TIPPs For Life

 What is a Good Society?  

This question represents an important topic to study because we all live in the context of the systems around us, and how well-connected we are with each other is paramount importance to literally any branch of service we bring to others.

What differentiates mammals from humans is a much-researched area of interest humans had for centuries. All observations lead to the conclusion that animals like primates and elephants, do live in social systems, groups we can call colonies, members even bond in an emotional connection, yet we cannot talk about societies in their case, because they don't operate on the level of shared values, beliefs or goals.

I the case of human societies the different subgroups of people, or tribes, hold the same or similar values, which organizes them into these chosen colonies. Value based societies also mark their territories to protect those values and live an authentic life based on the criteria within the defined cultural domain. This later piece is perhaps rare, because integrity, that is to do what we believe in is exceptionally rare.

So, if we now have defined what differentiates animal social systems from human society formations, we also can deduct what makes a society a society as such. It is SHARED VALUES and their practices that unite members by supporting criteria, laws, customs, futuristic systems to preserve or evolve into the image of the ideal culture its members desire to produce.  

In my understanding the 30 points of Declaration of Universal Human Rights made a profound effort to clarify the universal, globally shared values of the human community, and instantaneously was approved by the original 48 countries of the world in 1948 where each sovereignty individually signed the declaration. Today this same number is 193 countries, with still much room for growth. The underlaying message behind the signing of the 30 points is based on the principal value of RESPECTING THE INHERENT DIGINITY OF THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL. Societies are made of individuals, and the ultimate measure of a good society is how much respect it has for the life of its individual members, how much responsibility it demonstrates in practical response to inequalities and mitigating injustice, but also how much care and compassion is extended towards the vulnerable, victimized, neglected members. All this work requires investment, solid scientific and professional preparation, and strong individuals who have the capacity to join forces without compromising their own values, lifestyle balance, and personal safety.

We recognize other universal societal values as well, like environmental concerns, a right for fresh air and nutritious food, family values, friendship and love, creative self-expression by the cultivation of arts, a desire to live in a society according to your definition of peace, historical cultural loyalty, access to equal chance for an excellent scholarship, but those perceived rights aren’t basic human rights, they are rights earnt by personal merit, hard work performed in the pursuit of happiness, and no government can guarantee to ensure it for you. Often passionate, expert, committed involvements of the individual in local communities are fundamentally rooted in personal values that join up with societal values to produce a powerfully fortified united front.....ideally.

Values that influence my decisions are based in intense research, unending chain of questions that clarify ever-expansive perception fields that lead to amazing innovative accomplishments. Protecting such initiatives on a community organizational level is my highest understanding of the social arts and radical future building.

I highly value living in a society of ever evolving and improving justice system, being involved in a timeless, intermedia level, international, and intellectual dialogue with historical masterminds about significant topics, financial security, relationships and a sense of belonging, community dynamics, personal growth and education, loyalty, religion, respect of basic needs and human dignity, harmony, safety, and perseverance for a worthy cause, a milestone legacy.  

Core values are the most significant values of a person, group, and society. Core values are defined by the commitment of members to its preservation. Yes, it is possible to attain at least a few words and capture the core values highlighted among the shared values of a general population, which is pre-dominantly characteristic of intentional community building. Much of intentional community building on a large scale is done by political and governmental organizations. Core values are values we are committed to, but they don't have to be government initiated and executed for the population. Grassroot movements can be just as powerful if not more highly principled, more invested, more committed and action-oriented, mostly volunteer based work. Well composed and thought-through legal grassroot movements deserve public supports and a status of respected authority to learn from.

The challenges for grassroot societies to overcome is to overcome the limitations of conservative traditionalism and build on its honorable strengths. And other challenge is insufficient desire for academic and organized education, career planning, qualifications for influential office role that is strongly discouraged in our Hawaiian local attitude. Four those sub-groups the same concept of a good society is limited to a tribal consciousness, or family-ohana involvement only.

Doctor Martin Luther King talks about obeying a just law is just, but obeying an unjust law is unjust, and on the other hand disobeying an unjust law is just, therefore lawful.

While I fully agree with his statements, yet I hope we are at this stage of history at a place by now, when we can be proactive and not disobey an unjust law but change it for the better.

In Hawaii we adopt a cultural law, that is called Ho'opono'pono. Meaning know what is right and do what is right. It is the definition of a righteous path, and the first teaching is forgiveness. It is a value I learnt from the native Hawaiians, this is their cultural value to forgive others, and build a society based on doing the right thing at all times.

The Hawaiian culture had its dark side to it too, and many of those cultural activities accepted by them traditionally have been unlawful for almost two centuries by now, yet they are happening. Is incest criminal? We know it used to be natural to Hawaiians, it is outlawed today, and how many of us feels appalled by it just by considering justifying incest in families today? Does it feel very wrong? Are we holding the same values? So, when Dr King talks about disobeying an unjust law is just, how do we feel about the controversy of incest in native families just keeps rising increasing value related issues in the community. Some feel courts go too easy on punishment for this form of child abuse, and others think it shouldn't even be a crime. In this particular matter I would not use the Dr King quote without explaining that he talks about an unjust law broken is just, and not about an unpopular law broken by criminals looking to justify their actions before a moral audience.

The opposing ideas of locals and new-comers are felt in areas of incest, street-drug use, the aiding of unlimited alcohol consumption by minors, childcare/neglect in the form of deprivation from nutrition in school age, the necessity to encourage youth to enter further education and earn accredited diplomas enabling them to enter a specialized career field.

And other important value for my personal moral attitude is hospitality. By hospitality I mean also feeding kids at home by their parents. I live alone now, but used live in big intentional family settings where I was a lot in the kitchen feeding people. It is unacceptable for me to hear that during the pandemic a gross number of children starved because schools were closed, and often that was their only meal of the day what they received at school. It is unacceptable for me to see that well-to-do families a numbers of mammoth-trucks in their yard neglect feeding their children. My personal value conflicts a great deal with the local community values over that. It literally deprives children from a right to life, and education. Nobody can function as their best if they don't have anything to eat. While hospitality is mostly used in the context of newcomers to the land, heole, but the little children are also newcomers to life, they stay with us for a time before they step out into the world to start their own life. Starving children at home used for incest and other form of abuse, are being trafficked, their enslavement by their own caregivers is just as resentment-worthy as the segregation era in the deep South in the lifetime of Dr. King. How do I act today to free enslaved children from their own ohana (blood relations and other close friends under the same roof)?

Shared values are impressively endorsed by both parties in traditional arts and craft appreciation, cultural education of the local kids in the form of weekend Kamehameha workshops to learn Hawaiian language, attitude toward hospitality and entertainment, Malama, or the protective and respectful payback to Mother Nature and environmental consciousness.

I delight in our shared ideas with the local native communities and intend to work to improve on the challenging aspects of our unresolved discrepancies. I hope the dialogues of the future will improve for all members of society the quality of life we find moral and promising.

Mahalo

and may your day set with a forgiving heart, because according to Hawaiian values, only a forgiving heart is righteous.

See you next week. Aloha

Kirpatrick Signature Series

Application Assignment 1.3

Authored and Read by Mayasonette Lambkiss

LA400_LA410_LA420-C321 AMERICAN VISION AND VALUES (2243_1)

Date: 11/30/2023

Due Date: 12/3/23

Engaged citizenship begins with self-education. Understanding the basic concepts of what it means to be a citizen, what problems move in our local, domestic, foreign and global communities is the beginning of taking interest in our fellow humans. It is an important topic, because we all depend on each other for survival, supply, safety, personal growth, and interconnectedness.

The most important realization we may come to in our relationship to our community is that the more we ensure other peoples' needs to be met, rights respected, and gifts to shine to others, the more our needs, rights, and shining gifts will receive the kind attitudes. Only in a very small part for exchange and bargain, but because the more we educate our surroundings for a generous and right interconnectedness, the healthier our societies become.

To be engaged citizens simply means to make ourselves available for a necessary purpose to others within the context of our society. The nation we live in, the United States brings us the specifics on how they expect their citizens to contribute to the country as a whole, it offers us civic rights in exchange for duties and responsibilities. The more correctly we use our responsibilities, the more we ensure everyone else's rights, and our own role within the matrix. The healthier our engagement with our society, the healthier it is for others, and the coming generations.

Putnam's theory focuses on the importance of being involved, and it remains the most significant starting point. Without involvement there is nothing. Nothing happens, only rogue societal wildlife will be spreading, and the shadow of human nature carries inherent issues for our survival individually and as a human family as well.

Oldenquist beautifully makes the case for the importance of education, which will take place either we deliberately cultivate an educational direction and standard for our youngsters, or not. But the risk of losing the best qualities of our civilization is significantly less if we take responsibility and intentionally direct the formation of culture through education, than if we ignore our power to build better minds for a better society.

Americans created a new culture where individualism and respect to innate qualities of human beings is worshipped from birth, and it has brought a new sense of freedom to the world as such. While scientific observation of the various cultures brings to light, that apart from the benefits of individualism and freedom it has weaknesses, that other countries can manage better, and we have a reason to look into the relevance of how to shape our own attitudes towards the education of the will of children in their formative years already.

While American citizens perhaps are the most engaged citizens of any society, it is greatly engraved in our history of innovation, taking initiatives and grassroot-movements, it is imperative for the future of our country that we do not neglect the importance of shaping and defining the range and quality of freedom we groom our children to cultivate in their own minds towards our country and the world. America was built on the grassroot initiatives of leading minds, and it is an arena still providing the greatest opportunities for exercising civic freedom.

Grassroot activities form into movements by networking, and networking is dependent on the unmeasurable and immeasurable extent of social capital that many tried to define with different understandings at hand. Robert Putman wrote in his work of Bowling Alone (2000) “Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.” He reflects here on the sad phenomenon of how mass marketing is replacing the word-of-mouth promotion of real ideas and quality advertising.

While Bourdieu defines social capital as a person's property, Putnam recognizes it as the positive product of human interaction, a value network of a vast number of individuals, and therefore cannot limit it as one person's property, but a shared property of an entire society. The replacement of social networking with mass media robs our culture from the capital created by positive human interaction.

The sense of freedom American citizens enjoy, including the freedom to engage and make a difference, is intoxicating to members of other societies, where they do not enjoy the same level of freedom themselves. By migrating to the US, and assimilating into its culture, they also bring with them influences that can invite and cater to unacceptable, even criminal activities from Americans, using citizenship as a bait and a control over the freedom-hungry newcomers.

Though Elenor Roosevelt recognized the need for a united front on a global scale to address the issues of crimes against humanity and proposed already in 1948 to summit called the United Nations a declaration for Universal Human Rights, it is still the gravest issue to deal with today. To respect a human being simply means to acknowledge their power to lead their own life, and not use power to disempower them. Yes, respect is the end of power struggle, and power struggle is the end of freedom, and the end of freedom is the beginning of enslavement. Many does not know their right to use their own personal influence to instigate positive change, and others step into the vacant role to do it for them. And yet again others are groomed by more savvy and skilled persons to give up their personal power only so they would voluntarily submit to them.

In both cases we end up with involuntary and even voluntary enslavement of another individual, who by nature should be given the same right to a free will as anybody else. This activity, especially if the realm of crime is introduced to the process, is called human trafficking or trafficking in persons today in legal terms. The United States Constitution 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and Elenor Roosevelt adopted the intent accordingly into the Universal Human Rights 4th Article to protect against slavery.

What is about American freedom that millions of people value so deeply, they would allow themselves to be trapped in slavery for, which is the ultimate denial of freedom? (Need to state here, that not all human slavery is accessed by surrendering to whatever it takes to becoming an American citizen, but the most commonly used tool, and a voluntary one at that used in the enslavement of individuals.) In other countries the idea of the significance of an individual voice in the whole of a community is an unimaginable, often undervalued, undermined, even chastised quality of being present. Many Americans don't know that, because they never experienced to be constitutionally stripped of their individual significance, and they so underestimate this freedom they never use it. They are citizens, they know their responsibilities, they know their rights, use it, correctly and criminally too, but since for them it is a given, they have no innate sense of its value. An unengaged citizen is a half-baked citizen. But an immigrant, who is willing to surrender his or her basic human rights temporarily in the hopeful promise of a much greater freedom in the future, maybe understands the value of the American freedom and fully engaged to acquire it, even willing to pay an insane price for it, but also deceived: the intent to enslave is never temporary.

My dream to American citizenship started in my 8 years old head, and I stepped out of my comfort zone leaving my country of Hungary at 20 years old with the hope to realize this dream. Took me 28 years to be sworn in as an American citizen, after an incredibly questionable journey (story to be told another time) but was never an unengaged preparation for citizenship. One year later my actions lead me to becoming a United States diplomat, not just a citizen, and it is my engagement with the problems in my community and worldwide that gave me the means and the honor to do so. I worked so hard, and endured so much to arrive to my citizenship, that I am absolutely refusing to remain a half-baked citizen, lay back, earn a nice mortgage and car, and enjoy the freedom that everyone deserves, but very few is willing to promote correctly, and some would even exploit for financial gain preying on others' desire to be free. Today I am a diplomat, because I am an engaged citizen, and I am willing to die for it if I had to and live for it in every day of my life to make it better for everyone... even those who think only crime can sustain them financially and pay the bills, for they need education too to change their ways. For as Putnam had put it in his work titled Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American Community, “Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.” I must agree here with the emerging idea, that the diminishing of quality human relationships in the grassroot level of networking also means the emergence of slavery, and slavery is the end of any self-respecting society.

Oldenquist puts great emphasis on the moral education of the individual from a very young age and highlights the power of public injustice against the individual such as racism among others as a dart in the heart of participatory citizenship, for how can you expect a victim of such debilitating perception to be a good citizen. The article of Oldenquist on citizenship explains: "This collection of mistakes and confusion can combine to make a person reject the idea of citizenship education and retain just the name. 'Citizenship education' then becomes critical thinking, political activism, or 'inquiry', these all being way to avoid dealing with the ethical basis of citizenship and concern oneself with only the skills of citizenship without the ethical basis". Later he details what he means by ethical and moral basis for citizenship.

I fully support Putnam's theory of a better society begins with getting involved, and Oldenquist's theory that we need moral education, morality is not innate, and this precious, uniquely human attribute can be lost if left uncultivated. Therefore, I made this kind of moral education for Universal Human Rights my business, literally, and my engaged citizen project for life. I hope you sign up to follow the Institute for Universal Human Rights Hawaii Radio on demand by adding yourself as a subscriber below.

Aloha, and may the Spirit of Righteousness help you forgive.

And you just heard, Mayasonette Lambkiss from Honolulu January 2024.