Trust and Information

Trust is a very deep emotion. The words 'I trust you' are single most powerful words that one human can say to another. Of course, like any other emotion like love, joy, trust is also a word but when said has a power that no other emotion has. It is the single most important word in that encompasses a lot of positive emotions in it. The word positive qualifies anything that makes a human's life less unhappy.

Trust is a complex emotion, an integration of sorts of all the various emotions that are much easily felt like happiness, sorrow, anger etc. Trust is not felt directly but in an indirect fashion. If you can open your emotions in front of another person, you show trust. Then again, what you show establishes the level of trust. On one end of the spectrum is the 'social' aspect of trust where you maintain a guard about what you speak and what you don't. On the other end of spectrum is the place where you keep your head on someone's lap and get irritated because you did lousiest of mistakes and can blame no one. We all lie in between this. Complete trust is difficult to achieve because at times even we are not sure about our emotions.

Trust always makes things positive. If you trust someone, you bring out your negative energy and try to make sense out of it. There is a biological aspect and physical aspect of it. They both can be summed up as follows - your mind has a tendency to go to lowest energy state. The biological aspect is simple - rest now to save energy for tomorrow's disasters. The physical aspect is linked to electron theory of Bohr. Summing up, your brain will try to simplify things as fast as possible, provided it sees that it can come back to a state of rest. If you are with someone you can trust, thoughts ease out and clarity comes faster. Conversely, people who have the most clarity, trust their instincts to be relied upon in absence of any adversary.

Amount of Trust in a society directly affects state of society. As the quanta of trust increases, it means that more and more people achieve a peace of mind which leads to less restlessness and hence less aggression, less violence and a peaceful society. The converse is also true that in a peaceful society, more people will tend to trust each other than societies that are unstable in nature. Volatility in societies are largely hereditary. Ultimately body does what it needs to do in order to survive in an extreme condition. Although, when things get better, we don't break that habit and worse pass it on for generations together. Clans and tribes still exist, even though I am writing this blog over internet.

Information has a direct implication on trust because the more dialogs happen in a society, more trustful it becomes. This can be directly extrapolated from how one human trusts another. It is a positive spiral. One thing that information technology has provided is easy access to information that can be accessed from anywhere. We have telecommunication revolution of sorts going on and Google has opened doors for billions of people to transmit their thoughts. And yet, Iran is going against IAEA support to build Nuclear Enrichment plants. Why?

Because even though information is exchanged, we are still in that same genetic makeup of self survival. All information exchange wants to happen to ensure that personal benefits take precedence. While that'd have been good if personal benefit has a correlation with societal benefit though it turns out that Power and Trust don't go hand in hand.

The choice that every human has to make is this - do I choose to trust or do I want to make sure I am in control? Now I don't say it's bad to have control, all I say is control yourself because when you start controlling anything other than yourself, you start losing trust.

The fall of 'Complex'

The root of all restlessness and aggression is a complex. By definition, complex is " a combination of emotions and impulses that are rejected from a person's awareness, but influence the behaviour". It is imperative that complex lies at the heart of all our aggression. If we don't have a complex, implying that we don't reject our emotions, there is not much reason for a lot of emotional turmoil.

Why did I choose this line of argument to start with? Because right now the world is in a transformational mode. The transformation is with respect to assuring a person's individual identity. The signs are everywhere and now with technology it is becoming even more prominent. Because now there is a way to express one's idiosyncracy without hesitation.

Groups and socieities have been an integral part of human evolution. I don't think it will ever go, no matter how empowered people get or feel. There is always a need to inform, communicate and discuss. This is what connects people, forms basis of relationships. The fault happens when this relationship suddenly becomes bigger than the people involved, such as is the case with societies today. Society empowers humans to be their individual self. This feeling is lost somewhere. Lack of accountability and responsibility are key offshoots of over dependence on society.

Before the 90's information was sparse, and in hands of the few. There were newsmakers, media and followers or general people. The information technology changed that, and today whoever has an internet connection is pouring in to the information available. This is liberating and revolutionary.

Suddenly you are not shy to be what you are. While you can maintain a dual identity, you are sleeping much better in the night because your internet avatar is really what you are. Emotions are free at last, and do not need anyone's judgment or decision to see the day of the light. Complex goes down, even if by a small percentage.

Transformation is happening. Our societies will evolve as the humans who form it evolve. Empowerment is contagious. Argumentation decreases as everyone has one version of reality. Action increases as everyone realizes that they alone can actually change themselves. Information plays a near-revolutionary role here. And so does Information Technology.

Google Wave -- this is wayyyy too much..

I think this is going to change the way world collaborates because:
- In our minds, we don't differentiate between wanting to talk, and wanting to share information. Yeah, we don't and this tool will make it easy for us to be ourselves!

- In our companies, we use whiteboards and want to transfer that to documents. we also want to talk, share etc. Again here it is to solve all that in a way that's intuitive.

yes this is intuitive and this is big... welcome to the new world of information sharing.... GOOGLE WAVE...

The journey

From my last post, I will continue on the journey part. Every creature on the planet is born with the map of its life. You can understand this concept better if you see Nat Geo documentaries. You may not believe this but in Amazon, there are fishes who lay their eggs on low lying leaves of the trees and the male fish actually knows when these eggs will be fertilized to be brought back to the river. You think someone taught that fish that? No. It knew. And believe me we all know.
Humans have been given a far more sophisticated tool to tread through the map - the brain. The brain is an immensely complex organ that works as a decision making center for our body to tread on that map. Therefore, whatever you are doing right now, is precisely what you are supposed to do, given the choices you made earlier. Bad, good, right, wrong is all that this brain is experiencing and making you believe of that choice. Could there have been a better path? Maybe yes, maybe no. Could you have taken another path? No. But can you reach to that ultimate goal? Yes, because every form of energy in this world has a tendency to reach stable state. And so is true for your soul too.
Net-net, whatever you are doing, wherever you are, in deep shit or in penthouse, you are there because you needed to learn something from the choice you made. What you need to understand is this - deep shit and penthouse are least important, why you made the choice is what gets you to the state of peace.

Ultimately....

I have been thinking about this for a long time now and I guess this gives answer to a lot of my questions. Of course, I discovered them myself and therefore instead of linking to a credible personality, I will be doing the honors to write it. :)
I have spoken, in a purely philosophical terms, to many people about destiny, super consciousness etc. There are people who believe, there are who don't and in-betweens too. I sure do believe in destiny. And here is some food of thought on that topic.

1. According to Vedas (vedabase.net), the ultimate destination for all human beings is to be one with the supreme power or 'chaitanya'. Having said that we are all given several lives to travel through a part of that journey. We are also given means to complete that part of journey aka body (including the mind, which is mostly governed by one's genes).

2. This journey is what The Secret author Rhonda called as travelling from Seattle to NY only knowing the next 100 meters or so. Thats exactly it. You know where you have to get to, only you have to see only next 100 m at a time.

3. We have a choice, all of us, whether to follow our inner self which by the way is meant to take you through the "straight-line" path (meaning shortest distance). Unfortunately, in today's world we choose to be driven more by external factors than internal. Therefore we sometimes are incapable of making the right choice and therefore the path just elongates.

4. What do I mean when I say "inner self"? Well don't worry, I am not telling you to do Yoga or meditation. You KNOW when you make a choice against your will and when you don't. Seriously, just think about it and your mind keeps it stored. Negativity in one's personality is a resultant of this. Bottomline, you are perfectly aware when you do against your will.

Inner-dope: Ultimately, its trust. When you trust that this travel will only have situations, circumstances and people who were meant to come to your life and have a purpose, you become peaceful. Only thing you got to remember - go by your own discretion.

Recession ... a theory

Everyone knows we are in midst of a recession. A lot of economic textbooks and newspapers would have educated you on how a "cycle" works and about "boom" and "depression" too. So let's forget about all that. Lets talk about basics.

Capitalism works very well with democracy for a simple reason that the more choices people have the more they will demand. The more people demand, the more there are choices and so on. I hope this convinces some of you. A very few of you who think "well there is got to be a limit to what a human can ask for", well guys there is none. And I am guessing the few of you who thought are either from India or China or are very above 50 years of age. Don't ask me why.

In the history of mankind, human beings have evolved in their thinking and their capabilities. You have reasons to think that its not actually a human who is empowered but there are accessories to empower her, well ultimately the objective of empowerment is achieved.

Money has been defined and redefined itself. From just being an instrument to buy and sell stuff, it has become an industry in itself called Finance.

So I told you about 3 things : Capitalism, Evolution of humans and Money. Lets take our argument further with these 3 things.

Human beings essentially like to fulfill their needs. Obviously, the more of us are there the more choices we want to have. So basically there is enough "market" for some of us to go ahead and capture. Now why would I want to look at a set of human being's needs as market? Because I got to live and good old barter doesn't exist. So I choose to use something called as Money. Money gives me options to buy anything I like and I go "Ooh! I have choice to buy stuff". The more money I have the more choices I can demand.

The flip side, if you may, of this situation is if I catered to all of you, I have a lot of money and ultimately you all start catering to me. Market is ultimately people. If I built a Wal Mart and start giving flexible finance options to buy stuff from me (assuming you are all fools of capitalism), ultimately you are bonded to me for the goods I provide to you. Unless....

Unless you all start looking outside to see if you can serve some more so that you earn more and get rid of me.

Looking at Human development index, only 15% of countries in the world are Rich. So basically these are the people who can "demand" stuff. Unfortunately because they are rich, they are the ones who "cater" too, at times. Therefore, people of Rich countries need to head out and look for other markets. Fortunately there are 50% countries whose Rich populace also needs to be catered. Voila! more demand. Now these Rich people from poor country start to look at their own country for some services. Voila! more demand.

With a Population growth rate of 4% , number reaching 1.3 billion people, India can never run out of demanding people or rather "target markets".

If you are still looking at Obama to provide stimulus package to kick start Indian economy, oh my God, you are looking at walmart to provide you financing to buy stuff from it.