gm-reflection

                Comments of a Demented, Out-of-Clue, Naive Person?        I did a double take. Was Pope Leo okay? What on earth is he talking about? After all, the numbers are brutal. According to Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization , 90–95% of societies have engaged in war at some point in history. Hard to argue with those numbers. But Raymond C. Kelly, in Warless Societies and the Origin of War , challenges that view. He suggests war isn’t universal. Many early societies thrived on peaceful relationships — trade, intermarriage, and shared work. War came later, he argues, once wealth accumulated and fences were built. So, which is it? Are we born to war, or are we just stuck in the current story? At first, I dismissed Pope Leo’s sentiment as naïve. “War is not inevitable?” Come on. But the more I sat with it, the more it gnawed at me. Maybe he’s not entirely wrong. Maybe he's saying something we've forgo...

  “They say I’m the poorest president. No, I’m not. Poor are those who want more... because they’re in an endless race.” — José Mujica In my previous post, I looked into the “black mirror”: power almost always wins. The revolution becomes the regime. The wheel spins back to hierarchy.  But what if… not everyone played that game? What if—amidst the palace walls and propaganda machines—there were a few who remembered what power was meant to be? A burden, a service, a duty! A good man recently passed away. His life gave me hope. His example inspired me to look for many others—well-known and lesser-known—who held power but chose to be servants of the people. We’re talking about José Mujica , President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He walked into the office as a poor man. He walked away a poor man. Mujica lived on a small farm, drove a beat-up VW Beetle, and donated most of his salary. He governed with quiet resolve—legalizing marijuana, investing in the poor—not from a palace, bu...

  “If there is no transformation inside of us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.” -  Peter Block We’ve believed for centuries that once power falls and the oppressed rise, all will be made right. We imagine a world where everyone sings campfire songs and roasts marshmallows. But that’s not the reality. Let’s look back at recent history - these examples are still fresh. Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot... they all rose on the backs of the oppressed, only to become the very tyrants they once fought. Mussolini rose as a revolutionary socialist, a man of the people, before morphing into the architect of Italian fascism. Stalin took the Soviet dream of worker emancipation and turned it into a machinery of purges, show trials, gulags, and fear. Pol Pot promised power to the peasants but ended up emptying the cities, banning books, and murdering nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in pursuit of a purified agrarian utopia. Anyone r...