The inversion

The flow of information between voter and politician has almost completely reversed by now.
The latter, precisely because politics is their profession, should, drawing on their own knowledge, experience, and skills, have formed a vision of their own to present to the citizens.

Partly out of culpable incompetence, partly out of craven convenience, partly out of devious calculation, many politicians have stopped putting forward their own vision and have decided instead to indulge the demands of the electorate, just as they pick them up in the piazza, at the bar, or on the beach. Demands that they themselves often fuel, through complicit media, playing on ancestral phobias, inferiority complexes, and tribal instincts.

Not only do they abdicate their leadership role, they end up voiding the very purpose of their function: reconciling collective needs with individual interests.
And it is precisely to this, paradoxically, that they owe their success.

I find all of this nauseatingly dystopian.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Reappropriation

To remain alone, isolated, distant,
to break through the walls of one's own culture
and, the tent pitched in no-man's-land,
to observe, ponder, and reconfigure,
can reveal how much, truly how much,
of what we believe and then hand down
is the calculated fruit of indoctrination
basely inflicted in childhood years.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

High tech Buddhism: how to get out of the infamous video-scrolling-loop

The debate over the effects of smartphones on society and human mental health has been ongoing for quite some time. 
The situation has obviously gotten worse in the last 2-3 years. Buses and trains are full of people who seem to be staring hypnotized at the screen of their phone, swiping their finger on it now and then, just like zombies. 
New techniques, such as continuous video scrolling loops, have been introduced. They target some well known weak points of our psyche and they promote the production of some hormones that give us pleasure. If you feel guilty after having wasted hours watching some silly videos non-stop, well do not worry: it's not your fault. You're being manipulated like a lab mouse. Fortunately (maybe) we're not mice, and we do have methods to preserve our mental independence, if we want to. So if you are happy with your hours of trance like state you can ignore the rest of this post. But if you want to get out of this mental trap you might find what follows useful. 
The solution is actually grounded in some very old ideas. Good old Siddhartha Gautama, aka the great Buddha, had a very similar insight when he was trying to find a way out of our obsessive thinking about past and future, that distracts us from the only moment that matters: the present one. That solution is called MINDFULNESS.
Let’s clarify the problem first. 

Recipes against unhappiness, chapter 2 - Children

This chapter is about what NOT to do, rather than what to do, to make people less unhappy in life.
One of the most despicable things that humans can do is brainwashing their own children. This is done when they are growing up and learning, when they are most vulnerable and need the support of the adults that surround them, those same adults they trust with their own safety and security. That’s exactly when they get betrayed and permanently damaged. The aim of this subjugation procedure is to install in the youth’s mind functional narratives such as religion, nationalism, patriotism, ethnicity, culture, even preposterous tribal totems such as sport fanaticism and traditional cuisine. It has always been done, and it’s still done nowadays, even where a great emphasis is placed on children’s rights.