Insanity is fashionably updated

“Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule” Friedrich Nietzsche

I have come across an interesting concept, maybe known to some of you, which stated that “insanity is a legal concept not a medical or a psychiatric term; that in spite of the fact that insanity is a legal concept, it doesn’t mean that someone is not sick”. Moreover, the character went on and added that the “legal distinction between sanity and insanity rests upon free-will”.

Logically, for a determined fatalist, who rejects the concept of free-will and claims his destiny is written by some higher power (e.g.: Thy will be done) there is no such distinction. Consequently, such a person cannot be held responsible for his acts. Not within the frame of the current legal definitions.

What makes a person crazy? Who decides who is crazy and who is not? Who decides the normality of a situation or behavior? If your answer to those questions was “psychiatrists/psychologists and alike”, you were wrong. Try again.

Bear with me for a second and let’s try to define a few words so we can get the hang of it. Michel Foucault tried to define the relativity of values as opposed to the social power. Our cultural values, especially what we consider normal, determine and are determined by the way society exerts its control. Who is considered mentally sick? Who establishes this?

Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein go on with their explanation about the relative truth and tell us this well known story. So, Chuang Tzu woke up one day after he dreamt he was a butterfly. Or, he asked himself, maybe in fact he was a butterfly which dreamt it was Chuang Tzu. Was Chuang Tzu insane? At the time, no, but according to nowadays definition, yes.

Benjamin Franklin defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Oh well, I guess from this perspective we are all crazy. The term “insanity” is not longer used within the scientific community unless there is some psychiatric congress and they all crack jokes about it. We know they do. So what is insanity? Madness, craziness, foolishness, mania, bipolar disorder, dementia, all in all a violation of some norms but not necessarily health norms (see below).

Is insanity fashionably updated? What was considered to be normal (within the norms) 500 and 1000 years ago, ceased to be considered that way? Were Diogenes’ words sought after or was he suggested to be on medication as he lived naked in a tub and was on an onion diet?

Was our social sensibility exacerbated to the point where we consider a violation of norm if we come across someone who is bipolar? It does sound a bit paradoxical, but on the one hand, our moral sensibility increased while on the other hand, our emotional defense thickened. Aren’t we a bunch of happy, easy going and profound rays of sunshine? Since when normality became equivalent with contemporary median? Always?

Emil Cioran used to say that the divagations of a lunatic are absurd only by report to his situation, but not reported to his delirium. It kind of makes sense, right?

Dictionaries define insanity as violations of societal norms, or behavioral expectations. What if we fall under the expectations? What if we disappoint the society? Will we get imprisoned for it?

No doubt, crime is an extreme type of such societal disappointment, but isn’t equally disappointing if we cut our own veins, take drugs, drink, read the stars or have visions? Isn't a psychic, who claims to be seeing ghosts and reads palms and ironically gets paid for it, as “mentally deranged” as a person who claims to be hearing voices but is put on medication? They both “violate” society norms so why the double standard?

Media and entertainment industry abound in such “outside the norms” shows and needless to say they are successful. Moreover, do we all secretly desire to have the ability to see ghosts and hear voices? If movies are a type of escapism and we all are watching them ardently, aren’t we in fact as insane as the characters with whom we identify or we delegate to act on our behalf?

Since normality equals to being adequate, what happens to those who don’t fit in? Shall we stone them to death for getting out of line? Isn’t what the repressive societies and the despotic leaders did? To make us all fit in and stand inline?

What is the society expecting from us? One simple example of social expectation and norm is hands shaking after a match. So, no, it is not OK to be a sour loser and show your disappointment or that you hate your opponent. No, Vae Victis (Woe to the vanquished) is not socially acceptable anymore. Go back to ancient Rome for that episode. Although you have mens rea (bad thought) as long as you don’t allow yourself into actus reus (bad act) you will be fine. Keep it to yourself and we’ll be socially content.

It is quaint to notice how insanity got to equal, in time, “unhealthy”. The word itself, sane derives from the Latin sana, which meant healthy, and by extension insane became unhealthy, or non compos mentis (a non-composed mind).

There were times when daydreams, visions and divination were highly appreciated and sought after by wise men, not all crazy, I might add. In ancient Greece and Rome, such techniques were equally adulated by philosophers and demos alike. Words of wisdom and secretive meanings kept an aura of mystery and many looked for answers in ambiguous riddles. Pretty much like bibliomancy, where each random text pertains a meaning for a person, they all made sense to them. In our desperate and unquenched thirst to find answers, sometimes we are ready to listen and give meaning to what once were meaningless symbols, words, icons, gods. Some claim that newly found wisdom is an eye-opening experience, while others think those who can read beyond the immediacy of our world are “abnormal”.

Under these circumstances, normality can be defined as what lays under our eyes, what we can see from left to right, or what others tell us is normal. Now, the problem that arises is that philosophers will jump right at your neck and tell you “stop trusting what others tell you or what your eyes tell you, as the truth can only be known through reason and not senses”. Dubito, ergo sum, right?

Can you debate in a court motivating “the victim of the murder you have just seen, hacked into pieces, was not real? That we create our reality and your eyes are cheating on you? That nothing is real?” Isn’t how George Berkeley would have played the devil’s advocate? Wasn’t the physical body only a mental object, which had extension in the space of a visual field? How can you apply your refined wisdom and 5 o’clock tea theories when you have to talk about truth and the slippery concept of sanity? How would you explain to a victim’s family that the crime and drama they go through is not real? That their perception and memory cannot be trusted that “being sure is no guarantee that a memory isn’t false, reconstructed or even implanted”? (Bloom).

Since it was established that doctors and specialists have no say when diagnosing a “non composed mind”, who will then hang the label around the lunatic’s neck? Correct, the others. Nowadays, in a court of law, the mental health specialists can only suggest or submit their opinion to the court. However, it will be the judge and or jury (ordinary people, anyone) will make the final decision regarding the defendant's status regarding an insanity defence.

But I’d say, since we are tangled in jungle of legal lianas and sane definitions, and what society expects of us, why not start a revolution, an innocent one, to see how far we can push the society’s limits by breaking small rules. Revolutions meant first of all, evolutions. Let’s being slowly, with a single act. Let it be yours. Stop shaking someone’s hand when you don’t feel like it, but you do it just because society expects you to. Be honest when expressing your emotions. In exchange do a good deed, one that society doesn’t expect you to do. Feed the parking meter of someone you don’t know. Let’s do the unexpected! Let’s defy the societal norms by creating a sweet and positive anarchy, the kind no one expects! Let’s get abnormal! Let’s violate the societal norms.

Free-will depends on Merkwelt

An “improver of mankind” friend optimistically declared, in a Spartacus like diatribe, that he was born free. Argh, not the freedom and free-will speech again, please. My “I see life in pink and I am a positive thinker so let’s give it 100%, oh yeah” pal ultimately reasoned:

“Living in democratic country gives you the legal frame to declare yourself free”.

“I couldn’t have said it better, I added politely having the rendition law in mind where his freedom and personal rights could be annihilated in a second for the higher purpose of national safety and security. What higher purpose than individual freedom is there? “Check, please”.

My friend went on though and added pensively “Americans are the freest people in the world”.

"Most probably, being able to opt between CNN, Oprah, Jerry Springer and Cartoon Network is freedom’s ultimate delicacy", I pointed out. "Freedom you say? What, except your unjustifiable dopamine level, makes you so optimistically naïve? What does freedom mean to you except the illusion that you can freely say and do what you want?"

Obviously, if you consider freedom as non-incarceration, then ¾ of world’s population is free. Ancient Greeks said to be free doesn’t mean to obtain what you wish for, but to stop wishing what you cannot obtain. So did Obama in his prematurely awarded Nobel for Peace acceptance speech. What a load of crap to preach self-restrain while sending troops in a foreign country.

Apparently, the secret of freedom doesn’t lay in dominating the necessity but in dominating your own aspirations. Someone who dominates his yearning of finding out what is going on in the world, is freeing himself of the curiosity (by proximity or not). He dominates his inquisitiveness, a natural inclination of a healthy and intelligent human mind. From this point of view, most of the Americans are free like birds. No curiosity leads to freedom.

Assume a person that is not informed and has no clue about what is going on in the world. Can lack of information equal freedom? Paradoxically enough, it seems so, and in spite of whatever we might reproach to the Americans (their media is not as free as they like to think, their news bulletins are not objective, rendition law again) as long as the lack of information is self-imposed, and an aware choice, this is the result of the free-will in action. The power of choice, the free will as the moral agent of our ability to make rational choices is proudly represented by a piece of plastic with electronic circuits, made in China: the remote control. Free will is having the remote control. You can opt for channel 1 or 20 but there is only a limited number of channels that you can choose from. More choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all, no? Or you might as well turn off the TV set and walk away.

If you consider freedom just a chimera, then liberty and its agent, free-will, can be defined as a remote-control. From this stance, freedom is just a sad epiphenomenon, an illusion, or what the Indians used to call (maybe they still do) Maya. However, like everything else in life, freedom can as well be a psychological perception. In a world where we cannot trust our own memories, as memory is influenced by emotion and we concluded that we even “learn” about emotions, can you trust your perception? Isn't freedom a subjective spatio-temporal world, an umwelt?

If you keep on telling to yourself often enough that you are free, happy or smart you will end up believing it. And that will be your reality. For you, that will be your truth. Certainly, it might not coincide or correspond with “reality”, but will it matter to you? Was Hegel’s idea of reality who said this is the creation of our own mind valid? What is truth then? Someone way smarter told me “reality is this chair because it exists and because I see it”. Guess that would have been a heated debate between a Cartesian and him. If your reality is the creation of your own mind, and you insist on creating pinkish-happy-silly-crappy worlds where the skies are blue, the roses are red and there are no wars or tragedies, go ahead, delude yourself. Call me a maniaco-depressive and put me on Prozac just because I ruin your mood. I assume that.

That will be your world and you might as well be happy in it. If the reality is the creation of our own mind, what is the common reality then? An amalgam of multiple, individual realities which intersect? If it isn’t freedom imagination’s most precious concoction…

It wouldn’t be a classic free-will chit chat if we failed to bring Nietzsche into discussion. Nietzsche said about free-will, that it was an invention of theologians whose sole purpose was to create guilt, culprits and punishment. If your acts are guided and commended by god, you are nothing but a mere puppet in his hands, therefore not responsible for any crime you might commit. “Hey, it was the fate, couldn’t fight it”. So what about introducing a new concept called “free will” that gives you the impression you are not Moirae’slave, that fate/destiny is not that implacable after all, that you can choose, that you are free so you can be held responsible? Ironically, people are considered free so they can be held morally responsible and punished, as guilt is not one of God’s attributes.

Should you be self-aware to be able to define yourself as “free”? Self-awareness is a condition to be entitled to your own merkwelt. Is the thalamo-cortical physiological support for awareness sufficient to call ourselves "aware"? If merkwelt involves thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods and emotions, isn’t obvious “freedom” depends on our merkwelt, and merkwelt depends on self-awareness? Isn’t then freedom depended on self-awareness? How self-aware are you then? What does this imply? Are you aware just because you are awake, alert and responsive to external stimuli? Are you free because of it? Oh well, are you? (2010)

The disenchanted generation

A friend of mine told me she had an abortion. Although is nothing to be surprised of, I couldn’t help letting a reproaching “oh, how could you” out. Damn emotional roller coaster I have been riding for the past 34 years! Argh!

The look on my face must have been very expressive as my friend felt compelled to add: “At this stage, an embryo is like a rotten tooth. He doesn’t feel a thing. Come on, you know very well, it means nothing. An abortion is a regular medical procedure thing these days”.

In spite of my lax and liberal views concerning pro-choice actions, and having the widest views on euthanasia or assisted suicide, politics, silicone implants and miniskirts, I couldn’t help feeling my heart skipping a beat while hearing the comparison my friend had made: a rotten tooth. I instinctually reacted before my intellect got to dictate me “do not judge!”

In communist Romania, before 1989, thousands of women died because the contraceptive methods were not only banned, but whoever attempted to perform an abortion would have been imprisoned: doctor and mother alike, for homicide, regardless of the stage of the embryo. In 1990, after the revolution, the abortion was legalized. The same year 1,000,000 women (out of a population of some 22 million) chose to have an abortion. One million. One million. One million. It is a round and shocking sum. Population Services confirmed that there were 11 million abortions between 1989 and 2000. An entire disenchanted generation of women who reclaimed the freedom upon their bodies by terminating pregnancies and throwing in the hospitals crematories the “miracles of life”.

Today’s medicine, in order to put women’s minds to rest, decreed that a baby is considered an embryo from 0-10 weeks, from 10-22 weeks is a fetus, and from 22-40 is considered a baby. Between weeks 24-28, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place (Kristof Koch). For the few ones that do not know yet, the intrauterine life of a baby’s development lasts for 40 weeks. More over, “an abortion induced to preserve the health of the pregnant woman is termed a therapeutic abortion, while an abortion induced for any other reason is termed an elective abortion”.

At week 6, the spinal cord, which until now has been open, is beginning to close, a pipe-shaped heart is formed and begins to beat, the brain begins to divide into 5 parts, and the cells destined to be the arms and legs are in place. At week 12, the feet are almost half an inch (1cm) long, the pancreas is functioning and producing insulin, fingernails and toenails appear, the baby can suck his thumb, and get hiccups.

Most abortions are done before week 12.

Some abortionists claim that the embryo doesn’t feel a thing, although 3D images have showed that babies experience a great distress. Let alone the medieval ways of abortion (the vacuum curettage rips off the embryo’s limbs one by one, to only remove it as a pile of minced meat) the act itself is odious and atrocious.

I am not here to cast stones, and life has taught me that I should never be strict, judgmental or categorical on anything and especially, to never say “never”.

A few years have passed and I lost touch with my friend, as life has taken us to different parts of the world. I have however found out that she eventually got pregnant again, after years of desperate trials, as after that abortion she kept on miscarrying. By the time she got pregnant she was already 37 and had almost lost hope she would become a mother.

We are all aware of the anti-abortionists claim as giving the baby to adoption or similar solutions. Yet, there are cases when an abortion seems like a humane thing to do both for the mother and for the child. Tests that are performed nowadays like amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling can reveal in due time if a baby has severe disabilitating afflictions like Down's syndrome, Patau's syndrome, and Edward's syndrome or neural tube defects such as spina bifida. The risk of having a baby with Down syndrome rose above the 1 in 250 mark at the 35th birthday for women, so the test is even greater recommended.

So, what would you do if you learnt that you just became a parent but your embryo might have Down Syndrome or certain congenital, genetic, or chromosomal problems or other types of fetal abnormalities, including heart problems?

Have a child who is cognitively, physically and mentally impaired? What means to be alive? Just breath, eat and exist in a semi vegetative remote world without fully experiencing reality? Isn’t your duty, as a future parent, to make sure you also offer a high quality life not only “life”?

No matter how much we claim life is colorful, and doesn’t show the gray spectrum, there are moments when you have to decide to either go for black or for white. No matter what you painfully choose (either to keep the pregnancy or terminate it) the moment you decide that, becomes a point of no return.

Death makes a better Cosmo cocktail

As in numerous and previous times, it is rumored once again that we would die and we have to repent. If it wasn’t in the year 1000, it could have been in 2000, if not in 2000, in 2008, and if not in 2008, it would certainly be in 2012. The Mayan calendar says so. Nostradamus says so. The Bible says so. My 70 year old mother says so.

Some smart people from NASA discovered, on Catalina Sky Survey, an asteroid called TU24 that would have closely shaved the earth on January 29, at 10:33, sometime last year, at 1.4 lunar distances (don't Google it, I am telling you how much that is in metric system: 537.406 km).

So voila, once again, we got away with it and TU24 took mercy and spared us, only "slightly" touching us with an error of half million kilometers, not giving a comet's ass on those who share 98% of their DNA with the chimps. That would be us, in case you had doubts.

For a short while, I thought 'no bloody way, I get alive from bang bang Beirut so I can die in “exotic” Bucharest under a comet's sorry ass and the eschatology theories self-fulfill?'

Are, praise the Lord, hallelujah, Jehovah's Witnesses true? Do I have to repent for my sins like the Venetian from “A destiny of her own?”

Now, a believer or not, is not exactly light news hearing on the official channels (radio news bulletins, in between the news about the floods in Northern Europe, the blizzard in South East, the wars in the Middle East and the droughts in Africa) and you feel like your rye toast comes to a halt in your suddenly dry throat hearing the earth "might just come into a direct collision with an asteroid with 600 m in diameter". Gulp.

Before time, there were always "well intended" nihilists that couldn't help themselves from pouring their infectious pus of unhappiness over the heads of the more optimist and naive ones. Like myself. However, whether you laugh hearing such news or not, a question pops up: what would you do if you'd find out that you'll die on January 29, at 10:30 am, precisely?

What would anyone do? Why it is not advisable to make such news public? I mean, since we would die anyway, why would we care if mayhem is created? Is the imminence of death an annihilator of our reasonable censorship? Who would care if we go with dignity, hanging on the good moral behavior that led our lives or we just release our rage and seek revenge. I personally know a few people that I would gladly punch their faces. Apocalypse or not.

I will tell you a short story which led me to ask this particular question. A while ago, I was walking from pub to pub with a couple of friends and we felt like sipping a Cosmo to help kill the time and warm up a cold evening.

Said and done. So we sat our sorry asses at the bar and we apathetically asked for three Cosmos.

We all know what makes a Cosmo, a great Cosmo: the cranberry juice. Except that, these particular Cosmos, not only that had a problem with the cranberry juice, but this missed altogether. I asked the waiter what seemed to be the problem and he said bluntly: "there was no cranberry juice, so I skipped it".

An absurd dialogue, that would make Eugene Ionesco go green with envy has started between the waiter and me:

"But, I started shyly, you do realize that a Cosmo with no cranberry juice, is not actually a Cosmo, right?"

"This is a Cosmo, has all the ingredients, except the cranberry juice", added the waiter imperviously.

"But’, I stubbornly insisted, already blinking faster, ‘this is what makes a Cosmo, a Cosmo: Cointreau, vodka, lemon juice, and cranberry juice. Otherwise you call it something else like: Vodka Lemon Cointreau cocktail, not Cosmopolitan".

"Well, this is as good as a Cosmo. It is just missing the cranberry juice", added the Cosmo master.

For a second there, I thought I might be either in a Ray Bradbury's episode of Twilight zone or on candid camera (MTV's Boiling Point or something). And I have such a low boiling point. Duck everyone, am about to lose it.

I told him I didn't want the drink unless he could add some cranberry to it, and I wouldn't pay for something I didn't order.

The evidently pissed off the waiter, with an amazing attitude, just grabbed my glass of vodka lemon juice mixture and threw it in the sink, frowning and most probably cursing me silently!

I took a deep breath and on a second thought, ignoring idiocy seemed a better solution. I didn't even dare to laugh nervously. If you laugh at stupid people they might think they have humor. So is always better to keep that smirk of yours as a mental note.

Now the moral of this small encounter is not the rudeness of the waiters, as I am so used to it. What puzzled me is the fact that he found it rather normal to nonchalantly serve us a drink we didn't order, relying most probably on the fact that we had no idea what a Cosmo was, so if he could cheat us, he would.

The morale of the fable is: do people refrain from cheating (killing, stealing, being immoral in general) because the legal system stops them or because their moral system prevents them in doing so? Do we have a morality center in the brain? If we all had the chance to steal, cheat or kill and there would be no law to prevent that, would we all be doing it?

To what extent are we protected by the law, and to what extent we rely solely on our moral values to maintain our humanity with all its components?

Reverting to the asteroid and the imminence of death as a moral valve. What else keeps us moral, beyond the incumbency imposed by the morals and laws?

The idea that life is short and unrepeatable? The social constraints? The fear of consequences? The potential punishment? The qualms of conscience?

What instincts would kick in? The desire to live, at any cost, evidently. But since that is not an option anymore, what else would we do? Sex? Murder? Food?

Do you think that people would unleash hell and leave their most primary instincts free? That it would be a total chaos, debauchery, murders, stealing, mass rapes, sexual orgies, or truth frenzy in which people would finally admit what they think of each other or god? Would religious people admit there is no god? Would atheists admit they believed in god all along, but atheism seemed like a more suitable approach to the academic stand? Would they die for the idea? Would they die for themselves? What about exchanging the dear ones for an idea? What keeps us within the limits of legality, truth, morality and goodness?

Would I still care about the cranberry? Could it be that in his immoral way, the waiter was right to teach me not to stumble upon the petty things, like the lack of some juice and enjoy the greater scheme of things, like the rest of the ingredients? In any case, thank you, my dearest rude waiter, for teaching me what makes a Cosmo great: the imminence of death and enjoying life and not some cranberry juice.

(2014)

Let’s compromise

It is said that changing her mind is a woman’s prerogative. In Latin, praerogativa meant during the Roman times, voting first in the comitia, a privilege. Initially, praerogatus meant to ask for an opinion before another.

In time, a prerogative came to be defined as a privilege, an obtained right, or a discretionary power.

To change one’s mind means to think better of it. Often in a discussion is heard “she changed her mind. She is unstable. She cannot be trusted.”

In a relation, especially, I have noticed, mostly coming from men, a reluctance when comes to “change”. For some reason, men believe change is not good as it might denote a weakness or a flaw of character. The opposite of this “weakness” would be the stubbornness to remain unchanged on a certain position. Now, stubbornness itself might come in handy sometimes if it’s applied to the willingness of staying alive, for instance. Change is unknown, uncertainty and what we don’t know, we tend to fear. Change becomes fear. Of anything.

Sometimes, in a man’s opinion, change is giving up, stepping back, and consequently losing face. Yet, people and surroundings are in a perpetual change. Without change we wouldn’t have evolved as human species. Without change, we wouldn’t have been gratified with technological advancement or medical discoveries. Without change, we would be still thinking that thunder and lightning are god’s wrath.

I frequently hear the way the word “change” is used and I am displeased with its usage. “I will not change who I am. This is who I am. Take it or leave it” became a dear motto to people around the world, regardless of race, age, religion or mentality. All this, being served as a cold dish difficult to digest, with a threatening ultimatum tone, along with “I won’t compromise”.

In a relationship, change became synonym with compromise, and compromise for some reason has a negative connotation, denoting a feeble character of the person who agrees to it.

How many times didn’t we all hear “I will not compromise”! Why the hell not? What is wrong with compromising? According to the same dictionary, compromise is defined as a mutual promise to abide by an arbiter's decision, from the Latin compromissum, and basically denotes a settlement of differences by consent reached by mutual concessions. Mutual. Reciprocal.

However, the inflected form of the verb 'compromised' or 'compromising' reached in time to mean to expose to suspicion, discredit, or mischief as in “his reputation has been compromised”, and not at all to come to agreement by mutual concession, as in giving up something that is promised.

The word 'change' comes with various nuances: change of heart (a reversal in position or attitude), change off (to alternate with another at doing an act), change of life (a major turning point or critical stage), change of pace (an interruption of continuity by a shift to a different activity), chump change (a relatively small or insignificant amount of money).

The term itself originates from the Latin cambiare, to exchange, also akin to Old Irish camm which means crooked. Its synonyms are alter, vary, modify and mean to make or become different (source: Merriam Webster).

Is change bad? Is it something we should fear or embrace?

If people don’t change who they are, no one will repent eventually, no one will say sorry, no one will admit did wrong, no one will grow on a mental and spiritual plan. Change is always welcomed because change is adaptation. Change is evolution. Change is development. But change is also fear. How afraid are you?

And the Nobel goes to…

“We gotta get the job down there, and that requires us to have enough troops to not just air raiding villages and killing civilians” (Barack Obama, Nobel Prize for Peace winner and US president)

In order to preserve the leftovers of my personal freedom from democracy’s feast I promised myself to try as much as possible to keep a middle lane in everything.

However, not dealing with ideal situations or living in Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis I will not always have the luxury to pose as the undecided voter. I am aware that sometimes I will be forced to radically choose. To go for black or for white. Depleted by its illusionary aura of hues and variations, life is basically a cumulus of dichotomies: pleasure or pain, love or hate, happiness or sadness, “goodthink and crimethink”. War or peace. None of these can coexist, and one always excludes the other.

Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel for Peace. I like Obama and if I were an American I would have voted for him. However, regardless of his impeccable speech (in which he ironically used the word “war” 50 times, “wars” 9 times and “peace” only 31 times) held in Oslo the other day, Obama is a man at war. He has just sent over 40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Now, it could be that I play stupid, but when was the last time the president of a country that holds a war on two fronts, and decides to increase the number of troops, was awarded for peace?

I have nothing against Obama. Or war, as a matter of fact. As it is true, harsh times require harsh measure and evil, as Obama said, does exist. The end "excuses" the means, said Machiavelli and Obama completed “War (…) was simply a fact”. “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is recognition of history”…. “war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings”.

What I however reproach the Swedish Academy is their humble bow trying to compensate the feeble EU involvement in the Middle East armed conflict by awarding Obama. For peace. I had a déjà vu when Hale Berry was awarded the Oscar. Do we have to excuse ourselves to the US, like the Film Academy excused to the blacks by awarding Berry? Was her role in Monsters Ball the best performance? Is Obama the most peaceful man on earth?

Well, in this case, maybe we start a long line of world wide apologies: Church to the Christians, Crusaders to the Muslims, Germans to the Jews, Turks to the Armenians, and gay bashers to the gays.

Let alone the absolute premiere of the event itself, I couldn’t help wondering about the honesty of this award. How much do we really believe Obama deserved the Nobel for peace? Excellent orator and charming man. Yet, Peace?

As Dalai Lama said the award was "a little early". Could this bitterish reply be due to Obama’s refusal to meet with Lama in October this year, just because he wanted to keep China happy? If it isn’t politics interesting.

While Obama was charming the world with his well articulated speech, calling “Not only scientists and environmental activists for action on climate change, but also military leaders”, at Copenhagen, the US envoy, Todd Stern, a Harvard shark with a serpent tongue, forged under the Clinton administration, used his lawyer argumentation saying “We are certainly not going to become part of the Kyoto Protocol, so that’s not on the table. If you mean basically taking the Kyoto Protocol and putting a new title on it, we’re not going to do that either.”

What is wrong with this equation? Pretty much everything.

Even if the climate change reports presented at Copenhagen conference show that this decade is the warmest in the past 160 years, the US continue to reject the idea of signing the Kyoto Protocol, discarding the dead cat in China’s courtyard. China, on the other hand, points at the US and EU, claiming they must be the ones to present deeper cuts of GHG. According to a preliminary estimate by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the largest national producer of CO2 emissions since 2006 has been China with an estimated annual production of about 6200 megatonnes. China is followed by the United States with about 5,800 megatonnes. Here are our two champions. Give them a big round of applause.

If the egos debate wouldn’t affect us all, most probably it would have been fun to watch. But it is not. It is tragic.

Patrick J. Michael, the famous sceptic climatologist who claimed until recently that climate changes are not catastrophic but even beneficial allegedly said “this is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud”. With all due respect for skepticism, you must at least wonder why would anyone conspire to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change, when those changes are visible? You don’t have to be a genius to notice the lack of snow and some 15C during December in a country which had 20 years ago four seasons and -20C in winter. The climate change sceptics are simply not in denial but plain idiots.

Reverting to Obama’s acceptance speech “For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want”. Well, maybe it is time US free themselves from the want of Middle East oil. That is a pretty ironic claim coming from a country like the US. Obama’s Epicurean proposal matches like oil with water exactly in countries where both war and famine prevail. To ask to those people to free from want, before they have achieved the level of want, is both condescending and shameful.

No, I don’t have to be politically correct. I won that right fair and square. Political correctness it is just another name for false decency, a concept concocted by the spin doctors in order to get a few extra votes from the minorities.

Funny how the Leader of the Free world can take a prize for peace and speak of freedom in the same time the US restrained the freedom and personal rights for the higher purpose of national safety and security and still operates under the rendition law in which “rendered suspects are denied due process because they are arrested without charges, deprived of legal counsel, and illegally transferred to third world country with the intent and purpose of facilitating torture and other interrogation measures which would be illegal in the USA”.

Could be a silly question, but shouldn’t you free yourselves before you free the world?

Obama also added “I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war”.

And this is the man who was awarded for peace.

Just say NO!

I am outraged, affronted, chafed, choleric, convulsed, displeased, enraged, exacerbated, exasperated, fuming, furious, galled, hateful, heated, indignant, inflamed, infuriated, irritated, maddened, nettled, offended, provoked, raging, resentful, splenetic.

True, I preached compassion and tolerance and I emphasized this is what makes us human. I still believe in that. But let me be well understood. As a Buddhist acquaintance helped me open my eyes, a tolerant and compassionate person is not and should not be a pushover or constantly pleasant. Not so, not so, he added. True. Not so at all.

World is not a bed of roses and rage is a healthy and natural feeling. Injustice, intolerance, abuse and violence should outrage us all. Let me explain.

I love him

A good friend of mine has been abused by her husband recently. My incurably romantic friend has been married for 5 years. She described to me in detail how he mounted her, almost strangled her, squeezed her face and stopped one inch away from her face with his fist, then he threw her off bed. She told me the fear she felt didn’t equal with anything she experienced before.

Let alone the gesture itself, which is inexcusable, what happened was a point of no return.

Many couples reach to that stage, but some refuse to acknowledge it and resuscitate it with old and good memories, trying in a desperate attempt to patch a broken tie.

I asked my friend whether she was sure that was the end and to my surprise she didn’t say a bluntly “Yes”, but a half mouth “I don’t know”, leaving an open possibility to continue her disturbed relation. The husband went on apologizing saying he couldn’t be sorry enough, as if words alone would take away the instant that marked an evident rupture of their marriage.

For the moment, my friend seems decided not to go back, but she raised a question I didn’t know how to answer “what if I cannot live without him?”. As I do with all my friends that come to me for comfort and advice, I tried to fully and sympathetically listen to her and her arguments as per why she would go back to him, holding back my personal opinions about it. How hard it was to keep my mouth shut, though!

She then asked me what would I personally do? Cautiously, I replied that marital experts claim that a violent gesture leads to another violent gesture, and domestic violence is usually snowballing, and a slap never stops to a single slap leading to regular violence.

‘You think I should leave him, then?’

‘I think you should just leave. Not leave HIM. You leave the situation. You put an end to it’.

Bruises in numbers

According to a Romanian study, the number of women who are victims of domestic violence increased 7 times from 1996 until 2002, and in 2008 there have been over 5000 cases of abused women. Thirty-five of them died.

In Bucharest alone, over 1000 women come yearly to the centers that shelter abused women. At Polimed, within the Apaca center, come yearly 300 women battered almost to death with broken teeth, ribs, bruises and cerebral traumas. You cannot talk about it with respect for sensitive readers, and you cannot express it elegantly or less graphic: these women are not “traumatized, treated rudely, violated or molested”. They are battered! With fists, feet, baseball bats, chains, ax handles, pastry rollers, washing machine hoses.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, domestic violence affects more than 32 million Americans, or over 10% of the U. S. population. Estimates show that 248 of every 1,000 females are victims of physical assault and/or rape committed by their spouses.

Worldwide, at least 1 in 3 women has been abused or forced into sex at least once; a 5th of women have been sexually abused before the age of 15; half a million women die due to birth complication before the age of 20; violence kills more women than car accidents and malaria taken together; 70% of domestic violence victims have been killed by their partners; between 4-20% women that are being abused even during their pregnancy; between 10-69% of women have been abused at least once by their partner; at least 130 million women have been victims of genital mutilation; and the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims may be as high as 5,000.

War rape

War rape is used as a weapon and traumatized millions of women during wars. War rape dates back to antiquity, and during armed conflicts rape is used as means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate the enemy and undermine their morale. Human rights associations and other non-governmental organizations estimated that during the Bosnian War between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped. The Special Rapporteur on Rwanda estimated in his 1996 report that between 2,000 and 5,000 pregnancies resulted from war rape, and that between 250,000 and 500,000 Rwandese women and girls had been raped. It is also estimated that there are as many as 200,000 surviving rape victims living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today. Sexual violence occurred in a multiple ways, including rape with objects, such as broken glass bottles, chemical lights, broom sticks, guns and truncheons.

Tacit agreement

When comes to domestic violence, specialists claim there is a tacit agreement between the victim and her aggressor, that the former invites the latter to violence with a docile and submissive attitude, or words and gestures which instigate the aggressor to dominate the victim. And this domination must be done at any cost.

Logic claims that when people run out of verbal arguments and when their intellect fails to sustain their point of view in a debate, they make appeal to other arguments such as “argumentum ad baculum” (the argument of the bat), which means to make appeal to physical force or anything that inspires fear to your opponent. This argument then prevails and takes the place of logical reasons, motives or proofs one might have in a heated debate.

People make appeal to violence (domestic or not) then and only then they run out of logical arguments which they can use to sustain their point of view. People and most couples do not know how to fight, and most of the times their judgment is clouded by hormones and irrationality. “Fighting” in a couple should eventually be an exchange and presentation of different point of views and the result of such a fight needs to lead to a fruitful result where the debaters (partners) need to reach an agreement, a middle lane, a compromise. In reality, it is obvious people do not typically behave in optimal ways, when faced with a number of actions. The difficulty appears when we need to determine the optimal behavior in the first place and what it entails.

I told my friend, who is an economist, to use her knowledge to solve her dilemma. I know it sounded cruel and cold but what is the benefit of stuffing out brain with info if we don’t find a practical use to it. She has a decision to make: stay with her husband, who has violent tendencies and most probably and statistically he will recidivate or leave now, with all the regrets that she could have made things work, and abandoned the ship when it trouble.

To speak her language, I told her to make appeal to the decision theory used in mathematics and statistics which is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision and the resulting optimal decision. Meaning identifying the best decision to take, assuming an ideal decision maker who is fully informed, able to compute with perfect accuracy, and fully rational. Like her.

My friend is facing a choice under uncertainty. Some decisions are difficult because of the need to take into account how other people in the situation will respond to the decision that is taken. We are all aware of the choice paradox: more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all. In this case, it should be simple. There is only one choice.

Why stay?

Couples fight. It is normal, say some. But to disfigure the person whom you promised to be with for better and for worse is humiliating not only for the victim but especially for the aggressor. To stay in an abusive relation is not normal. Why do victims choose to stay? Dr Nancy Faulkner explained the reasons. The Safety Seeker: (It may be familiar, and oddly enough, a comfortable lifestyle); The Blind ( Not realizing it is "abuse"); The Worthless (No one else would ever love me), The Defective: (I deserved it; I'll do better), The Manager: (I can keep it from happening again); The Gullible: (He's really sorry, and it won't happen again); The Pretender: (I know I make him sound terrible, but he's really a good person most of the time); The Defender: (He didn't mean to hurt me); The Caretaker: (No one else understands him the way I do); The Fantasizer: (But I love him); The Martyr: (He isn't hurting the children; if he ever did, I'd leave); The Helpless: (I can't support the children on my own); The Hopeless: He'll kill me if I try to leave him).

No excuse

There is no excuse for those who beat their wives and urban legends claim that there is only a typical category of men who beat their wives: drunkards, uneducated, etc.

There are a few myths according to which men beat their wives. The Kababaihan Laban Sa Karahasan foundation for abused women identified a few:

1) Only unemployed of drunken men beat their wives. False

The image of the irresponsible man who beats his wife is a myth. There are the so-called “responsible” or “respectable” men who aggress their wives. Eight out of ten men who beat their wives are governmental employees, engineers, doctors, businessmen, or they work in the army. Of course, some of the abusers are construction workers, drivers or unqualified workers.

2) Domestic violence is only caused by drug or alcohol abuse. False

Contrary to popular belief, six in ten men are perfectly lucid and are not under the drug or alcohol influence when they beat their wives.

3) Women instigate and provoke the beatings. False

Nagging or verbal articulation is women’s defense mechanism to cope with stress and domestic unhappiness. Nagging is NOT a reason for battering a woman.

4) Women can leave their husbands whenever they want. False

Most women don’t leave because they have no place to go or their own families don’t support them. Women can be caught in a trap of lack of social or economic opportunities and these alone create impediments to start a new life. Starting with lack of money which can insure transportation or departure, continuing with lack of self-confidence and ending with the lack of a proper emotional support, women remain blocked in this vicious circle of domestic violence.

Most women get battered when the husband detains more economic, social, physical or financial power than women.

This aspect is clearly related to the gender apartheid which at the end of the day is nothing but a violation of human rights and common decency. Men who usually beat their wives do it out of weakness, to exert control and most of the times due to an animal instinct to prove they are “real” men. But most of the times, to beat down their own feeling of uselessness. Real men don’t beat their partners and a slap marks always the point of no return. It is time you say NO!

I am a half breed

A half-breed dog is sold for a smaller price than a pure breed, as usually is considered that only one parent is pure blood. This automatically implies that the other parent has a lower quality DNA.

A half breed human is usually a person of mixed racial descent, a half blooded, a hybrid. A half-breed human hardly finds its place in the world; it doesn’t belong to any cast, religion, gender or race. A half-breed human is neither female nor male, neither black nor white, neither Arab nor European, neither Muslim nor Christian. But apart from the obvious half breeds, there is a new species of half breeds: the men who are not men enough to be considered so, who have their manicure done, are too emotional and marinate themselves in cologne, and women who are too “whole lotta women” to join the reading and kneading bread mothers ‘community club.

As a naturally and biologically born woman (last time I checked), I was told and taught how I should be: kind, merciful, beautiful, hard working, loving and understanding but also strong and not to rely on anyone else.

As I made no secret of it, life had put me into a position where I had to learn and accept how to become: a man, a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a father, a few grandparents and everything in between.

Experience taught me that if we possess the will (as the Germans say Ehrgeiz), impossibility becomes a sweet and certain reality.

In time, you learn how you can flip a 22 liter gallon in the water cooler, how to change light bulbs or flat tires, or replace switches for burnt electrical wires. Your feminine skills are put to test. How can you do all that and still preserve your genetically and educational given female qualities? Hardly. Your testosterone levels increase and your agressivity goes through the roof.

The present society claims that the modern family isn’t necessarily formed of a mother, father and a baby, and the sociological data and statistics reveal a tremendous increase in number of single parented families, while emphasizing the alarming rate of divorces.

As long as a woman earns as much as a man and she is becoming physically as strong as one, and as long as there are sperm banks, we, as women, will do just fine. Moreover, recent discoveries showed that women will soon be able to reproduce without any help from men and their generously spread seed, as sperm can be obtained out of bone marrow.

My personal issue popped-up however when I realized I am not strong enough to join men’s exclusive club but also not weak enough to inspire their sympathy, as Alice Nastase would say. I am what I am: a half-breed. To paraphrase a modern pop singer: “I am not a woman, not yet a man”.

In 2009, there are 192 (+/- 3) countries in the world. The UN recognized 192, while the US State Department admits the existence of 195, according to their own political agenda: a Kosovo here, a Taiwan there…

In October 2008 the statistics numbered only 15 female presidents and Prime Ministers around the world. That would be only 7.7% from the number of world leaders. Doesn't something seem wrong with these statistics?

Ironically enough, women are told that they can be whatever they want to be. That “good girls go the Heaven, but bad girls go wherever the hell they want”. A bad girl is usually a loud, assertive woman, with excess testosterone. A good girl is the type that everyone loves (or loves to hate), sweet (aw, a queen of hearts), always polite and eventually dedicating her life to the happiness of others to her own detriment.

Women have been given the pep talk the same way you prep a teen before going to college: parental and condescending. Eventually they have been granted full power to use the full throttle.

Women have come a long way, indubitably. And they still have a long and strenuous road ahead.

They fought to be able to be treated as human beings, and not as sexual pets or baby machines.
They fought to be able to vote, equal to men.
They fought so we win the right to speak up.
They fought so we can work and be paid for it.
They fought to be able to wear pants (Coco Chanel, thank you!)
They fought to be able to decide upon their own bodies.
They fought for our daughters.
They fought so we can become psychological hermaphrodites.
They fought so we can become half breeds.

But is this what we want, eventually? Be half-breeds?

To die for

Suicide as altruism

Lemmings are a species of rodents about whom people believe to commit mass suicide. They migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Sporadically, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean then jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to death. Frequently, lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more lemmings arrive at the shore. Due to their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to suicidal people.

Scorpions, the prairie deer, elephants, whales, and dogs are other animals known for terminating their own lives. However, the motives behind an animal’s choice of terminating its own life are not doubled by an aware reasoning, as in human’s case. In the animal regna it can only be instinctual suicide, most of the time due to the survival of the tribe. Without giving too much credit to this behavior, we can nevertheless claim that this particular case of self sacrificing for the benefit of a larger group can be defined as altruism. Consequently, altruism stops being monopolized as an exclusively human trait. For the time being, irrationality seems to remain the only feature reserved to human beings.

Suicide as freedom

Yet, it is noticed a higher conscience in animals like the scorpion or the prairie deer which commit suicide if they are imprisoned. Can we extrapolate and speculate that the prairie deer longs for freedom? For humans, freedom is, from a psychological point of view, just a matter of perception. Biologically, we are not free but slaves of your impulses and instincts. Sociologically, freedom it is just an impression -in terms of norms and rules constraint. What is freedom for a deer that was born in captivity?

I hate name dropping, but Voltaire once said the human species is the only one that is aware about the imminence of death and knows this based on experience not instinct, as opposed to the animals who “feel” death by instinct.

Consequently, animals can only have instinctual presentiments (I know it sounds a bit redundant, but I have a point, so stick around).

Humans, on the other hand, know that death is an immanent and imminent future of life.

Ironically enough, while animals seem to commit suicide due to lack of freedom, humans kill themselves out of excess freedom, and to exacerbate this prerequisite.

Dostoevsky's character Kirilov committed suicide to prove the absolute freedom of the man and paradoxically emphasize his own divinity.

Suicide as double standard

The ancient Greeks, Epicureans and Stoics thought that suicide is to exit stage when the play is too boring. For them it was that simple. Some Asian societies still do it. Why do we give so much moral charge to suicide nowadays? When but especially why did suicide attempts start being labeled as mental unbalance? The desire to live equals a mentally healthy individual. Yet, humans are driven by “death tempting” highly irrational acts (just think of extreme sports). Is it OK to have a death wish by jumping off a cliff with a parasail but not OK to chase a bottle of vodka with a fistful of aspirins?

Suicide as control

Paul Ludwig Landsberg tackled this issue in a whole book unsurprisingly titled “Essai sur l’experience de la mort, suivi de la probleme moral du suicide”.

He said that people fear death as the fear of death is fear of the unknown. Death is immanent and imminent but its arrival is uncertain. Some of the suicidal people chose to commit suicide and do so to eliminate the fear factor of the unknown, as they cannot take the pressure of the death’s imminence. These are usually people who are in control of their lives so the idea “of the unknown” scares them into pulling the trigger. For them, to die is to eventually fulfill their human mission controllably.

Suicide as temptation

From a religious stand, all three major Abrahamic religions blame suicide equally and unequivocally.

Church rejects suicide and finds no moral justification for it. However, my most stringent question is: doesn’t the concept of free-will contradict the religious precept that requires blind submission? Stuart Mill argues in his essay “On liberty” that “the sine qua non of liberty is the power of the individual to make choices”. Isn’t suicide just one of these particular choices to end one’s life when one considers timely?

From a Christian point of view, we can also contemplate suicide as temptation because the nature of human sufferance imminently brings the temptation of death.

A. Bayet said that condemning suicide isn’t a Christian attitude but a human aspect introduced by church to it, as Christianity means first of all unconditional tolerance. But there is a very fine line here, and Christianity thinks that if you justify suicide you justify crime, theft, sin. Christianity’s bottom line is that to commit suicide is to kill a human, and to kill a human is murder. However in certain societies, suicide can also be perceived as a moral duty- Japanese do the seppuku, ancient Greeks used to drink poison, Dacians (the ancestors of Romanians) threw themselves off the cliffs if they lost wars.

Judaism as well views suicide as the most serious of sins, although suicide is not specifically recorded in the Talmud.

Starting with 533 AD, those who committed suicide were denied a Christian burial, which was a requirement for going to heaven. While suicide is strongly condemned by the church there is however no specific text that explicitly states that suicide leads to hell.

Some authors say that, because Jesus took the punishment for the sins of mankind, and suicide is seen as a sin, the result would be that the person that commits suicide would not be more culpable than an ordinary criminal, and that all his sins (suicide included) would be absolved and covered by Christ.

Suicide as validation of ideas

Emil Cioran (the master of “The Summits of Despair”) said that “Jesus allowed to be crucified because he knew that only through sacrifice his ideas can triumph”.

Suicide is forbidden in Islam and is listed among the “enormities” in "Reliance of the traveler" (a manual of Sharia in the tradition of Imam Shafi’i), yet some think it is the highway to Heaven.

However, the question of suicide as a path to martyrdom is neither new nor original. At a certain point there was a specific Christian group called the Donatists who believed that by killing themselves they could attain martyrdom and go to Heaven. There were eventually declared heretics by the church. Apparently, only self sacrifice and death offers authenticity to your ideas and doctrine.

Christ’s suicide

Why the self-murderers are not being given the last mass and are ostracized and proscribed post mortem to the outskirts of the cemetery? Christ's guidelines preach unequivocally love, tolerance, and forgiveness.

Weren’t the Christian martyrs, who willingly allowed to be killed, suicides?

Didn’t Christ himself commit suicide since he knew what was expecting him and still accepted it? St Peter said “Don’t run away from sufferance as Christ himself willingly gave his life for us”.

Isn’t suicide the act by which a human voluntarily decides to cause his own death?

If a murderer can be forgiven why can’t be a suicidal?

Doesn’t free will mean to be able to make free choices, and doesn’t free choice mean to be able to commit suicide as well?

It is said that a useless life is an early death. For some, life is a journey, for others a burden, and for most of us, a gift. Enjoy it while you have it, and remember “those who are in the obituaries today, thought yesterday that tomorrow is just another day”.