"A husband and wife had just finished reading H.C. Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. Seeing her husband, posing naked, she asked. 'What is it, babe?'It's nothing honey, it's just the emperor's new cloth,' he replied.'Oh okey, but you'd better iron it first!' she responded.""In the previous session, we've looked at three speaking style behaviors: assertive, non-assertive, and aggressive. So, what about listening? The French expression, 'tendre l'oreille, and in English idiom 'to lend an ear', means literally 'to stretch the ear'," Sansevieria opened the adjoining sheets. "It is in a way to mimic internally the outer mobility of this organ among certain animal species. It is, even if all the while remaining motionless, to turn our attention toward what summons our listening. But to lend an ear is also a matter of a loan, says Peter Szendy. These pinnae, we inherit them, we receive them, we borrow them without even having chosen them. This ear that we lend is certainly above all lent to us. And don't ask, 'by whom?' Life on earth is a loan.We will always listen to, one one side, our inner voice, and listen to others, on another. Douglas Bloch says that over a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, 'There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right words.' And also, Bloch tells us what Shakti Gawain have said, ' To whatever degree you listen to and follow your intuition, you become a creative channel for the higher power of the universe. When you willingly follow where your creative energy leads, the higher power can come through you to manifest its creative work. When this happens, you will find yourself flowing with the energy, doing what you really want to do, and feeling the power of the universe moving through you to create or transform everything around you.' We live in a time of rapid transformation. The old rules and guidelines are no longer valid. Everything is changing far too quickly. No longer can we turn to gurus or external teachers to provide the answers we seek. As we approach the dawn of a new era, each of us is being called upon to listen to and be guided by the 'still small voice' within.The idea of listening to ourself is simple in theory, but difficult in practice. This is because the higher voice is not the only voice seeking our attention. We have inside us a false voice, also known as the voice of the ego. While the inner voice gives expression to who we really are, the false voice focuses on who we think we should be. The inner voice supports our essential nature; the false voice denies it.Each of these voices is accompanied by a number of clear signs., says Bloch. The primary experience that emerges from listening to our inner voice is the presence of inner peace. The second sign that accompanies the inner voice is that of joy. One of the key ways to recognize the voice of the ego, according to Bloch, is through the presence of fear. Moreover, while the inner voice is committed to the truth, the false voice preaches dishonesty.On other hands, oftentimes, we wanted to hear something from other people, about anything, especially about what other people said about ourselves. But frequently, we sensed that most people were more interested in telling their stories than hearing ours. And to be honest, we were more interested in telling ours than hearing theirs. While we relished times when others tried to understand our stories, we came to value even more, friendships where understanding worked both ways.When we took time to understand others, it not only benefited them, it benefited us. We grew to accept a wider range of people and to enjoy most of the unlikely and unlikable among them. Not listening well causes a lot of unnecessary confusion and pain. Experience also tells us that people who are willing to work at listening better, can improve their relationships across the board. While better communication skills do improve relationships, they are not the entire picture. The need-to-win and put ourselves above others in relationships, causes even more problems than shoddy communication. If we learn to recognize this tendency, we have a chance to set it aside and move into more meaningful connections with family, friends, and co-workers.We often hear or used to hear that men do not live in perfect harmony with each other. Rather, again and again, conflicts arise between them. And the source of these conflicts is always the same: the scarcity of goods. Ever since mankind left the Garden of Eden, there has been and always will be scarcity all-around us.Absent a perfect harmony of all human interests and given the permanent human condition of scarcity, then, interpersonal conflicts are an inescapable part of human life and a constant threat to peace, says Hans-Hermann Hoppe.Confronted with conflicts concerning scarce goods, but also endowed with reason or more precisely with the ability to communicate, to discuss and to argue with one another, as the very manifestation of human reason, then, mankind has been and forever will be faced with the question of how to possibly avoid such conflicts and how to peacefully resolve them should they occur.History then goes on with its qissa: The king, the first warrior in the realm. He defended it from its external and internal enemies and was ready to uphold the laws he made by force. Immediately below him were a body of men who enjoyed his favour and owed their elevation to their skill in war. They were called ‘knights’. The Crown granted them land that was cultivated by a peasantry which was largely unfree. Their labour supported the knight; it gave him the leisure to train for battle and it paid for his warhorse, armour, sword and lance.From childhood, the knight mastered their use, inured himself to the weight and discomfort of armour, and learned how to control an often temperamental charger which had been bred for weight, strength and ferocity. Stamina and training made knights the masters of the battlefield; they also appear mounted alongside a nobleman.In Politeia, Plato thought that the best people would be those most expert at identifying and pursuing the common interest. They would be called ‘guardians’, professional rulers and leaders. As such, they would receive a long and careful training, and enjoy no substantial property that might induce them to pursue private interest rather than public. Much of this was implicit criticism of the way city-states were actually governed in Plato’s time. But Plato’s republic was not thought practical by his most distinguished pupil; Aristotle preferred description to prescription, and he offered a definition of aristocracy based upon observation.According to William Doyle, Aristocracy [aristokratíā] is a word coined in ancient Greece. The word ‘aristocracy’, disappeared from regular usage for around a thousand years. When it resurfaced, in the 15th century, it still meant a form of government, but it was largely employed to describe states ruled by noblemen. Originally it meant not a group of people but a form of government: rule by the best. It was a form of government ‘in which more than one, but not many, rule … and it is so called, either because the rulers are the best men, or because they have at heart the best interests of the state and its citizens’. It was thus the rule of a virtuous few; but was easily perverted into mere oligarchy ‘when it has in view the interests only of the wealthy’. In an extreme oligarchy, the governing class ‘keep offices in their own hands, and the law ordains that the son shall succeed the father’. But Aristotle was realistic: wealth was essential to underpin the leisure and lack of temptation necessary for holders of public office, and so in aristocracies magistrates were chosen ‘both according to their wealth and according to their merit’. And if ‘the principle of an aristocracy is virtue’, this quality was more likely to be found among people of ‘birth and education’, good birth being ‘only ancient wealth and virtue’.Parkinson, in discussing political evolution, included 'aristocracy'—as well as Feudalism and Communist Theocracy—into the subject of Oligarchy. Aristocracy was the rule of a virtuous few, says Doyle, but was easily perverted into mere oligarchy ‘when it has in view the interests only of the wealthy’. In an extreme oligarchy, the governing class ‘keep offices in their own hands, and the law ordains that the son shall succeed the father’. But Aristotle was realistic: wealth was essential to underpin the leisure and lack of temptation necessary for holders of public office, and so in aristocracies magistrates were chosen ‘both according to their wealth and according to their merit’. And if ‘the principle of an aristocracy is virtue’, this quality was more likely to be found among people of ‘birth and education’, good birth being ‘only ancient wealth and virtue’.Parkinson suggests that it is easier for an aristocracy to establish its power within a state already formed, inside boundaries already defined and through institutions already in existence. Nor is it necessary for the monarchy to disappear. The Egyptian monarchy, the earliest of which the history is known, was largely overshadowed by the nobility during the fifth dynasty (2750-2250 B.C.) and still more during the sixth, but the monarchy, in form, remained. The same was roughly true of China under the Han Dynasty. At Sparta, a predominantly aristocratic state, the dual kingship survived and with a share of influence. At Athens the monarchy gave place quietly to aristocracy during the eighth century. At Rome, by contrast, the kings were dethroned, about 509 B.C., by the nobles, and the kingship lingered on only in the form of the Rex Sacrorum, a sacrificial office of minor importance. Rome provides perhaps the best early example of aristocracy in its republican form.For Montesquieu, in De l'esprit des lois, there were three basic types: republics, monarchies, and despotisms. An aristocracy was merely one type of republic, where the few governed rather than the many. He identified these ruling minorities as nobles, but the true destiny of nobles for Montesquieu lay in monarchies. There they played an essential role as an intermediary power between monarch and subjects, upholding the laws and preventing the state’s degeneration into despotism. His fundamental maxim was ‘no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch’.When, only three decades after Montesquieu wrote, the American revolutionaries successfully renounced allegiance to George III and established a republic, they declared that any form of nobility was incompatible with their new state. They also began to talk about the dangers of ‘an aristocracy’ of the rich usurping power–thus eliding Aristotle’s careful distinction between aristocracy and oligarchy. And around 1780, while the issue in America was still unresolved, reformers in the Dutch Republic began to denounce their own oligarchs as aristocrats–a word previously unknown. Within a few years, it was taken up by the French revolutionaries to describe their own opponents. This usage derived from the fact that the Revolution had begun as a struggle to destroy the privileges and power of the French nobility. Aristocracy now clearly meant more than just a form of government. It meant the power of a particular social group and its supporters. It also meant that group itself in a more general way. Aristocracy and nobility had at last become completely interchangeable as descriptive terms.This has been the common usage ever since. Some analysts or commentators employ the word ‘aristocracy’ to make distinctions within the wider ranks of nobles, confining the term to the rich minority of influential magnates or peers. This can be useful for certain sorts of analysis, but in more general terms the description ‘aristocratic’, or the nouns ‘aristocrat’ or ‘aristocracy’, are widely (if imprecisely) understood to mean much the same thing as noble or nobility.Aristocracies believe they have existed since time immemorial. They see themselves as manifestations and beneficiaries of a natural human tendency to accept the leadership of elites of proven superiority. When noblemen spoke of themselves, as they so often did, as patricians or senators, they were implying that they were the same sort of people as the rulers of ancient Rome. A few even claimed direct descent from at least the senatorial order of late antiquity. Most modern aristocracies, however, have traced their collective identity no further back than the upheavals of the barbarian invasions in the early Middle Ages. Some saw themselves as descendants of conquerors, with conquest as the ultimate proof and justification of their superiority.'Noblesse oblige', the phrase is not old. It appears first to have been used by the French Duke de Lévis in 1808, when 20 years of tribulation for aristocrats seemed about to end with the creation of a new titled hierarchy by Napoleon. He said: nobility has its obligations. Aristocrats were prevented by law from doing some things, and by beliefs about themselves from doing others. Since the waning of feudalism, not many laws have imposed more positive obligations, but everybody knew that true nobles were expected to behave in ways which reinforced their claims to social distinction and power, to ‘live nobly’.A form between monarchy and aristocracy is a theocracy. The Empires of the Ancient World were normally ruled by a king who was also a god. Given a priesthood to support his divinity, we have thus an element of theocracy in the oldest kingdoms. But theocracy, rule by a priest or priests, is only one form of monarchy or aristocracy and not, in itself, of great political importance. It would hardly be possible to distinguish between the religious and political functions of the ancient monarchies; and in the instances (as among the Jews) where the priests had taken the place of the kings, then political and religious powers were at least co-extensive. The people were all of the one religion and they showed no particular desire to extend its benefits to anyone else.Jeffrey A. Winters has another story about Oligarchy, a form of government in which political power is in the hands of a small minority, the oligarchs. It derives from the Greek word oligarkhia (government of the few), which is composed of oligoi (few) and arkhein (to rule). Winters tells us that all oligarchies can be categorized according to four major characteristics: the extent to which oligarchs are directly engaged in supplying the coercion that undergirds their claims or rights to property and wealth; whether oligarchs are also directly engaged in rule or governing; whether that engagement in coercion and rule is fragmented or collective; and finally, whether oligarchs are wild or tamed (with external taming being both more common and more stable than self-taming). The most significant historical line of demarcation among oligarchies divides those before and after the rise of the modern nation-state.Oligarchy, in Joel Kotkin's view, is one of the factors causing the comeback of Feudalism, which he calls, 'Neo-Feudalism.' The way the term ‘feudalism’ has been used sometimes tells us a lot more about the perceptions of people in the periods that used it than it tells us about medieval society, says David Crouch. As is now well known, the first guise of ‘feudalism’ as a social—rather than as a legal—construct was in the use of the phrase ‘le gouvernement féodal’ by Charles Louis de Secondat, the Baron Montesquieu (1689–1755), in 1748, in his L’Esprit des Lois. But the idea that the European middle ages had been ‘feudal’ was of course already long established. The English legal scholar and antiquarian, Sir Henry Spelman (c.1564–1641) had concluded that tenure and feudal law was basic to Western medieval societies, and was indeed their defining characteristic.Fiefs and feudal law were believed to be specific to the middle ages. However, even before Spelman, sixteenth-century French jurists had produced theories of the origins of fiefs in the collapse of the Roman empire, and attributed their invention to their own Frankish ancestors. They believed that fiefs and feudal law had become nothing more than antiquarian survivals long before their own day. Spelman’s French contemporaries were also coming independently to the conclusion he had reached, that the middle ages was inescapably and characteristically ‘feudal’. The count of Boulainvilliers was building on the tradition of both nations when he wrote that ‘féodalité’ arose out of the wreck of Imperial Rome. It is not surprising in view of all this that the encyclopedic minds of the Enlightenment would eventually decide that the medieval world was characteristically feudal, and inevitably attempt to define it according to the label that had been pasted on it.Montesquieu was the first writer to use the adjective féodal in the context of a social state. He used it to describe a condition where monarchy had so far degenerated as to be forced to share power with a military aristocracy whose power base was their knights, established on hereditary fiefs.Why and what are the backgrounds to Kotkin's Neo-Feudalism, we will discuss in the next session. Bi 'idhnillah."Then, before continuing to the next session, Sansevieria sang Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody,Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?Caught in a landslide, no escape from realityOpen your eyes, look up to the skies and see *)
Citations & References:
- Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, 2008, Fordham University Press
- Douglas Bloch, Listening to Your Inner Voice: Discover the Truth Within You and Let It Guide Your Way, 1995, Hazelden Publishing
- Jim Petersen, Why Don’t We Listen Better? - Communicating & Connecting in Relationships, 2015, Petersen Publications
- William Doyle, Aristocracy: A Very Short Introduction, 2010, Oxford University Press
- Lawrence James, Aristocrat - Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain’s Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present, 2009, St. Martin’s Press
- David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900–1300, 2014, Routledge
*) "Bohemian Rhapsody", written by Freddie Mercury
