Conflict of cultures

purasuchikku wrote ;"Individually, people do not mean much (self realization is only the acceptance that we are mortal), they always fit into a larger group (a nation, a culture, even a religion or an association) with a transcendent, divine destiny".
This seems to be the central point of present conflicts in the world. While the European civilization (some tend to call it Western civilization incorrectly, after all the Western Civilization from the Japanese point of view is the Chinese civilization), so coming back, the European civilization started with new scientific and philosophical understanding about the world sometime in the 16-17 century, while still embracing the political system of belonging to a group, community, nation, kingdom. Only at the 18 century appeared first time new ideas about individuality that brought at the end of this century the famous slogans of French revolution. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". This ended with unprecedented violence unseen until this time of the guillotines and Napoleonic wars. During the 19 century, after years of "Restoration" of the old order, slowly the ideas of the revolution penetrated to the European subconsciousness and in France and Brittany, with the new industrial revolution, the individual human being started to be counted. It was not an easy process. France and Europe needed the Dreyfus affair to bring to the awareness of the European population the criminality of the power structures enforced by the traditional leading elites. (I am France against J'accuse). 
Twenty century seemed to start as promising, when Germany, Austria and after the 1905 revolution even Russia adopted certain kind of constitutional Royal political system, where the elected parliament had more and more influence. But the traditional political forces surrounding the one royal family ruling in whole Europe, (except in France), was not ready to accept so easily the decline of their political power. Mainly it was truth in Germany and also in Austro-Hungarian empire, a remainder of political structure created in late middle ages. The World War I was the result of this political power structure. The German ruling elites had no difficulty to recruit the nationalistic feeling of the social grouping called the German nation, created just few decades before, to start a war. This war as to my perspective ended after 80 years at 1992 with the dismantling of the Soviet empire. 
The horrors of WWII, the moral remorse and joint shame of the Europeans, about the crimes they committed to the humanity, that included genocide and annihilation of cultures and races, caused a U turn in the European political culture, from national commonality to liberal individualism and human centralism. The liberal political system, that emphasizes the rights of expression of each individual human being, brought an outbrake of individual creativity, that helped to endorse economic and cultural expression, and brought progress and riches in these fields as never before in the human history.
Yet this U turn was not adopted by all the world communities. In contrary. In Europe itself, the post Soviet Russia, and lately also Turkey's political leaders try to adopt a more pro communal focused political system, with more rigid cultural expression, suppressing the free expression of the individual, while still trying to enjoy the economic fruits, the liberal political system enabled to create. Their success is very partial, because the successful economic wealth creation in Europe based on scientific, technological and cultural freedom needs to open its societies and political system to the each individual without difference in beliefs, social belonging and even education source. Even if social coherence in these states seems to be stronger than in Europe, and many individuals, with less need for self expression, can find it more advantageous than the alternative "chaotic" state, where every individual has the right for any kind of non-normative behavior or opinion, on the long term, the liberal individualistic society, with its creative diversity, and apparently chaotic state, successfully causes emergence of new cultural and economic values, that eventually win the game, and bring the progress and the economic and cultural wealth. 
Even worse economic-social-political fiasco than in Russia and Turkey can be observed in the Arab countries, adjacent to Europe and in their peripheral Muslim countries like: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. In this countries non of the liberal individualistic approaches were adopted. Their education system is not universal, and doesn't support learning about cultural diversity and intellectual openness. In contrary, the education system based on faith and rigid religious values suppresses the opened minded exchange of opinions so dear to the liberal individualistic approach of the Europeans. 
In all the Arab countries political despotism and social-cultural intolerance prevails. The failure in these countries in all the fields of human existence is so colossal, that these states ceased to be a place to provide to its citizens a life worth to live, with right for honor and decency, and its population in desperation tries to escape to the neighboring Europe, while risking their life. Even in countries like Iran and Pakistan, where officially governs a "democratically" elected governments and certain free political expressions are allowed, as to the humanist record and the right of the individuals to self expression, they are totally repressed. No freedom of choice is given to the population in these countries in the issues of religion, sexuality, social belonging economic transparency, etc. 
Unfortunately to Europe, the desperate population of the Arab and Muslim countries, while leaving behind their original homeland, bring with them their cultural identity, religious beliefs, and tribal communal belonging, that in its essence opposes the liberal individualistic European philosophy of life and politics.
The conflict between this new emigrants and the Europeans is inevitable unless the emigrants will be willingly absorbed by the original European population and the immigrants themselves will be ready to abandon their cultural identity, or at least to adopt it to a form that will enable their cultural incorporation to the liberal individualistic cultural concepts of the European societies. Obviously this is not what is happening. Such a cultural change and adaptation of millions of people is a prolong process, even if the immigrant is ready to live behind his beliefs and cultural identity, that brought on them in the first place the tragedy of need to leave their birth place and home. 
Also the European political leadership and its population is not ready to make necessary changes in their political philosophy to try to cope with the new situation, where bigger and bigger populations of Europe live a cultural life, that strongly opposes the individualistic humanistic values the European political culture is based on. The conflict between political system based on absolute faith in scripts expressing belief in extraterrestrial extra-human entity governing human destiny and individual life, and the rational scientific belief system believing in the right and duty of each individual to take responsibility on its own beliefs, destiny and acts seems to be at this state of affairs inevitable.

Truth

May I ask you, what is the truth all about?

Is it something worth to fight for?

Some may value it even much more than that,

Those who are ready to sacrifice it all,
The most valuable when they get the call,
To marsh frantically within the  mobs,
Demanding death, upon all the others,
Who have no respect for the ultimate truth,
The untouchable essence of all of us,
Thee holy consecrated imaginary One!!!
This being beyond all our senses,
Who is above all our perceptions,
Then let it Be, whoever it may be,
Whose holiness is beyond all the whole,
Smaller than the very energetic string,
Vibrating in the depths of the substance of all,
Larger than the very multiverses,
Reaching beyond the edges of infinity,
The very zero,… who is more than many.

Yet to those, who can know only the perceived reality,
The One may seem nothing but imaginary,
Yet the fact that it can’t be validated,
Makes it beyond all our means,
Causing unbearable horror to me,
When exposed in its perfect naked fallacy,
Emerging in me inhuman pain and agony,
Beyond anything comprehensive on earth,
Shaking my very material existence,
Demanding from me to kill and be killed.

May i ask you, is this what the truth is all about?

Fuco and me

Someone warn me in one of your responses from becoming a Fucoist. I thought about this notion, and meditated about the question how you came to this idea. Fuco as to me is like a waiter, who is cleaning up the table, but then has no menu and no food to offer. So he is the cleaning lady, but someone else has to come after him and bring the menu. 
Then i thought you probably mean the archaeology of history in Fuconian terms. Meaning i try to derive out of historical events that changed the human history and collective consciousness, the answer to the question, where we are and to where we are heading too. But except of the technique Fuco used, that seems to me quite trivial, nothing in me is Fuconian. I'm digging into the history to find there directives to where from here and on, while Fuco just tried to find the source of collective consciousness, that substance of which all the ethics, norms, conformity and morality is derived from, to diminish it. Then he opposed any trial to create a new substance, which could create new norms of any kind that could guide the human social behavior. I wondered, what kind of food Fuco would eat without recipe? 
Then I wondered, it is obvious on Fuco's system couldn't be established a community life, but maybe a total individualism could work. So i made a thought experiment, and imagined what would happen to Robinson Crusoe if he would live a Fucoian life, instead of puritanically harboring his island. He would probably psychologically fall apart.
Then my associations changed to wonder, what a world was then in these times when still existed inhabitable islands, without human creatures and without five star hotels. And here i understood, this is all about Fucoism, when you come to the point that you have to give answers, you just change the subject. 
What’s right about Fuco to my opinion is his observation of effectiveness of modern surveillance and control of the individual as compared to the medieval system, cruel by itself by any stands to the individual, but very ineffective as a tool for domination.

The main problem of Fuco, as political scientists before him, starting from Machiavelli, Hobbs, Lock, but even Karl Marx is that they looked at political power or any kind of authority of one human being upon other, from the point of view of elites. Yet, the point of view of subordinates, those who are ruled, coordinated, monitored, indoctrinated, humiliated, suppressed, exploited, and sometime even enslaved or murdered, without to be explained why it happened, etc. is very different from this point of view. They are not looking to understand the structure of authority, or not even for moral questions of right and wrong, but they are looking for justification for the authority of those who rule. Yet, those who submit themselves to be ruled are not looking for justification in explanation of some rational philosophical theory of power, like Machiavellian understanding and managing cynically the evil to arising submission and control, or Hobbs idea of creating a body of human community managed by one top manager who has the authority to create fear and obedience, or Locks social contract between the rulers and the ruled. Those who act out of submission, under the rule of others, don't even look for a turn of the wheel, so their turn to rule would come. Even if by accident those, whose destiny and cognitive capacity is to be submitted to the rullers they happen to participate in such a turn of wheel called revolution, out of the revolution again will emerge as the leaders those others, who are destined or have the knowledge to rule. Here Fuco was right, authority and power to control others is about knowledge, or i would put it rather as ignorance of those who are submitted. But those who lack this knowledge, the ordinary people, who voluntarily subordinate themselves to authority have no knowledge of this kind. They are happily deceived by all the instruments created by those who dominate them. Instruments like, all the media ( Hollywood, newpapers, television, even the most popular clips on the internet), festivals like sport and cultural events, public holidays, public ceremonies, public events, divinization of  celebrities, etc. They are definitely not in a mood to change their state and position from being submited and monitored to a position of self-rule, without any predifined norms, codes, epical heroes and heroines to indentify with. 
For these people Fuco has no place, he would cause them to be lost in confusion. As contrary to Fuco, the ruling elites, who do have the knowledge and capacity to dominate others, will create the mythology to mystify the ruled by their divinely justified position and authority. Do not look for rationale behind any of this justification. Enough to remember the intensity in which the worlds 95% population watched for days the funeral ceremony of princess Diana, to understand how important is for the majority of worlds inhabitants the epical story of his heroes.
And who was this princes Diana after all? Will here death cause any change in human existance? Nothing of this kind. And yet she was the ultimate heroine to morn for and not someone like Rosalind Franklin, who died at age of 38, even before she could recieve the well justified nobel price for discovering the basic structure of the DNA. So all the fame could go to Watson and Crick, who have stolen her laboratory results with generous help from Roisalins college, Maurice Wilkins, who had stolen from Rosaline her results, to give them to Watson. The Nobel commission find this act enough to justify to give him the nobel price instead to  Rosalind Franklin, she by the time of the ceremony was dead. To my knowledge, no wide spread public ceremonies were hold in her funeral.

Tribal systems

Everything in the reality is a system. Atom is a system, living cell is a system, living being is a system, but also tribe is a system, a social system. Every system interacts inwardly and outwardly. So doe's the atom and so the tribe. The inwardly interaction activity  of the system is to help to sustain and flourish the system and as a such its strategy is very similar in most of the systems. On the other hand outwardly interaction of the system differs from one system to the other. The inorganic system interacts outwardly mechanically and in a predictable way. This is truth even if the human knowledge is not always sufficient and maybe never will be sufficient enough to understand what is in the core of the system. At the essence of every system are the laws of causality. While mechanical they can be understood, meaning it's reactions can be predictable, even if probabilistically. This is because a mechanical inorganic system has no intentionality. There are those who claim that there exists intentionality also in the mechanical systems. No scientific evidence was found for such a claim, so it remains in the sphere of the religious faith and esoteric believes, without scientific or technological impact.
On the other hand, the organic system does have intentionality that can be observed. The most obvious and universal intention phenomena is the continuous uncompromising strive for continued existence of the system. If there is a system without uncompromising intentionality for survival, it is destined to be doomed. This can be observed in a simple viruses or in a complete social systems like a tribal system.
An organic system sometimes is broken to parts or its subsystems that continue a separate existence, and sometime they join together to create a new unified system. Such an unification can occur voluntarily out of adaptation of the innate or learned intentionality of the system, to a new intentionality as it is defined by the new unified system. In other cases such a unification is done by violent acts among the seperate organic systems. The result is adaptation of the winning dominant systems intentionality by the subordinated systems, that during the process are disintegrated or annihilated. Yet sometimes the subordinated system, as it becomes part of the winning system, it itself influences the winning system and causes it to be changed accordingly.
To understand certain tribal phenomena as a system, we have to look into its intentionality. The very best expresion of intentionality of a tribal system is expressed in its mythology. What is one of the most important mythological movers that drives the tribal intentionality and also defines the tribal existence? Belief in transcendental coordinator. Without it the tribal identity loses its goal, meanning and finally also its vitality. The whole European idea failed to create a unifying myhology. Cultural diversity and liberalism seems to be rather an antidote against creating a commonly excepted mythology with intentionality the Europeans can identify with. It seems, the goal of creating a wellbeing, peaceful existence is not enough to create a mythology. The reason i see is that mythology needs its mysticism, a beyond human understood phenomena. It needs a hero who can act beyond daily human perception. No bureaucrat of Brussels is good for that. What seems to me with more chances to create a platform for whole European mythology with intentionality is the muslim jihadist threat. If the Muslim jihad will emerge more are more from its marginalised corners to the consciousness of Europeans, it will cause more and more recruits to a reaction against it. What prevents to this to happen is the memory of whole European criminal violence, its major symbol is Auschwitz, where the human capacity for absolute evil was obviously expressed.

Coming back to Mother Teresas myth, as a representative of the Christian system intentionality, of course her phenomena is beyond the inter-human relations on the personal level. The same is truth with the Muslim faith and the mythology that drives the Muslim intentionality. To understand the future impact of the new emigration wave on the European culture, it is necessary to learn the myths driving them to the acts of immigration in spite of all the dangers and potential personal price they have to pay.