Originally Posted by
Sunfish
It's simply normal how many of you are in denial about free markets. You are perfectly happy to consume the fruits of such markets - cheap Korean and Chinese appliances, Malaysian cars and so on, but of course when it comes to YOUR Industry, you decide that free trade is good for everybody else, but not for you.
Its simply normal for someone that has devoted their life to become a 'high priest' in any invented human system, to damn or condemn those that question their preachings.
A contemporary philosopher (and former Canadian oil-man and CEO) puts it thus...
"
Take what are presented as natural economic forces.
They can only exist to the extent that humans exist and therefore are not natural. The market in software would be surprisingly quiet if put in the hooves of sheep. Cattle have minimal interest in e-mail. Economic forces must take their appropriate place as the dependents of humans; more precisely, as dependent upon human characteristics in order to be shaped appropriately to our circumstances. And those human characteristics are themselves inferior to and shaped by human qualities.
"What history tells us is that economics - commercial activity, production, trade - usually falls in importance about halfway down the list of human activities, far off the radar screen of our desire for society. So the complexity of shared knowledge reminds us that, if one globalisation model claims to be the voice of inevitable forces, a dozen other models will appear which don't."
(John Ralston-Saul, Chapter 2, pp 21-22,
On Equilibrium, 2001, Penguin, ISBN 0 14 023914 0)
Former Canadian oil company CEO!
"E tu, Brute?"
How is this connected with Pprune and this discussion?
Sunfish, most of the people you are addressing here have a basic technical qualification. You recognise that, we are trained as pilots.
The bit you don't seem to understand is that even though most pilots could not spell it, there is a metaphysical aspect to being an effective GA or airline pilot.
That is, the ability to imagine. The ability to put together unconnected facts in an imaginative and non-linear way, based on shared knowledge and intuition, to look into the future... "don't take your airplane somewhere your brain didn't go five minutes before."
There is also in most pilots a strong sense of serving society. Sure, many say "the pax are safe because my @arse is strapped in this tube too!" but there is in most, if not all, the pilots I fly with, a sense of responsibility, a sense of imagining the other, a sense of their role in society, that places their belief in the need for their skills above 'economic necessity'. We resist limiting our store of airmanship and professional knowledge on the basis of 'risk management.'
There is a strong sense that in a crisis, they are obliged to do
all that is humanly possible to deliver our pax safely back to earth. Possibly at the cost of our own lives; a concept that cannot be adequately explained under the heading of self-interest.
That is why we admire Capt Al Haines (Souix City) rather than Geoff Dixon and Mr Ryan.
You scold us for pursuing the good life via cheap Korean imports et al.
All you did for me when you made that statement was confirm my appraisal that you lacked imagination, and really don't understand what a lot of the pilots on here are talking about.
Human experience is not summarised by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The only institutions that have taught that model since the 1950's are Schools of Management.
