The Sucker Punch of Sharing

By Hamid Rafizadeh

Every persons existence has its origin in a balance of four elements: brute force, resources, knowledge, and direction. Yet in the evolving landscape of modern-day life, when no one lives a balanced life, everyone suffers.

The Sucker Punch of Sharing explains the balance all human beings need to have in their lives, and it shows how human beings can become free. Author Hamid Rafizadeh teaches you how to manage obligations of freedom, and he shows how obligations can be shaped so that you can do what you always wanted to do. With this new understanding, you can receive tremendously detailed and thorough accounting of how to manage the woven tapestry of force and resources in your daily life.

The dense forest of knowledge and the deep fog of ignorance must be managed together if human beings are to climb to higher levels of existence. Nothing is guaranteed, as awareness can always come with stumbling down into the lower levels of existenceand even returning to the fog that never lifts. So even as you begin to see the truth of things, the challenge of development and maintenance remains.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480862449

Hamid Rafizadeh

Hamid Rafizadeh has conducted forty years of intense research into understanding the interplay of human life, the earth, and the cosmic neighborhood. He holds a PhD from MIT, a master of humanities degree, and an MBA. Hamid has worked within a wide array of fields and is also the author of The Choice Maker, The Sucker Punch of Sharing, The First Rung, and Here Comes the Watchman.

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Copyright © 2018 Hamid Rafizadeh.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6245-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6244-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905045

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/21/2018

CONTENTS

Chapter 1     Opinion, Core, Today’s Knowledge Processing

Chapter 2     Capability Sharing, Essence, Human Existence

Chapter 3     Points of Symbiotic Balance, Human Life

Chapter 4     Pursuing Capitalism, Maze of Alternatives

Chapter 5     Pursuing Virtue, Maze of Alternatives

Chapter 6     Manager, Managed, Wealth

Chapter 7     Where the Heck Are We?

Endnotes

CHAPTER 1

Opinion, Core, Today’s Knowledge Processing

On the surface, no one wants deeper understanding.

They all want understanding at the level of what they already know.

The human is an aggregation of knowledge pieces. The body itself is one such aggregation. The arms move, the heart beats, the lungs breathe, and the eyes see because the body’s aggregated pieces of knowledge are accessed and used as needed. Then there are pieces of knowledge the body accumulates in its interactions with other bodies and the earth. Some such pieces get stored in the brain, others in books and computers.

There is a difference between the knowledge stored and the knowledge produced out of the stored. I may have stored the knowledge of many words and can access them as I wish, but there always remains the possibility of coming across a word not stored in my knowledge base. If the new word is in the language I already speak, all I need is the additional work of visiting a dictionary to find out what it means and how it is used. If in a language I do not know, then the burden of knowledge seeking amplifies. Now, to understand what the new word means, I have to learn a new language, find someone that speaks it, or use a translation software.

Building a new piece of knowledge resembles building a new piece of anything. It is hard work. To do it, takes time and resources. It is easy to pick up a book and read but quite difficult to write a manuscript and publish it as a book; easy to buy a car and drive it, but quite difficult to make a car.

Why am I telling you all this?

The ease of processing the knowledge we already have constantly pushes humans toward a world built out of personal opinions.

In encountering any situation, it is easy to reach into our knowledge base and bring out the pieces of knowledge we already have and can readily access, namely our opinion. If someone tells me that today in every society on earth the use of force is prominent and we have to switch from force to making knowledge prominent, I can readily respond using my opinions. I may know nothing about the force-based and knowledge-based ways of life, but just having heard the words force and knowledge I can reach into my stored knowledge and express my opinion.

So easy.

Every opinion is simply knowledge pieces already in the human mind. One puts them together and expresses them with ease. In contrast, finding out what the force-based system is and how it operates in human societies is not easy. Similarly, if I am told the Sermon on the Mount is a knowledge-based view of life, to understand it requires further knowledge processing. That is hard work.

That is why most if not all humans are opinion givers.

They are not interested in gathering new knowledge or thinking about and putting the existing and new knowledge together as a means to form deeper knowledge. Everyone really likes to stay in the domain of opinions, especially if done among like-minded individuals in a setting where one’s favorite beverage and snack are consumed, perhaps while watching one’s favorite game on television.

So we have a problem. A serious problem.

The ease of expressing opinions.

The difficulty of developing new pieces of knowledge.

In conducting everyday life, there is no problem with expressing opinions. Every aspect of human life involves expressing opinions. The problem resides in the ease of starting with opinions before engaging in the hard work of developing and using new pieces of knowledge. The human is stuck in the ease the opinions bring, always reluctant and resistant to engage in knowledge processing beyond opinions in order to create and use new pieces of knowledge.

Beyond the ease and difficulty issues, we have the question of capability. Assume a society that only knows how to make horse-driven carriages. Someone shows up telling them about new ways of knowledge processing that will create a special kind of carriage called Mercedes-Benz. He gives them the same spiel about the ease of staying with their opinions when making and using horse-driven carriages and the difficulty of creating new pieces of knowledge to make and use the Mercedes-Benz. Is it possible that the society of horse-driven carriages would resist the idea of Mercedes-Benz, not because of the knowledge processing difficulties but because of lacking the capability to create the needed knowledge pieces?

Regardless of how much I am told about building spaceships to travel to planets in other galaxies, I am not capable of building them. I cannot venture beyond expressing opinions about spaceships and space travel.

The capability question is paramount.

Serious implications exist for adopting the knowledge-based way of the Sermon on the Mount. What if the human capability is limited to society formation based on the force-based way of life? Regardless of what the answer might be, the fact remains that everyone’s starting point is the world of opinions. The existing world of opinions sits at the center of what is needed to develop a better understanding of the world.

Consider a new terminology. It says: every opinion is a few-agree position. Why should I call the opinion a few-agree position? Imagine a discussion among friends on subjects like politics or sports. In my experience, no one agrees with anyone and everyone seeks to push his or her point of view. Thus everyone’s position, everyone’s opinion, is a few-agree position.

We all rely on opinions as the best means for the flow of knowledge. Yet, in order to form and maintain a society, we have to develop some many-agree positions. Imagine what would happen if we could not reach the many-agree position that highways are for motor vehicles. Without the many-agree position, it would be okay to have bicyclists, horses, and pedestrians using them—or even children treating them as playgrounds.

We are most reluctant, many times resistant, to take on the hard work of integrating few-agree positions into many-agree positions.

We accept many-agree positions in two ways. First we are born into them, in that the society has already created them. We are conditioned to see them as part of our lives as we grow into adulthood. Second, we assign others—the politicians and bosses—to decide the many-agree positions. Whether we like what they do or not, our response remains at the level of opinions. The most one might do in converting few-agree positions into many-agree positions is to vote on who would be the next group of politicians in charge of creating the society’s many-agree positions. Most humans remain dedicated to staying in the world of opinions—the world of few-agree positions—where they sense the greatest ease and are most comfortable in life.

Why are humans so stuck in few-agree positions?

The answer, simple.

For the human individual, the few-agree positions mean freedom.

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The few-agree position is the human individual demanding an exclusive right to make decisions and judgments on anything and everything, and that all such decisions and judgments are right. Yet in the societal setting, that arrangement can only happen within the bounds of societal agreements—many-agree positions—that hold the society together. The challenge then becomes to form many-agree positions by aligning certain few-agree positions. Otherwise, life becomes a continuous confrontation of humans that demand exclusive right of judgment and decision making on anything and everything.

We often overlook that brute force is the first aspect of life to get converted from a few-agree to a many-agree position. Each human knows a personal way of using brute force when interacting with others. Yet we all abandon our individual ways in favor of a societal way of using brute force—namely through police and armed forces that in theory serve every individual’s need for managing brute force. This is the same as creating a many-agree position on using brute force. Then comes the step of backing the many-agree position by the societal brute force in order to declare it an all-agree position.

This is how the laws are born.

The laws are force-backed many-agree positions.

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They claim to be all-agree, even though they are not. Their claim to an all-agree position comes from being backed by the societal brute force. Anyone deviating from the law’s all-agree position, adopting their own few-agree position, would have to face the wrath of the societal brute force.

Do you see how the force-based way of life develops?

It begins by managing the few-agree and many-agree positons on brute force.

The role played by power

The conversion of few-agree positions to many-agree and all-agree positions has implications.

With every many-agree position comes positions of power, each controlling certain resources and each exerting influence on the design of the laws. How does that come about? When everyone agrees on working to produce goods and services as a many-agree position, those organizing and applying human capabilities to production and distribution of goods and services get to occupy the positions of power. We know such people as bosses.

In the force domain, those that manage the many-agree positions become the government officials, gaining the power to design the laws and to define the mode of application of the society’s resources. Power structure is the outcome of moving from few-agree to many-agree positions and from there to force-backed many-agree positions. The word power means two things. First, control of resources, especially wealth, and second, influencing the design of laws and controlling their application. The powerful human is a controller of wealth and an influencer of society’s pattern of use of force in human interactions.

In such a setting, the powerful humans achieve another capability.

The powerful can declare their own few-agree positions, their own opinions, as a many-agree position or even as a law that others, within their domain of power, have to obey and align with. Thus the boss decides the goods and services to be produced without ever consulting what the workers and consumers think. Or, the man declared the society’s leader can adopt a dictatorial posture and declare his own opinions the law of the land. Often the boss’s declarations and the dictator’s commands are accepted because everyone is more comfortable with staying in the world of opinions than getting involved with the hard work of developing many-agree positions that would counter the pronouncements of those put in positions of power as boss or dictator.

The focus on ease of using opinion, the focus on few-agree positions, makes humans hostile toward new flow of knowledge. Any change in knowledge pushes the individual out of the world of opinions. It makes everyone do the hard work of developing new pieces of knowledge, especially as many-agree and force-backed many-agree positions. This is especially the case when the new knowledge opposes and radically alters the existing knowledge base. Consider the classic case of such behavior, the witches. Recall the brute force applied in witch-hunt to destroy all such knowledge flow. In the case of witches the society remains resistance to either tolerating the few-agree positions that have a different approach to flow of knowledge, or reconsidering the existing many-agree positions in light of the new knowledge and few-agree positions that give rise to witches.

The reluctance to face the possibility of new knowledge and the resistance to extra knowledge processing originate at two factors:

1. For uncounted generations humans have been conditioned to see knowledge processing as hard and mostly irrelevant to daily life, and

2. For uncounted generations humans have been conditioned to see opinions and the existing knowledge base, especially the existing many-agree positions and laws, as all one needs to manage the daily life.

Does this reflect wisdom? It does - in operational terms. It’s not easy to go against the wisdom of this logic.

If we stay within the bounds of what exists as many-agree positions and laws and only interact based on opinions, life becomes like a party with friends and relatives. Everybody gets to share his or her opinion and everyone stays within the bounds of the already established laws and many-agree positions. No hard work of knowledge processing is needed to develop new knowledge pieces to replace the existing many-agree positions and laws.

In this observation, note the time span usually needed for societal change. If the society switches from the millennia-old force-based model to the knowledge-based Sermon on the Mount model, the transformation might take hundreds if not thousands of years. Why should any human consider that relevant to today’s life? That would be the same as the makers of horse-driven carriages declaring the Mercedes-Benz notion irrelevant to their own time and society.

It is all hard work. The transition from one societal form to another requires new many-agree positions, new forms of sharing brute force, and new force-backed many-agree positions.

It would be hard. Really hard.

It would require knowledge processing, at all levels, to develop the required knowledge pieces to implement the transition from the existing into the new societal structure.

When facing such situation, the response, often, materializes in the form of complaints. Complaints arise about different features of whatever is being proposed as an alternative to whatever the individual views as a previously-fixed structure of many-agree positions and laws. If anyone offers anything that moves in the direction of knowledge processing, to either affirm or reject the proposed new alternative, it is ignored. The procession of complaints and offering of opinions overwhelm and bury the possibilities for new flow of knowledge.

The complaints and opinions shield humans from engaging in the hard work of knowledge processing; to create new knowledge pieces that would either affirm the existing structure or alter and set it to a new direction.

What is the prime outcome of such behavior?

It strengthens the role played by boss and government official—the societal managers. Buoyed by the societal ocean of opinions and complaints, they get to allocate resources and influence the design of the societal force network.

Did you notice? I just combined the powerful in business and government under a single word. The manager.

Why would I do that?

cI do so for the sake of simplicity and clarity of understanding. With everyone mesmerized with the world of opinions, the human behavior and way of life are determined by those nearby on the power scale. It almost always leads to behavior and way of life aligned with the manager’s opinion as to what is to be done. If you have not observed that in the society’s top leader, or have not felt it when dealing with the boss, you have definitely felt it under the parent when a child. The manager’s opinion becomes a power-backed opinion that functions as a many-agree position or law that those in the lower power rungs must obey.

Throughout human history, the existence and prominence of power-backed opinions is the reason that organizations and societies continually decline on their way to the point of collapse. The accumulation of power-backed opinions hollows the knowledge structure in whatever humans make and use in their daily lives. Such arrangement lacks the solidity of a structure built on many-agree positions.

This is most dangerous because as opinion manager, every human is also a resource taker.

In order to exist in daily life, every individual has to continually take resources from the earth and other humans.

It is through resource taking that I get my food, my car, my house and everything else in life, and in return, everything I do in life is to satisfy the needs of others as resource takers. We are a society of resource takers.

Combining power and resource taking creates an explosive mix.

In the society of resource takers it is quite possible that the focus of power-backed opinions would remain on taking more for the powerful even when doing so harms the masses. History is full of stories of companies and societies that collapse when the masses become opinion expressers that watch and obey the managers’ power-backed opinions as life’s foundation.

When facing any immediate situation’s demands, the only thing the human does is to express and defend opinions. There is little knowledge processing. Little if any new pieces of knowledge take form. At a larger scale, this pattern, eventually, leads to the downfall of companies and societies that construct and maintain themselves within the world of opinions.

In life, every group—be it the family, company, or society—thrives when forming many-agree positions and adjusting those positions with new flow of knowledge. Those that fight to preserve their few-agree positions, than engage in knowledge processing to develop new many-agree positions, are agents of distorting and dismantling the family, company, and society. Managing the societal life at the level of opinions (few-agree positions) drags everyone down to the lowest possible level of knowledge