Entries in the 'Globalization' Category

Wishes For 2017

laitman_240Question: In the future will there be more people who have attained spirituality?

Answer: Ultimately all people will reach the spiritual state. My wish for you is that you will attain it in 2017.

But don’t rely on various predictions or astrological forecasts. Don’t believe in any other future than the one you create for yourselves; even though you really want to believe in it, no other kind of future exists.

Everything depends only on the unity between us. We can arrange everything such that it will truly be good for everyone. Humanity is doing everything except for one thing; it is not advancing toward unity. Our role is to prove to the whole world that we only require correct, equal, simple unity.

In the meantime, we are not going this way, and the ground slips from under our feet. We see what is happening today. Soon nobody will be working, there will be no need, neither to work nor to earn money.

I hope that in the coming year this situation will become clear to us and we will finally build the right society, rise a bit higher above our prejudices, and understand that all of us are fragments of one single soul. If we connect them, a collective soul called Adam will be created that will already exist in another dimension, on another level, in eternity and wholeness. That is what I wish for everyone.

I very much hope that this year will enlighten us and will make it possible for us to understand more sharply what is happening, where we are, and what is happening with us through our dull, smoky and “thick-headed” intellect. Then there will no longer be a need to explain anything to anyone. Everything will be clear to everyone.

Let’s try to dispel the fog in our hearts and minds and to be closer to each other! Here’s to health, success, and a future that we build for ourselves!
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/1/17

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General Intention For The New Year

The UN Convention Rights Of The Child Is Pointless

laitman_547_05Comment: The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the UN General Assembly and opened for signature in November 1989. This is the most comprehensive international document for the protection of children’s rights. This convention is supposed to ensure the lives of children all over the world, but unfortunately in many places in the world children live in miserable conditions. Every year about 11 million children die before their fifth birthday and millions are hurt physically or mentally.

My Comment: No declaration can help. The UN is becoming an increasingly ineffective organization. You can declare anything, but it all depends only on people receiving the proper education. First of all, they must think about how to reach the true level of a human being and how to actually fulfill it.

But everyone in the world acts out of a need for control, and the UN, despite its assertions about its successful progress, it is really just “talking shop” for the great powers, and more recently, the Islamist extremists. The UN itself has led to the fact that no one takes them seriously.

Question: What do you think should be the rights of a child?

Answer: Adults must realize that they are responsible for the lives of young children more than for their own lives. We have to educate adults that way.

We are living in the 21st century and children’s lives are not considered of value yet. In many countries, like Syria and Lebanon, for example, minors are turned into terrorists and are sent out in front as a defensive shield. This, of course, is terrible.

Every adult must value the life of a child more than his own life, just like in a family. It is only through the right education that we can write a meaningful convention of children’s rights.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 11/21/16

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Uniting The World Has Turned Into A Sad Holiday

America Welcomes Its New President, Part 1

laitman_426Question: The day after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, America and the entire world split in two, protesters against his rule and those who support it. Do you think this is a temporary phenomenon or a gap that will widen further?

Answer: Actually, such a split has never happened before. After World War II, liberalism became the fashion in the world. Humanity decided that the West, the “free world,” cannot afford many things without any restriction of religion and governmental system, and everyone can feel more or less free.

By itself, liberalism is a good thing, but if it is based on human egoism, it leads to distortions. It happens with everything that people do. There are many excellent qualities and aspirations for remarkable plans that people offer wholeheartedly

Humanity enthusiastically accepts them, without considering that human nature is inherently egoistic. The moment we begin to implement these excellent programs, egoism will begin to wedge into them and turn them so that only destruction will be left.

After all, if we want to correct something, we need to correct our egoism first, and then all aspects of our lives will be corrected. Without this, only harm will come from all the programs.

Therefore, neoliberalism and democracy initially looked very enticing, promising to provide everyone with good development. The problem is that all of this was based on egoism and therefore led to the destruction we observe now.

Democracy and liberalism have led to these distortions that affect everyone. Everyone does what he wants, and this is the most egoistic, abhorrent form possible, especially in our time when egoism has developed so much that it has come to quite unimaginable desires, inclinations, and properties.

It turns out that there are no restrictions on the manifestations of egoism, no power over them, not newspapers, governments, financial oligarchies, not the judiciary, police, nor universities. One cannot raise a child because he will complain about his parents to the police. In society, there are no constraints that would keep it in some kind of a framework so as not to lead to total anarchy.

This is like children who had been granted freedom to run riot as they want. In the end, what will happen with these children? That’s why we have come to such a crisis with the government, finance, media, law enforcement, and judicial systems.

The problem is that we don’t take into account that real democracy requires the prior correction of the egoistic nature of man. Democracy must be built on a corrected basis. Otherwise, it will crumble.

The split that has occurred today in the world is the difference between people who belong to the previous generation that still want some kind of order, and the younger generation, brought up in the last thirty years, who don’t recognize any order and are accustomed to doing
what they want.

So they have, after legal elections, gone out to demonstrate in protest. If they stand up for democracy, why don’t they agree with the President who received the most electoral college votes?

Apparently, they think that the opportunity to display their egoistic nature is democracy and an indicator of a modern, developed person. There is no correction, no understanding of creation, nor even an understanding of how society functions. In the meantime, society is functioning through other people who are preserving it, and the army and police are still working somehow.

However, a polyarchical system has already been built. Everyone wants to rule—the government apparatus, financiers, media, the military, and police. It is happening all over the world, but it must end.

Now is the opportunity to eliminate this conflict in a peaceful, quiet way. It is still possible to fix the destruction done by the liberal rulers in Europe and the previous American leadership in the United States.

Today, there is a struggle between the two parts of America, and it won’t be very simple. Yet, the process doesn’t depend on one or another, and in any case, it will move in the direction of correction. The only question is, which way it will go, good or bad? Hopefully, Trump will be able to implement at least something from his program of change, and the realization of evil will happen through the mind, and not through suffering.
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From the 2nd part of Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/22/17, Lesson on the Topic: “Mismah Arosa” (Arosa Document), “Altruists and Egoists in Society”

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New America + Trump, Part 3
A New President, A New World, New Values

Ynet: “The Day Robots Take Over The Labor Market”


From my column in Ynet: “The Day Robots Take Over The Labor Market”

Autonomous cars that are driven by themselves, three-dimensional printers, and computerized supermarkets without cashiers, what will taxi drivers, salespeople, and all the other people do who have professions that are going to disappear? How will we fill our day after we discover that our workplace has been shut down? Rav Laitman presents the expected scenario of changes in the future society that we should prepare for.

In 2025, the world will be totally different. Sophisticated machines and computers will take over the labor force. Robotic cars that drive by themselves will replace truck drivers, taxi drivers, and bus drivers. We will not need banks either, and professions such as cashiers and other service providers will likely perish from the world. We will still need personnel to operate computerized systems, but will require very few people. The conclusion is simple: most of today’s workers will find themselves without a livelihood.

If such scenarios sound like a science fiction movie trailer, here is some data. The research institute Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, about 50 billion tools, objects, and people are expected to be connected to the Internet. The world will be connected by formats similar to smart cities; we will all live in smart houses, and machines that know how to transmit information between them and give orders to each other without any human contact will be part of our daily lives. This technological revolution is called the Internet of Things (IoT).

Along with the work place, which is like a second home for us today, wages in their familiar form will disappear, money, which gives us an incentive to get up in the morning, glues us together, and compels us to make a living through the connections between us. What will our future source of income be? What will happen to our wages?

It’s All About Relationships

The Americans have great hopes for a better future with the election of Trump. They expect him to create tens of thousands of new jobs and to make America great again. Other people are hoping that salvation will come from science and that scientists will offer a new socio-economic approach. In both cases, it is about covering up the problem, about providing patches that will not last long. Eventually, we must face the growing problem of global unemployment.

You might try to bury your head in the sand like many do or to ignore the enormous changes that are coming, but you should take one thing into account: man’s egoistic nature. It will continue to grow and develop, will become increasingly more ferocious, and might eventually lead puzzled humanity to choose between two familiar options: a Marxist-style socialist revolution or a nationalistic regime with Nazi/Hitler-style characteristics.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the solution is in building the right relationships between people. It is the different social connections throughout history that have formatted different new regimes. Even back in the Middle Ages, different social eras like slavery and feudalism based on agriculture divided society into two major classes: the nobility and the vassals. The egoistic nature in humanity grew stronger at that time and led to the search of crooked ways to profit more, and people began to develop new means that led to great changes.

At the end of the 18th century, the gradual transition to the modern world began. The industrial revolution developed very rapidly and led to urbanization, a process in which the masses in Europe and the US left pastoral villages and moved to big cities that developed around the new factories that were being built. Society gradually changed, and two new classes emerged: the working class and the bourgeois class.

In the middle of the 19th century, the egoistic nature of relations in society became more extreme and took on a new socio-economic format called capitalism. The method was good at first, but the 2008 economic crisis illustrated briefly how far things can go, and generally speaking, few know how to play by the rules of capitalism, and they are the ones who determine the game, and the others, who are the silent majority, lose big time.

Economy or Corruption

Although the economy helps us live, it isn’t life itself. The increasing activity in the model of universal basic income (UBI), according to which the state pays every citizen a daily allowance regardless of his employment status, disconnecting work from pay, is no coincidence. It reflects the awkward attempts to prepare for an era in which there will be no work, but there will be plenty to live on thanks to advanced robotics. This is the reason that, in a digital era that threatens to change jobs as we know them today, we must engage in building a new social structure. As soon as society changes, the economy will change.

How will we bring about the change? Just as we are all products of the public education system that was founded with the acceleration of the industrial revolution in the 19th century in order to train skilled workers for the professional work on the assembly lines of the factories, we also must bring about an unprecedented educational revolution in the 21st century. This means that we must adapt the relationships between us through educating the masses to live in a new society.

What is the first step? It is to attend school once again, to study about the global world and about human nature, and to discuss how we can tighten the positive relationships between us at a roundtable. The positive force of connection we will create and establish between us will balance the negative force of our egoistic nature, restrain it from disintegrating relationships, and will provide every individual with an income in the emotionally and psychologically in the form of happiness, joy, peace, and tranquility.

Homemade

Such an educational initiative is based on the laws of global nature, which is taught by the wisdom of Kabbalah. Unity is the most basic, natural structure. Nature aspires for balance, equality, and wholeness, and since people are part of the circle of nature, we, too, are obliged to operate in equality and mutual consideration. The only difference is that in our case, we must do it consciously through an educational process. We will put an end to the problem of growing unemployment by promoting an ideology that calls for unity. New jobs will be created for many and their only goal will be generating the positive energy of connection. This will be our production, an income of nobel human value, a pay we will work for.

What will be our work? We will be busy developing a society that encourages closeness between people. We will focus on the improvement of skills such as patience, concession, and restraint in our relationships with others and will increase awareness of social relations hidden from view. We will not be required to change any of the natural attributes we were born with or those we have acquired during our lifetime, but we must learn how to establish nice mutual relationships between us that will guarantee a good and happy life.

What about the basic necessities such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, and other social services like healthcare and education? We will leave that to robots and smart machines. The enormous surplus in manpower will operate the advanced equipment, and wherever manpower is needed, we all will work together in rotation and with great will to serve all of society.

Robots gradually will replace our technical contribution to humanity, but not the human part, which we have not developed yet. When we connect a bit more, the social atmosphere will bring us together and create a new socio-economic structure that we have never known before. The state will become a big communal family, national and personal problems will be solved from a new perspective, and the force of connection will heal society and bring it to its full recovery. The new social economy will finally free us from the continuous worry about making a living and an exaggerated engagement in materialism, and will leave us spare time in order to develop individually, socially, and spiritually.
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From Ynet article 1/5/17

My Thoughts On Twitter, 1/20-22/17

twitter

After liberalism, we must realize: The solution is not in the extremes, but in unification enabled by Integral Education.

Despite what many think, the world is not collapsing as Trump takes over. Rather, it is going through labor pains. Let’s wish it good luck!

The protests of Democrats and liberals against Donald Trump show just how democratic, pluralist, and liberal they are.
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From Twitter, 1/20-22/17

Eleven Years After Arosa, Part 3

Laitman_115_06From “The Crisis and Its Solution” (Arosa Forum Report)

How can we prevent the deepening of the crisis?

To overcome further deepening of the crisis it is necessary to:

1. Acknowledge the existence of the crisis.
2. Reveal its causes.
3. Realize the existence of an alternative and the possibility of getting out of the crisis.
4. Create a plan for exiting the crisis.
5. Implement the plan.

In January 2006 when this report was prepared, the crisis had not yet manifested. Therefore, it was only a warning that the world was entering into crisis and advice about how to avoid it in order not to come to the manifestations that we see today eleven years later.

Today, it is impossible to hide the crisis, although some of its manifestations are still hidden from people and part of the crisis is still not apparent at all, but ready in potential. The crisis has spread to industry, trade, financial and political systems, the control structure of the financial elite over the masses, education, and family—in other words, all areas of human society.

It may seem that these are different crises affecting each of its regions and that it is possible to deal with them separately. However, in fact, there is only one crisis in man’s relationship to human society, which should become more and more integrated and interconnected. If we begin to correct this problem, we will correct each individual crisis that is manifesting today.

In essence, this is a crisis of humanity, rather than of any extraneous things. The crisis is rooted in human society living on Earth, or more precisely, in the most developed countries of North America, Europe, and Asia. The reason for the crisis— the relationship of man to society—is because we feel ourselves as individuals, rather than feeling like an integral part of human society.

Throughout the millennia-old history of humanity, it was considered normal for a person to feel special, set apart from others, and not obliged to anyone. On the contrary, he aspired to use others as much as possible and, by this, to advance.

It is exactly this egoistic aspiration that motivates all human achievements, and it was considered a useful quality. Human society has evolved due to the fact that there were people who used it because they were pulling society forward.

All development was due to the use of human egoism. All great discoveries—new continents, energy, electricity, and drugs—happened precisely because the people who discovered them wanted to gain power, money, and knowledge, which are operated by their egoism.

This was greatly encouraged by society because a person who strove to invent, discover, and create something new was helping others and dragging them along after him.

However, today, this engine has stopped working and even has begun to spin in the opposite direction, and we need to realize that.

All the while, until recently, human egoism was a developing element, a positive factor in the development of mankind. But from a certain moment in time—we could say from the middle of the 20th century, or more precisely, from the creation of the Club of Rome in 1968—humanity began to discover that egoistic acts cause harm.

It is like a fruit that ripens and then begins to rot if we continue to use it as we did before.

Today, the world has realized that there is a crisis but doesn’t see any way out of it, and therefore, everyone is trying not to talk about it. After all, politicians, rulers, and scientists don’t want to show their weakness and inability to manage. They want to believe that they can cope with the crisis.

Now, all hope is with the new US President. All of this is necessary to go through to make sure that it doesn’t work for him either. However, in this way, it will be confirmed that this crisis has no solution on the ordinary, human level.

If the cause of the crisis is human egoism, then only the correction of the relationship of the individual to society can bring us out of the crisis and enable the continued existence of humanity. Otherwise, nature will harshly teach us the path of suffering and wars.

This is not a technical crisis caused by a lack of organization of some material systems, but a human one, at the human level. Therefore, to exit from the crisis, we need not establish a system that is of this world; we need to correct man’s attitude toward nature, society, and his entire existence.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/10/17, Lesson on the Topic, “Mismah Arosa,” (Arosa Document)

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Eleven Years After Arosa, Part 2

laitman_272The Correct Diagnosis Is Half of the Treatment

The signs of a crisis are evident, but as a rule, due to the seeming impossibility of getting out of it, its existence and aggravation are silenced by governments and non-governmental organizations, scientists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Our desire to develop in the usual way, that is, egoistically advancing civilization, technology, and society, has led us to crisis. We wanted to grow and use all available opportunities. Instead, we came to the conclusion that this entire developmental process is stopping and getting out of control

We came to this crisis in a natural way, from our egoistic desire to succeed. It turns out that the entire problem is in our human nature, and when we are guided by it, we come to a standstill. After all, we are developing because of our egoism.

Egoism is an engine of development that pushes us to victory, profit, success, knowledge, understanding, and discoveries. Everyone, from scientists to criminals, acts only in their self-interest, and thus the world is coming to destruction. It is becoming apparent that the use of human egoism is leading us to a bad life, instead of a good one.

During the eleven years since the Arosa report, the world has advanced quite a bit toward the crisis, and now is at a critical turning point. This is also evident from the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency with his declaration to change course. But let’s see how many of his words, programs, and hopes will really remain.

Today, everyone understands that the world must change, especially in everything that relates to the harmful influence of the media and the spread of drugs that has progressed immensely since 2006.

In addition, the world is beginning to give up on money, seeing that it on its own doesn’t bring happiness, which depends much more on human relationships. It is becoming much more evident that money isn’t happiness.

The Muslim refugees became an added problem during these years, meaning the internal crisis in human society in the confrontation of different religions. Another significant change is the last financial crisis in 2008 that inflicted a heavy blow to the US and European economies, which they haven’t recovered from.

The rampant terrorism and wars between nations are realities today. The European Union that was so filled with so many hopes eleven years ago is beginning to collapse. People no longer trust their governments, and governments are losing their ability to govern.

There is a growing frustration of people with politics, media, democracy, and neoliberalism. It is obvious that humanity underwent a qualitative transformation in its perception and evaluation of reality and its values.
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From the 3d part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/9/17, “Mismach Arosa,” (Arosa Document)

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New Life #410 – The Judicial System In Society, Part 2

New Life #410 –  The Judicial System In Society, Part 2
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Summary

The accepted form of punishment in Israeli society today no longer works as a deterrent. How can education be a tool for correction in society instead of punishment?

The word “punishment” is incorrect. There should be correction, meaning an educational process to bring a person to function correctly.

How can we do this? We put a criminal into a society that functions on a high level. We show them good examples and teach them. Why do we do that? Because he previously saw examples in his society that were not good and he learned from them. So now we do the opposite. This is something like the strong social influence in rehabilitation groups from drugs or alcohol.

Today, a person who enters prison learns to be a greater criminal. An offender must learn about human nature and corrected relationships every day.

In the future, in “cities of refuge,” good examples will be provided, what is beneficial will be praised, and what is harmful will be denounced. Understandably, it is impossible today to move to this framework. Before that the entire population needs deep education.

Today we need to add Integral Education in all prisons. We have seen amazing results with this.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #410 – The Judicial System in Society, Part 2,” 6/17/14

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Eleven Years After Arosa, Part 1

Laitman_004

Comment: In January 2006, in the report at the international forum in Arosa, you warned about the beginning of the global crisis and advised how to avoid it. Today, eleven years later, we should return to this report and look at it from the position of the current state of the world.

From the paper “Crisis and Its Solution” for the Arosa Forum 2006

Evidence of the Crisis

The general global crisis of humanity is obvious—depression, drugs, the breakdown of the family, terrorism, uncontrollable social systems, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, ecological catastrophes, and so on. For example, according to the data published by the European Council in the “Gruenbuch” (Green Book), Europeans suffer from serious depression that leads to 58,000 suicides a year, and 30% of all citizens of the EU suffer from a mental disorder.

The imminent threat to the existence of humanity is steadily growing as a result of the use of nuclear weapons. According to leading scientists, humanity does not have that much time to prevent this crisis from developing in an undesirable direction—to thermonuclear world war or global ecological catastrophe.

My Response: Eleven years ago, people didn’t want to admit that the crisis had started and they didn’t believe things were so bad. One of the American scientists I met at that time complained that discussion of the global crisis was banned by the guild of scientists.

Today, it is impossible to impose such a ban because the crisis has become apparent and has affected everyone in some way, every family and every country. The situation in Europe where the Arosa forum was held has changed dramatically. The world has advanced further in the recognition of evil. However, the danger is that humanity still doesn’t know where it is.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/9/17, “Mismah Arisa,” (Arosa Document)

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A Crisis Of The Egoistic Perception

New Life #409 – The Judicial System In Society, Part 1

New Life #409 – The Judicial System In Society, Part 1
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Summary

What is the role of the judicial system in the education of the people, who is suitable for becoming a judge, and why do people need a legal system to define values of good and evil?

The legal system has to educate people. A judge should explain what is right and what is wrong. A judge who understands the depth of creation must show what the deviations from the laws of nature are.

The legal system comes to complete what the educational system didn’t provide. The legal system must clarify what a person is lacking in order to function as a member of society and to be concerned about its achievements.

In a proper society, there must be a permanent influence from the general social educational system on everyone. For some time every day, every person, from the young to old, must be in the framework of social education.

In the event that someone harms another, everyone must sit and clarify what kind of social neglect occurred.

The role of the judge is to help to lead this social inquiry so the process will be educational.
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From KabTV “New Life #409 – The Judicial System In Society, Part 1,” 6/17/14

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