, together with the toxins produced by Bacillus pordigiosis, which caused the patients less trauma.  Production of the toxins was supervised at the hospital.  Toxins were also produced commercially by Parke-Davis (Formula #XI), but these were less effective (37% cure rate), because the formula was heated.

In the early part of the 20^th Century, Coley’s boss at the hospital started experimenting with radiation for cancer treatment.  Patients responded well initially, but then succumbed to their disease.  Despite this, radiation therapy was seen as the promising cure-all which would eventually prove to make all other treatments obsolete.  Coley’s toxin treatment fell by the wayside.

Some doctors kept using the treatment after Coley’s death in 1936, and there are some who are still using and developing it today, with good results.³

Why is it that a treatment which was producing such good results is no longer in vogue?  Could it be that it needed to be customised for individual patients?  Was the lure of high-tech (e.g. radiation) too tempting?  Why has at least one eminent doctor who was using the treatment in Germany jailed on trumped-up charges, and then acquitted?⁴

There certainly have been treatments over the years which have deserved to die out for lack of efficacy or because something much better has been developed.  But there are also many which have simply gone out of fashion, or the ‘established’ profession has not liked it.  What are we missing out on in possible alleviation of suffering and elimination of disease?

One thing we are missing out on is the individual treatment which would in many cases lead to better outcomes.

[to be continued in the next post]

1. Report on a statement by Allen Roses, BBC News World Edition, 8 Dec. 2003 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3299945.stm

1. Coley, William B. “A Preliminary Note on the Treatment of Inoperable Sarcoma by the Toxic Product of Erysipelas.” Post-graduate 8:278-86, 1893.

3. Havas H, et al. “The effect of bacterial vaccine on tumors and immune response of ICR/Ha mice.” J Biol Res Mod. 1990;9;:194-204.
4. Issels, Josef, Cancer: A Second Opinion. London 1975.

© 2011 Daan Spijer

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In dealing with government and business, we divulge a great deal of information about ourselves.  We may readily understand the need for some of that information to be handed over, but why is the rest needed?  One answer may be that the procedures and forms used are designed to cover as many customers as possible.  This means less tailoring to individuals’ circumstances and therefore less work for those designing the forms.

Have you ever been in the situation of filling in a form, and finding that in some part none of the options given reflect your situation?  What do you do?  Do you pick the one closest or the least innocuous?  If there is no option of ‘other…’, do you write in an extra option?  Or do you ignore that part completely?

When did we become a ‘one size fits all’ society?  Or have we always been one?

Talking of size, do you easily fit into to the clothes sizes available in the shops?  Is your individual size and shape catered for?  What about shoes?  Do you have a wide foot and find it hard to fit into the current, fashionable, narrow shoes?

When you go to the hardware store, needing three plugs to secure a coat rack to a plaster wall, can you buy three?  Or do you have to buy two packs of two, or a pack of six?  What happens if you want two large bolts with corresponding washers and nuts?  Can you still buy them individually?

An area that particularly interests me is medicine.  Most of us need the services of a doctor from time to time.  Increasingly, those services are available through a large medical practice where we often take pot luck as to which doctor we see.  Or we go to a hospital outpatient department and we deal with whoever is rostered on.  The service we receive is usually excellent, but it is not as personal as it used to be, when there was a local doctor we would see almost every time we needed to.

The biggest change, however, is probably in the area of medication.  Most prescriptions are for pharmaceutical drugs which are designed to alleviate symptoms, rather than deal with underlying causes.  As most symptoms may be a reflection of any one of a number of underlying causes, we are not really being treated.  And is the drug we are being prescribed really suitable for us?

All drugs have side effects and whether you will manifest any of these depends a lot on you: your genetic make-up; the underlying causes of your symptoms; your diet; and a host of other factors peculiar to you.  Add to this that trials for the efficacy and dangers of drugs are carried out using an atypical group of people, and you have drugs that are anything but tailored to the individual.

Drug trials are conducted to obtain statistics about the effects of the drugs.  A group taking part in a trial typically consists of healthy men in early adulthood.  Usually excluded are women, non-Caucasians and anyone not in good health.  This is done to make the statistical analysis easier – to have fewer factors to correct for.  Until recently, pharmaceutical companies were not required to publish the details of trials with negative outcomes and there are many instances where, if the negative results had been taken into account, a drug may not have received regulatory approval.  There are also instances where the drug showed little benefit greater than the placebo effect (comparing the drug with a substance – a placebo –which has no pharmacological effect), but through careful manipulation of data, the drug was ‘shown’ to have significant benefit.  One recent example is a group of antidepressant drugs, which were actually only marginally more effective than a placebo.

The placebo effect is a term applied to the observed phenomenon that if people are given something which they are told will benefit them, it does so to some extent in a large number of them.  The reason for this effect has not been properly explained.  There are indications that the effect is largely psychological, because red placebo pills are often more effective than green placebo pills.  It also seems important that the person taking the placebo thinks that it is active medication.  ‘Bedside manner’ may also be a factor – some doctors seem to have better results than others, and this may be a consequence of how they relate to their patients.  However you look at it, most people respond positively to medication, whether it contains anything therapeutic or not.

One notable Canadian doctor, Sir William Osler (1849-1919), famously said that his favourite prescription was “time in divided doses”.

[to be continued in the next post]

© 2011 Daan Spijer

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I can only guess at what happens to all that information.  Actually, I can do better than guess, because others have written about it and continue to write about it.  It is used by the supermarket owner and others to try and get me to buy more, through targeted advertising in emails.  The ‘others’ are companies to which the supermarket owner sells information about me and my purchases.  I expect that one day the display monitor at the checkout will list items I may have forgotten, because the supermarket ‘knows’ I buy them almost every time.

Why do I have a loyalty card?  Because the points I accumulate can be converted to flying miles with an airline or be exchanged for goods.  I once exchanged 26 000 points for a new steam iron, which I could have bought for about $75.  I have yet to use frequent flyer points for flying.

I wonder sometimes if all the companies that collect data on consumers will eventually drown in the digital sea.  Will they accumulate so much data that they can no longer make effective use of it?  How do they manage to keep the growing data pool useful, when some companies and government departments I have dealt with seem to have a problem making sense of the little bit of data they hold about me, when there is something I need from them?

I have trained myself to ignore much of the advertising in newspapers and on the internet, to minimise the distraction of its quiet insistence.  However, recently a ‘sponsored’ advertisement next to a Google search result caught my eye.  It was for a company from which I bought a camera lens about six months ago.  Coincidence?  I assumed so, until advertisements from that company kept appearing, no matter what I searched for.  The next day I did an experiment.  In an office where I work part-time, I carried out some specific searches on the company computer, including searches involving cameras and lenses.  The particular advertisements did not appear.  I then did the same searches using my personal laptop.  Bingo!  There it was.

The mobile internet connection I use for my laptop goes through the same ISP as my network at home.  I plugged my laptop into the wired network at the office (which uses a different ISP) and I repeated the searches.  No advertisements from that company.  It is understandable that I get paranoid when I know they’re watching me.

So many people, these days, want to be visible to all and sundry – to people they know and ones they have never met.  Many also invite offers from businesses that may give them even a small chance of receiving something in return.  They are willing to lay their lives open to the world.

I find this curious, as in some sectors of our society people have for a long time been voicing an increasing concern about the amount of personal information about them held by governments, business and other institutions.  Is there a spontaneous shift in the attitude people have to privacy and personal data or have those who benefit from this been successful in a cynical plan to bring this about?  Will those of us who still value our privacy be swept along until the distinction private/public ceases to exist?

Whether the erosion of this distinction is deliberate or not, it is insidious.  There is a trading of what was once considered to be entirely personal for some perceived gain or benefit.  My accumulation of loyalty points at the supermarket is a perceived gain but may deliver no actual benefits, or the benefits may be exceeded by real and notional losses.

With the ease offered by the internet to sign up for ‘newsletters’ and other ‘services’ in return for scraps of information about ourselves, we may be giving up more than we are aware of at each instance.  It is easy to forget from one click to the next how much of ourselves we have revealed and we have no way of knowing how these scraps are shared, collated, cross-referenced and stored, until we see advertisements specifically targeted to our personal likes and dislikes and to our habits.

© 2011 Daan Spijer

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This cynicism has me want to say that we have lost a lot of decency in public life and in interpersonal transactions.  Some of the concepts that have lost immediate recognition for too many people are manners, refinement, honesty, integrity, respect and truth.  There has always been crassness in society, along with opportunism, rudeness, bigotry and bloody-mindedness.  What seems different now is the balance between these.  The latter seems to be in the ascendency.

There may not be anything inherently ‘good’ about one person holding open a door for another, but it at least demonstrates an awareness of the other.  When extended to younger people doing so for older ones, it may even represent respect.  Such respect for an older person – maybe even acknowledging them as an elder – demonstrates an awareness of a person’s position in society: one’s own and the other person’s.  It may well be that we have tried too hard (and succeeded) to have everyone feel that they are equal to everyone else and, in the process, we’ve lost something valuable.  In between sameness and stratification, there is a dynamic state in which each individual has a sense of place in relation to everyone else.  In this dynamic state, no-one is stuck in any particular position.

Relationship and relative position are two conditions that allow a society to exist harmoniously.  We hear too much from educators and education administrators that the simple respect of teachers by students has disappeared from the classroom, making teaching and learning more difficult.  The classroom is one place where acknowledgement of difference (between students and teacher) is useful and productive.

As with many situations where such acknowledgement is useful, it is not the case that the difference necessarily exists outside that particular situation.  For instance, a year-twelve student may be an excellent tennis player and be a personal coach to one of her school teachers.  A football umpire may be an employee of one of the players in an amateur team.  The unequal relationship in each case is useful in the particular situation in which it exists.

In the wider community there is nothing inherently ‘unequal’ between a young person and an octogenarian.  However, the younger person holding a door open for the older one is perhaps silently saying, ‘I acknowledge that you have lived sixty years longer than I have and you have probably experienced many things I can only guess at, and I respect you for that.’  In return, the younger person will likely have the respect of the older.

I used the word ‘elder’ earlier.  We used to recognise the elders in our communities – people who had learning and wisdom that others could benefit from.  It was not necessarily formal learning – often life experiences, adversities and ‘aha’ moments.  Youngsters used to have more consistent contact with grandparents who were often more able than parents to instil a sense of balance into young people’s lives.  This contact also made youngsters more aware of the elements of the life cycle, including ageing and dying.

It seems to me that governments also used to take more note of elders in the community, especially in the guise of academics and scientists.  Policies and parliamentary decisions were more informed than they are now by the ‘wisdom’ of people who were acknowledged experts in their fields.  Such people are still appointed to committees and boards of enquiry, but their recommendations are often rejected or simply ignored.  Expediency, short-sightedness and economic/financial/political self-interest seem to be the major reasons.

The important question is: how can we bring more of these useful qualities back into daily life?  They cannot be mandated or legislated into existence.  They need to come through leadership, most importantly leadership from politicians demonstrating respect for each other and for society’s institutions.  It is very damaging to the fabric of society when the prime minister attacks the judges of the High Court because she does not like their decision in a particular matter, or if the Minister for the Environment makes a personal attack on a scientist instead of engaging in a debate on the real issues.

Something that would help redress the situation is the establishment of more mentoring relationships between elders and young people.  Youngsters crave such relationships because they crave guidance to help them make sense of what is to them a very confusing world.  If a critical mass can be reached, we may again achieve a society in which harmony and goodwill are more common than is disruption and violence.

© 2011 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

CLICK HERE to download a formatted PDF of the above post

See more of Daan Spijer’s writing and his photos at Seventh House Communications