Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society is a lesson for humans, culled from studies on primate behavior. The fascinating lessons push the boundaries between man and animal. The book is also a plea for the use in human society of the concept of ‘living together.’

Frans de Waal, a multi-awarded primatologist and ethologist who became one of 2007 Time Magazine 100 World’s Most Influential People Today, is an author of numerous books and scientific papers. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing.

In a time when humans look out for their own interest in the name of survival, animals teach us that we are our brothers’ keepers and that we have the natural instinct for compassion. de Waal tells us his observations from years of fieldwork and laboratory research on chimpanzees, bonobos, and capuchins, as well as on dolphins and elephants, ‘that many animals are predisposed to take care of one another, come to one another’s aid, and, in some cases, take life-saving action.’ For de Waal, every human is destined to be humane.

In The Age of Empathy, de Waal says, “We start out postulating sharp boundaries, such as between humans and apes, or between apes and monkeys, but are in fact dealing with sand castles that lose much of their structure when the sea of knowledge washes over them. They turn into hills, leveled ever more, until we are back to where evolutionary theory always leads us: a gently sloping beach.”

Man, today, has seen greed as an organic result of the human will to survive. de Waal exhorts everyone to believe that  empathy is required for survival and that we must completely revise our assumptions about human nature.

Empathy is more sophisticated than greed and self-preservation, in fact. And this is seen among nonhuman primates. In a national park in the Ivory Coast, chimpanzees have been observed licking the blood of comrades attacked by leopards, and slowing their pace to allow the wounded to follow the group. In the same community, there have also been several cases of adoption of orphans by adult females, as well as by males. Among nonhuman primates, there is the collective interest to cooperate.

Just when the world has turned aggressively selfish and competitive, the nonhuman primates as well as other mammals have retained their instinct for altruism. Humans can learn from the chimps the ability to be genuinely concerned for the welfare of others.

Photo courtesy of Frans de Waal
Wikimedia Commons

Retailer brand Lord & Taylor has not changed its tag line in the times of recession. There is no reason why should it change either for recession is not going to change human attitudes and instincts overnight. Human world is full of emotions and competitions. There is no point in denying that most people want to love self, spend on self to look better, dress better simply to make others envious and win attention. These are all evolutionary instincts. The ad is bitchy and extremely straightforward.

It is indeed strange to expect recession to have great impact on the world. It is still the same materialistic world with same human breed and greed. Once recession ends and the cash flows everyone will be back to spending and splurging. Human memory is short and everyone forgets the hard times. World has seen many a wars, genocides but still conflicts continue. There has been worse era of depression in human history in the past and people have been rendered homeless and jobless, but yet world as a whole has succumbed to greed and materialism.

Lord & Taylor is being realistic about contemptuous and bitchy world we all live in. And it better remain materialistic world for business interests.

Via BrandFreak

Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas have agreed to do the sequel of the film ‘Wall Street’ (1987). Fox Studios is also negotiating with actor Shia LaBeouf for a role in the film. Allan Loeb wrote the screenplay. Ed Pressman, producer of the original film, will likewise finance the sequel. Filming is expected to start this summer.

Douglas, 64, won a best-actor Oscar for his work on the original version. His character Gordon Gekko, a powerful and unscrupulous corporate raider who made for himself a huge fortune, became the iconic representation of Wall Street and capitalistic greed and corruption. The film is now known as the ‘archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess,’ especially with Douglas’s character’s mantra of “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” and his thinking that a few million dollars is a negligible amount.

A repeat of his role these days augurs well for the current theme of the times: a global economic meltdown that commenced at Wall street and is traceable to greedy financial executives.

The sequel is said to focus on a young Wall Street tyro, much like Charlie Sheen’s role of a stockbroker upstart in the original version.

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Via The Huffington Post

When income does not go to savings, it generally ends up in the realm of consumption. The principle of consumption rests on the concept of disposable income. When one has more income to spend, he has the bigger opportunity to consume.

Consumption is rather attractive and tempting, at times. In a free world, there really is no barrier to consumption except the material capability for it. So, those who can afford to spend more, consume more. And those who cannot – do not. The balance is tipped in favor of those who use up more of the finite resources of this world. The end result is sheer disparity in resources between the haves and the have-nots.

Additionally, consumers become victims of producers. The more people consume, the more producers use up the raw materials available on the planet to fashion them into material goods or services for the consumers to avail of.

The weakness that is inherent in consumption is its loss of control. Consumption is bred by greed. People will avail of things that may include those that they do not even need. Some ugly scenarios include traffic jams where people who can afford to buy vehicles buy more than they actually need in terms of the transportation purposes of vehicles.

Purchasing power is the bastard son of a capitalist and consumerist society that comes with free market economy.

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Via Congoo

Once again, the American people are living in a time of utter concern for their economy. While the American government speaks in terms of its military victories over agents of terror, the ordinary American taxpayer might not be aware that he or she shall continue to shell out for his or her government’s military spending.

Through the decades, however, the American people continue to learn the lessons that have to be learned, that of being democratically empowered to be stronger than their government.

Eisenhower’s politics, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and Reaganomics have all been huge phenomena that have had great impact on the lives of the American people. At the very least, these five social, political, and economic events have helped the American people determine their wisdom and resolve.

The United States of America aims to be a global hegemony where many nations would be subordinate to. The trend for such has shown. This bid for hegemony has always taken the form of wars. Military and foreign aid that was rising in demand was the main reason for Eisenhower’s failure to reduce federal spending. The anti-Communism war that the US waged in Vietnam, the biggest proof of how US reacted to the Communist threat, debilitated the US economy at more than $167 billion dollars a year in war costs. Reaganomics’ tax reform policies glowingly included large-scale deficit spending on the military, thereby significantly increasing public debt.

George W. Bush’s War on Terror has been a massively-funded military expedition against terrorists, thereby giving birth to such a global sociopolitical phenomenon called Islamophobia. This US-backed colossal global war against terrorism continues to hurt the pockets of each and every American taxpayer.

The American people have always been wary of their government. Eisenhower ended up with the image of a ‘do-nothing’ president. Reagan fell out of grace because his economic reforms consequently hurt the American public. Public skepticism and cynicism eventually befell the government proponents of the war in Vietnam. Total distrust in the powers of the White House was all that was earned by Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

The Watergate scandal started the eventual weakening of the power of the US presidency, so much so that big business had taken the reins of power in the United States. With the current US financial crisis and global economic meltdown that springs from it, the global public is now wary of the power and influence of big business. Greed is now a four-letter word.

The American people have shown their discerning intelligence and wisdom through the decades. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is proof that there is such a thing as Americans’ collective decision to harness collective action towards a just society that is not subservient to the excesses of power. No matter what government and whoever president is put in place at the White House, it is the American people that sway the American fate. The will of the people was ultimately more powerful than the power of their government. Conversely, no American government was ever more powerful than the collective will of the American people. Truly, the United States of America has been a solid proof of the power and influence of the citizenry. In a word, democracy.

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Pride renders in a proud man’s mind the idea that he has more rights than others, since he is deemed to be in a superior position. He, therefore, has the right to amass wealth more than the others. Pride leads to greed and gluttony, two more deadly sins, because pride gives the false impression that it is alright to gain more and merit more.

The feeling of superiority that a proud man has is very dangerous in the general scheme of things. Resources in the world are finite and competitively won. The proud man, in his high regard of himself, thinks that he deserves more than others do. Moreover, he also thinks that he can get more than others can. He thinks that his superior position gives him the right to get more and more, at the expense of others who are bound to lose more and more, in the process.

Pride motivates competition that can range to abnormal levels. A man afflicted with pride is never satisfied with anything and everything that can and will feed his pride. It is a natural and logical characters of his, too, to covet much more because he is in constant jealousy of what others have. Pride, then, also causes envy and lust in a man. Envy and lust are two other deadly sins. Pride, and all the other deadly sins that it encompasses, is a bottomless pit that can never be filled to the brim. It always needs feeding.

An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth, is what makes pride trigger the other destructive forces of envy and lust. The basic motivator for pride is self-preservation. The proud man always finds some other things in others that he will always be envious about and lustful for. In his mind, these coveted things will help him self-preserve his superior position, be it his brother’s new struggling company or his best friend’s very attractive trophy wife.

Since pride causes or triggers all of the other deadly sins, it is the worst negative trait of all. It is also the most destructive because it ultimately causes discrimination and inequality among people. In this world, the most discriminatory governments are the ones that cause inequalities among nations. These countries think of themselves loftily because they are undeniably superior among the rest. They reached a superior position precisely because of their pride and all the other negative traits that pride spawns.

These are the rich countries of the First World who did not become rich without gaining material wealth at the expense of the poorer nations. Resources on the planet are finite and limited. Therefore, they are competitively won. The richest nations are those that have been winning this competition for material resources. They have succeeded, of course. But the material wealth they have been earning are also the losses of the poorer countries. The pride in these rich countries has caused the great social and economic divide in this world.

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On the Pope’s visit to Angola, he called for an end to wars, tribalism, corruption, and the eradication of greed. Those words describe the decades-long strife and misery in the continent. He also paid tribute to women and cultural values, aspects of the continent’s strength. In a statement over Vatican Radio, Benedict said that war can destroy everything that is of worth such as families, whole communities, and the hope that guides and sustains lives and work, and that it results in fatigue of men. “The destructive power of civil war, the result of hatred and revenge, is a recurring experience in Africa,” the Pope lamented.

“The Gospel teaches us that reconciliation, a true reconciliation, can only be the result of a conversion, a change of heart, a new way of thinking. We are taught that only the power of God’s love can change our hearts and make us triumph over the power of sin,” he said. He added, “When the Word of God, a word that looks to the building of individuals, the community, the entire family is unattended, when the Law of God is ridiculed, scorned and mocked, the result can only be destruction and injustice, the humiliation of our common humanity and the betrayal of our vocation to be children of the merciful Father, brothers and sisters of his beloved Son.”

Later, Benedict paid particular tribute to the women who, in a world dominated by technology, almost always manage to keep dignity intact, defending the family and protecting cultural and religious values.

He also lamented how history records the achievements almost exclusively of men, when in fact a very important part is due to the decisive and purposeful action of women. The Pope said that “at present, no one should doubt that women are fully entitled to enter actively in any field of public life and her right must be legally affirmed and protected, but the recognition of public role of women should not diminish the unique role they have within the family.”

The Pope dedicated his homily to the ‘national reconciliation in Angola.’

Via Reuters/Vatican

Images courtesy of Reuters

Wall Street is not a metaphor for greed. It is greed itself. In his radio program, the US president lashed out for the second time in less than a week at the financial market of his country. Obama warns that the US economic situation “is going to get worse before improving.” He also attacked what he called “arrogance and greed” of Wall Street. Obama is up against the likes of Gordon Gekko, the Wall Street corporate raider whose character Michael Douglas deftly played in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film ‘Wall Street.’

Finally, there is an American figure of authority who stares American greed in the eye and calls a spade a spade.

Earlier, Obama expressed outrage over reports of bonuses given to Wall Street executives in 2008 despite massive job cuts, financial losses, and government rescue plans. He was appalled upon knowing that even while demanding assistance from taxpayers, Wall Street firms paid nearly $20 billion in bonuses and perks to highers up in the financial industry. Wall Street has always been known for excesses, after all.

Obama is now demanding for an “unprecedented transparency, rigorous monitoring and clear accounts” for the funds that are intended to stabilize the financial system. This may be a complete reversal of how the financial industry operates away from the mainstream public eye. The wheelin’-and-dealin’ in Wall Street is almost executive privilege. With Obama opening the box, Wall Street may yet cease to be an enigma of greed.

Such is the price to pay when private sector bungles up, leaving itself with no choice but to let government in. With government funds infused into major financial and business institutions, the taxpayers’ government will now be privy to how secrets are carried out in the financial industry – that is, if secrets can still exist. With Obama around, Gordon Gekko’s kind will soon be a vanishing breed in a place where “greed is good.”

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Via Channel 4 News

Government of India has proactively stepped in to rescue Satyam and control the damage done by Satyam scandal to India’s overseas image. Satyam founders Ramalinga Raju, his brother and financial head of the company are in judicial custody for interrogation. Government has appointed three experts as new board members and looks like Satyam and India’s corporate image will be saved though founders of the company are facing criminal charges and may face severe punishment. Analysts are now trying to study the fall of this giant which ushered outsourcing to Indian shores in the first place.

Satyam was one of the pioneers of outsourcing business in India. Ramalinga Raju became a legend and a hero in his homeland for ushering in new prospects and boosting economy of the state and country. History of Satyam dates back to the time when Raju offered services to his first client almost free of cost with his mantra ‘if you don’t like service don’t pay’ just to build an image of credibility and an empire. Experts feel that it was the competition and emergence of new software giants like TCS, Infosys which made Raju falter and gamble ambitiously to stay afloat. Raju continued to offer services at lesser costs and compromised on profits (made them up by forging). It could be wrong financial and overall management strategy of the company or total lack of it which finally became its nemesis. Added to it was the greed and ventures in to real estate. May be global financial crunch was the final prick that burst the bubble.

While the rise and fall of Satyam will go into business books as there are many a lessons to be learnt from the whole saga but Ramalinga Raju’s rise and fall will be more dramatic.

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Via New York Times