Selfish Desires Research Articles

The impact of cross carpeting and multiplicity of political parties in Nigerian democratic process

The return to democracy in 1999 has ushered unprecedented hope on democratic process in Nigeria and, thus, heralded another opportunity for the country to launch a new strategy towards democracy, after many years of lost opportunities under a prolonged period of authoritarian rule. Indeed, the emergence of multiparty system in Nigerian Fourth Republic can be seen as a major breakthrough in the democratic process. The journey so far since 1999 raises a lot of concern and apprehension, chief among them is the multiplicity of political parties and most troublesome is the cross-carpeting of party’s members. Their structure, operations, funding and general activities can make or mar the democratic process. The way political parties in Nigeria have gone and going, does not, however, portend good tidings for her democratic process especially the selfish desires of candidates jumping from one party to the other. It is on these grounds, this study investigates factors responsible for proliferation of political parties, decampment of parties’ members; and how healthy are these activities to democratic process in Nigeria. In achieving this objective, the study relies on primary data and analysis would be done through basic statistical tools. Key words: Political party, cross-carpeting, multiplicity of political party, democratic process.

The De of Levinas: Cultivating the Heart-Mind of Radical Passivity

This essay explores the early Chinese text Guanzi to address the question of ethical responsibility in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. We begin with the premise that being responsive to the other, feeling the impossibility of renouncing ethical obligation, and experiencing the basic moral asymmetry at the heart of Levinas’s project all rely on the welcome openness of the subject that Levinas describes as the subject’s “radical passivity.” However, his emphasis on infinite responsibility, coupled with the theme of radical passivity, gives the problematic impression that ethics amounts to a never-ending to-do list for the other, and certainly this is not what Levinas means. We turn to the Guanzi, which recommends that the ethically efficacious sage-prince must cultivate a state of passive stillness and inner vacuity. Only because the sage-prince maintains this deferential heart-mind is he freely open and responsive to others. Here the sage-prince looks strikingly like a good Levinasian: He is deferential, sensitive to context, and hyper-aware of the limits of his own knowledge. The Guanzi goes on to describe specific practices the sage-prince can employ to cultivate his ethical prowess, including practices of meditation and gentle physical exercises. Taking this insight into Levinas’s context, we suggest that such practices of self-regulation are necessary to enable effective responsiveness to the other. From this perspective, responsibility is “infinite” not because I am perpetually beholden to the other’s whims, but because I am perpetually accountable for calming and clearing my own mind of the unstable emotions, selfish desires, and intellectual machinations that prevent the welcome openness of radical passivity.

Understanding institutions: replies to Aoki, Binmore, Hodgson, Searle, Smith, and Sugden

AbstractOur goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity between simple rules of precedence and sophisticated institutions like property, marriage, or money. Finally, we argue that a satisfactory account of institutions must be compatible with different theories of normativity, specifying the social and psychological mechanisms that make it possible to override selfish desires.

The Role of Obedience in Child Faith Formation: Insights from the Teachings and Practices of John Wesley

This article explores Wesley's directive to “break the will” of the child in order to achieve obedience, which he saw as the foundation for faith formation, and offers implications of this directive for Christian education today. Wesley saw children as capable of experiencing the full grace of God and possessing the ability to grow in grace. Wesley also realized that a child's natural tendency was to seek his or her own way and please self. Wesley urged parents and ministers to break the will of the child and move the child from seeking after selfish desires to obedience. He suggested that obedience to the parent must first be achieved before a child could learn obedience to God and called for Christian education that resulted in obedience to be consistent, personal, mild, loving, and Spirit-led.

A Key Management Algorithm Based on Fingerprint and Fuzzy Decision

This paper presents an algorithm about key management including key generation and key recovery in cryptosystem based on fingerprint and fuzzy decision. Traditional key for the encryption and decryption is remembered by a trusted person, or stored in a safety location. The key may be lost or misused for the person’s self-ish desire. Sharing secret algorithm is used to prevent from misusing in a single management, and fuzzy vault scheme is used to avoid the disadvantage of numerical password. But the proposed method is not an easy combination of fuzzy vault and sharing secret. To keep from the collusion among some persons, a simple fuzzy decision is added in the proposed method. Security analysis and experimental results are given to show the proposed algorithm is feasible and safe for key management in cryptosystem.

Obedience, Self‐Control, and the Voice of Culture

Milgram's obedience studies dramatically demonstrated how obeying authority can have grim consequences. Nevertheless, we propose that obedience to legitimate authority is a vital aspect of human culture. Among other things, obedience to authority can encourage individuals to set aside their selfish desires for the good of their group. Often, such selfish desires are violent in nature. Thus, obedience can function to limit violence. We challenge the notion that people typically respond to the commands of authority with blind obedience. Last, we suggest that the implications of Milgram's findings have in some cases been overstated.

English

The environment in which man is born or evolved plays a significant role in his life.  It emits in him a special way of living a life which later develops to what is known as a culture. Thus man is caught in meshes of customs, superstitions, selfish desires and, possibly, incorrect teachings which, sometimes have undesirable bearing on him. This development may make him pugnacious, unclean, false, and slavish and hankering after what is wrong or forbidden and deflected from the love of his fellowmen and unconsciously from the pure worship of the one True God. It is against this backdrop that an attempt will be made in this paper to look at the role of cultural diversity in the enhancement of international co-operation.   Keywords: Culture, cultural diversity, beliefs, customs.

Theological Aspects of Winstanley's Writings

By engaging directly with Winstanley's writings this essay explores the main contours of the Diggers' theology, insofar as a distinctly “theological” dimension to his thinking can be discerned. A central belief for Winstanley was that, as in biblical times, God still speaks to ordinary men and women. Men and women may also experience the “indwelling” of God's Spirit, once the selfish desires of the flesh, which struggle for power within them, have been overcome by Christ. This tension between “flesh” and “Spirit” is also at work within society, Winstanley argued, but will be resolved as people throw off the bondage to which the present system subjects them and reclaim the freedom they knew before the Fall. The practice of buying and selling the land, something originally given by the Creator as a “common treasury” for all to enjoy, lies at the root of the present bondage. Winstanley's schema leads him to offer highly creative interpretations of Christian doctrines such as the Fall, and Resurrection and Second Coming of Christ; and his preferred name for God, “Reason,” further marks his theology out as different from that of the beneficed clergy who, he argued, had much to gain in material terms from espousing the views they did. The chapter reflects upon Winstanley's millenarianism, his employment of apocalyptic imagery from Scripture, and his emphasis on the importance of action – on reclaiming the common land by digging.

Rousseau’s Child

Modern thinking about human nature is notoriously divided between two contradictory notions: The Hobbesian tradition portrays men as driven by selfish desires, while the Rousseauian tradition recognizes altruistic proclivities as true motivations to cooperate. We tested preschoolers’ predictions about the prosocial or antisocial manner in which people would behave toward each other. Four stories were presented to 3- and 4-year-old children. In each story, the protagonists could either cooperate, act in terms of their own interests, or adopt a behavior unrelated to the ongoing scenario. Children as young as 3 years of age expected the protagonists to behave prosocially – and even more so if the protagonists were female. The results suggest that, even at an early age, children are inclined to adopt a “Rousseau-like” stance rather than a “suspicious” or “pessimistic” Hobbesian stance.

The #NBCFail Olympics: Access, liveness and the public interest

This article explores the deeper meanings within social media criticism of NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games, focusing on the divide between those social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for primetime, tape-delayed broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies and liveness, which creates concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general).

The making of romantic love: longing and sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900 to 1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

Reflexiones sobre la naturaleza y la práctica del perdón en el contexto doctrinal no-teísta del Budismo

This article deals with the concept of forgiveness within Buddhist thought understood this concept as "a way to prevent negative thoughts, and therefore harmful, detrimental to peace, tranquility and mental health of the individual." The practice of forgiveness must necessarily be accompanied by feelings of love and compassion toward the offender and not motivated by a selfish desire to get admiration for the act of forgiving. The act of forgiveness is a difficult one but it is at the same time an important act of personal growth.

Preocupação Ambiental e Consumo Consciente: Os Meus, os Seus e os Nossos Interesses

Respect the limits of the nature is a challenge that emerges in contemporary society. In this sense, this paper aimed to identify the values ​​and interests that dominate the decision process and that characterize the environmental concerns of consumers. The application of 33 in-depth interviews associated with the projective technique allowed identify if the concerns are related to the preservation of the global environment (our interests) and to the welfare of the community (your interests) or to fulfill selfish desires (my interests). The qualitative content analysis guided by Bardin (1977) showed high environmental concern, however it is clear that prevails values ​​linked to individualism, passivity, immediate benefits and a strong selfishness predominates in the behaviors of the respondents.

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

Reflexiones sobre la Naturaleza y la práctica del perdón en el contexto doctrinal no-teísta del Budismo

This article deals with the concept of forgiveness within Buddhist thought understood this concept as "a way to prevent negative thoughts, and therefore harmful, detrimental to peace, tranquility and mental health of the individual." The practice of forgiveness must necessarily be accompanied by feelings of love and compassion toward the offender and not motivated by a selfish desire to get admiration for the act of forgiving. The act of forgiveness is a difficult one but it is at the same time an important act of personal growth..

Models of Structuring Peace and Gandhi in Modern Democratic System

The concept of world peace has been fascinating indeed. Gandhi realised that if the embodied human spirit was to progress, muffled as it was by selfish desire, man must be free, full of dignity and earnest about his own advance. “There has been no greater advocate of one humanity, one world and no stronger opponent of violence and war than Gandhi, for, his faith in no-violence was absolute and he believed that peaceful means alone could lead to peaceful ends [1]” ‘While world peace is undoubtedly one of the most universal and significant of human ideals, Gandhi has described is as ‘one of the few positive symbols having meaning for the whole of humanity’ The present world is beset with problems like international terrorism, arms race, civil wars and ethnic and religious problems. Though cold war is over, there are smaller conflicts between and among nations. These regional conflicts have disturbed international peace, attempts for disarmaments, confidence building measure etc. The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest and most destructive century in the history of the human race. According to UN statistics, there were only twenty eight days in this entire century of genocide and destruction without a war of some kind, in some part of the globe.

The principle of sphere-sovereignty in a time of globalisation

This article investigates the phenomenon of present-day globalisation from a Christian perspective to determine whether the principle of sphere-sovereignty can provide an antidote to globalisation’s harmful consequences. Firstly, it is explained how the principle of sphere-sovereignty is founded on the biblical message, and that it includes two interrelated dimensions, viz. that of life-orientation and of responsible differentiation. Secondly, the following four characteristics of contemporary globalisation are reviewed: it is (1) of a more or less autonomous nature, (2) a seemingly unavoidable project, (3) a process of a dynamic nature, and (4) a product of Western modernisation. In the third place the implications of the acceptance of the principle of sphere-sovereignty for globalisation are investigated. It seems that globalisation, in many areas of life, is detrimental to healthy forms of differentiation – the first dimension of sphere-sovereignty. From the perspective of orientation(the second dimension of sphere-sovereignty), it becomes evident that the present project of globalisation has in some respects already deteriorated into a kind of blinding, oppressive ideology. This type of globalisation “ad malam partem” is finally contrasted with a better road of globalisation “ad bonam partem”. This last type of globalisation – not driven by selfish greed, desire and power, but by love for our Lord Jesus Christ,and for one’s neighbours – may help to prevent the ominous crisis of our time.

Public pedagogies and global emoscapes

It is now well recognized that public pedagogies help to inform the ways in which people engage and transform both culture and politics. But the roles of globalization and of emotions are under-researched in the literature on such pedagogies. Through a discussion of the notion of emotional geography and the emotional dimensions of globalization we argue that globalized emotions are central to such pedagogies. In so-doing we introduce our notion of “emoscapes”. This helps us to consider the diverse and intersecting scales and flows of the emotional geographies of globalization. Through the case of the global financial crisis, we show how emotions enter and influence mediascapes, ideoscapes and financescapes. Using cameo studies of YouTube videos (film, anime, videos) and performance protest, we identify a range of emotional registers involved. We point to the mobilization of the greed creed and consumer Darwinism, both of which involve selfish desires, distraction and political inaction. But we also show how the public pedagogies associated with the global financial crisis can involve other emotions that challenge such emotional geographies mobilizing mood as a form of resistant political intervention.

A Vaccine Against Ignorance?

A Vaccine Against Ignorance?

潜在自我意識(papanca)と認識(sanna)の転換

潜在自我意識(papanca)と認識(sanna)の転換