TV shows and Philosophy

I was not really happy when my mom told me that we will were invited to a dinner with people I did not know. The atmosphere was heavy and conversation was limited to social things like “ how long have you been here? Do you like the area…’’. It was so boring that I finally asked: “What is your favorite TV show’’ Instantaneously, everybody had something to tell and we finally spent a good time to exchange our point of view on TV series and their new role in our life.

Coming back home I started to think about what happened during the evening.

To me, TV show, more than music or cinema, have become point of reference, a topic of conversation. Everybody has watched or heard about House or Lost… And has an opinion about this.

How to explain this new phenomenon?

I think the unique and new point with the TV show is to create a unique situation like a flight crash in Lost or new medical cases never seen before in House, and to involve the viewer in the exploration of all the consequences on the characters. Contrary to cinema where the viewer has only the possibility to observe a situation, characters and psychology issues, the show concept immerges the viewer in the action and gives him the chance to have his own opinion on psychological dilemma evolving in the show.

I think TV show, or at least some of them, are really interesting as they address a social or psychological issue that lead you to think about and formulate your own opinion.

For example, House is not a pure medical show that addresses a key medical ethic question concerning the place of emotion in the medical practice.

House, in the show, never shows any emotion but resolves all medical challenges. He pushes reasoning to its extreme. Each episode includes a phase of crisis where he has to make patients take risks, in order to find the truth.

Cameron, one of the doctor in his team represents the theory of Care strongly present in the United States medical system.

As said Nietzsche a crisis step is necessary to get to the revelation. I think this show demonstrates this concept very well.

Each show has its own characteristics and philosophy.

I learned in Latin class that Socrate used maieutics technique to make his student express their ideas using mythology stories. I think TV shows could be seen as the new Socrate support, to make people formulate their opinion on a specific topic.

Beauty and estheticism

Some days ago, we talked about beauty and symbolism of the beauty during the Middle Age in English class. We have had an interesting conversation on the topic saying that at that time a woman was considered attractive if she was fair-skinned and overweight because it represented wealth.

After the class, I started thinking about the beauty in general.

To me, I think there is a difference between beauty and estheticism. Something will be elected beautiful at a certain time because it meets the specific esthetic codes of the time but it will be ugly later if the codes have changed. The case of Middle Age we are studying is a good example. At that time, beauty was characterized by a fair-skin and over-weight, while today you have to be tanned and slim to catch eyes on you.

I think we are not talking about beauty here. We are talking about estheticism codes and that these codes vary with time.

I think beauty is not only limited to the physical appearance but also can be related to the emotion. We can be moved by a music, a scenery, the cherishing mother’s look on his baby…

Beauty is the richness of a person whatever how he/she looks like. The appearance should not have an influence on our judgment. As in the Wife of Bath Tale, wisdom and intelligence reveal the true beauty of someone. I have met a lot of people that were disgraceful but were so rich by their reflections and their open-mindedness that you wanted to stay with them. This is the real beauty.

Unfortunately, in our society, appearance often dictates the chance and opportunities that will be offered to you in your life.

To me beauty is not necessarily link to something visible. The quote I posted at the top of this page reflects pretty well what I mean by that –“ On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur; l’essentiel est invisible aux yeux’’ which can be translated by “ We can only see well with the heart; Essentials are invisible to eyes’’

Shopping on credit card

Banking and credit card system has probably be on the most difficult thing to manage for us when we arrive from France and certainly something that still continues to question us as an irrational concept.

American and French banking system are completely different as well as the credit management.

Typically, French banks only deliver debit cards. In most cases this is a VISA with a financial limit of debit authorization, which is fixed according your financial situation. If you exceed the limit you have penalties to pay and your card is blocked. Some private credit firm like SOFINCO exists which propose you credit cards with rates in the range of 9-12%. Salesman often proposes them when you want to buy standard consumer goods, like appliances, vacation package, or a car.

So we were and are still very puzzled when the cashier at Heinen’s ask us “Debit or credit’’. For us it is obvious that expenses like buying food for the week have to be paid cash or with a debit card with direct withdrawal.

With time, I realized that a lot of people paid their shopping with credit card. Once I witnessed a situation that surprised me: a person at Heinens had to use 3 different credit cards to pay her cart. My first thought was: are people indebted at such a high point that they cannot afford to buy food? Do they still have any control on their purchase capacity?

Then came the time for us to buy our house. There we learned about the credit score system and the paradox of the concept.

In France, you are a reliable person if you do not have more than 30-35% debts or in other words, the less credits you have, the more reliable you are. If you want to buy a car or a house and need to get a credit from your bank, you will be eligible only if you do not exceed this limit. This limit is considered as the maximum amount of money a household can spend for credit reimbursement while keeping their capacity to pay other expenses like insurance, food, schools…

In the United States, you have to prove that you have credits and you are able to pay them as a proof of reliability. This is recorded under credit score. It is common here to receive in your mail box proposals from private credit companies or banks saying “ Congratulation, You have been pre-qualified for a Platinum card with a reserved credit line...’’ Then in very small characters at the bottom of the page, you can read that the annual interest rate is 19.99%!!!

A real paradox to us. Arriving from France, we had no credit history, no debts with the financial capacity to pay our house cash, but not eligible for a credit because we had no credit history !!

To me, this partly explains the financial crisis we are plunged in. Living in a consuming society supported by a dangerous credit system, people have lost track on their financing capacity. Then devastated by too many debts to reimburse, they have all kinds of proposal coming from credit companies. Because people who had contracted these kind of credit did not have financial back up, credit companies collapsed, letting thousands millions of dollars unpaid to banks with the financial crash we have witnessed the lat two years.

I think a profound reappraisal and a new look on our consumer behavior would be essential. Even if consumption is a key part of the economy, rules should be established and basic principle introduced in the education to teach people not to purchase if they cannot afford it.

Women leading the economy

I read an interesting article in Newsweek, explaining how women are poised to become the most important and leading force of the post-recession era.

Actually, women represent a real driver of the economy as they make the majority of the purchasing decisions.

Besides that, women’s role in the world has significantly changed in the past decades:

· Access to education around the world has improved and colleges in Europe and in the United States became equally open to boys and girls.

· Laws changed to give women equal representation to their male peers.

A significant change is being observed.

Women from the previous generation, who tended to be paid less than their male peers, are retiring, leaving the place to a younger group with equal education that male. However, studies show that a woman with the same level of education and the employed at the same position than a man still tends to be less paid than him.

Hit by the crisis, companies had to licentiate people with a high salary in order to save money. Therefore, according to the article, 80% of the job losses in the United States were held by men, allowing women to access to high positions.

The article was interesting as it brought a new light on an unobvious aspect of recession and pointed out that the recession can benefit a certain category of person while hurting even more another one.

Crisis and Entertainment

Economy recession has plunged thousand families in difficult financial situation, having to struggle between household duties and charges, loans reimbursement nightmare, fees for school and college for children…

After one year of this unpredictable cataclysm, I was wondering how entertainment business was facing the situation.

A nice opportunity to talk about this topic arose as my mother just came back from Orlando where she was for business. She told be about her trip and was absolutely surprised to see how transparent the crisis was for Disney business.

She said that the level of activity for the hotel was high – though several seemed to have reduced their rates to attract a larger range of people –, attractions were always full, and she had to queue up to get a table in restaurants.

She told me she witnessed a person buying for more than five hundreds dollars of gifts in a Disney shop. It is interesting to note, she said, that the lady who wanted to pay with credit card had to try different ones as they were all rejected probably due to limitations of credit.

Saying that, I wondered how this is possible. How people can still spend thousands of dollars while the situation and the future are still so uncertain.

My first assumption is that it may be a way for people to protect themselves from the moroseness. People save money for entertainment, probably reducing household expenses or delaying car purchase or the plan they had to remodel their bathroom or kitchen.

This is good for the entertainment business; nevertheless it is not a sign of recovery. Crisis is still there, though we start to see a slow down in the drop of economical indicators.

My mother brought me back some small gifts. It is interesting to note that all are manufactured in China – and therefore are manufactured for less than a dollar and however are sold for more that ten –. We have had a long conversation about that to finally agree to say that all the efforts developed by the United States to make the economy restart may finally result in helping countries such as China that product low cost goods. So we help these countries reactivating their economy first, before helping our own country.

I keep being reserved on how and when western countries will recover from the crisis.

I remain surprised to see how people seem to have reacted to the situation, as if they were ignoring it, and how some regions seem to not be affected by the crisis.

I hope they do that purposely and that it will help maintain a certain level of activity for the economy.

Equality

I recently studied the Declaration of Independence of United States. The sentence about the equality awoke my curiosity: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” Together with French motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, I wondered how the Equality concept had evolved with time and what it means today.

I think Equality and the right for Equality is a universal concern that has been debated and will continue to be debated forever as it is in constant evolution.

To me, the main step has been taken by making each human being equal as a citizen – in other words politically equal: “one man, one vote’’. Unfortunately, we know this rule is not universally true particularly in countries where dictatorships still exist. This ontological right is key for the humanity and worldwide organizations continue to strongly struggle to make it applied.

Even if we consider western countries, I don’t think people have reached and will ever reach equality.

At first, the main form of inequality was based on the social class (rich vs. poor). However, this principle had evolved into more subtle inequality concepts. For example, if you live in a polluted suburb and your child suffers from asthma due to the pollution, you may feel an inequality compared to your friend leaving in countryside. If you suffer from a handicap, access to a job will be more difficult.

I think all the efforts deployed for years and centuries to set up liberties and equal rights for everyone have turned into a tyranny for equality with the counter productive result of increasing inequality. What do I mean by that? In this context tyranny refers to what we are kept being said: that we CAN succeed in life even if we start with bad cards in hand. However, do you think, a person will have the same chance to access Princeton or Harvard if he come from the suburb of Bronx or from downtown Boston? Moreover, I think there is a business around equality driven by the wish of people to possess the exterior signs of richness: have a nice car, a big house, play golf, have a Rolex…. To me the main risk is to see our society sacrificing its differences for the sake of equality, forgetting that its differences make its richness.

A perfectly equal society could result in a “flat” society not willing to expand its potential and go beyond its limits to get better. I think we should awake. The race for equality in all domains has turned into the opposite effect. We need to cultivate the differences as a unique source of improvement to keep civilization progressing, while giving more value to the equality in the sense of promoting the right to be different but still having the same chances to make our life unique.

2010 World Expo

We start to hear a lot about the 2010 World Expo to be held in Shanghai from May 1^st to October 31^st 2010. World Expo is another year event considered as a unique showcase for each country to promote its recent advances in technology and foster worldwide economical ties. First World expo was in London in 1851 and the last one was in 2008 in Seville.

Each World Expo is developed around a theme. Shanghai theme will be of “Better City, Better Life” and will focus on improvement of the quality of life in the world’s cities

In American newspapers, Shanghai expo is presented as “a unique occasion for the United States to promote business, culture, and values in one of China’s most dynamic cities and to foster an even stronger friendship between the American and Chinese peoples. It should host 70 million visitors, among which 60 million from China. More than 175 countries will be present through a country pavilion’’.

However, the bill to pay for the United States to get a Pavilion is 61 millions dollars. It will be 50 millions Euros for France.

USA was one of the last countries to confirm its participation. Indeed, it is prohibited in the United States to spend Federal funds to participate in expositions such as Shanghai 2010 World Expo. So, its pavilion had to be funded by private and non-profit funds.

In March, with 40 millions raised coming form a dozen companies including 3M, General Electric, Dell, Pepsi, the United States confirmed its participation.

This is where we can start to think about it: Is it the best and most decent time to spend such a huge amount of money while worldwide economy is ruined by the economical crisis?

After the Olympic games in Beijing, the World Expo in Shanghai is the second worldwide event in China and a unique opportunity to overcome economical crisis.

Personally, I have a reserved opinion on the pertinence of this event in the current economical situation and how it can help world to strengthen and expand economical relationships between countries.

From an economical standpoint, China already drags a lot of our economy with billions dollars of exportation of goods not balanced by import.

To what extent will that be beneficial for United States and other countries? I don’t know. It will certainly help China to face the crisis. I see more opportunities and benefits for China as for the participants. Indeed, preparation will give thousands jobs to China, tourism will be boosted, and infrastructure like transport, hotels in and around the city developed for the occasion will benefit to Shanghai on the long term.

Is that fair to ask 61 million dollars to participate? It would have been reasonable to reconsider the project and the contribution asked.

I hope the effort deployed by each country in the current circumstances will be beneficial from a political standpoint by relaxing relationships when it is needed and that the theme “Better city, Better life” will rally all nations in the world around a central motto.