How we can shift the world

It doesn't matter what you believe - if you're into a New Age movement, if you're religious, if you're not. The message still is - you can only have a war against terror if something other than terror is participating. If you use terror to fight terror, then terror will win. It's just a question of whose terror wins. Use love to fight terror. And showing love is something we all can participate in.

This is not terror

Car chase. Shooting. Injured. Killed. A car chase in Washington DC ends with gunfire, a woman killed and police officers injured. But this is not linked to terrorism. Which makes me ask the question, by whose definition?

What do you call the feeling you get when a bullet approaches you, and you know it will kill you? Well, terror. It might sound like nitpicking, but the boundaries we put on definitions also puts boundaries on how we think and handle the term.

I want to define terrorism as "the act of inflicting the feeling of terror into someone else". Failing to do so, we open for the possibility that generating terror in others can be justified in specific circumstances. Succeeding to name terror as terror, we open up to approaching terror as an emotional psychological foundation that causes violence, and at the same time gain a higher threshold to committing our own acts of terrorism.

This is not to say that one is necessarily better than the other, that all boils down to what you want out of life. It is a subjective matter, just like the feeling of terror itself is, indeed, subjective. What we do know, is that inflicting terror is a response to the feeling of terror. That is, a police officer may fire a gun (thus inflicting terror on the suspect) as a response to his own feeling of terror that comes as a result of the criminal pulls his own gun and pointing it at the police officer. The criminal did this because of his own feeling of terror from being chased, even though he was chased because society at large had a feeling of terror from the criminal's behaviour. The criminal may very well have been engaging in criminal behaviour because of his own feelings of terror from being in an economic hole.

Which all sums up to the fact that terror generates more terror. The question then, is whether you want to live in a world of terror? Do we want to just cap the amount of terror by reacting only when terror has reached a specific limit, or do we want to do something to practically eliminate human-generated terror, aka terrorism?

I vote for the latter. We must focus on how to reduce and possibly eliminate the amount of terror a human can inflict on others. And the way to do this is obviously to do the opposite: Instead of making others feel unsafe, which is the precursor to terrified, we must make others feel safe.

11 new ways to define a country: Developing the non-western third world

Are you getting tired of seeing the same old news stories about "non-western" people and "developing" countries when you know it's not that simple a world? Let's look at how we should be looking at things instead, things that have an impact on the human psyche.

1. CHEAP/RICH and EXPENSIVE/POOR countries: Cost of living vs. average income.
   An "expensive" country is one where the average income is low compared to the cost of living, which translates to the population being "poor", while a "cheap" country is one where the average income is high, translating the population to being "rich". A formula for the expenses is hard to normalize, even within each country. For example, some places require that you have an automobile, while you can live your entire life walking in other places. Either way, statistics might come as a surprise to some.
   "He came from an expensive country"
   
2. MILITARY and PEACE countries
   What's the military expense per capita? How much of the taxes goes to the military? How many military conflicts does the country have with other countries over the last decade?
   "He came from a military country"
   
3. INDUSTRIAL, ECOLOGICAL and DEPENDENT countries
   How is food made? There are three basic productions, the third being dependant on importing from others. Which food resource is dominant?
   "He came from a dependent country"
   
4. TECHNOLOGICAL SCALE
   It's too easy to say "developing country" or "developed" - no country is ever fully developed. If that was the case, we would not longer be developing anything new. So the question is rather - how far in the technological development has a country arrived at? To claim that a country has reach a level, at least 90% of relevant implementations of said technology should be in place, such as:
   INDUSTRIAL: 90% of manual labour has been taken over by industrial machinery
   DIGITAL: 90% of population has access to digital equipment
   INTERCONNECTED: 90% of population has access to the Internet
   "He came from a digital country"
   
5. MENTALLY STABLE and UNSTABLE countries
   Or, as politicians like to call them, "crazy" or "reasonable" countries. A country can be seen as "Mentally unstable" if more than 20% of the population have severe psychological problems. "He came from a mentally unstable country."
   
6. VIOLENT and SAFE countries
   How many violent crimes per capita? "He came from a violent country"
   
7. HAPPY and UNHAPPY countries
   Nations should check the happiness of their population on a regular basis and from this determine f they are a happy or unhappy nation. "He came from an unhappy country." "We don't know if he has happy or unhappy roots, his country refuses to release that data."
   
8. ILLITERATE, PRIMARY, SECONDARY and EDUCATED countries
   How much education does 90% of the population have? "He came from a secondary school country."
   
9. GRAVELLED, RAILED, SAILING and PAVED countries. WALKING, BICYCLING, RIDING, DRIVING and BOATING countries.
   There are these main methods of infrastructure for goods and passengers. Which type of infrastructure is dominant in terms of road conditions and vehicles? "He came from a gravelled boating country."
   
10. HEALTHY, SICK or DEAD country
    What's the predominant health condition of people age 60-80? "He came from a sick country."
    It could also be presented in sickness age (at what age does 90% of the population have perpetual illness?) and average age of death. "He came from a sick 60 dead 75 country."
    It could also be expressed with the predominant illness. "He came from a flu country."
    
11. MORTALITY TYPE
    What's the predominant type of death in a country? "He came from a heart attack country."

So with this fresh in mind, it is time for someone to sit down and define the world all over again. Good luck!