Even more feral

Social media, the modern battlefield for consumerists. My former workplace still fights hards for them valuable google reviews, and since the first comment of an unhappy neighbour, which accidentally is my house mate, the number of reviews has increased tenfold.

Honestly, I'd love to put it all behind. Due to utter stupidity on my side, I got confronted with this story again. And while I don't like mudslinging, I appreciate honest feedback. About less than a week ago, I heard about the next rallying call to rescue the reputation of this company, and found about 30 positive reviews floating in in just one evening.

As those reviews remain, I save myself from the copy and paste job of praising the product, its maker, the staff, the environmental highfalutin and so on. Marketing works, and most people taste the image of a product, and not its ingredients. My palate has adapted, though, to the nuances of this fermented product. Other frequent consumers, not being inundated by marketing, also agree that a potentially healthy drink turned into a sugary soft drink.

As I haven't sampled other brands lately, I can't assess how "real" the product from this company tastes in comparison to its competitors. The homebrew I had some months sets the standard of what I consider the real deal, and neither bottles nor kegs of my former employer get close. Anyway, while I'm cautious to prevent to name names, I'm certain if this blog is found it will be used against me.

Before the flood of good reviews came in, customers of the online shop reacted. Viki wrote:
"$19.95 for a ***** and I got two little pieces that didn't do anything.  Shopped on Gumtree and got a large health ***** for $10 that is going gangbusters." Charles commented:
"VEGAN RIP OFF This is the smallest ******** I have ever seen for the price!!! I don't even have a carbon footprint I got but stomped on with this one...  NEVER AGAIN ***..:( :( :( :("

Now, as these reviews refer to the actual product, and not how well the company gets along with its neighbours, it's probably hard to flag this feedback as "inappropriate". The majority of comments I quoted in the first part of this saga have gone by now, although I saw some reappearing temporarily. No idea whether the removed feedback stills gets into the average which now stands at 4.3 stars.

Even though I didn't want to, let's quote a five star review from the night of upvoting, as it presents the mixed approach of selling product and "community engagement". Gav wrote: "awesome brews and a real hub for community. i would love to see them host way more events at their brewery with lots of sustainable tunes to bring happiness to all of Brunswick. Could only be better if the tunes were loud enough to hear it from my place !"

Dear Gav, just move into one of the about twenty or so properties close enough. It's just, those people living here already for decades don't seem to share your enthusiasm. Paul steps in for his mom, who most likely doesn't engage on social media. "Every time I visit my mother all I can hear is horrible techno music coming from down the street. She will not open a window or even venture out into her beloved garden because of these disrespectful people.  techno music all day and then live bands on the weekends blasting out onto the street. She can't move. Over 40 years in her home and some tool is trying to drive her and her neighbours out. Respect your neighbours. There is no need for your music to be played so loud that all can hear it down the street. You do not realise what you are doing to the mental state of people who just want to get by. please consider."

I did the emphasis, for good reasons. I remember a neighbour coming into the warehouse stating something similar - that the sounds coming from the warehouse were meant to drive him out of his home. Unsurprisingly, when I mentioned today that I considered some of the negative feedback coming genuinely from real existing neighbours, I was again blamed for not convincing my housemate to withdraw her comment.

Carl sounds like someone who visited the place which once was flagged as "HQ". He writes: "Scary people. Unfriendly. Unclean premises." As I experienced quite different moods while working there, and various characters as visitors or extreme short-term staff, I have no difficulty imagining getting such an impression on a first visit. After all, I spend lots of time, especially when I had the hunch that things aren't working out the way I envisaged, in maintaining the front yard to create a pleasant impression.

I have to admit, the last quote might actually been inspired by social media sympathy, and not by the unique experience this business offer. Sally wrote: "A lot of great reviews is a very short period of time, no doubt most of them are just rubbish reviews designed to boost your rating, seems they have no problems criticizing people but when people do it to them they throw a tantrum like a bunch of 5 year old's, man up you bunch of pansies or go back to Healesville.

Pluggers review of this sh--t hole is the best and funniest I have read in a long time, need to put this one up on twitter, love the writing on board out the front by the way LOL"

Unfortunately, I haven't found pluggers review, I could do with some funny stuff while I'm confronted with lots of challenges. Telling this story provides me with some relief after a real life encounter with this severe storm in a teacup. I got reminded today to pick my team - which is ridiculous as life isn't a competition. I'm with team humanity.

Since I have left facebook I'm no longer exposed to vicious online battles, which usually exceeds how most people would interact in real life, even in conflict. I walked away from a work environment with an extremely volatile boss, as I don't believe in the "my way or the highway" mythos for lasting cooperation. I worked enough with change management systems to realise that individuals resisting to change themselves will not change anything around them for the better.

I might have burned a bridge, but sometimes bridges connect fertile grounds to wasteland.

Human nature

Language acts like a virus, especially once we enter the level of abstraction. While we might learn from General Semantics, or Rene Magrittes famous painting 'Ceci n'es pas une pipe', that even words describing tangible objects fail to capture the suchness of the worded item, abstractions lead us to a dive in truly murky waters.

We pave the road to misunderstandings elegantly when talking about all sort of -isms, as no-one can define those terms with authority and accuracy, albeit many claim to do exactly that. In most real life situations, people insist that 'everyone knows' what communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism etc. means, and whether or not one abstract category fits into another.

Unless we become aware of the inherent inability of using language to describe our individual and shared experience, we are held captive in Plato's cave, and might easily get angry at those who have seen the light of day. That doesn't stop us from attempting to communicate verbally, and luckily in a majority of cases that still works out sufficiently for survival and even enjoyment.

Since Occupy Wall Street happened, the term 'human nature' became a highly popular confusing term to argue either for or against specific ways to organise society. Although all of us have our very own way of perceiving the world around us, and although language with its multiple levels of abstractions makes it challenging to pinpoint some agreeable ideas about 'human nature', I want to give it a shot.

The black-and-white perspective on human nature seems most popular, describing humans as inherently 'good' or inherently 'evil'. I guess most peoples experience rather shows them that some people act without the intent of harming others, and other do. Of course, even 'bad' people do some 'good', and vice versa. Using the black-and-white approach fails from the start to provide a framework that could be backed up by experience, no matter how much one wishes for people to fit into this worldview.

Modern psychology uses the Bell curve as a tool to describe the distribution of human traits. This approach seems much more appropriate to approach 'human nature' than the moralistic ideas lingering around in the dualistic approach of either 'good' or 'evil'.

Bell curve (normal distribution)

A lot of the categories we use in language compare to boxes, especially if we think in mutually exclusive categories (good/evil). Let's put the thinking in boxes aside for a while, and take the above image as a better representation of human nature, with potentially 'good' and 'evil' on the flat ends of the curve. If an axis 'willingness to do harm' exists in human nature, only a few percent fall into the extremes of psychopathy or saints, the rest will simply do whatever they perceive as 'normal'.

The origin of the idea of government, however, links back to the idea that humans can't be trusted, and need protection from each other. This meme spread first via religion (born in original sin), and was then happily reinforced by more secular forms of government which basically acted like parents for entire populations. The expressions 'fatherland' and 'motherland' remind us of the generally parental character of nationhood. 

As humans, we are individual expressions of consciousness, sui generis, and as such share some elementary needs. Besides that, we are pretty unpredictable most of the time, which makes life so interesting. A minority of humans lacks the ability of empathise, and therefor feels no remorse when harming others. How we can we deal with those individuals?

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. In tribal societies, shamans held the responsibility to identify those individuals, and prevent them from harming the rest of the group. People with psychopathic predisposition don't turn automatically into monsters, and can still fulfil useful functions within their community. You might have noticed the absence of shamans in modern society, which happened unlikely just coincidentally.

Without anyone in the position to identify and keep psychopaths in check, they can basically do whatever they like. After killing or removing shamans as safe guards for communities, they could spread fear with impunity. And they used the fear they spread to demand even more power and less control for themselves. 

Has anyone ever wondered why an individual murderer bears the full brunt of punishment society can offer, while president Obama signs off kill list as regular routine task? We live in a world run by psychopaths, which used violence to implement systems of government that create heaven on Earth for themselves and other psychopaths. Being only a minority, this means hell for the rest of us. 

As a majority of humanity can be described as relative gullible, they perpetuate this mad system that harms the rest of humanity, many other forms of life on this planet and the planet itself. This has several motivations. (hey, we're all individuals), which potentially collapse into the erratic believe that human nature is inherently 'good' or 'evil'. As long as we believe in the validity of this construct, psychopath will maintain control over the rest of the population.

If ones believe that we're inherently 'good', then she/he will fall for any intentional lie. If government harms the environment or other people, it is 'for the greater good'. If one believes that we're inherently 'evil', their fear will ask for protection, even from themselves. Just when one understands that we cannot generalise this aspect of human nature, the opportunity arises to reign in the psychopathic elements in society without converting it into a prison for all but the psychopaths.

Humans can adapt probably better than any other species to their environment. Humanity survived much longer without the illusion of government than with it. Well, maybe we managed to get to this historical water shed moment before, and just wiped out the memory of it by nearly extinguishing our species. We have seemingly unlimited learning potential, as individuals and as community. We can create a world that shares the resources of this planet, and allows 100% of humanity to survive and prosper. 

If we don't do it, the cosmos might giggle in schadenfreude about the failed human experiment, or feel sad about its end, or remain equanimous as the universe continues to exist.  

The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed and choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance of divinity - those who mold them themselves blind masks of ideas and thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead man's eyes.

Countless people in East and West throughout the ages have tried to find God, salvation, or enlightenment through denial of the body. This took the form of denial of sense pleasures and of sexuality in particular, fasting and other ascetic practices. They even inflicted pain on the body in an attempt to weaken or punish it because they regarded it as sinful. In Christianity, this is called mortification of the flesh. Others tried to escape from the body by entering trance states or seeking out-of-body experiences. Many still do. Even the Buddha is said to have practiced body denial through fasting and extreme forms of ascetism for six years, but he did not attain enlightenment until after he had given up this practice.

The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of-body experience.