Of hypocrisy and truth

We may all be the product of our upbringing, over and above what we as humans are naturally imbued with. Perhaps our natural faculties are much more subtle in the way we perceive "rights" and "wrongs" - to put it simply. The natural understanding of what is right and wrong may have more to do with personal safety, ability to resist, and laughter. The cultural influences that civilisation exerts on our thinking today through beliefs, communal interaction and trade, had built layers over the innate and natural knowledge we possess. So, we can accept the idea of some sort of primitive wisdom and that of a developed wisdom, but essentially all wisdom of any sort is based on the passing on of knowledge from one generation to another.

In Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 21, verses 28-31, there is a very brief parable given by Jesus which is easily overlooked because it does not have the usual poetic form. Instead, this parable seems to be an idiomatic argument to press a point. Here is the quote from the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB):

'What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He went and said to the first, "My boy, go and work in the vineyard today."

He answered, "I will not go," but afterwards thought better of it and went.

The man then went and said the same thing to the second who answered, "Certainly, sir," but did not go.

Which of the two did the father's will?' They said, 'The first.' Jesus said to them, 'In truth I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you. Obviously, what we do and how we affect our community with our actions is how we will be judged somewhat. But the kernel of this parable is about understanding what is expected and asked of us, and choosing how we will react to that expectation. Those who understand what the expectation is and deliver are those who act in truth. And those who know what the expectation is and decide not to act accordingly, are plain hypocrites: that is, to say something and other another thing. There are leaders of all sort in human history who are hypocrites: emperors, judges, priests, generals, fathers and so forth. This free will to act in truth or hypocrisy is so real that it pervades all human behaviour and activity. Being brought up a certain way reinforces in us this notion of truth and hypocrisy. As a child, my parents will recount at home whom acted this way or that and these would be our own familial lessons with neighbours and people in the news as characters in the parable. Of course, as one grows up, you realise that a great deal of what is expected of us by friends, neighbours and family is often let down by disappointment caused by a refusal on our part to act according to those expectations. Some of those expectations  are built upon the personal benefits and selfishness of others, and we have a right to refuse to cooperate. Other times, the expectations are intended to hurt another person's dignity or possessions, and again, we are responding to a deeper well of expectations on the morally appropriate behaviour when we refuse to act to hurt another. At the deepest level of our conscience or thinking, we will have to anchor ourselves on where this moral ground is.  The abandonment of modern society of these classical ideals and virtues as a result of a renewed belief in the "splendour of Enlightenment in the 20th Century" has brought about the rise of "relativism". The consequence is that many of today's young people believe more in their own personal moral compass than that of a commonly held ideal. Oddly, atheism is a leading cause of this belief in the moral self, partly an off-shoot of the Protestant concept of self-revelation and interpretation, partly the development of Humanism in the post 17th Century Enlightenment framework, and the development of modern industry, which made class distinction more painful to the masses as cities grew as a result of bludgeoning trade and infrastructure. Many people have little trouble saying one thing and doing another. Consistency is no longer a virtue. We are expected to be nimble-minded, liberally inclusive and flexible in how we relate. This is both true and good, as well as terrible and sad. The reason why it can get so confusing is because of the context. There are times and ways nimbleness, flexibility and inclusiveness are beneficial, and in other occasions, these give rise to hypocrisy and unfairness. There was a time when the right thing to do meant what would bring about good. But in the minefield of relativism, what is "good" and to whom, simply depends.

A Life A New

On Monday, 17 September 2012, at 1130 hrs, I was performing a routine maintenance on my Mac Book Pro's storage and decided to reduce the large storage used by Time Machine on both the laptop as well the 2TB LaCie Thunderbolt drive. Time Machine utilises a great deal of cached space on the main machine, and in my HDD, took up more than 700GB in various time slices.

Granted that I could afford to retain what already has been stored, my focus was to free up any unused space on the LaCie and do some automatic disk maintenance. I was perhaps too Windows PC-oriented... it does not work the same way on the Mac. In running a function in disk utility on the Mac, it immediately (and without warning) removed the partition within the LaCie and destroyed the HDD operating application, which immediately removed the device from my desktop. After consulting with Apple care personnel, the only recourse was to send the HDD back to the agent.

The problem with doing this was that all my content would be vulnerable to being hacked/copied by the agent themselves. We have all heard how content have always been copied by these technical personnel and eventually leaked out.

To be safe, all I could do was erase all my content on the disk by doing a reformat... and with that decision, my whole digital universe was erased. That meant all photographs and personal archives from 1997 to 2011, and 2012. All my Outlook PSTs from that time to last year was erased. This was made worse because during my Mac Book Pro maintenance that same morning, I had put the 2011 and 2010, and Starwood PSTs back onto the LaCie, and these were not backed-up anywhere.

All gone. Including my CVs and other business files, databases and such.

Then while trying to recover these, I continued to be aggressive about my removal of shared or duplicated files. The iTunes update on my Mac resulted in the iTunes in my Windows on Parallels being inoperative and while removing the file, it completely affected the Mac iTunes as well. Which to rebuild in from my iPod and iPad, I had to download and purchase the iExplorer app. Fortunately, the app worked quite well and not exactly to its advertised standards but with some careful thinking beforehand, I copied all the media files into separate folders and then only copied these back to the iTunes on my Mac.

All that effort and cost aside - I had already moved past the point of absolute grief and unhappiness.... after all, these are the direct result of my own actions, regardless of whether these may have been from ignorance or simply misunderstanding some of the technical lingo and paradigm built into the Mac OS.

But having been forced to let go of so much critical information and wealth of reference material including samples of my writing etc. I can only move on as if leaving my world of the past and taking on the future ahead with each present moment I live hence with a vigour and vision anew, all afresh.

So, this is now Day 3 of my new life... either told as one Walking Dead in Zombie land, or just one life, plain and unadorned. I could change my name now and simply be whomever I want.

Looking forward to Day 4 of my new life...