In this day and age, such labels do not mean much anymore. Many using them simply do not know what they mean, and many others use them to cloak their own real intentions. Judging by deeds is the best way not to be mislead by words or labels, hence my insistence here on PDF that results matter and claims do not. Those who dislike being called out or who get upset at their claims not being accepted are doing so only because they have no substance to back up their positions, leading to an inevitable deterioration of the discussion and environment, which thrives further due to the lax moderation.
The microcosm is the microcosm in the end. If you get a microcosm applied to a lasting principle, it remains a microcosm regardless.
The important thing in the end (to the better minded, whether they are in position to make differences now or later) is in the end what are the parallels the microcosm has with the macrocosm.
There are far worse microcosms I have been party to (observing + interacting wise) but heavily disjointed and abnormal with the macrocosm that I had known and still know....so there was only so much relevancy in the end in the nasty bits concerning principles and hypocrisies, ingratitude and all the rest of the "no good deed goes unpunished" stuff.
There are also microcosms that are in far better state than the macrocosm likewise.
So if a microcosm does mirror the macrocosm very well or near perfectly, well it serves a greater purpose to those mindful enough I suppose....without the mental juggling needed to think about how reflecive of reality it actually is in end. That's how I see things anyway.
You try your best with what you have and time you allot for it, just like everything else. There's diamonds, diamonds in the rough (person-wise and topic-wise)...those things matter to me as I see them.The other types of carbon I just leave to be unless there's a real soot problem it creates with the former I suppose.
There are entire contentious/charged topics I totally ignore in many places incl here, because I already had access to great diamonds elsewhere for that and its waste of time for me to really care about its ebbs and flows with the mundane carbon-soot and hot smoke.
Anyway I get where you are coming from, is the long and short of it.
It depends on whether we believe in a top down or a bottom up approach.
Many here will choose to keep their head in the clouds and talk about broad global visions and pan-regional concepts breathtaking in their grandiosity, and ignore completely the ground realities that are inconvenient to their preferred visions and agendas so as to deal a death blow to them. I have used the analogy of the desire to build the tallest skyscraper in the world, but trying to start only from the 50th floor on upwards, without any foundation or the lower floors, which are simply too much hard non-glamorous tedious work requiring a lot of planning and basic education and training.
I believe in the bottom up approach, where one starts in the immediate vicinity of doing what one can do, rather than grandiose visions. I once posted the example of my friend who went with me on a motorcycle trip to New Mexico. We both were upset at the amount of litter people had thrown about at rest stops, particularly empty water bottles. I wanted to write to the governor and tourism boards to complain and ask for more enforcement. He laughed at me and said he will do that too. And he then proceeded to pick up two pieces of trash every time we stopped. At the end of the trip he had cleaned up a whole barrelful of trash, all by himself, and left the place better than when he found it. To me that was highly instructive, to say the least.
Of course, many here just laughed at me and the stupidity of my friend when I posted that here to illustrate how we can begin by doing what is possible, no matter how little, around us, rather than telling others how to do their jobs better. Trivial things? I would say not. That is how real changes begin, and how magnificent results are achieved.
Yah each graduation, the founder of our school (in Singapore), old, rich but very philantrophic.... would give along with the diploma (be it middle school or high school) the story of "The man who planted trees".
Only later in life did I really get his reason for picking that story and that it must have deeply influenced him much earlier in life. For quite some time I thought it was a true account too, but its allegorical, so in a way even better.
We had great community service in that school too (including ecology clean-ups etc)....some number of kids were snobs and brats and unfortunately stayed as such later in life from what I've seen....but good sizeable number had long term takeaways to apply as well.
Practice what you preach. Praxis past just theoria etc etc.
By trivial I meant trivial in the conception of solutions (long known and staring at us, theoria etc). But the action, the praxis is very non-trivial for sure....thats the greatest cost in the end in society.
Friendship past differences. Amen to that, brother. Amen. But it takes a broadness of mind and a willingness to accept new ideas and concepts that can take many out of their chosen comfort zones and that can be a scary thing to minds not used to freedom.
Yah, for longest time I kept looking for a song I know from a pretty early memory of mine, some storytelling cartoon-short outro on TV where it described our entire planet as a spaceship bounding through the milky way....we just call it mother earth. But I have given up on finding it now largely....oh well. Its hit and miss if these things show up somewhere in google or youtube heh. There are whole songs I learned in school that seemingly have no material record out there sometimes....sometimes I keep looking anyway heh.
But in the end its up to enough people to know this ship isnt that big at all.....and like any ship you dont really have that much room in end for strife. Differences are always going to be there, but there has to be hard limits on strife....given basic binary of life and death, that allows for differences to be perceived and to exist in first place.
Always good to see it in bottom up way with a friendship past differences. It gives hope the top down adjusts more to that with time.
Given my top down vs bottom up argument presented above, I am sad that this PDF drama is predictably scripted to reach its logical result, simply because I tried and failed to implement that approach here: do what one can to implement at least the basic rules step by step. But the uproar at being told to not change titles or post copious amounts of agenda driven drivel upset too many people so used to getting there way that management simply caved in to their demands. All I have to show for my time and effort is the satisfaction of having tried my best and failed.
May be someday things will change. As I am often told here, there is always hope.
Satisfaction of trying your best but failed. Far better than not trying at all.
We all fail at living in the end, life just ceases. So yes you must try your best in the time you have as you see something to be worthy that is within you reach to work upon.
If success was always guaranteed and failure never existed....there is no trying and striving to begin with. Courage would not exist in that universe.
To me the trying and striving (and the impact others see from that, whatever the final result) is the whole meaning and purpose....the test.
Stoicism is great life recipe for me for this very reason. Just got to do your best whatever the odds of success....as doing good things cultivates good things in you at the very least.
Then sometimes you get extra benefits anyway. One time I was very pleased when someone brought an earlier work I did to my attention, that my failure was important to his later breakthrough. He didn't know it was my work at the time (he only looked one layer deep and there were intermediaries).....but it was a unique feeling and I didn't tell him as he was well on the way to looking at the base at some point and finding lil ole me and my failure then....and have a better laugh then too. This was a total dead-end to me at the time after considerable time spent....but the record mattered in the end to someone else.....a fresh pair of eyes, time and intent.
