Would You Like
to Live with Me?
By A.H. Cemendtaur
CA
Of all the injustices
that prevail in our world there is one that is particularly
disheartening. It is when a person gets punished
for the crimes and misdeeds of someone else. Today,
there are billions of people being punished for
others' sins. These people live in countries that
are either war-torn, or are ruled by stifling dictatorships,
or are at the brink of economic disaster. The suffering
masses get the short end of the stick for being
born in a place where leaders have made bad choices
for them.
A lot of well-meaning folks and organizations have
worked and have been working to better the lot of
all those billions of people, but the task is monumental,
and no matter how big the effort to tackle the task,
it is often dwarfed by the problem and just gets
drowned in the sea of chaos. Is there a way to break
down this monstrous problem into smaller manageable
tasks?
Let’s look at two people of identical educational
backgrounds and equal mental capacity; imagine one
to be born in the Third World and the other born
in the West. You can bet the two would have completely
different destinies. People living in the West have
all the opportunities to use their education and
skills for the betterment of themselves and the
society they live in, if they so choose. A person
of equal credentials, but born in the Third World
is doomed to constantly fight a failing system.
Imagine a situation in which we see two people drowning:
one is a philosopher, the other unskilled and unlettered.
If a community is given a chance to save one of
them, most communities would save the first one
because of a very selfish reason: in terms of its
resources the society has invested more in the philosopher,
and consequently the society has more chances of
benefiting from him/her.
We can seriously curtail the scale of our problem
— how to provide nurturing environment to
all the people in the world (and especially to those
living in the Third World) — if instead of
trying to change the destiny of billions of people
at the same time, in a first step we resolve to
provide succor only to the educated and the skillful
among them. One can argue that the educated people
in the Third World are already rescued, that they
already live in privileged environments, but those
of us who grew up in mismanaged countries know that
the argument is false. People who get to live in
privileged enclaves in the Third World get there
because of their power or wealth. We wish to change
the criteria from power or money to education.
So this becomes our thesis. Let’s create education-based
membership communities in chaotic environments to
provide relief to people capable of doing good to
the larger society. Every such community would have
a physical existence, would have a definite boundary
that would be guarded, and would only let people
in who would meet the community’s membership
criteria. Unlike other privileged places in the
Third World the membership criteria for these communities
would not be based on wealth, it would be based
on education. A physicist with no money in his pocket
would be welcomed; a millionaire who fails the membership
criteria would be turned back.
In our education-based membership community we aim
to provide the following:
A safe, secure environment, free of violence.
A reliable infrastructure of roads, communication,
and utilities.
A society that is open and is tolerant of different
point of views.
A society that makes decisions through dialog and
consensus.
Imagine such communities existing near Bogota, near
Lagos, near Bombay, near Karachi, near Ho Chi Minh
City. Educated people living in those cities, enervated
by the inefficient systems, and making the difficult
decision to migrate to a Western country for a more
promising future, would now have a much easier path
to take. The country instead of losing all that
brain would be able to retain it. These people living
together in a functional setup would prove to be
a potent force capable of changing the society outside
their enclave of discipline. But before we go any
further let’s answer a very basic question,
a question that requires brainstorming and help
from a lot of people. What should be the membership
criteria of these communities of ours? How do you
define education? How do you verify someone’s
education? How would you pick up people who would
work with you to preserve the characteristics of
the society you would have created in that little
island and would like to expand the experiment?
Let’s hear from all reading this.
The above concept is being refined at:
http://elmustee.wikispaces.com/
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