06.06.2015

Death in Live Broadcast

Not so long ago, the listeners of one of the Danish radio channels witnessed a murder in the live broadcast.  The TV host invited the defender of the animal rights to the studio and started the discussion with her about the ways of killing the animals at the farms.  And then apparently to back up his arguments he pulled a rabbit out of the box and killed it with three blows on the head with a bicycle pump.
It is not hard to guess that he defended the right to kill the domesticated animals for food using any ‘convenient’ way.  Any alternative viewpoint the truth-seeking journalist considers as the hypocrisy and duplicity.  Moreover, he does not see anything wrong if people should get accustomed to that idea from the very small age. 
In response to a flurry of indignation arisen in the Internet, the presenter said that he had really killed the rabbit for food: he returned home, skinned, butchered it and made a stew.  His two 6 and 8 years’ old children helped the father. The discussion is over, forget about it.

It seems that the Danish journalist had his own right.  In the end, he at least used the unfortunate rabbit for food, while  an year ago the young giraffe Marius was put to sleep, butchered and then fed to the lions in front of the specially organized school children visit to the one of Denmark's zoo. The lions, by the way, were also killed later. They, like Marius, were ‘not needed’ by that zoo.
On the background of these senseless killings the appalling radio host seems to be a quite adequate and modest man.  Well, what could he be blamed for?  But the trouble is that, as Shakespeare said, "No vice is so simple as not to take the outside view of the virtue ".  There is a well-known technology of manipulating the human psychology called the ‘Overton Window’.  In simple terms it means that the certain manipulation can change the mentality of the public to such extend that what seemed inconceivable yesterday, will be the accepted as the rule tomorrow. Thus what has happened in Denmark is far from harmless. Some could ignore it for people always do something stupid. However, Honore de Balzac warned with a good reason: "There is always a crook by the fool."  The politically engaged journalists are gradually adjusting society to the idea that the nonsense is the norm, trying to stop people to think reasonably by switching the public attention to the secondary issues.
Where does it lead to? The only answer is to the imbalance between the actions of the politicians and the true interests of society. The vehicle chassis imbalance inevitably leads to an accident.  The imbalance of the subtle energy fields of the body and the aura leads to diseases from the common cold to the cancer.  The civilization imbalance leads to the even more disastrous consequences.  Let me explain my point by the clear examples.  Hardly someone would argue the fact that all religions preach goodness, renunciation of violence and other human values.  Islam does not stand out from these. However, when the radicals or just dishonest people privatize the ideology of Islam by distorting and interpreting it according to their interests we get ISIS with the cutting off heads in public and the destruction of the ancient cultural values.  Thus, Islam is associated with terror and barbarism in the public mind now.
Another example is the sanctions imposed against Russia. They were supposed to hit the citizens of the Russian Federation leading to public outrage and, in the end, to change the foreign policy of the country.
However, I have travelled around the world quite a lot, and I see that the Europeans suffer most from the sanctions, including those by the predictably imposed the Russian ‘anti-sanctions’.  Last year I witnessed the Polish farmers unable to sell their apples and the Norwegian fishermen forced to sit at the shore, all of them having to pay the bills and pay back the loans taken for the future harvests and fish catches.
Whenever politics are doing stupid things with the silent consent of the majority, the ordinary people suffer most. Wherever the stupidity is triumphant in some place, the whole human civilization suffers.
The Danish journalist did not just kill a rabbit to feed his family.  He killed a piece of our civilization.  Human society is distinguished from the biota of the Amazon jungle by the fact that each of us and all of us as a whole has voluntarily taken upon ourselves the limits restricting our behaviour. We misbalance the very foundations of the civilization.  If we can kill the rabbit today on a live broadcast then why not make a film of beheading a man tomorrow?  Why not to bomb a couple of the peaceful cities?  Meanwhile, the efforts of Western media to go beyond the limit (do you remember the ‘Overton Window’?) is no longer considered as something unusual but became somewhat fashionable. The society is being deliberately led to stop thinking of the important issues by giving it more and more horrific examples of going over the limit again and again, day after day. It is no secret that the politicians for the most part are not independent.  And even realizing the harmful consequences of their decisions, they still make them, subject to the pressure and expecting that the society, distracted by other issues, would not mind.
Is it possible to resist the destruction of the limit set by the centuries of civilization?  I'm sure, it is. The FIDE project ‘One billion of clever people’ designed to increase the number of chess fans was established to exactly achieve that goal.  Chess disciplines the mind but most importantly it teaches to calculate the consequences of ones’ decisions.
‘First think and then do’ is the initial thing the chess beginners are taught. A man who is able to think cannot so easy lose his independence. The politician who had been playing chess from the childhood could make the unpopular decisions but never the foolish ones, deteriorating the life of the fellow citizens, without giving them anything in return.
These days about six million people are playing chess in the world.  According to our calculations, the quantity would turn into quality when their number will reach one billion.  We are not saying that they all have to be GMs.  It is enough to understand the philosophy of the game.
For example, if one in ten had becomes a politician that is the hundred million and every ten politicians take the right decision, we will get the ten million right decisions.  Even the single right decision can often save thousands of lives.  Ten million right decisions can save the human civilization and lead our society to progress again.
And then, I hope, we will no longer kill rabbits and behead people in live shows.