Depression Cured

A Cure for Depressive Illness

 

 

"Perfection of work is man's greatest reward. When a man sees his work perfected and this perfection is the result of incessant labor and application he is the happiest man in the world. Work is the source of human happiness." (`Abdu'l-Baha, SW, Vol. 13, p. 152)

 

By popular request, I am beginning a series on the above quote, which has inspired me for decades. First, before getting into new material, I will repost some of what has already been featured on the Badi’ Blog, starting with this:

 

Work and Happiness

p18wri 2007 July 14; Baha'i Mention, and Other Mentions

Revised and reposted, May 2012

 

 

Work and Happiness

 

Back on the 20th of September, 2002 I wrote an essay called, "On the Parable of the Talents; Ethical Economics, Part IV" where I did a detailed analysis of the implications of the following reported statement by the Master:

 

"Perfection of work is man's greatest reward. When a man sees his work perfected and this perfection is the result of incessant labor and application he is the happiest man in the world. Work is the source of human happiness." (SW, Vol. 13, p. 152)

 

It turns out that scientists and medical experts have been making discoveries confirming this wisdom, according to the following report in a local newspaper.

 

"Want to be happier? Work longer hours," by Joanna Frketich

 

"You're in early. You stay late. The hours are piling up. Congratulations! Workaholics are less likely to suffer from depression. Statistics Canada reports that those working fewer than 30 hours a week suffered more depression than workers clocking more than 40 hours. Though nobody is quite sure why. Maybe because workaholics don't have time.

 

"People working 40 hours meet the norms and expectations of society and feel they're doing something useful said Vish Baba, professor of management at McMaster University.”If I'm, working less hours, my sense of self worth is threatened. I might feel the skills I have are not wanted.

 

"Others suggest it has more to do with being passionate enough about your work to put in the extra time. They have a strong sense of mission to their work:' said Peter Bieling, manager of the mood disorders program at St. Joseph's Healthcare. "It's work that matters to them. Then again, the answer could be simply that people suffering from depression can't work as many hours. "Someone who is healthy is more likely to work longer hours," said Heather Gilmour, analyst in the health statistics division of Statistics Canada." (Hamilton Spectator, A1, 13 Jan, 2007)

 

Such is the problem with scientific confirmations, you never know if people are happier because they are working, or whether they are working because they are happier. There is an element of faith in both, in being happy and in working, which is why they are of such benefit. As Paul said, "Every man's work shall be made manifest." (1 Corinthians iii. 13)

The Trouble with Billionaires

By John Taylor; 2012 Apr 25, 168 BE

Book Review: The Trouble with Billionaires, by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Viking Inc., Toronto, 2010

Whenever I pick up a book by Linda McQuaig, I cannot put it down until I have read it cover to cover. I find her strangely compelling. She always seems to grasp the essence of what a good journalist should be investigating. This, her latest volume, is even better and more authoritative than usual because she teams up with a law professor and taxation expert, Neil Brooks. Together they take on the self-serving lies that the rich, who are nothing better than the hogs who happen to be closest to the trough, come up with to justify their unfair position in accumulating wealth. It is a joy to see their drivel so effectively refuted in this book.

The wealthy love to delude themselves. They loudly proclaim that they are rich because they deserve to be rich. They repeat this Big Lie so often that lately a great number of gullible but otherwise intelligent people are conceding that they might be right. Maybe innovation, talent and skill were what got them their affluence, and not just the fact that they are just pigs that happen to be standing right next to the slop pail.

In a time when billions of people do not have enough to eat, and billions more do not have the resources to live a decent, productive life, it is important to grasp the enormity of the evil that these few billionaires, the notorious one percent, are perpetrating on the human race. Their lies are so big that they make Hitler's big lie and the mere sixty million murders that he committed seem trivial by comparison.

I will not attempt to review "The Trouble with Billionaires" in the usual way. You can read an excellent review of the book at the Amazon website at:

http://www.amazon.ca/Trouble-With-Billionaires-Neil-Brooks/dp/067006419X

If you want a taste of the book, there is an excerpt at:

http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2010/09/trouble-billionaires

Using a new scanner I just bought, I have OCR'ed the table of contents of Trouble with Billionaires. What I will do then is that instead of a normal book review I will comment on certain chapters of the book in the order written.

Chapter One: Return of the Plutocrats

The book starts off in an unexpected way. It is the most innovative opening for a non-fiction book I've seen in a while. It should win them some kind of a book prize. The problem they address is that most people think of a billionaire as little more than a millionaire spelt with a "b." You have to use nine rather than six zeros to write the digits for "one billion," but that does not convey what a huge number you are dealing with. Here is how they get around that problem.

==========

Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second.

At that rate, after one minute, you would have sixty dollars. And after twelve days, you would be a millionaire -- something beyond most people's wildest dreams.

But how long would it take to become a billionaire?

Well, at that rate, it would take almost thirty-two years.

Being a billionaire isn't just beyond most people's wildest dreams, it's likely beyond their comprehension.

Another way to grasp the sheer size of billionaires' fortunes is to imagine how long it would take Bill Gates, generally considered the world's richest man, to count his $53 billion. If he counted it at the same rate -- one dollar every second -- and he counted non-stop day and night, he'd have it all tallied up in 1,680 years. Or still another way to look at it: if Bill Gates had started counting his fortune at that rate back in AD 330 -- the year the Roman emperor Constantine had his wife boiled alive and chose Byzantium as the empire's new capital -- he'd just be finishing up now." (p. 1)

==========

A billion is, then, a rather large sum. Of course, so is a billion people. A billion people living in total, miserable, avoidable indigence. Don't get me started on that wrong. Suffice to say, our descendants will not be saying "oriental tyranny, cruelty and wealth," they will be talking about early twenty-first century billionaires' tyranny, cruelty and conspicuous consumption.

The point is that all this wealth is our common inheritance from the past. These funds were earned and generated not by the wealthy few, but by previous generations of inventors, thinkers and workers. "Innovation," they write, "is accumulated social capital: if most of what we are able to create is inherited from the past, it seems reasonable that any resulting windfall should go back to society." They make this point over and over, and illustrate it with many examples. It is a point that should be drilled into everybody now, but a press that is, not incidentally, owned by billionaires, is not likely do any of that debunking. You have to read books like this one to find it out.

Chapter Two: Why Pornography Is the Only True Free Market

The hog squeals: "Do not tax me because I earned my billions fair and square." The hog wants a totally free market, ignoring the fact that markets are the product of laws, government and taxes. Without that, the one percenters would not be able to squeeze a penny out of the rest of us. The authors make this point by describing the sad case of porn stars. These "sex trade workers" make relatively little money, compared to Hollywood stars, because the police tend to be lax in protecting them from being pirated. Porn is widely copied and distributed for free on the Internet. No matter how talented a porn star may be, he or she does not rake in money hand over fist like a billionaire, protected by intellectual property laws, even ones who are non-talented, who inherit their wealth.

Millionaires and the Crash of 1929

The only time when wealth was concentrated into as few hands as now was just before the Great Depression. Enough said.

Billionaires and the Crash of 2008

Now that billionaires have dismantled the many protections erected after the Great Depression, the Great Recession and its jobless recovery have set upon us. The cause is clear, too much concentration of wealth. When the wealthy get more money, they fritter it away gambling on the stock market. Speculation and gambling have a negative effect on society. When normal people get money, they buy things from productive businesses, which bolsters the general prosperity. They are even known to share wealth with the poor. When billionaires give, they support facilities frequented by the very rich, opera houses, golf courses, etc. Oh, and they also give to political parties so that they will lower taxes even more.

Why Bill Gates Does Not Deserve His Fortune

Bill Gates is the poster boy for billionaires, a self made man. Except that he is not quite the saint that he is made out to be. His sordid story of betraying and stealing an operating system from the guy who actually wrote an innovative OS is told here.

Why Other Billionaires Are Even Less Deserving

Bernard Shaw, who was not unfamiliar with the very rich, said that behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. This is still true, only much, much worse. Sordid stories are told here of gamblers whose rash behaviour resulted in billion dollar payoffs while many other smaller players lost everything are told here.

Hank Aaron and the Myths about Motivation

Hank Aaron in the 1970's broke baseball records while making a relatively modest salary. Current athletes, less so, but they make up for it with their multimillion dollar pay checks, and with their creative substance abuse. Everybody with the slightest claim to talent is cashing in on the greedy myths popularized by the very rich.

Taking the Fun Out of Tax Havens

One of the ways billionaires feather their own nest is by doing all they can to glorify the crime of tax evasion, and the antisocial practice of tax avoidance. In reality, anybody who does either should be ashamed to call themselves a citizen. The story is told here of two terrorists. One, a Muslim from a poor country, the other a wealthy nutball who read too much of the billionaires' propaganda and took it into his head to fly an airplane into an IRS building in Texas, killing one of its tax collectors. The first terrorist is universally condemned by all in the media. The daughter of the second is handed questions from toadying reporters like, "Do you think your father was a hero?"

This is my favourite chapter, because it not only lays out the problem of tax evasion and tax havens, it points out how ridiculously simple it would be to solve it. It is so easy, you would have to wonder why nobody has done it. After all (this is not in the book), the current president before he was elected pledged to eliminate these so-called "offshore" banks. Yet nothing has been done about it yet. Such is the power of the closest hog to the slop. Anyway, I cannot resist closing by including the solution to these banks whose money laundering enables billionaires, organized crime and other, more small time crooks.

==========

All that is encouraging, but falls considerably short of what's actually needed to stem the extensive use of tax havens and the considerable damage they do to national treasuries.

In fact, the solution is quite simple and easy to implement.

What's needed is not just a promise from tax haven countries to adhere to international standards, but a requirement that all financial institutions, whenever they make a payment to a client, report that payment to the tax authorities of the country where the client resides.

The report would be automatic, in electronic form, and include a unique number to identify the client. That way, all governments around the world would be notified of all payments made to their wealthy citizens, and be able to tax them accordingly -- in the same way that governments receive notification from domestic banks about payments to citizens within the country, and use that information to verify their tax returns.

Such a system could be enforced by an existing body like the World Trade Organization, the Bank of International Settlements, or the United Nations. It would be particularly beneficial to Third World nations, which badly need the money parked overseas and have few resources to track down wealthy drug lords and other rich people determined not to share their resources with their abjectly poor fellow citizens.

Perhaps this scheme sounds too ambitious, but in fact it's no more complex than the international system of passports, which works well and with few compliance problems. Each passport has a unique identification number. Every time a person crosses a border, her number is swiped into a computer, which instantly discloses information about her. Transmitting an electronic record of all payments made by tax haven banks would be no more complicated than that. It turns out that, among the benefits of the computer age are not only video games, but the easy tracking and taxation of the gigantic hidden fortunes of the world's billionaires. (p. 139)

Paul Farmer, Doctor in Haiti

On Haiti and the Day of the Covenant

By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 28, Qawl 06, 167 BE

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, 2003

Long ago I read Tracy Kidder's early book about the computer company Data General, one of his first books. Then Kidder turned to themes that were less interesting to me. At our library's annual summer book sale, I came across a recent book by Kidder, called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It is about Paul Farmer, an amazingly saintly American doctor in Haiti who learned Creole, then in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere invented techniques for controlling difficult-to-handle diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS.

Until he came along everybody thought it was impossible to deal with them in a poor country, and planners blithely left the world's most destitute to die in the dirt. Aside from the ethical issues, this unthinking lack of policy let the disease spread unchecked, and it inevitably spread to what really matters in the minds of rich planners, home, in rich countries.

So effective is Farmer the doctor's approach that it is now the model for epidemiology around the world. What Farmer and his organization, Partners in Health, do is they train local talent to work in their health clinics. They go out on house calls to the homes of anybody who gets sick and, if they judge their situation desperate enough, they see to it that they get a job, a new house, whatever it takes to assure that they will actually take their treatment in its full course, and that they get better before the disease can spread further. This targeted approach nips epidemics in the bud, and takes a major swipe at the scum of poverty as well.

Farmer's approach is now standard practice.

He took the technique to the prisons of Russia (which had become breeding grounds of TB). This proved that Haiti was not an isolated case. His approach works anywhere, it is transferable. This eventually persuaded "smart charity" groups like the Gates Foundation and that of George Soros to finance it around the world.

The local, community-building approach of Paul Farmer reminded me of our local, non-Baha'i Persian physician in Dunnville, Reza Kazemi, who has started a community based organic farm. Every week I go there and pick up fresh veggies from the farm. Anyway, after I finished reading Kidder's book, I passed my copy on to Reza to read.

Since I am fascinated with democracy, I chose the following amusing incident that took place when Paul Farmer was in Russia, trying to arrange a loan to pay for TB drugs for prisoners there.

The chief of the Russian doctors -- a colonel -- laughed. A woman doctor said gravely, "We have lots of TB and no labs." More toasts, more vodka. The colonel reached in his pocket, began to take a pack of cigarettes from it, then paused and asked Farmer,

"Is America a democracy?"

Paul's face grew serious.

"I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than as an American. Ludmilla and I, we belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as Ludmilla, I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich."

I thought he was done, but he was only pausing for the interpreter to catch up.

"Look, I'm very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I'm American. I can travel freely throughout the world, I can start projects, but that's called privilege, not democracy."

As Farmer had talked, the colonel's face had begun showing signs of exertion. Now he let his laughter out. He said,

"But I only wanted to know if you would permit me to smoke a cigarette."

Goldfarb made a face.

"Paul. He wanted to know if he could smoke, and you gave heem a speech on socialism and democracy."

"But the speech was marvelous," said the colonel, smiling at Farmer, who seemed on the verge of falling asleep.

Goldfarb turned to the colonel. "Tomorrow Paul will represent your interests at the World Bank."

Farmer shook himself alert.

"The only thing wrong, I don't think it should be a loan. But for the international community of healers it will be a good thing.

"I pray," he put his hands together in a steeple, "that it will go well." (Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, p. 229)

I have expressed this opinion before on this blog: if we had real and open democracy, without candidature, if there were any justice in the world (this is just two ways of saying the same thing), then Paul Farmer (and others of his moral caliber) would be elected to the parliament of the Americas, even if he did not "run" for office. Once you get people like him representing us all, then you would see government start doing good, start being good. Farmer is the perfect choice for office. First of all, his activism follows the divine principle of "go for the greatest need." That is why God chose the places that He did to receive His Manifestations.

That, consciously or not, is why Farmer chose to concentrate on Haiti.

Go to the poorest, treat them, and if it works there the treatment will work anywhere. To prove oneself capable of office, one must do so by helping the poorest, most desperate place. Anybody who does not succeed, or does not try, is a poseur, unworthy of the high station of leadership.

For another blogger's view of this book, go to:

http://eileens52review.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-8-mountains-beyond-mountains.html

Homemakers and Palaces

By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 08, Qudrat 05, 167 BE

Homemakers, the First Generalists

For millennia women were blocked from the workplace and public life; in that sense they were oppressed and could not live up to their full potential. However, it would be unjust to depict women in history as helpless victims incapable of contributing to those around them. Quite the reverse. We often forget that women as homemakers in the traditional extended family had a complex and extremely responsible management position.

A famous passage in the 31st Chapter of the Book of Proverbs pays high tribute to homemakers in the ancient world. It points out that her well-run household made a decisive contribution to the success of culture, and -- to use modern language -- it made women prime drivers of human evolution.

"Who can find a worthy woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusts in her. He shall have no lack of gain. ... She is like the merchant ships. She brings her bread from afar. She rises also while it is yet night, gives food to her household, and their task to her servant girls. She considers a field, and buys it. With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength, and makes her arms strong. ... She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness." (Proverbs, 31:10-16, WEB)



In that age, women were generalists; they had a hand in every phase of economic activity, from clothing manufacture to import and export. But more than that, a homemaker played a leadership role, making major economic decisions all down the line. She managed the entire work of agriculture, from seed to field to dinner plate. Another passage mentions the superior generosity of women in helping the poor. "She stretches out her hand to the poor; Yes, she reaches forth her hands to the needy." (Proverbs, 31:20, WEB) That tendency persists among women, married or not, and has been confirmed by many studies comparing men and women's charitable donations.

Female managers were involved in every phase of manufacture, which enabled them to appreciate the world holistically. This gives a good sense of why so many cultures personify wisdom as a woman. For example, for the Hellenes wisdom was Sophia, who embodied the "female" attributes of the Godhead, such as kindness and compassion. A woman, therefore, could "open her mouth with wisdom,"

"Strength and dignity are her clothing. She laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom. Instruction of faithfulness is on her tongue. Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also praises her: `Many women do noble things, but you excel them all.' Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain; But a woman who fears Yahweh, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; let her works praise her in the gates." (Proverbs, 31:25-31, WEB)

A wife and mother had to be a wise manager, since she had discretion over the well being of several people, what they ate, how they dressed and, no doubt, even their happiness. A wife or mother just had to look into the faces of her charges to see how diet and lifestyle were affecting their condition. She was fully in charge of putting food on the table, and could adjust diet, meal times and eating habits according to what she saw. She could respond to subtle dips in health. She made substantive decisions about what plants were grown, indeed whatever went into the mouths of her family.

Starting in the mid-Twentieth Century, women started to swing away from anchoring the home. They entered universities and took on full time jobs outside the home. At that time, obesity rates began to climb until now in North America the majority of the population is obese. This is happening around the world as the Western diet takes over, in both poor and wealthy nations. At the same time, women lost the control they once had over diet. Powerful corporations, whose primary concern was not welfare but profit, took over food production, preparation and service.



Their power was bolstered by corrupt science, Homemakers and children were inundated with propaganda, confused by a succession of fad diets and news of miracle ingredients in certain foods, from antioxidants to low fat yogurt. Industry reaped tremendous short-term profit, but the incidence of chronic diseases rose alarmingly with each decade that passed. We need but glance at a crowd of average people to see how many fat, flaccid bodies are among us, and how necessary the oversight of a competent homemaker once was for our health.

Work in Worker's Palaces

Flora Tristan planned her worker's palaces as a way to do the reverse of the trend that is now going on. They would be amplifiers of female leadership, not rivals or replacements. Far from exploiting human vulnerability, worker's palaces would be not-for-profit organizations located at the heart of each neighbourhood.

Flora Tristan proposed that worker's palaces particularly emphasize the equality of women vocationally, by allowing girls to enter their schools in equal numbers with boys, as well as industrially, by subjecting housework to the economies of scale that even in the 19th Century were commonplace in industry. Its kitchens would feed residents, and kitchen gardens could also grow vegetables. They could also deliver hot meals to households all around, reducing the cooking burden of local homemakers. Their prominent, central location in the neighbourhood would make quick, on-time delivery possible. They might also send out cleaning crews to area homes, as needed, at a low enough cost that everyone could afford it.

As mentioned before, the palace would make every effort to include and gain the support of everyone in the community. Children from rich families would study along with orphans and pupils from poor families. For residents of the worker's palace, and students in their schools, the daily schedule,

"would still permit time to give him proper care for his teeth, hair, and feet. His body would be strengthened through appropriate work, and he would be given food best suited to his temperament. Various diets would have to be followed: meat and wine for some; vegetables, fruit, and water for others. The Union offers such great advantages that everything seemingly impossible to us in our individual households becomes simple in such a vast organization." (Worker's Union, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, para 65, p. 122)

In this way palaces would lighten the burden of household tasks and free women to participate as much or as little as they chose in the workplace, the home or the local community. These palaces of labour would give women the chance to devote their entire life to a career or, alternatively, to follow in the old homemaker's footsteps by overseeing the entire food preparation process, from planting to serving dinner, without the drudgery (or, alternatively, the array of servants) that was needed for pre-modern household management. Similarly, a palace might enable them to oversee the design and production of clothing in its textile workshop.



Needless to say, erecting such palaces in every neighbourhood would be an expensive proposition. But since it would also house workshops for members of every trade and profession in the area, they, as part of her Worker's Union, would contribute from their wages and pension plans to the palace's expenses. Other sources of funding come from every level of society, as well as part of the profits from productive work done by residents of the palaces themselves. As hinted at last time, the cost of building palaces would be a sensible way to spend the vast reparations fund that the global financial system owes to women as compensation for centuries of exclusion from most professions.

Flora Tristan envisaged worker's palaces as a way permanently to end indigence, that is, what we now call homelessness and unemployment. Everything they do is dedicated to encouraging full employment and universal participation in the workplace, either as a volunteer or a professional. This is because, like many previous thinkers, notably Plato and Comenius, she saw the origin of corruption in the failure of society to involve everybody in some form of productive work.

As part of this project, palace schools would introduce every child, rich or poor, to labour, both skilled and manual. Applying the latest educational theories, they would train each student in no fewer than two manual trades. But the emphasis would be on following their own interests, not forcing them to work.

"As for vocational training, each child would choose the trade he feels the most suited for. Besides all the other work, he would have to do, upon leaving the palace he will have to be a competent worker in at least two trades." (Worker's Union, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 122)

Although established in adult education, her idea that children too should be allowed to choose their own course of studies is rarely allowed by mainstream schools, even today.

Another reform Flora Tristan put forward was profit sharing, even for children learning and working in the Palace's vocational school. This is rare enough even for adults -- or at least it is outside of Europe, where cooperative companies are among the largest employers, especially in Holland and Spain. Furthermore, Tristan suggested that profits from their work be used to motivate the

vocational training of children at a very early age.

"In order for him to become interested in work, as of the age of ten the child will be eligible to share in the profits produced by the work in the establishment. This amount will increase every year until his departure at the age of eighteen. Half will be given to him as a trousseau made in the establishment and the other half in money." (Worker's Union, p. 122)

Writing before child labour laws, she suggested between the ages of six and ten that students would begin to be paid out of their share of the profits of their work. She also suggested that palaces maintain a steady flow of adult guests and boarders from diverse backgrounds. In this way young people would not grow up parochial or prejudiced as a result of having friends and acquaintances from a single mould. This also is a reform rarely attempted today, where age segregation throughout schooling is all but universal. By fearfully "protecting" children from contact with friends and co-workers of many ages and cultural backgrounds, we deprive the entire society of the benefits of wisdom, and we stunt the development of democracy.

This way, palaces would provide essential social services at the most local level possible. Their robust, face-to-face social services would endow homes, the neighbourhood, city blocks and wider districts with more prominence than we do now. Today, centers of wealth and power hide beyond the horizon, usually hundreds of kilometres away. The principle that it is most efficient and for social services to be done as close as possible to those who run and benefit from them is called subsidiarity, which we shall discuss in greater detail next time. Worker's palaces in every locality and region would give the body politic ballast, allowing a balance between the personal and the public, and local and global policymaking.

::

Union vs. Strife

The Real Enemy of the People

By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 02, Ilm 18, 167 BE



Extremes and extremism divide and conquer efficiently, whereas Flora Tristan's message of moderation was too kind, too womanly and far too conciliatory. She called for a union of workers, not a violent slave revolt. She called for constructive cooperatives, not forced equalization. She believed in God, whereas Marx and Engel were atheists. Worst of all, Flora Tristan believed that the real enemy of the working class is poverty and ignorance.

She declared that in this fight all can participate. Workers, as the main victims, have the primary responsibility to advance their own lot, but Flora Tristan would have every level of society invested in their liberation. Since it was only war in a metaphorical sense, nobody died, no blood was spilled and everybody won. Victory would come of group study and by putting the manual skills of workers to work constructing what she called worker's palaces, cooperative social service enterprises in every locality. Tristan actively sought contributions for worker's palaces not only from laborers themselves but also the king, the nobility, intellectuals, artists, the church and business leaders. A large part of her manifesto, The Worker's Union, consists of letters of petition asking for moral and financial support from the various elements of society.

In light of subsequent events, outlined last time, the ruling classes would have been wise to heed her appeals and let workers share power. It would have been far cheaper to build palaces to manual labor than to soak workers until revolt soaked the streets in blood. Had she lived long enough to forge a Worker's Union and enlist the entire society in building palaces, there would have been no bitter aftertaste, no class war, no endless struggle, no chains to throw off.



Casting Off the Chain Paradigm

By contrast, the Communist Manifesto made the insulting assumption that workers are slaves, and, worse, that their only way forward is to think more slavishly than before. Workers can only liberate themselves by violent overthrow of the government, as the slaves of Haiti had done, and by forced appropriation of the means of production, as was later done in the Soviet Union. All-too-typical males, Marx and Engels stripped Tristan's plea for cooperative activism and religiously inspired socialism of its essence, an all loving God. They promoted a specious but stultifying and reductionist belief that capitalist exploiters care nothing for their fellow man. Human nature is greedy for material goods, and hates mankind, body and soul. As it went viral, it became a self fulfilling prophesy that the elite will do what nature intended, enter into an endless death struggle of oppressed proletarians pitted against their vicious oppressors, the bourgeoisie.

Flora Tristan treated workers as free men and women, capable of learning, of carrying their own weight and building up social support mechanisms on their own. Her religious convictions taught that the way to brighten a dark room is by "shining your light before men." Ignorance, iniquity and sharp class differences vanish as soon as laborers gain the knowledge and wealth to become entrepreneurs and owners themselves. As they learn to share in natural resources and run the means of production, ownership and profits will be distributed equitably, without violent struggle or confrontation.

For Flora Tristan, slaves, including wage slaves, are liberated by knowledge, especially by educating their own children. She would have had the schools housed in Worker's Palaces run by the best teachers, so that parents from the business class and the nobility would have wanted their own children enrolled there too. In this way, increased education would cast off workers' poverty and indigence in a generation or two. The lot of girls and women would have improved even more, and their influence would increase. The home is where educated homemakers tend to have the most benefit to society, as Tristan herself pointed out.

"Woman is everything in the life of the workers. She is their sole providence. If she fails them, everything fails them. Consequently it is said: `It is the woman who makes or unmakes the household,' and this is the exact truth; that is why a proverb has been made of it. But what education, what teaching, what direction, what moral or physical development does the woman of the common people receive? None." (Translated by Doris and Paul Beik, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/at/tristan_text.html)

Recent statistical studies have confirmed Tristan's intuition in this respect. As soon as potential mothers become literate, in whatever nation, economy or culture they may live, there is a strong echo effect through several subsequent generations, improving everything from child mortality to income to social mobility. In spite of this clear benefit, Tristan's complaint that homemakers are left on their own is still largely true today.



Class Struggle As Red Herring

An unnoticed effect of radical Marxism was the elbowing out of family and religion. Traditionally faith groups and extended households took on many responsibilities for social support, such as educating children and caring for the aged. Communism and the threat of it set worker and owner at each other's throats; this distracted public attention and allowed a power vacuum to form. Opportunistic nationalist dictators, of whom Louis Napoleon of France was only the first, centralized power while ingratiating themselves by doling out what the people had before done for themselves. Slowly, the full range of social services were appropriated by a monolithic state. Even in parliamentary democracies the role of nanny shifted to large, faceless professional bureaucracies.

Worst of all, in spite of all the squabbling the rights of workers have still not caught up with Tristan's vision.

To this day, a single workplace constitution has yet to be officially adopted. Many workplaces are unionized but there is no overall union of all workers, as Tristan envisaged. Employees still rarely have a say in who leads them, or in how their company is run. They are laid off without accountability. Workers in wealthy nations compete with prison labor in authoritarian economies. While these workers are treated relatively well, on a global level the vast majority of workers are if anything worse off than in Tristan's time. Bosses exploit and bully them with impunity. In a pinch corporations can escape responsibilities simply by crossing the border, taking the jobs along with them. Wage gaps and concentration of ownership have worsened. At the same time, the basic right of humans to own and manage the planet's resources has been blocked for decades by a tiny elite with hegemony over the lion's share of the world's wealth.

If Flora Tristan's vision had caught the public imagination, everyone would be on the same side. Workers and owners would earn a fair share of the profits in whatever workplace they serve, and both would have a say in decision making. Eventually, everyone would become a worker, and for that matter everyone would become an owner and manager too. Rich and poor would be trained at a palace elementary school, and taught a skilled trade by local journey-persons from early adolescence. Young people who demonstrate a desire and ability to enter a profession could then pay for their continued education with wages from their original trade, without getting into debt. This would leave no room for rebellion or forced equalization -- basic characteristics of Marxism.

Tristan's palaces would be located in the center of the local scene. Families, religion and every community group would both contribute to and benefit from them. Financed and run by workers themselves, workers palaces would stand as prominent declarations that everybody works and all benefit from the right and obligation to be employed. Local people would be directly involved in palace service projects in a variety of roles, and at every stage of life. Each neighborhood would display a palace as its badge of honor. As cooperative, not-for-profit institutions, they would avoid bureaucracy, buffer the economy in bad times and gently spread the wealth around. The widening gulf between worker, owner and manager, would start to narrow and disappear.

In spite of all this, Flora Tristan was no economist. She believed that women are at the heart of the issue. They have been called upon to moralize the world, and it is up them to make this vast project of reconstruction possible. Let us talk about this in detail next time.

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Flora Tristan, II

Flora Tristan's Plan

By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 31, Ilm 16, 167 BE



Living conditions of workers in the 1840's were degraded to the point of desperation. Sadly, ignorance and poverty were worsened by open strife among themselves. Workers' guilds in Flora Tristan's time were fraternal groups whose interests were seen as restricted to a given trade. The idea of solidarity among all workers was a foreign one. Guilds were plagued by bitter rivalries among trades; it was not unknown for fights to escalate to rioting in the street. They sponsored graduating apprentices on a cross country junket called a "French tour." Unfortunately, this involved more carousing than professional development.

The year after completing her "Worker's Union", Flora Tristan followed the example of the workers she wanted to help by starting her own "French tour," a speaking tour promoting broader solidarity. "Worker's Union" was her suggested plan of action for organizing guilds and other workers groups across the country. In the spring of 1844 she officially started her Tour de France, leaving Paris on the 12th of April. She took her mission very seriously, fighting ill health, giving public addresses in each town, pleading with the proletariat to build worker's palaces.

Her diary of this tour recorded details of working class life that no other writer noticed, making it a valuable document for historians today. On her first stop, Auterre, she wrote in her diary that "I felt in me something like a divine grace enveloping, magnetizing, and transporting me into another life." (Le Tour, P. 38, cited in Workers' Union, Translator's Introduction, xv) After six months of travel her illness worsened and she had to stop. Bedridden, she died in a hotel room soon afterwards.

Flora Tristan held that workers can advance their own lot through effort and study. Nobody else was going to do that for them. As a fervent Christian, she believed that faith, knowledge and love are the true liberators; in Christ's words, "the truth shall set you free." She did not believe that conflict between classes was needed, much less inevitable. The mere fact that they were in the majority was sufficient for ultimate victory. As they educate themselves and exercise their rights, the representatives of her proposed Worker's Union could enter government. Soon, they would gain the same amount of influence in government as had the bourgeoisie. The democratic process would then kick in, workers would dominate elections and their interests would prevail on their own.

Nonetheless, she was not naive. With great prescience Flora Tristan anticipated the chief objection that would be raised against unity among workers,

"This demand, no matter how just and legal, will be considered an attack on property per se (land, houses and capital). And labor organization will be considered an attack on private enterprise. And, since those who lead the governmental machine are land and capital owners, it is obvious they will never agree to grant such rights to the working class." (Tristan, Flora, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 55)



After Flora Tristan's death in 1844, extremism and radicalism took over. Revolt, violence and reaction made an ever more volatile mix. As conditions for workers worsened a series of revolutions broke out across Europe, lasting until about 1847. All failed. Nonetheless, the radical model of socialism took over. After a decade of Louis Napoleon's dictatorial regime, a spontaneous bloody uprising in Paris known as the Paris Commune broke out as soon as his restraints toppled. Idealistic socialism gave way to communists fomenting open rebellion. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their famous Communist Manifesto. Inspired by Flora Tristan's example of martyrdom on behalf of workers, they agreed with her that the poverty-stricken, exploited workers of the world had to take their fate into their own hands.

The difference was that Marx and Engels prescribed war instead of construction. A recent reader of the Manifesto pointed out that it is difficult to read this stirring tract without wanting to go out and shoot a businessman. Whereas Flora Tristan in Worker's Union addressed everyone involved, businessmen, politicians, women and men, as well as workers, the Manifesto is addressed to the victims of exploitation alone and ends with the famous admonition, "Workers of the world unite, the only thing you have to lose are your chains." Flora Tristan would have pointed out that this is, at the very least, a lie. The right to life is crucial. Workers can easily lose their lives, their families, their homes and their wages, and they do every day. In rebellions they invariably suffered the most. Even if they really had nothing to lose, perpetual class struggle would doom everybody to the loss of a clean, peaceful world and a harmonious future.

As atheists, Marx and Engels did not agree with Tristan that truth alone is enough to liberate workers. They firmly believed that conflict not only cannot be avoided, but also that it should not be avoided. The misery of most of mankind is its fate and our only choice is who will be the miserable class. Their ideas eventually led to the Soviet Union, a spectacularly failed experiment in forced equality that lasted most of the 20th Century.



The Chains of Haiti

The historical model that Marx and Engels called to mind when they spoke of "chains," was a singular series of events that took place about fifty years earlier in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. There, for the first time since Moses, a successful slave revolt took place. After a long series of bloody slave uprisings, the slaves really did lose their chains. The victorious former slaves named the French side of the island of Hispaniola "Haiti." This event, where slaves won out, sent a chill down the back of the ownership class, especially in France and America. In spite of the rhetoric of the French Revolution about freedom and brotherhood, French gunboats were sent to Haiti, but even that failed to put down the rebels.

The model of self-liberating slaves that Marx and Engels chose was an unfortunate one. With only two known exceptions, all slave revolts in history were crushed. Moses' slave revolt, we should recall, was aided by divine miracles. Even then it took a full generation for the Israelites to see the promised land. The modern abolition of official slavery came from top-down legislation by the British parliament, which banned slavery throughout its Empire. In the United States the Emancipation Declaration was also top down, and made only after slavers had dragged the country into civil war.

For better or worse, the bottom-up triumph of the Haitian slaves was unique, a Pyrrhic victory, and remains so today. It provoked a united reaction by the entire ownership class, which then as now, is highly class conscious and refuses to respect national borders. It pushed the French government to incur on Haiti a huge reparation payment to compensate for "stolen property," that is, their human chattel. Haiti had indeed been a plum target, by far the wealthiest colony in the Americas. The sum they arrived at for reparations padded their budget for over a century. Several times during the 19th Century the leaders in Haiti tried to default on the unjust debt. Other western powers, including Canada, America and England, supported France in recouping their "compensation" for lost slaves.

After several attempted defaults, Haiti finally paid off the debt in the late Twentieth Century, leaving its infrastructure devastated. To this day, Haiti remains a pariah state, anathema to capital, isolated, chaotic and, though technically independent, it is still enslaved to drugs, debt and corruption. From the richest it sank to the poorest nation in the Americas, one of the poorest on the planet. In spite of all our political correctness today, and even after a devastating earthquake levelled Port au Prince in 2010, France still refused to recognize pleas by activists to return the mulcted money to Haiti.



A slave rebellion was hardly an auspicious model for the workers to adopt! The Communist Manifesto plunked the worker's movement right into a no-man's-land between owners of capital and government. The more militant workers got the more fearful owners became. It is no longer possible to crucify revolting slaves alongside public highways as a grisly warning as was done in Roman times after Spartacus's revolt, but the elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was still quietly exiled to South Africa, to mention only one instance. Owners do anything to protect against threatened loss of their wealth, legitimate or otherwise. Such is the dominance of the male element and the unpopularity of religion today that the name "Karl Marx" continues to remembered by every educated person today, while the name "Flora Tristan" remains buried in obscurity.

Next time, let us talk about what for Flora Tristan was the real enemy we should be fighting.

The Worker's Union

Flora Tristan's Worker's Union

By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 29, Ilm 14, 167 BE



Some of the most insightful thinkers about citizens as local planners have been women. Among them are Jane Jacobs and, much earlier, Flora Tristan (1804-1844). In 1843 Tristan launched an early initiative to persuade the impoverished workers of France to come together in their own interest. Flora Tristan was part of a movement among writers called "Christian humanitarianism," and was influenced by Utopian socialists and the emerging idea of scientific socialism. She got the idea that she was destined for a personal mission on behalf of workers when in England, on a visit to Bedlam, the insane asylum. Here she met a French inmate who proclaimed that she [Tristan] had been sent by God on a special mission. Tristan was persuaded that she was a "modern female savior committed to rescuing the working poor from their intolerable circumstances." At least five years before Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, she set out to liberate the workers of the world.



Long before there was welfare state, Tristan suggested that workers set up their own self-governing co-operatives, which she called "communities of human unity." An early feminist, Flora Tristan also hoped that these communities would advance the lot of women if they set down legal provisions to allow them to enter their schools and trades as equals of working men. At the same time, in the face of objections from men, she urged the males to emancipate themselves from their traditional thraldom to the bottle.

Tristan had noticed that the poverty and iniquity suffered by workers was wrapped up in an extreme imbalance between the sexes. Uneducated women became sullen baby-making machines, while their husbands fled for solace to the local tavern.

Disproportion gave rise to an either/or mentality and widened the artificial gap between worker and owner. Tristan did not see this as inevitable. She dreamed of human progress based upon economic cooperation, male temperance and conscious advancement of the lot of women.

In her 1843 manifesto, "The Worker's Union," Tristan pointed out that the 1789 French Revolution, although it pretended to uphold universal human rights, really was a revolt of the business class (the bourgeoisie) defending their own interests against kings and aristocrats. While they had pretensions to universality, in practice they utterly ignored the rights of women and the welfare of the working class, the better to exploit the degradation of both. A union of workers, she hoped, would refuse to imitate such precedents.

Once organized, workers in every locality (department) of France should found institutions to take care of their own, the old, disabled, sick and vulnerable.

"I come to you to propose a general union among working men and women, regardless of trade, who reside in the same region -- a union which would have as its goal the CONSOLIDATION OF THE WORKING CLASS and the construction of several establishments (Workers' Union palaces), distributed evenly throughout France. Children of both sexes six to eighteen would be raised there; and sick or disabled workers as well as the elderly would be admitted. Listen to the numbers and you will have an idea of what can be done with the union." (Flora Tristan, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, pp. 38-39)

The union of workers would express the solidarity of workers, who now were engaged in fights among the trades. Meanwhile the buildings, which she called workers' palaces, in which the union is housed, would have symbolic as well as functional value. Just as kings and magnates build palaces as public statements, as gilded showpieces of prestige, wealth and power, so should the Worker's Union.



Work has great dignity since it is the source of the power of which the elite boast. So why should not the proletariat build palaces too? The palaces of the workers can be visible declarations in every locality of the fact that workers are what she called the "most numerous and useful class." Unlike their antecedents, Tristan had faith that since their interests are identical, the leadership of a workers union would be congenial to the equality of women.

"Workers, perhaps in three or four years you will have your first palace, ready to admit six hundred old persons and six hundred children. Well! Proclaim through your statutes, which will become your charter, the rights of women for equality. Let it be written in your charter that an equal number of girls and boys will be admitted to the Workers' Union palace to receive intellectual and vocational training." (The Workers' Union, p. 88)

In the workplace, in the workers' palaces and their subsidiary institutions, the rules should "recognize, in principle, the legal equality of men and women as being the only means of constituting the unity of humanity." She had this faith because in her travels Tristan had observed that cooperative institutions like Robert Owen's New Lanark tended to be structurally more open to the social skills and inclinations of girls and women. Small, local co-ops tend to be friendlier to the concerns of women. They allow for greater equality than the hierarchical structure of larger institutions.

Flora Tristan thought that it was important that worker's palaces be largely -- but not exclusively -- supported by the workers' own money. Government should neither regulate or fund them. She set about the daunting task of persuading workers to pass the hat among themselves in order to build the first palace on their own. Once it is built, they should agree permanently to deduct a portion of their admittedly meagre wages to maintain its social service institutions. She calculated that a small portion of their wages, if all workers were involved, could easily keep the palace's school, the orphanage and old age home going.

In addition, workers should form reader's circles, raising their consciousness by discussing reports of the lot of workers around the world, and sharing the expense of the books they read by pooling money among themselves. Once their children are being educated as well, they could seek out representation in the highest circles of power. Here her proposal resembles in some ways that put forward much earlier by John Amos Comenius. In a nine bullet point summary of the proposals in Worker's Union, Tristan put as number two:

"Representation of the working class before the nation by a defender chosen and paid for by the Worker's Union, so that the working class's need to exist and the other class's need to accept it become evident." (Worker's Union, p. 128)

Once workers had a toehold on power, their representative could assert the right to work for adults, the right to education for children and the right of women for equality of opportunity. In order to address the workers' lack of ownership -- in comparison to the business class and the nobility -- this representative would seek official recognition of workers' hands as "property." This is how she reasoned it out:

Every right derives from the right to life. Although established before, the right to life had not, unfortunately, been guaranteed in France's 1830 Charter. It was crucial to re-introduce it, and its consequence, the right to work. Workers were so destitute that the loss of a job was effectively a death sentence, so the two, life and work, had to go together. Their own two hands were all that most workers possessed. This ownership, this ability to work, was the cornerstone of all property rights. In this sense, the right to work gives workers ownership of the means of production too. Therefore, she reasoned, workers have another fundamental right, the right to organize themselves.



Since workers were by far the majority of the population, democracy alone is enough for their rights to prevail. No need for struggle or conflict, just by making their rights known by a single representative, workers should prevail. All workers need, therefore, is to advance the democratic process --although, strangely, Tristan saw nothing wrong with the union openly purchasing votes! Nonetheless, her faith in democracy was such that she made the following statement, which I think every elector should read over before casting a ballot.

"Let us adopt a humanitarian point of view, and since we are looking for men of love and intelligence, let us not consider their religious and political opinions." (Flora Tristan, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 59)

Once there is democracy in politics, there soon would be democracy in the workplace. This would further lead to economic equity. Gradually the tendency to concentrate money into the hands of a few will reverse itself and wealth will flow the other way, into the hands of the many. Hence her belief that the use of their hands is all that workers need.

Next time, let us look at the provenance and the fate of Tristan's plan.

More Flora Tristan

From the Rise of Women to Storehouses

By John Taylor; 2010 Sep 13, 'Izzat 03, 167 BE

Another revision of a late chapter in the "Comenius and the Cosmopolitan Condition" section of Citizens without Borders.

In this section we established that good government on a world scale will be the outcome of a holistic view of self and humanity. This vision of Homo Universalis takes us in three directions, one, enlightened service, two, expressions of faith and three, participation in the polity. As John Comenius pointed out, citizens and groups can support one another through three institutions based upon these three, one each for science, religion and politics. Using standard PIM software, borderless citizens can coordinate activity within a repeating service decade and election cycle for these institutions. Once everyone participates in this, we will grasp our due proportions as human beings -- which is just how Plato defined wisdom. Wisdom permits us to apply principle without qualm or compromise. We have discussed three world principles so far, those of counsel, harm and need.

Equality of the Sexes

Last time, we broached another universal principle, the equality of women. As women rise to prominence in every region, society will gain the capacity to balance personal and social, local and global control, and manual and theoretical work. Flora Tristan raised an issue rarely mentioned even in feminist circles today, that of reparations to women for centuries of suppression and exploitation. She came up with a sensible way to spend the vast compensation funds owed to women, that is, to found in every locality an institution that she called the Worker's Union, and to erect in prominent places physical buildings to house that institution, which she called Worker's Palaces.

These palaces would showcase the equality of women vocationally, by allowing girls to learn in equal numbers with boys, as well as industrially -- that is, by subjecting housework to the economies of scale that even in the 19th Century were commonplace in industry. The palaces would also provide social services at the most local level possible -- a principle called subsidiarity that we shall discuss in greater detail shortly. Sources of funding would come from all levels of society, and from the palaces themselves. The palaces would include schools whose goal is to introduce every child, poor or rich, to skilled manual labour. Using the latest in educational theory, they would take on the ambitious goal of providing no fewer than two manual trades for each student,

"As for vocational training, each child would choose the trade he feels the most suited for. Besides all the other work, he would have to do, upon leaving the palace he will have to be a competent worker in at least two trades." (Worker's Union, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 122)

Although well established in adult education, the idea that children should be allowed to choose their own course of studies is rarely countenanced by mainstream schools, even today. Another reform she envisions is profit sharing. This is rare enough even for adults outside of Europe (where cooperative companies are among the largest employers, especially in Holland and Spain), but Tristan suggests that it be used to motivate the vocational activity of children at the earliest age possible.

"In order for him to become interested in work, as of the age of ten the child will be eligible to share in the profits produced by the work in the establishment. This amount will increase every year until his departure at the age of eighteen. Half will be given to him as a trousseau made in the establishment and the other half in money." (Worker's Union, p. 122)

Outside boarders from rich families would study along with the orphans and pupils from poor families, and, between the ages of six and ten, would also be paid from their share of the profits of their work. She also suggested that the palaces maintain a steady flow of adults from diverse backgrounds, so that young people will not grow up parochial or prejudiced as a result of having friends and acquaintances from a single mould.

The Twin Principles

The rise of women to equality, aided by the social services provided by Worker's Palaces, will endow the home, the neighbourhood, the block and the village with much more power and prominence than we can imagine in our time, an age when the centers of power for most people exist far away, over the horizon. As mentioned, wisdom will be possible, capacity will increase and the principles mentioned before will be applied, as well as two new ones, the twin principles of local governance known as subsidiarity and fiscal transparency. These Jane Jacobs set out in her final book, Dark Age Ahead.

"Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best -- most responsibly and responsively -- when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money." (Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, Random House, New York, 2004, 103)

As Jacobs points out, localizing principles are far from new. They arose in the cities and towns of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and enabled European civilization to take the ascendant for many centuries. According to Jacobs, they saved civilization from the dark ages, while ignoring them puts us in danger of another dark age.

Jacobs' twin principles of fiscal accountability and subsidiarity are so important, both individually and in combination, that before describing the outward physical conditions of the Cosmopolis, I should go into them in more detail.

Fiscal Transparency and Neighbourhood Storehouses

Fiscal transparency is the key to keeping local governance from the corruption that is endemic today. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. This is even more true of so-called "hot money." As the song says, evil grows in the dark; blocking budgets from view invites wrongdoing. "Offshore" or "flight" money funds crime and skims trillions of dollars directly off the budgets of corporations and governments alike. Funds are laundered for organized crime, the illegal drug market, tax evaders and so forth. Meanwhile, open books are closing as secrecy and "black budgets" become increasingly widespread, especially in the richest and most corrupt nations. At the same time, the centralized bureaucracies of the monolithic state in effect bribe the populace into quiescence with welfare and other payments. This creates a mentality of dependency on the local level, in spite of the fact that all wealth, by definition, is generated from services performed on the local level.

The banking industry with its "private clients" is so heavily complicit in this and other types of skulduggery that it would be appropriate for reformers to oust them from the table completely. We can re-introduce fiscal transparency at a stroke by replacing large, centralized banking institutions with community-owned "storehouses." Here everybody has a right to a bank account, and has to use it, at least for local transactions.

These local storehouses, perhaps a part of the Worker's Palace, will take on most banking functions, and even devise their own local currencies, all rooted in local needs. As semi-public institutions, they will be responsible solely to the people, both locals and the entire human race. As such, they are required by law to have "glass pockets," or open bookkeeping methods, and everyone working there is accountable to a democratically elected leadership. As the story of Joseph in the Bible illustrates, these local financial institutions offer stability by storing up the windfall profits of good times and re-distributing them during down cycles. In order to work well, though, these storehouses need to function on the most local level possible. This leads us to the other twin principle, subsidiarity.

next time: Subsidiarity

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