I was thinking about power and responsibility the other day – as you do 🙂

It’s a bit of a theme with me, that I see many human things around me in terms of those two terms. I believe (helped of course by reading science-fiction 😛 ) that having power without responsibility makes you bad, having responsibility without power makes you sad and having them unbalanced makes you mad. Or maybe it’s viceversa 🙂

Anyhoo, I reckon that only by having a balance of power and responsibility can we act well.

I will examine those two words in other articles. For now though, I want to focus on human systems. I was reading an article a couple of months ago, and for the life of me I can’t find it. What I understood it to say is that roughly 50% of the people surveyed don’t believe democracy is the best ruling system. Now I have to confess I am biased and stand with Winston Churchill “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. I shall explain.

Going back to power and responsibility, I guess the point I am taking from the life I have lived until now is that only people can take responsibility for themselves. And if they are to take responsibility, they might as well take the power to help them carry it. The alternative, for me, does not bear contemplating. Now I don’t mean each man for himself, That’s why I have used the plural, because I believe that only by standing together we escaped extinction, only by standing together we hunted the mammoth and only by standing together we have any chance of making it past the troubles that are all around us. I am, after all, a humanist.

And yet, people have an abysmal record when it comes to turning against their own. How to reconcile these without going bad, mad or sad? I guess I could analyze the options, at least those that have already been applied: oligarchy, aristocracy, autocracy, anarchy, theocracy. Each of them have been taken to extremes by people with the usual gruesome consequences. Each of them has its own proponents and protesters. But in all of them, the responsibility remains with the people themselves (yes, even in a theocracy, it is still people) yet the power stands (with the exception of anarchy) with people that are kept apart by an ideology that accepts collateral damage in its own name. I have issues with that.

Isn’t it enough that democracy itself is too generalizing because there are too many of us for it to be flexible? Do we have to loosen the reins on an already damaging idealism and make a joke out of caring for one another?

I have spoken before about my views on communism and capitalism (please please please do not confuse them or put them on the same level as the subject we are already discussing!). I have already expressed a wish for a particular type of revolution. But what worries me is not the fact that many people wish for something else than democracy. It’s the fact that history seems to have been forgotten… or not learnt. Except for Antarctica, where we don’t seem to want to live, each of the continents has seen different ruling systems put in place at one time or another. Countless people have died, are dying or wish they were dead because of them. All of the systems are thought up and executed by people, no matter what else they might say. A few people, I might add. It seems to me that, chancy as it were, standing and ruling together is the best hope to actually live.

People ruling… safety in numbers… democracy. Now, if only we could get it right!




I was thinking about this after a long talk with a friend but also after a bit of a media binge. Government departments applying the rules with no flexibility. Businesses trying to reach many more people effectively. Finding a doctor that suits one’s personality and approach. Industrial revolution – no, I am not joking! They are related at some level but it took a while to figure out what that level actually is.

And I’ve got it!

It’s the generalized approach. Like clothes size 8 that fit only a percentage of the people who should generally meet the size criteria. It’s the rules and regulations that we are supposed to follow just because they are despite not actually being suited to the humans who live with them. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against rules and regulations per se. In fact, I think they are necessary. I just don’t think that there is a one size fits all approach.

Where does the industrial revolution actually fit in this? I have this (potentially wrong) idea that prior to the industrial revolution most people were self-employed contractors. Some were not, like slaves, priests, aristocrats. But most were, participating in a loosely wild economy. It seems that the industrial revolution changed this into a rigid, time-bound system that had flow-on effect on most human life, from child care to leisure to death. And despite it being only a couple of hundreds years old, the “civilized” world swears by it and has to be forced to percieve alternatives. The language we use is telling: a self-employed” person is somebody who is “out of the rat-race” as opposed to a government employee being “out of the wild race” or some such expression. So the rat-race is normal and being out of it is not, with (again!) flow on effects like being eligible for social welfare or insurance.

One reason for the above is sheer number. Of people, I mean. Because, of course, other flow on effects of the industrial revolution were the advances in health care, sanitation, convenience etc. So people numbers went up like a kite. So then the generalization that made the Industrial Revolution possible became necessary – or so we think.

Now we’re going the other way and talking more and more about population burden and reducing the number of people on Earth. Few of us have actually stopped to think what that may mean though. We may agree that there are too many of us, but somehow we never include ourselves in the number of people who needs to… disappear, for want of a better word… like death. It always seems to be someone else who needs to die so that we may continue to experience the better life, on a cleaner planet with enough food, water and services.

And yet live how? Why do we have to be lucky to be told that there are alternatives to the rat race? Like self-sufficiency. Or financial independence. Or self-employment. Work from home. Creativity.

What would you choose, if money was not a factor?










This, our pride cannot concede.
















Two strikes against me: I am lazy and it looks like I might die before I “should”. And all because of nature, it’s all her fault! 🙂

The particular state that apparently contributes to the moral judgement and potential demise described above is sleep. Yes, that brother of Death, but different from coma, anesthesia or hybernation. Sleep itself is poorly understood (we know it’s essential but that’s pretty much it), subject of much research (so that we might have an idea as to why it’s essential), a huge source of money and suffering and, of course, the best place for dreams.

The laziness comes from a mere accident of history. The civilized world we live in has been set up by and for the benefit of early risers, which I am so NOT! Which meant that I spent almost a lifetime being sleep deprived. I will assume that I slept enough as a child and on school holidays/weekends. I definitely tried! 🙂 But in our world of 8 am starts which means a 6.30 to 7 wake up time so that you can have breakfast and walk to whereever you need to be, I accummulated a lot of sleep debt. And, of course, I am considered lazy as you cannot get much sense out of me before 9 or 10 am.

But wait, there’s more! I also tend to sleep longer than the 7-9 hours considered normal for a healthy adult. If allowed I average 10-12 hours. Lazy, much? I could be told so, if someone could actually stop me during my awake period 🙂 Apparently this longer sleeping preference could increase the chances that I die earlier… although we mostly don’t know why and no studies that I know of have managed to account for such factors as depression, cancer and other fatigue-inducing illnesses. So I will ignore this until such time as we know more.

I love to sleep. I love getting tired knowing that I can then sleep. I anticipate lying down and having a bit of time to just think and create. I used to also indulge in staying as late as I could (sometimes all night) for the sheer pleasure of falling asleep.

It hasn’t always been easy. As a teen my mind used to be so busy I would have trouble falling asleep. I was lucky in that I was reading some combination of fiction – self help books and I found out about meditation, visualization and the rest. I practiced religiously, even when I could see no results, and I would go as far as saying that it saved my life. I use this to sleep to this day, especially when stressed.

Then I had a baby and thought my life was going to be over. You know how you are told of the lack of sleep and how to manage it? Well, I tried to prepare for it, by using meditation and visualization to “command” myself to wake up when needed and fall asleep as soon as I was not needed. It worked, and I am lucky in that I don’t have an early riser 🙂 But having a baby means less time for myself – music, reading, people etc. So, stubborn and self-indulgent person that I am, I tried to push the boundaries: with falling asleep and getting up sorted, I started staying up later and later, with the expected results: fatigue, short attention span, worse memory (it’s merely very good now, down from great) and less creativity. All in all, a big and rapidly increasing sleep debt, with nothing else to give…. but stubbornness and self-indulgence 🙂

So I have given myself a stern talk-to and I started looking forward to stretching out on my bed again… to think, to dream and, who knows, maybe to create.
















