ROW Episode 32

In this episode we delve into some less explored and often overlooked practical requirements for operationalizing the principle of justice in our lives.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we delve into some less explored and often overlooked practical requirements for operationalizing the principle of justice in our lives. I'm delighted to be with you all again. We took a little bit of a break during the last two summer months, but we're back again in full swing. World events have continued to escalate. We are buffeted by a cascade of crises. While our natural inclination is to respond with fear, agitation, despondency, we simply can't afford that luxury as all of these negative emotions lead to paralysis. And now is the time to act as never before to lay the foundations for a new way of being. Both at the individual level, in our personal and private lives, and in the life of society in general, and the two are entirely and intimately interconnected. Interestingly, when it comes to trying to solve our many societal challenges, we have a habit of trying to tackle each of the myriad problems separately, in isolation. But perhaps a more sensible and effective approach, one that we've continued to advocate during this series of Reimagining Our World and building a better world, a more effective approach would be to identify the principles involved and then apply them methodically to solving the problem at hand. One of the benefits of this approach is that it provides the glue that holds together solutions in many different areas of life and makes them congruent with each other as opposed to having the effect of a solution in one area undermining a solution in a different area. Now one of the foundational principles that one finds as you reflect that is a prerequisite to creating this foundation for a better world and to create a shift in the reality we're experiencing is the principle of justice. And this is the principle we're going to focus on a little bit today. Whenever the topic of justice comes up, we all know, I know this is my first reaction,"Oh my gosh! It's such a broad concept." It's a concept that's much bandied about. And for most of us, it seems very amorphous and unwieldy. So it's easier, frankly, to put off thinking about it, say,"Yeah, we'll talk about that when we have time. That's a complicated topic." Yet the good news is that there are some overlooked, rarely examined, concrete, practicable, and effective implications of this foundational concept of justice that I wanted to share with you today. Because we can start as soon as we leave this time we have together, we can start applying these in our daily lives and start reshaping the social fabric of our world. Now as a broad proposition, when we talk about justice here, I'm going to cast a wide net and say that the fundamental meaning is acting in a way that gives each individual their just due, their fair due. So let's see as we unpack this idea what we come up with. Justice implies as a preliminary matter that we should see with our own eyes and not through the eyes of others. That's actually a very deep concept and bears some further and deeper reflection. In other words, we have to assess and render judgments of people, of situations, problems, ideas in way that's independent, without letting the judgment of others, whether they're other groups, or political parties, or religious denominations, or family, or anybody influence us. This idea of seeing with our own eyes immediately to my mind triggered two very practical habits that we can begin to adopt as a means of implementing justice, because I'm a firm believer in breaking things down so you can figure out,"Okay. So what can I start doing today to get me from where I am to the vision of where I want to be and bridging this gap?" So the first thing I wanted to talk about was gossip and backbiting and the importance of refraining from these two habits that we all have in spades, unfortunately. Let's quickly define our terms for purposes of this conversation. Backbiting is malicious talk about someone who's absent. Whereas gossip is casual and unconstrained talk that reports the details of life without regard to whether it's true or not. We don't bother to actually discover whether what we're passing along, something we heard from someone else or picked up from some article somewhere is actually true or not. The problem with both gossip and backbiting is that they blind us to reality. They act as veils that stop us from seeing people's situations, people's cultures, races, groups with a clear eye. And they unwittingly influence us and cause us to judge others, even those we've never met before. So a wonderful way, an analogy that helps me because I can bring it to mind whenever I find myself in these situations, is to think about backbiting and gossip as a drop of poison that one puts into a reservoir of pure, clear water. As soon as you introduce that drop of poison, all of the water, even though all of it was pure, is now tainted and cannot be drunk because it will cause illness. Unpacking this further, have you noticed, I know I have, that if you're around people who are gossiping about someone who's absent, when you eventually meet that person, however much you might try to put out of your mind what they said, the very fact that you're sitting there, standing there, trying to put it out of your mind means that you're actually focused and very much aware of what was said about this person and it's now tainted your interactions with them and the way you perceive them and your emotions towards them. Besides, by engaging in gossip and backbiting, or just allowing ourselves to be exposed to it, even if we're not actively engaged, we deprive a person of the opportunity and the freedom to grow and change. Because we're trapping them in the past. So even if what we're talking about is true, let's say they said or did something that they may now regret, they're going to find it very hard to break out of that and make changes in their lives if people are constantly going to harp on what they had said or done in the past. So it actually retards the progress of that individual or a group and then of the rest of us, because we live in an interconnected world. That is a theme that we have been hammering home in all of our episodes. Interestingly this is also why in a court of law and common law jurisdictions, a jury can't hear evidence of prior bad acts or bad behaviors by a defendant if the evidence is excessively prejudicial. In other words, if the jury may think,"Gosh. They did this bad thing before, so they're more likely than not to be guilty here, right?" So even the law recognizes it. And if such evidence is introduced it can be a grounds for a mistrial. I find that very interesting. Then the question becomes what can I do to avoid the trap of gossip and backbiting? What if I'm standing around with a group of friends or with my family and one of them starts gossiping or backbiting about somebody? Is it enough for me simply to refrain from participating and to be passive? Honestly, the short answer is no, because we're allowing the character assassination of another human being to continue, and by not intervening to try to stop it, we could be viewed, and I think we ought to be viewed as implicitly condoning that behavior. What if instead, we chose to speak up and ask a question. In what way is this conversation helping to advance the interests of our community? That's a really powerful question. And when inserted in the midst of gossiping and backbiting, it steps in, and you interrupt the pattern, while also giving the participants the opportunity to reflect on what they're doing and to change course. Now sometimes it'll be effective, they'll change course or change subject, and other times it won't. But regardless, it is worth doing, because we will have discharged our personal responsibility to do something. And by courageously taking this step, we will have demonstrated that there are alternative ways of responding. And over time, as we do this over and over again, such a response may actually empower others to do the same and eventually contribute to changing the culture of a community. So it's a very powerful thing to do. Now, the second implication of seeing with our own eyes is that we need to develop and cultivate a new habit of seeing with our own eyes, free from the veils of preconceived biases and prejudices, which we all have by definition. What we've been exposed to in our cultures, through media, through family, through cultural history, through our national history, through our ethnic history, all of these act as filters that actually create veils of prejudice. And we think we're seeing and assessing things clearly, whereas we're not. This is another practical expression of justice. If we want to learn how to practically implement justice, it is by doing this. We've already talked about judging a person. One of the ways we can help ourselves not to have preconceived biases is by absolutely refraining and refusing to participate in gossip and backbiting. And by the way, it's not just conversations. What are we letting into our systems? What social media are we exposing ourselves to? What books or material are we reading? Is it all based on gossip and innuendo and passing along tidbits of juicy information about somebody else's life? Or is it uplifting and empowering? What about our political messaging? We live in a country in the United States where we're extremely polarized, and a lot of this polarization has come because of the messaging that people have been exposed to on both sides over and over again that makes them see themselves as superior to, understanding better, getting it right, and the other as the other, the ignorant, and that's to put it mildly. Judging people and then judging groups You know, this whole notion of racism of gender biases, these are all based on judgments that we make based on perceptions that we have adopted about entire groups of people at this point. When it comes to women that's, almost 50 percent of the world's population or more than 50%, just over. These are pretty egregious biases and we need to finally get a handle on them. So we need to free ourselves from these insidious group prejudices and get rid of these narratives that we have without thought just imbibed and are part of our DNA and part of the operating system that runs us. We need to raise these to the level of consciousness and then recognize the baneful effects they're having and take active choices about getting rid of some of them and developing new narratives that are really more fitting for us as humanity approaches its stage of maturity. Now, when we are investigating new ideas, new philosophies, or even new beliefs, it's another area where we can bring this principle to bear, investigating truth without preconceived notions to explore an idea with an open heart and an open mind, allowing our inmost spirit to see whether it resonates with this idea. We can't rely on what others tell us to believe or what ideas they tell us to adopt, even if they're dear family and friends. The same holds true for our religious leaders or priests. We have been each given the gift of understanding. And no person's faith can even be conditioned by that of another. We each have to take personal responsibility and engage with ideas, trust ourselves, and listen to the voice of our conscience and our hearts and our soul and our minds to see what resonates with us. Because otherwise we stand to deprive ourselves of a truth that may come, may be present in our lives, and may pass us by simply because we have so many veils interposed between us and it that we fail to recognize it. We need to stop abdicating responsibility to other mere mortals to tell us what ideas are worthy and which ones are not. Another area in which we can very usefully exercise these muscles of justice is in judging candidates for leadership. Again, seeing with our own eyes. We have this habit, and we fall into it mindlessly, of relying on their promises made, their platforms, the words that come from their ads, biased media, vested interests. And we're constantly surprised that we tend to elect leaders that just don't seem to be completely up to the task of resolving the challenges of our day. What if we were to change this and instead of relying on all of this information, that we ourselves looked at the character and the virtues and qualities of the person who's proposing to run for office. How are they dealing in their personal lives? What their marriages look like? Are they faithful? Are they loving? What about in business? Are they honest? Do they have integrity? Are they known for being humble, being self sacrificial, for wanting the good of the whole, whether it's their companies or their employees or their family or their communities. What is their record of service? Are they corrupt or not? All of these are the kinds of questions that once we start exercising this muscle of seeing with our own eyes and dispensing with preconceived biases, we start to see for ourselves. And once we see for ourselves then we can act on it, then we make better decisions. And the same, finally, is true about the media. We know that in today's environment, it's very hard to assess where the truth lies, because honestly, all the media seems to be biased to greater or lesser extent. Sure, there is a question of degree, but biased nonetheless. And we develop the habit of seeking different sources of media to listen to or read and figure out that the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Sure, it's more time consuming, but in order to be a citizen who's capable of making good decisions, I think it's worth the effort. This leads us to the next two related ideas to justice, the implications of justice. Justice demands universal participation. This is a really powerful principle. Both experience and research have shown that the more diverse and inclusive decision making is, the better the outcomes. This is true in both business and in government. In business, the evidence clearly points to the fact that decisions are made faster. You wouldn't think so, but they are, and lead to better business performance and financial gain. So businesses, you're interested in the bottom line, this is the way to go. Ensuring that people in decision making positions reflect a diverse range of values, interests, perspectives and experiences dilutes the inevitable, inherent biases of individuals and therefore creates a more fertile ground for innovative solutions. The same holds true for governmental institutions, where drawing on different types of knowledge and a broad array of opinions makes room for assumptions in the decision making process to be challenged. Because we always seem to start with underlying assumptions that we often don't examine. And so when you've got a group of people with diverse values and experiences, they can say,"Hey, wait a minute! You said that, but that rests on this assumption, and how true is it? Let's explore this together." Our takeaway is that we should affirmatively seek and welcome diversity of input at all levels of decision making, as it is an act of justice and fairness, which also has the benefit of redounding to our collective highest benefit. Now, intimately linked to this idea that universal participation is a hallmark of justice is that consultation is a tangible expression of justice. When you have a diverse group of people, especially, the benefits of consultation get even more. Just as we said of justice being a multifaceted gem with different sides to it, and there we were talking about the various implications of justice, consultation is also a multifaceted gem. And it is literally, if you look at a ruby or a diamond and you hold it up and say a few of us stand in different corners, I may look at it from the angle I'm looking at it and the way the light is hitting it, I may see blue. Somebody else may see red. Someone else may see it as yellow, and so on. Now, if we could either all enhance our collective understanding by stepping into each other's shoes and saying,"Wow! Okay, I can see things from your vantage point. How interesting. All of these things are true, or can be true." Or we could start fighting amongst ourselves, which is our normal habit, and all of us would be wrong, and all of us would have deprived ourselves of the opportunity to raise our understanding and our consciousness. Getting out of this habit that"I have an exclusive lock on truth" can be done most easily by using the tool of consultation, which is a tangible expression of justice. Now, when we talk about consultation, people ask me Sovaida, when you say consultation, what is it you mean by this term that you love to use? When I talk about consultation, I think about it as having certain necessary ingredients. First of all, that the group gathered has the intention of discovering the truth or finding the solution that is to the benefit of the collective. In other words, the person's not there to push their own agenda or their own ego. The next thing is that opinions are offered frankly. In other words, no walking on eggshells. We can speak frankly and openly about what our opinions are, so long as that frank opinion is also clothed in respect and love for all participants. Recognizing that all of us are basically one and equals, and we're all of children of the same creator. None of us is better than the other. The next thing is that the idea given by any person becomes that of the group, meaning that we detach our egos from the idea. If you've been in debates or consultations, really more in the nature of debates, where somebody offers an opinion and then sees that people aren't running with it and then keeps saying like I said before, and then repeats themselves over and over literally trying to force people to adopt their position. That won't work. One doesn't get to the kinds of results. However, if we get all these diverse opinions offered in a spirit of frankness and love and respect, and you get the clash of various opinions, where egos are detached--so it's not the clash of egos, but the clash of the opinions-- then from that clash, the spark of truth can be discerned. And very often, and this is the beauty, if you ever have the privilege of being in a consultation where these ingredients exist, one of the amazing things that can happen is that the spark of truth that emerges is something that nobody else actually thought of in advance or during the course of the meeting. And in fact, even when they voted on this decision, none of them even saw the potential outcome of it. So there are two things. First of all, a truth emerges that nobody thought of. And then once that truth emerges, the wisdom of that truth often becomes apparent sometime in the future. When other circumstances come to pass that nobody could have envisioned going in, and everybody's left marveling that,"Wow! We made a great decision. Not for any of the reasons that we made it, because none of us could envision how life and the world was actually going to unfold." Think that's a really powerful idea. The fifth implication of justice is that justice, this is another really interesting thing. We don't tend to think of justice in these terms, but that's why I want to offer it. Justice demands the exercise of moderation in our behavior. Think about, for instance, our behavior as consumers. We have been mindlessly extracting and consuming the resources of this planet. And along the way, we have created this massive problem of climate change that is now threatening our very lives and so many species and destroying our environment. This mindless consumption has also led us to a place where we have increasing extremes of those who have and those who do not have. And of some countries benefiting excessively from resources and other countries being deprived of resources that they need. So go back to the idea of climate change. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we started thinking about"What does it mean for me to live a moderate life so that I leave some of the resources of the planet untouched and definitely leave the fossil fuels in the earth because we simply have to stop burning fossil fuels if we want to arrest the process of climate change and not have it be ultra catastrophic. I was struck by an article I read recently about Salt Lake City in Utah. There's a lake there called Salt Lake, which has been drying up very rapidly. And the salt concentrations in it are going up and are killing the algae. Consequently, the shrimp are dying. And the migratory birds who relied on the shrimp for their food are also dying. There's also very little water left for farms and homes. And the results they're predicting, because it's happened before in other places and around Los Angeles, is that the dust left after the water dries up is laced with arsenic and other poisonous metals and will kill large numbers of people. They call it a nuclear environmental bomb. And yet, talk about mindlessly doing things. It is crazy to me that the homeowners association in that part of the world, where they have all these problems, can require people to water their lawns and fine them if they fail to do. So the story was about this one gentleman who had thought for himself and said, Wow! It doesn't make any sense for me to be wasting water, precious water, to have a pretty lawn, when we need it for our farms and for our food and for this lake not to dry up and for the birds and the species. The homeowners association came after him and started fining him excessive amounts. To me, justice demands the exercise of moderation, so our institutions, our communities, and us as individuals, we all need to start reflecting on ways in which we can implement this principle of moderation as a practical expression of justice. Now, justice means giving someone their fair due, what they deserve. But it's not an easy thing to do and actually requires a great deal of thoughtfulness. Here's an example. You have two hungry boys and they each come to you and you have a loaf of bread. And they say,"Oh, we haven't had breakfast. It's now lunchtime. We're starving. Could you please give us some bread?" And you're thinking, What is the fair way to distribute this bread?" Now, most of us would immediately go to,"Why, it's obvious. I take the loaf. I cut it in half. Half to one, half to the other." Ah, but what if one of these boys comes from a very poor family? And in fact, he hasn't had a decent or square meal in two weeks and is really starving. Whereas the other boy comes from a very well to do family. They generally have sumptuous meals and desserts and snacks and whatever, and he has pocket money. He got up late that morning, so he missed breakfast, and now he's hungry because it's lunchtime. Is it actually fair to give each of these boys half a loaf? Maybe fairness dictates that the entire loaf should go to the boy who needs it the most. I give this extreme example as a way of highlighting a point here that giving people their just due is not a simple matter. So for instance, giving men and women equal pay for equal work, not allowing prejudice, preconceived notions of the value of a woman's work to intervene or old social constructs. We have to actually be thoughtful about these things. What about women who do unpaid but very valuable work in the home? The cooking, the cleaning, the washing, the raising children. It's a very interesting exercise for each family to do. I know we did it in our family to actually sit down and calculate how much it would cost if one were to hire somebody to do each of those jobs and how much it would cost the family. And here, is it fair to ask the woman to provide all this free labor and not be acknowledged and appreciated somehow? So should they be compensated in some way? What if you run a business and two people do similar work? Is it actually fair to give them the same salary if one works extra hard on a regular basis, is diligent, always goes the extra mile, stays late, stays weekends, and takes pride in producing good work while the other is the opposite? Do, the minimum work required and get out of there when you can and never go the extra mile. Justice is not sameness, but fair treatment taking all relevant factors into account. And yes, it's hard work. Nobody said it was going to be easy. But, we can envision a world in which, if we were to implement this and all start to be more thoughtful in how we treat everybody, starting at home, be more appreciative of the work that, say, the home makers do or at work, acknowledging what employees do and encouraging them and all the way up, then the world would be a better place. Now, another topic that is really interesting is, What is the relationship between justice, vengeance, and actually forgiveness? Vengeance is not justice. I just want to start with that. Let's talk about what we mean by revenge or vengeance. It's that inner gratification, that feeling that results from returning like for like:"Gotcha. You did this to me. Out to get you" and it just feels so good. It's that inner feeling of gratification. So if we want this better world that's built on a foundation of justice, what if we adopted the following principle? When someone wrongs me as an individual, I should practice the muscles of forgiveness, virtue of forgiveness. However, if somebody wrongs my friend or my neighbor, I should be the first to stand up for them. That's at the individual level. So forgiveness when it's me, standing up for someone else when they're being wronged or unjustly treated. And by the way, that was what the gossip and backbiting analogy was, stepping in and trying to interrupt that pattern. On the other hand, when someone commits a crime, society has the responsibility to mete out justice, including punishment, as a deterrence, not in the spirit of vengeance of"Hah! We got you. It feels so good to give you a taste of your own medicine," but as a deterrence and as a message to prevent aggression and as a protection of the community. Society has certain obligations and responsibilities, and we as individuals have an entirely different set of obligations and responsibilities. I find it very useful to try to distinguish between the personal responsibility and societal responsibility in this area. Now there is a linked idea here, and it's come up recently for me in working with some organizations where we've been grappling with this issue,"What do you do when someone's trying to take unfair advantage of you?" I firmly believe and would propose that it is absolutely mistaken and wrong to allow people to take unfair advantage of you. If one wants to be generous, if we want to give of our own volition, that's fine. But I think to yield even assent to a person who wants to take it wrongfully is bad for society and bad for that individual. Why? Because it encourages that person to repeat that behavior again, and that behavior is actually not good for their own growth as a human being. It also encourages them to repeat the behavior again. So you are setting up other people to be victimized by their behavior and it disrupts order in the world to allow this behavior. So I think we have to be very clear minded. Sometimes we feel sorry for people or we feel uncomfortable about saying,"No. You can't do that. You simply can't try to extort money," for instance, and bring some trumped up claims and then say, and now you owe me money and that's just not appropriate. Taking this now to a global level, I just wanted to say that this principle of justice applies obviously in spades at all levels of society: individual, community, and institutions. But one of the areas where our global society absolutely has got to get its act together is that we have to recognize that it's so unfair and unjust that world affairs are currently structured that it is possible for so many innocent people around the world to be impacted by the actions of a few in power. I think about the conflict in Ukraine, the devastation that's wrought. I think about all the conflicts in the world. I think about what is happening in the Congo. I think about what's happening in Tigray. I think about what's been happening for years in Syria and Yemen and in Myanmar, so many parts of the world, where we have created a structure that allows a handful of people to turn the lives of millions of human beings into absolute misery and to trigger a global food crisis, as the Ukraine conflict has done, where the UN says 300 million are going to bed hungry every night and 50 million stand close to starvation. This is untenable. How can we stand for this? It's triggered a global energy crisis and a global economic recession, and it's putting the world in danger of a larger war, God forbid, another world war, and a potential nuclear catastrophe, a war with all the consequences that flow from it. The last topic that I'm just going to raise, but we're not going to unpack today, because I'm going to save this for the next session, I have a lot of interesting material to share with you, is this. Justice requires the elimination of corruption. Justice is a flower that simply cannot flourish in the soil of corruption to put it that way. And it is one of the greatest factors contributing to injustice in the world today, and we have got to come to grips with it. This subject is so important that I am going to, address it fully hopefully in our next episode and take it from there. I hope you've enjoyed this session. And if you like us, please do follow us on our YouTube channel for free. It's the CPGG, Center for Peace and Global Governance, dot org. And Feel free to comment, I hope you will, on the YouTube channel, on Facebook, wherever you're listening to this, and I look forward to seeing you next time. I'm just going to quickly check and see if there are any questions or comments. There are not, so with that I'm going to close, and I look forward to seeing you next month. Take care. Bye bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.