In terms of money
Jaap den Haan | 13.05.2007 10:27 | World
No flowers
Sometimes it is counterproductive to critisise people for their money. It safeguards them against constant control and intrusion and gives useful people the opportunity and privacy to do anything at all.
An environmentalist is checked for his electricity-bill, and we see a type of control occurring by for instance housing-corporations, which are the first to take advantage of his ideas leaving or putting still paying occupiers merely in the cold to save energy and money in particular.
This phenomenon we see for instance take place in the Netherlands, symbolically.
Also insurance companies are quick to acknowledge the danger of global warming and assess the risk of floods, as is now happening in London.
As long as anything can be measured in terms of money, it is real to the public, which is the first victim of its assessment, trapped.
A lover of nature who buys vegetables in the shop is checked if he doesn't have too many flowers in his garden where he could grow vegetables instead, a surgeon if instead of the delicate and expensive knives he uses for surgery has no ordinary kitchen knives at home, and a media-reporter if he has no pigeons to bring the news. A genius is accused not to have been just an average schoolboy.
An illegal good-looking female somewhere is also a great joy to the envious public, if it will provoke a sense of guilt or shame it doesn't have itself.
Politicians are expected to be the religious leaders that are missing and obviously missed in real. And so politics seems to revolve around the possibility of a scandal more and more. As a reaction it constantly seeks to represent and appeal to controversial elements in society. And the real scandal left are we to ourselves. We are supposed to grow very docile from this type of concern and more subservient even than we were.
Revolutions often became colourless, regressive and even repressive by this type of reasoning: no flowers.
That people with some quality are constantly checked in this way may exactly be one of the reasons why they go into retreat and why there are so few politicians left with some integrity, and the ones left are reactionary. Nobody else wants to take any responsibility.
Sometimes it is counterproductive to critisise people for their money. It safeguards them against constant control and intrusion and gives useful people the opportunity and privacy to do anything at all.
An environmentalist is checked for his electricity-bill, and we see a type of control occurring by for instance housing-corporations, which are the first to take advantage of his ideas leaving or putting still paying occupiers merely in the cold to save energy and money in particular.
This phenomenon we see for instance take place in the Netherlands, symbolically.
Also insurance companies are quick to acknowledge the danger of global warming and assess the risk of floods, as is now happening in London.
As long as anything can be measured in terms of money, it is real to the public, which is the first victim of its assessment, trapped.
A lover of nature who buys vegetables in the shop is checked if he doesn't have too many flowers in his garden where he could grow vegetables instead, a surgeon if instead of the delicate and expensive knives he uses for surgery has no ordinary kitchen knives at home, and a media-reporter if he has no pigeons to bring the news. A genius is accused not to have been just an average schoolboy.
An illegal good-looking female somewhere is also a great joy to the envious public, if it will provoke a sense of guilt or shame it doesn't have itself.
Politicians are expected to be the religious leaders that are missing and obviously missed in real. And so politics seems to revolve around the possibility of a scandal more and more. As a reaction it constantly seeks to represent and appeal to controversial elements in society. And the real scandal left are we to ourselves. We are supposed to grow very docile from this type of concern and more subservient even than we were.
Revolutions often became colourless, regressive and even repressive by this type of reasoning: no flowers.
That people with some quality are constantly checked in this way may exactly be one of the reasons why they go into retreat and why there are so few politicians left with some integrity, and the ones left are reactionary. Nobody else wants to take any responsibility.
Jaap den Haan