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Laws of Development: Internet

                                                                                                October 1, 1999

            Institutions are born when organisations mature and lose the need to be centrally monitored. Normally society creates an organisation, administers it for a long time and when the population takes it over after a few centuries, the organsiation changes into an institution. Internet was born as an institution without passing through the stage of organsiation. It shows that the society, because of its advanced technology of telecommunication and the maturity of its members, has shown the ability to skip the essential stage of organisation. This is analogous to talented children skipping the need for training.

Internet precedes ORGANISATION.

            It combines information, communication and elimination of cost. The physical is in interested in acting, the vital is enamoured of acting more particularly with other people, the mental is interested in learning. The highest form of learning is philosophy, learning of concepts. The lowest from of learning is observation. All that is around us is there for us to observe, which the subliminal does. We do not observe all that is in our purview but observe only those items we are trained to observe. Training gives an ability to know. Exercising of that ability begets interest. As it releases mental energy, observation in interesting. Flow of energy enlivens. Greater flow of energy is enthusiasm or excitement. That which creates energy is life. Mental energy is released by the desire to know. Internet is the preeminent. instrument of knowing or knowledge. In that sense Internet ushers mankind into the age of mind even as the automobile did so at the vital age. Land that is situated at one place showed capacity to produce food. It made the nomads stationery and provided the basis for physical life.

Internet mentalises the collective.

            Born out of the combination of telecommunication and computer, it serves to educate people so that the individual's opinion may have a greater say. The power of Internet should make us see the evolutionary power generated by the coming together of two organisation. When two equally powerful aspects in the same plane - two organisations - or two aspects of differing powers - education and printing - combine, a vast social power is released. Society has done it several times already. It is time for us to think of combing two or more such aspects for which society is ripe.

Past examples

Future possibilities

 

Land and technology

 

Education and Internet

Agriculture and education

Agriculture and genetic engineering

Education and printing

Family and psychological knowledge

News and railways

Transport and electricity.

Car and electricity so for have thus integrated themselves with all walks of life.

A very long list of combination that is virtually all these technologies so far not used in agriculture, manufacture and education can now be used safely.

Exhaust combinations of all possibilities.

Combinations of the present organisations can excel discovery of never ones.

World Bank found that 10% of internal efficiency equals $250 Millions of capital. Any developing nation looking for a few billion dollars foreign aid will do well to calculate what 100 billions of dollars in their country can achieve and resort to EXHAUST the above combinations to achieve the same results.

Information educates. Information empowers.

Internet is almost impersonal. Its impersonal character reflects the impersonality of the society that is leaderless. Information helps form opinion. Those who have all the information about an event do not look up to others or their leaders to lead them. They have their own opinion, and do not borrow it from their leaders. Information dispenses with that function of the leaders. Once the public has an opinion, they expect their leaders to reflect their opinion. Leaders who made the public opinion are now led by the opinion of the public. Information is in the early chain or an early link in the chain of information ideas, decision, and determination. When we have all the information we need we often find it difficult to crystalise it into an idea. Leaders have done that so far. More than one idea presents and challenges the individual to decide. Again he looks to the leader. That is another function of leadership. When all the right decision is there, it requires a leader to initiate action with determination. Presently nowhere in the world is there a nation that is devoid of that determination and that needs a leader for that purpose. The collective at the top is now capable of acting on the basis of right information and decision.

Internet shifts the leadership from the top to the bottom.

It has the capacity to compel men to be rational as far as facts compel if not based on arguments that explain ideas.

Facts compel. Compelling facts.

It is a sure impelling away from impressions as far as facts are capable of. It distributes power of information, dissolves centres of power based on secrecy, capacity to deny information or knowledge. This is not the true power. We can call it negative power, arising not out of utility as in the use of oil, but out of the power of one who can deny the negative power to others. In a Parliamentary democracy the majority of the ruling party is no secret. It can not be in power a moment longer that it keeps its majority. Suppose the people are denied that right to know the true position of the ruling party's strength, it can be in power even when its power of ruling is fully eroded. This is not power, but tyranny. Society is ruled by this tyranny and its shadow of superstition arising out of it in a very large measure. Internet spells a doom to this tyranny in full measure. It is a leveler of status. It throws people on their resources and prevents them from enjoying the fruits of negative power arising out of secrecy, ignorance or superstition.

Money and power presently give a lot of power, the power of ego. Internet renders them impersonal and entirely removes that opportunity for pockets of power to develop.

Internet - the destroyer of the ego.

Professionals have a sea of information about legal cases, diseases, subjects etc. This is an enormous area for them to exploit the public which they have done abundantly. The information offered by Internet dissolves about 50% of this unfair power. Next the patient who cannot decide on the information is certainly capable of deciding his own course, in most occasions, when he consults several other patients. Internet now offers the fullest such opportunity to patients and the litigant public. No longer is the professional in a position to play false with his clients. What does it mean to the society. The change here is almost as the steel knife replacing the stone tool or TV replacing the radio.

Self- determining knowledge.

Internet by and large gives information and therefore its power directly issues in the mental domain. Partially this can be used to blunt similar abuses in the vital domain. It is a mental tool, not expected to deliver vital or physical power directly.

Self-vitalising power is not yet available. 

The vital power may await the abolition of national armies. Education released men from superstition, but not from the social abuse of power arising from communal or political advantage. For this to deliver that power, KNOWLEDGE should lead to social restructuring of political power.

Abolish physicality. Power will be self-vitalizing.

In the past development of one plane did lead to the improvement in a lower plane. For that this knowledge should move to that level. These who cannot read and benefit from newspapers could hear the radio. It became a wider audience when TV came to reach these ‘minds' that cannot even be reached through the ear. Here, the technology moved from printing to audio and then to video. Internet can also do so. It can further go down to the physical plane as LAW has effectually prevented the tyranny of the bully. Further laws that empowered labour to form unions are now in a position to tyrannies the erstwhile bully of muscle and money power.

There is one further step. It is the abolition of tyranny instead of shifting it from one social stratum to another. Glenn Doman's kids are incapable of jealousy, corruption, meanness, etc. as their education opened their curiosity, not only gave them information.

Whether Internet will be used by better educational methods or whether the technology itself will upgrade itself so as to humanize its users remains to be seen.

As far as development is concerned, if every new technology especially COMPUTER and INTERNET, is fully integrated into all walks of life, it will be furthered. But, it is better to know they are all only technologies, not knowledge of development which is our theory.



story | by Dr. Radut