Memetics

"Piled on", modern dance.

M e m e t i c s

Ideas replicate themselves and compete for survival.  Like animals ideas are evolutionary.  Only the fittest ideas survive.  However, fitness of ideas need not be a guide to truth, fitness is simply the ability to survive and reproduce.  Besides, fitness is contextual, if everybody in a group shares the same perspectives then their ideas will survive, in their midst, regardless.  In order to survive ideas need a context, a fertile and suitable context; or, as we would say in psychology, a compensating context.  Compensation is a strategy to hide, cover up or substitute for what we lack or not do well, by doing something else really well.  The end result is the bubble, the place inside which our ideas survive and reproduce by making sure out “best” overshadows our inabilities to survive otherwise.  Fitting becomes the exercise of spending time, emotions, goods, pleasure and profit with people similar to you in thinking and action.

The Bubble Effect
In a community there are all kinds of social animals, some very fit, some very unfit.  Lack of social fitness may be the result of ignorance, culture, language or attitudes.  When the social “unfit” get together they compensate, that is, they substitute their inability to fit with everybody with their ability to share experiences with a selected few.  They create a ghetto, the place where comfort, survival, reproduction, pleasure AND profit makes life livable in an unfamiliar or threatening space.

Do you live in a ghetto?

You may already know the answer, or you may consider some explorative statements:

1.        I only hang out with people I like.

2.       I only do what I came here to do (pleasure, business, or profit, or…)

3.       I create spaces where people like me come to be with me, and do things we all like.

4.       I do not truly understand contexts other than my own.

5.       All else outside my context is bad, or wrong, or unseemly.

6.       I do not want anything outside my bubble, or tolerate very little.

7.       I´m critical or hypercritical of everything else.

8.       Nothing moves me away from my reason for being here (pleasure, business, or profit)

9.       If someone or something endangers my reasons or purpose for being here they are wrong or are dangerous.

10.   I need my bubble to continue to exist as I want it to exist, otherwise I will go.

The Overview Effect

Astronauts report that when viewing earth from space, that giant ball of matter hanging from nowhere, all national borders vanish, all conflicts appear less important and a pressing need to find a common purpose becomes urgent.  Utopia?  Perhaps, but the answer is certainly not the bubble, that “fitting” place where some find comfort living separated from the rest.  Most likely we will never make it to outer space, but we could explore more of our immediate community in order to experience the psycho/social impact of our own geographically shared space, not as a passive, detached, or uninvolved participant, but in the fullness of citizenship.

The Challenge for Las Terrenas

Crises provoke many responses and two, in particular, are extremely powerful.  One is the urge to retrench, to go deeper into the bubble; the other is to seek out and connect.  Las Terrenas is at a provocative junction, a crossroads, caused for a variety of crises—political, economic, social and cultural—and people who are from here will stay the course as there may be no other options for them.  What´s extremely interesting to watch is what happens among people who are not from here and can escape the crises anytime they wish, or have a financial cushion that protects them, or have guachimanes (security guards) preserving them from the “real” world.  The most common observable phenomenon among them is one of retrenchment, going deeper into the bubble while seeing any crisis as threats to their very survival—pleasure, business, or profit.  They don´t pursue community necessarily, they simply want the status quo, nothing different from what they perceived was happening when they chose to come here.  They might be in need, however, of the “overview effect”, so that they could be in a privileged position to see this community the way astronauts see earth from outer space.  Such change of vision might allow them to change ther “immigrant” status from passive observers to full citizens in the experience of community.

Community

Your definition is as good as mine, but if you are in your own bubble you are not in community.  As simple as that.  All experts sustain the idea that being in community is not a passive experience, it is an active attitude and place, involving the wholeness of your being.  If you agree then the question is, are you involved?

Participation in a community cannot be prescriptive, no one can impose a behavior on you, but it needs to be the result of making one choice:  partaking.  Partaking or social empathy is answering the question “what do we owe one another as part of the same community?”  If you live in a bubble chances are you will answer by saying “I don´t owe anyone anything.”  If you have experienced the overview effect you might notice the urgency to do something about our common place of habitation, sharing in common struggles and pursuing the resolution to crises that endanger the community.  To partake you must become well-informed, not just from inside of you (your opinions and ideas), but also from the context driving the crises.  Then you might be in a position to make choices, better choices, those that will prevent you from just pursuing pleasure, business, or profit, or from seeing yourself strictly in opposition to the larger community that surrounds you. 

Las Terrenas is in crisis and it needs as many people willing to partake of its promising future by getting involved in local issues that concern everyone.  Living in a bubble is not a suitable option, community is. 

"Not Our Problem"

One of the arguments recently heard about the situation with the local power company, Luz y Fuerza de Las Terrenas, S.A., is that it is simply “a fight between shareholders that must be resolved among them.”  On the side, some also comment that the results of the audit authorized by the courts will be delivered to the shareholders and it would be resolved in their midst, hence we should leave that process alone to follow its  proper course.

I agree with the plain fact that it is a “fight” between shareholders.  Both Mr. Dartout and Mr. Orsini have been at it for more than a decade, Dartout asking for the audit and Orsini denying it.  Finally, the courts have spoken and the judicial power gave Dartout authorization to be the administrator in order to produce the audit and give the results to the shareholders.  Conversely, in Las Terrenas there are many similar businesses, owned and managed by shareholders, some of which are family members and others not.  In some instances those business entities come apart, as in the case ofHotel El Cacao, and similar situations could be faced by supermarkets, stores, drug stores, car dealerships and any other business managed by shareholders.

The sentence produced by the courts asked Orsini to deliver to the new administrator all papers, goods, equipment, processes and systems necessary to run the company but, of course, Orsini has not gone along with it.  Instead, he opened a shadow office and is collecting  money on his own, as well as keeping the equipment and managing it at its will.  When something like that happens it is anything but a “simple fight among shareholders.”  There’s a delicate yet important difference between any business and a power company.  If shareholders within the power company fight and it ends badly it would severely affect the expectation that each of us has about a dependable electrical service.  Most people have expressed profound concerns about what’s happening, so it goes to show that we all would be concerned if the electricity, well, gets unplugged!

We shouldn’t compared an utility—even if privately held—that offers a public servcice (such as the aqueduct, streets, electricity) to other business such as Super Pola or a hotel.  If the owners of Super Pola fight among themselves and close the place down, there are hundreds of stores and plenty of supermarkets to go around, but if we lose the electric power our food will go bad, our businesses will be affected, there would be no tourism, restaurants would go broke and we may not even get to watch the soon approaching Dominican baseball games on TV!!

Note that most people in Las Terrenas have been quite content with having shit floating around their streets for months (thanks to Solsanit, the company that built the sewage system/plant), with a lack of potable water in most of the town (thanks to INAPA, the national water authority and problems also caused by Solsanit), with broken down streets and, in addition, with piles of garbage, lots of noise, deficiencies at the public hospital and a million other things, but they are not willing to lose our electrical power.  Are you?  We are addicted to it, or so it seems.

So, we shouldn’t take the situation so lightly as to say “it is not our problem.”  Truth be told, it is our common problem and we should all be invested in the solution to the problem.  In addition, given the long struggle against management at Luz y Fuerza, considered by many of us an abusive and unjust business, the audit could only confirm or deny the many allegations of improprieties.  Why fear an audit?  Orsini wouldn’t have anything to lose and the audit could actually confirm that all he’s done is nice and well, except if it isn’t, in which case we all need to know because we all pay the electric bill.

Most community organizations have given public support to the audit, the same group that organized the march to the Capitol two years ago, the neighborhood organizations, the evangelical ministers, the mototaxis, in addition to taxi drivers, mothers clubs and many business leaders.  They all understand that after years of fighting through the system without any results (some among the expat community have seen this as an anti-business stance, unfortunately), now there’s a legal decision made that could bring about the best of their wishes—a just and effective electrical service for the community, one that would do good by the poorest in the community as well as by those who have more than plenty to pay with.  The sentence produced by the courts was firm and irrevocable, regardless of what Orsini and his press cronies have said.  

Orsini has rejected the decision of the judicial power and has himself become a judge, determining what’s legal and what’s not; he even abandoned the business headquarters that he himself had built and moved “his” business to a shack (figuratively speaking), where he collects money, uses the symbols of the company and all in fierce defiance to the courts and a rejection of the legally established business in barrio Caño Seco.

Instead of ignoring it, what Orsini has done is our problem because the electrical service is indispensable in a town like Las Terrenas, so dependent on tourism, foreign investments and businesses.  It is sad to see the person that has often been identified as the one that brought progress and development to Las Terrenas through the power company, to have become the same person that creates so much restlessness and dares endanger the same company he helped create.

Let’s not fool ourselves, the audit benefits all of us and we shouldn’t allow practices that fall outside of the legal realm to succeed.  The audit is the best way to guarantee a just electrical service for all.