Programming the crowd by conditioned reflexes

There was an interesting sharing yesterday by one my friends in facebook. The shared post was a slide showing the result of an experiment by scientists carried out on a group of monkeys. The outcome of the experiment is interesting and has significant importance to our social behavior, the reason why I would like to write here.

At first the scientists selected a group of 5 monkeys and put them in a cage. In the middle of the cage they placed a ladder. At the top of the ladder, they placed some bananas. Obviously, the monkeys will be tempted to eat the bananas. One of the monkeys climbed up the ladder and took the banana. Then the scientists splashed cold water on other four monkeys standing on the ground. Splashing of water was repeated whenever a monkey climbed and took the banana. The monkeys now realized that whenever a monkey climbs the ladder, the rest will be splashed with cold water, which they did not like. All the five monkeys one by one tried to climb to take the banana, but the one who try to climb would be punished by beating by other four monkeys.

As a next step, scientists replaced one of the monkeys with a new monkey. The new one’s mind was fresh and did not know about the cold water splashing. By seeing the banana he started climbing up. The other four got angry, pulled him down and beat him. Scientists did not splash the cold water, but the fresh one got beaten by others.

What Makes Japanese People Different from Others?

Every time I read about the street fights and hooligan hostilities in my country, I am more convinced that we are still at the primitive stage of human civilizations, though it is widely thought otherwise. The motivation to start writing this post is Mr. Omar Abdullah’s tweet on the hospital fire in Kolkata, one of the famous cities in West Bengal. While our history books are proud to acclaim thousands of years of inherited civilizations, the anarchic state and the vicious uproars point to the story of an immature and halfway dropped civilization process in India.

We may have hundreds of reasons to justify the hooliganisms and vandalisms, sweetly coated with the reasons of freedom of speech and expression, democratic rights, and so on. Freedom of speech and expression should not harm others as well. Those actions that harm others cannot be counted as the result of a democratic way of agitation. Such criminal actions are the result of the desire to kill, the desire to destroy, and the animal instincts that exist in the primitive minds of human beings inherited from their uncivilized ancestors.

People in southern states of India, one state which is home to the most educated people and the other which is home to the cultural capital of India, have been misled by their political protagonists. It is hard to find ‘differences between people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala’ unless you are strongly motivated to write a thesis on that subject. The problem could have been solved through discussions rather than pulled out to the streets. The street dogs know only to fight and bark for a single piece of bone, and this is what we see and hear now. An illiterate crowd could be malleable, but one thing has become certain: now that education, or the rate of high literacy, won’t automatically bring any common sense or guarantee that the educated mass cannot be mass-hypnotized.

Is this what we had inherited from our ancestors through the so-called 5000 years of ancient Indian civilizations? The land where the looking into the self was taught as more important than looking to others had gone years back to the early stages of human development or might have stopped somewhere in the middle of the civilization process.

The chaotic state still exists in India, where multiple ethnic groups have to share common land and bread. The migration of ethnic groups and their spread were not directed with a clear objective; rather, the movements might have been caused by war, famine, and natural calamities. The intrusion of new elements into an existing system causes disorder. Disorder causes for collision. This is true in the science, and now I am convinced that it is true in social science too.

In fact, collision is what we see in our society. As the particles collide and generate heat in a system, different groups ram, and we call it unrest or agitation. This process may continue till a unification happens, and it may take years, but any society where multiple interest groups co-exists has to go through these processes.

Japan is almost homogenous and has one of the highest rates of literacy. Four years before, I read in a blog that the Japanese race is unique. I started searching for the truth of this statement and went through different academic papers and websites. There is no race called the ‘Japanese race.’. Japanese people belong to the Mongoloid race, in which the Koreans, Chinese, and other East Asian people belong. The other way around is propaganda that is similar to the one that Indian right-wing groups use to find a common ancestry for all Indians by denying outside migration to India. Scientific facts are bad for many deceptive groups.

What makes Japanese people different from other East Asian countries is their more civilized manners. That is the outcome of years of civilization processes that happened in a unique way that is exclusive to Japan. Here I don’t claim any superiority to the Japanese society, and they don’t have it either. They are just like any other country’s people with all kinds of emotions and instincts. History may have something different to tell, but observing the current practices, I feel this way. It is my personal observation that the public behavior of Japanese people, at least among themselves, if not to all the foreigners, is more refined.

There were internal fights in Japan, and there were different interest groups as there are there in other parts of the world. Japan is like a bottle into which differently colored solutions are poured, closed with the cap, shaken thoroughly, and then allowed to rest for 250 years. Now the mixture has become perfect and looks as if it is one of the unique base colors. That mixing produced a different color that is unique to Japan! Want to call it a different race? OK...

Signing off...

Japanese way of redesigning the nature and its resources

God (not in the institutionalized form but in an absolute sense) might have His own plans, but human beings have their own plans. Both may not necessarily be the same. When it contradicts there is a conflict, which may result in catastrophes. We call them man-made disasters.

Some fifteen years before while going through a magazine article captioned ‘Future wars will be for water” I was prompted to think to redesign the natural resources so that such conflicts could be reduced. Thoughts of redesigning the natural water resources had its seed from the news on diverting the rivers through the water-scarce regions of Rajasthan state in India. India’s ever powerful lady prime minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi was ruling at that time. She had a great vision to redesign India and redefine the life. She did many attempts to achieve those goals, which the predecessors could not carry forward.

The reason why I started writing this post is not the current fight between two southern states in India for water which is in the headlines of Indian newspapers recently. While walking from Indian School in Nishi Ojima to our apartment at Higashi Ojima by the river side, we could see some construction work in progress on the river banks. Also I heard from Japanese teacher that the kyu-nakagawa river, which is visible from our apartment’s front side veranda is an artificial branch of the Arakawa river.

What percentage of the salary a foreigner can save in Japan?

 

Some of the visitors to this blog were interested to know the living expenses in Japan and how much they can save. It is quite natural to have these concerns about living costs before one makes final decision to come to Japan. For expatriates, apart from the job satisfaction, savings is one of the major driving forces to accept the offer from their prospective employer in Japan. Cost of living has increased recently. “Especially in the changed scenario” one would like to add with the preceding sentence in the wake of recent alarming news from one of the famous baby food producers.

Living cost for foreigners in Japan and I believe also for Japanese people has been on the rise after March. Either people buy water from the stores. Some book online from western sides of Japan or water from outside Japan. The consumption tax will have negative impact on the potential savings.

 

 

Disaster is a fact, so is life and death

Some weeks back, along with friends I conducted some measurements to verify the radiation levels at different locations of Komatsugawa, especially where our children frequently play on weekends. Almost 9 months have passed since the disaster, still the fear of radiation linger in the minds of those who decided to stay back in Japan. Radiation is a fact and living with the painful facts needs an extra effort and justification. Probably the measurements we conducted were also to justify our decision to stay back.

It is also a fact that, solving disasters whether manmade or natural takes long time. Any kind of disaster is a sudden transition from a balanced state to an unbalanced state, where the whole system knowingly or unknowingly goes out of a defined set of procedures. Unfortunate, but it happens. It happened in Russia, now in Japan, tomorrow somewhere else. But the thirst of human beings to experiment with their own life to find new things and progress never ceases. It is this aggression of human beings to explore and conquer nature and universe differentiates them from other creatures.

Emotion does not play a significant role in the human endeavors for scientific progression. That is how humans evolved and learned to master things around them. Strong determination to tame the nature and surrounding things in the struggle for existence (more close to the definitions of Ayn Rand than Darwin) is the foundation of modern civilizations.