Four Quadrants

Four Quadrants of people: Expressive, Analytical, Amiable, Driver (Working Styles)

Four Quadrants of time use: Urgent vs. non-Urgent X Important vs Unimportant (Covey's 7 Habits)

And now Four Quadrants of Money Styles: Employee, Self-Employed, Businessman and Investor (Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad books)

It's so easy to classify intangibles, isn't it? But, for those frameworks that outline intangibles for the purpose of enabling change (if a member of the audience feels such is necessary), how does one organize one's life according to those concrete descriptions of the intangibles. If one is the author or a close associate of the same this question is moot. But what about the rest of humanity?

And then, before one begins to address that question, try this one on for size: How does the change to align with these new paradigms align with other principles that one already accepts as givens? One can't just embrace a new defining framework. One must examine it against one's current values and only embrace it if it makes sense. And one must have the bravery to say the Emperor (new framework) has no clothes (no sense) if indeed no sense can be found in it.

"Know yourself!" said Socrates, meaning in part, I believe, "Know yourself that you may better yourself."
And if "better yourself", then also, "change yourself".
And if both "better yourself" and "change yourself", then also, "be on the watch for new ways of changing".
So, look at and accept new paradigms -- but do so provisionally. A wise man is just as ready to throw away a bad pair of glasses as he is to try a new prescription when he realizes that his vision could be better than it is.

Borders are getting to be more and more meaningless. This was initially driven home to me when details of the Mahaffey and French murder trials, under a publication ban in Ontario, surfaced on my computer screen in BC under the subject line "YOU CAN'T READ THIS!". The inexorable pace of globalization, initially visible to me in the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA, has only accelerated. The successful destruction of the World Trade Centre towers was no more nor less than the marching on of globalization. Not only do all places have more access than ever before to markets in other lands, people in all places have more access than ever before to initiate terror in other lands. Get used to it.

In the midst of all this, there is a striking image in the growing number of illegal (mostly Latin) immigrants in the US and the bizarre contrast of the growing drive to expel all illegal immigrants (mostly Latinos) with the growing influence of Latinos in the American political political process.

And now the Dutch have begun expelling asylum-seekers -- not that the politicians believe that's the right thing to do. They're just scared spitless that another Pim Fortuyn will show up to replace the one who's gone.

The countries of the world are becoming irrelevant and not even the one-and-only hyper-power, the USA, is exempt. The funds being spent on immigration-regulation enforcement are sunk costs that should be brought up short at the earliest possible opportunity. The money being spent on them should be poured into something more profitable and beneficial, and not just for those countries who feel this compelling need to protect their own borders. In recognition of the fact that there is but one planet and one human race they should be into things that benefit humanity outside the borders of those countries. And it should be done in small pieces because it is at the level of individuals, families and neighbourhoods that the lasting change must be brought about to remedy the basic lacks that are fuelling the desparate felt need for what ends in "Illegal Immigration."

These people should not need to feel that in order to better themselves, they must leave their own country to go to another one that must have their labour but is not necessarily willing to admit it (or them) even to themselves. Such opportunities can and must come to them where they are and ultimately we will find it more cost-effective to service these people where they are than to keep them out of our own home towns. But if we can't attract them to stay where they are, rather than chasing them down to try shipping them back, we should recognize the value that folks with more-than-average initiative and chutzpah are likely to contribute to us than drain from us here in their new homeland of choice.

Listening to Justice Talking on Exporting Democracy and I was struck by Morton Halperin's closing comments that it wasn't good enough to establish democracies, but that they should be democracies based on tolerance. What struck me was what has struck greater minds before me -- and has, in practice, become equally clear to more civic-minded friends than I¹ -- that "tolerance", no matter how grand it may sound to us, is not strong enough to serve as the basis for a democracy. That democracy based on tolerance is in danger of descending into a tyranny so pernicious that it will continue to look like democracy to all except those who live under its thumb.

"Tolerance" sounds so compassionate in the sense that all positions are acceptable but where do you draw the line? Supposing you are in a stratified society where one segment lives, as their forefathers have for generations, on the proceeds of theft? Whom do you tolerate more: the thieves or their victims who wish to incarcerate, banish, maim or kill them? So you must make a judgment between them, that one is right and one is wrong. So, tolerance has let you down.

But how then, if another part of your society living under your "democracy based on tolerance" is convinced that something that another portion of society does is morally wrong? Choose your subject: homosexual sexual acts or corporal punishment of children; eating pork or eating beef or eating meat at all? What if one group or the other makes one of these issues the crux on which tolerance turns. And what if the other group "calling a spade a spade", states that such acts are morally wrong? What if they do so repeatedly and publicly, but by and large without calling their audiences to what we would term hate-crimes against those who do them? And what if the first group says of the second: "Because you are calling this action which defines who we are as morally wrong you are inciting to hatred"?

In that case, some form of democracy may continue but more likely tolerance will be pulled up from the foundation of democracy and crushed into rocks with which one group or the other² attacks and incarcerates, banishes, maims or kills the other. And after the smoke clears what will be left will no longer be democracy, even if it retains much of democracy's forms.

If things do not degenerate to that point, public discourse will become ever shallower until nothing being said is actually worth saying. That, too, is not democracy but is rather an empty shell which may or may not retain much of democracy's forms.

No, democracy requires, as a first principle, a strong moral code with an objective bent, even if it is open to a certain latitude of subjective interpretation. Perhaps I'll expand that thought the next time I try to post here.

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¹ One friend of mine was seconded from a government ministry to being a member of the related cabinet minister's political office. He went in with a strong principles-based socialist position from, but came out in disgust at the intolerance he saw exhibited against those with some strong principles that disagreed with their own.
² the one that is more bellicose, perhaps? or more given to busybodying? or just better organized?

I'm back. I have things to say, I just don't always have time to distill them.

Recently, I moved into larger digs with my family. Thanks so much to the people who helped us move.

Un-thanks for the lack of good information from our local telecom on whether DSL was going to be available in my area or not.