Friday, November 11, 2016

What the World Needs is ... Evolutionary Love

On the day Donald Trump became president elected of the #USA2016 I went to a Stacey Kent concert in Rotterdam #Netherlands.


What lovely music. Her voice and singing: beautiful, intense, crystal clear and honest. I cried twice. After her first song she spoke to the audience. She told she slept that night 1.5 hour and that her heart was broken in thousands pieces because Hillary Clinton didn't win the elections. Heartbroken and devastated.

What puzzles me since, is 'Why?'. Why are so many people so over the top on Trump's "winning"? He won? She lost? Why don't we celebrate democracy? We agree, we disagree and we agree to disagree. Play hard to get selected but within the rules of the law. Democracy isn't perfect but it's, "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried" (Churchill). Give the President elected a fair chance. In people we trust. In democracy we trust. In the long run presidents want to be remembered as a "good" president. This endeavor is a guarantee for "misbehavior". Have trust!

Next to that there is a bias when we see democratic elections as a "game of or win or lose". The image is according to me wrong. The engine of the evolutionary process is not struggle, strife, greed or competition. Rather it's nurturing love. In which individual 'homo sapiens' are prepared to sacrifice their own perfection for the sake of the wellbeing of its neighbor.

Addendum to my 'reading list on history' (October 19, 2016):
21. Charles S. Peirce/ Evolutionary Love (1893). Antidote against Charles Darwin's image 'Survival of the Fittest'. The image is not evolutionary competition but evolutionary love.

P.S. Number 21 is a footnote on number 4, this is the power of images/ metaphors.

1 comment:

  1. I really want to believe in democracy, but I would not fail to realize facts such as: big corporations dominate the media, promote slave labor in several poor countries as well as commit serious environmental crimes and .... elect presidents. This makes democracy something very fragile today. Still democracy is better than a dictatorship. Trump is also a person who has publicly declared contempt for black people, for women,etc, this in 2016 should be unacceptable, extremists who support people like him now feel "authorized" to commit abuses (and several events of violence against minorities have already been reported in USA), that situation if not controlled can cause a lot of damage. I hope he is more thoughtful in his government than he was to give statements permeated with prejudice. Btw when I saw the result I remembered a phrase in Kafka's diary: "August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon." I'm not sure I can explain why this came to my mind.

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