The calmness needed to change the world

A 2000 year old olive tree, painted by Aafke Steenhuis

A year ago I wrote on my other blog, in Spanish, that while my wife and I were listening to the singing of the blackbird (merel in Dutch) in our garden and having breakfast, I said we should be able to stop for a day or a week the world of agitated minds, to make them think and talk more calmly about a few key problems of our capitalist world.

In Spanish I wrote: "...mientras tomábamos desayuno y escuchábamos al canto del mirlo en nuestro jardín, [dije] que tendríamos que ser capaces de parar el mundo de las cabezas agitadas durante un día o una semana entera, para que ellas piensen y charlen con calma sobre algunos problemas claves de nuestro mundo capitalista".

That is the kind of psychological mood (with the extremes of individual and mass hysteria... by the way, is neoliberalism a kind of mass hysteria or is it just a doctrine?) of calmness that I would favour when a policy alternatives oriented G24 or G25 (see my post A new G24 to change the world?) would discuss a mass media and internet campaign (making use of facebook and blogger and whatever there is to reach younger people, which is crucial, as this should be a wide and long horizon effort) on the basis of experts giving talks at parliaments.

The title I gave to my post of a year ago on the other blog (its name is "Tutto è possibile") was "Manca la calma", which I would translate into "Calmness is Missing".