Entries in the 'News' Category

Unemployment In The World Of Unfinished Business!

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Gavriil Popov, President of the International University in Moscow): 
“As it is known, the model of the Soviet and Nazi state socialism ruled out unemployment. There is nothing more difficult for a person than the impossibility of finding a job, that is why unemployment during crises is the main factor of people turning to socialism, national socialism, fascism.

“The experience of Soviet socialism has shown that providing all the members of society with work creates social stability, but reduces the average wage because the output should be divided among everyone; the desire to work effectively is diminished, and society heads towards a dead end.

“Unemployment is inherent in the modern postindustrial formation. But it is intolerable in comparison to the benefits that post-industrialism gives the employed. The solution must combine rewards to those who work efficiently and provide employment to everyone who wants to work with reasonable salaries.

“Therefore, it makes economic sense to have two systems of work:

“The sphere of competitive employment, based on competition, where high earnings stimulate efficiency;

“The sphere of social employment, providing jobs and wages sufficient for life to those who cannot work in a competitive environment (the elderly, the disabled, women with children, the unemployed in the sphere of efficient economy). Social employment must be self-supporting. And there is plenty of work in the social sphere: the collection and recycling of waste, remediation of forests, road repair, remediation of wasteland.”

My Comment: There will be a need for work in the social sphere for many years ahead. In any case, it is necessary to combine work in both spheres with integral education.
[101508]

Related Material:
The Features Of Future Employment
Will The Medicine Of The Future Be Able To Make Everyone Happy?
Unity Is Our Salvation

German President Asks Britain To Stay In The EU

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from The Financial Times): “Germany’s president appealed on Friday to the people of the United Kingdom to remain members of the EU, in a speech intended to counter euroscepticism across the continent.

“’Dear people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, dear new British citizens!’ declared Joachim Gauck. ‘We would like you to stay with us!’

“His appeal to British pride and patriotism – ‘During the second world war, your efforts helped to save our Europe, and it is also your Europe,’ he said – underlined a deep concern in Berlin that a referendum in the UK, promised by David Cameron, the prime minister, could see a British vote to leave the EU.

“We will only be able to master future challenges if we work together. More Europe cannot mean a Europe without you!” …

“He dismissed accusations that Germany was seeking to intimidate its EU partners, or force its ideas on them, in laying down the rules to recover from the eurozone crisis. …

“’This is not just a struggle for our currency,’ he said. Europe was facing more than an economic crisis. ‘It is also a crisis of confidence in Europe as a political project.’…

“’We stand together . . . for peace and freedom, for democracy and the rule of law, for equality, human rights and solidarity.’”

My Comment: Isn’t it too late to appeal for solidarity, and not even complete solidarity at that, just financial? The root of the problem is a gradual shift in the program controlling humanity. The program is gradually changing from egoistic to altruistic and requires humanity to become similar to it and to participate in it actively. Inconsistency with the program is manifested as a multi-faceted crisis.

Humanity has a method of retraining itself to become similar to a new program. The method is called integral education. As long as humanity is stubborn, the program is being introduced more and more in our world, in all its forms, and that is why the crisis is felt stronger from day to day. Let’s wait when the words about equality, rights, and so on will become significant and desirable, instead of empty.
[101425]

Related Material:
Where Are You, Common Europe?
Europe Needs Time To Unite
Europe’s “Proud Empire” Is Entering A Cul De Sac Of History

Where Are You, Men?

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Mikhail Reshetnikov, Professor, Rector of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis, St.-Petersburg): “Scientists talk about social issues – the emergence of a new type of men: a hybrid of the spoiled son and a cowboy, fighting for space under the sun. Concern is caused not by their infantilism, but a tendency to be aggressive in the desire to succeed.

“In the former USSR, the state made decisions and did everything instead of people. Since the time when the state has ceased to be the most powerful ‘parent,’ men themselves have to carry the entire burden of establishing their own life. In Western society before the crisis, everything was clear and divided as well.

“But today, upbringing by the family is lost; 50% of households are single parents; parents and educators are replaced by the TV and Internet, which promote aggressive behavior, the desire to win by force and at any cost. Young people do not have a positive image of the future. In the crisis of modern society we have lost a vision of the social ladder – a degree and knowledge do not help break through. And even a greater crisis is ahead!”

My Comment: Only education will help us support young people, to fill them with a good attitude to life and the world, to show values other than material ones, to instill a desire to receive fulfillment from communication, from the revelation of higher existence, with an equal and fair distribution in which there is no room for struggle and competition. Nature has left us opportunities only for this scenario of life. Our success depends on how much we can fit into this model.
[101344]

Related Material:
Weak Men And Strong Women
Where Are You Real Men?
The Integral Upbringing Of Spouses

Nuclear Weapons Deter Wars

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Sergey Karaganov, Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International HSE National Research University, founder of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, chairman of the editorial board of Russia in Global Affairs): “In the world, there are two groups of people who support the reduction of nuclear weapons:

“Those who understand the immorality of deterrence because punishing someone with nuclear weapons means destroying millions of lives. …

“Those who want to make the world safer to be freer in using conventional weapons. …

“Now the chance of accidental nuclear war is diminished. Nuclear weapons are sent to us by the Almighty to save humankind because if not for nuclear weapons, confrontation and the Cold War would have ended in World War III. …

“This does not happen just because any large-scale change in power, which could lead to the escalation of an armed conflict, is excluded. And the priority of the current generation of politicians is formed in such a way as to prevent such an outcome. …

“If there were no nuclear deterrent, we would have lived in a more terrible world. Without nuclear weapons, millions of Europeans would be brutally destroying each other for centuries.”

My Comment: It is correct for the time being, but everything depends on the “boiling point.” According to Kabbalah, if we do not start restructuring towards the next level of our existence, to a society of equality, unity, mutual guarantee, then the 3rd and 4th nuclear world wars will surely break out.
[101239]

Related Material:
“Top Economic Advisers Forecast World War”
The Reverse Side of War
All We Need Is Love To Restore Balance In The World

Europe Without Religion?

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from Rethinking Europe): “International Congress “Rethinking Europe with(out) Religion” 20.2-23.2.2013, Vienna. The International Congress ‘Rethinking Europe with(out) Religion’ reflects on the religious and political transformation processes in European contemporary societies in the context of a growing pluralism. It investigates the political role that religion can play for the unification process of Europe in times of crisis. ‘Rethinking Europe’ is more than an economic challenge. It means searching for ‘a soul for Europe’ (J. Delors). However, it is highly controversial if religion(s) can contribute anything at all to Europe and if so what this contribution may look like.”

My Comment: This is what Kabbalah says. By Kabbalistic definition “Religion is love for one’s neighbor!” Everything else, all the religions and beliefs, are invented by man to evade observing this only law of nature. If Europe accepts this religion, it will survive and prosper; otherwise, it will be lost!
[101234]

Related Material:
Dalai Lama: To Rise Above All Differences!
“Atheism On The Rise Around The Globe”
Religion And The Process Of Integration

Automation Against Man

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, member of the British House of Lords): “What impact will automation – the so-called ‘rise of the robots’ – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises.

“In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed the textile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.

“Then the fear of machines died away. New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – were soon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fear was wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner or later, we will run out of jobs. …

For those who dread the threat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to train people for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the better jobs, too. A wide range of jobs that we now think of as skilled, secure, and irreducibly human may be the next casualties of technological change.

As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, data analysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation of workers be trained for?

Optimists airily assert that ‘many new types of job will be created.’ They ask us to think of the lead drivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up ‘convoy-style’), big data analysts, or robot mechanics. That does not sound like too many new jobs to me. …

“It is not true that automation has caused the rise of unemployment since 2008. … If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of ‘spreading the work’ that still has to be done by human labor.

“If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with each diminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

“Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.”

My Comment: The revolution in social thinking can be done only by introducing universal education for a new type of society with respect for others, work distribution, that is, in teaching the conditions of existence in an integral community.
[101136] 

Related Material:
Half Of Jobs To Disappear By 2030
US Schools Are Creating Worker Robots, Not Human Beings
A Mutated Ego That Kills Itself

A New Relationship Will Break The Ties Of Politicians And Tycoons

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government): “There was a time when we economists steered clear of politics. We viewed our job as describing how market economies work, when they fail, and how well-designed policies can enhance efficiency. We analyzed trade-offs between competing objectives (say, equity versus efficiency), and prescribed policies to meet desired economic outcomes, including redistribution. …

“Frustrated by the reality that much of our advice went unheeded (so many free-market solutions still waiting to be taken up!), we turned our analytical toolkit on the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats themselves. We began to examine political behavior using the same conceptual framework that we use for consumer and producer decisions in a market economy. Politicians became income-maximizing suppliers of policy favors; citizens became rent-seeking lobbies and special interests; and political systems became marketplaces in which votes and political influence are traded for economic benefits. …

“Why are so many industries closed off to real competition? Because politicians are in the pockets of the incumbents who reap the rents. Why do governments erect barriers to international trade? Because the beneficiaries of trade protection are concentrated and politically influential, while consumers are diffuse and disorganized. Why do political elites block reforms that would spur economic growth and development? Because growth and development would undermine their hold on political power. Why are there financial crises? Because banks capture the policymaking process so that they can take excessive risks at the expense of the general public. …

“If politicians’ behavior is determined by the vested interests to which they are beholden, economists’ advocacy of policy reforms is bound to fall on deaf ears.”

My Comment: Fortunately, nothing will be left of the past egoistic economy in the age of its collapse; so, there is no point in trying to identify all the secrets of clans of the elite and how to work with them. The crisis will clean everything! What will be left of people and the world will take a new form: the necessary fulfillment of the material things and infinite fulfillment in the revelation of the meaning of life. This state can be reached through education, that is, changing a person. In an effort to soften the landing of the world to the new conditions, we have to consider integral education, proposed by Kabbalah.
[100957]

 Related Material:
“2012 Debt Tipping Point Results”
A Progress Trap
The Pyramid Economy

The Financial Crisis In Arms Sales

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from SIPRI): “Sales of arms and military services by the largest arms-producing companies—the SIPRI Top 100—totalled $410 billion in 2011 according to new data on international arms production released today by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Compared to the companies in the Top 100 for 2010, this result represents a 5 per cent decrease in constant dollar terms. Over the period since 2002, arms sales by the Top 100 have nevertheless increased by 51 per cent in real terms.

“Several factors contributed to the decrease in arms sales in 2011. Austerity policies and proposed and actual decreases in military expenditure as well as postponements in weapons programme procurement affected overall arms sales in North America and Western Europe.

“Conflict—in particular the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the sanctions on arms transfers to Libya—also played a role in the fall in arms sales. …

“A number of companies have also established foreign subsidiaries in order to access new revenue streams in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.  …

“The expansion of arms producing companies into the cybersecurity market—a clear trend in the first tier of the SIPRI Top 100—is due the growing political and budgetary importance of cybersecurity as a national security issue. …

“These companies’ cybersecurity activities are focused on data and network protection software and services; testing and simulation services; training and consulting services; and operational support.”

My Comment: The era of transition to cyberspace has begun; wars are played out by drones and computers. And ahead is the war between good and evil thoughts.
[100955]

Related Material:
The Reverse Side of War
No War!
We Demand Our Own Correction!

Why Do Societies Decline?

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Victor Davis Hanson, American military historian, columnist, political essayist and former classics professor): “Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

“Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.

“One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius and Tacitus — pointed to ‘bread and circuses,’ as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.

“For Gibbon and later French scholars, ‘Byzantine’ became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts.”

My Comment: Everything repeats because our egoism has reigned in us from the day of man’s appearance on earth. But today we are talking openly about a new state of development of the individual and society: the state of “one family” that will occur 1) unwillingly through suffering or 2) easily and pleasantly by realizing the necessity.
[100901]

Related Material:
Unemployment: The Threat Of Global Scale
Altruism Is Precise Calculation
Transformation Of The Familiar World

The Consequences Of Insight

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “2012 became a critical year for the world’s financial, economic and political elite: They have realized the inevitability of the continuing crisis and that they cannot maintain the basis of social and political stability of the modern Western (liberal-democratic) society; the existing model of the state cannot be saved because the economy will be too much destroyed and the standard of living will fall too much. That is, a new model of state is needed.

“Who will the world elite entrust with the development of new concepts of state and society? They should be marginals, mentally prepared to become the leaders of the mainstream. These people should be reasonable conformists, not denying the elite and its status; no one needs revolutionaries, even if they are the most brilliant scientists. In addition to these innovators, there should be organizers and administrators who will turn ideas into schools, universities and the methods of practice.

“In this case, as soon as something interesting appears, the entire mainstream will begin to push it down, otherwise it will cease to be the mainstream; it means that cash flow will fall drastically.

“An understanding that the current state of economics should be changed already exists, but there are no active steps in this direction. In the developed countries, serious changes in personnel have begun; this means that the “special” hour is approaching…”

My Comment: You cannot build a new socio-economic system without the knowledge of the true laws of Nature and society that only a Kabbalist can know. The world will hit the wall again and an even greater, more disappointing crisis until, inevitability, our dissemination reveals to the elite the need for restructuring according to the laws of nature and not their innovators.
[100890]

Related Material:
The Global Crisis Will Not End!
No One Has Any Chances
The World Crisis: Worst Yet to Come