Vasilios Theodorakis – An Online Author

I can honestly say, I feel blessed to have the people who are now part of my day to day life.

From the handful of relatives, to my wife and close friends – people who I see face to face and who are there for me as I am there for them – not through some impersonal, superficial, digital connection. So I say, “Hit the internet kill switch Barack Obama” and let’s see how many of those social network participants have actual, reciprocating friendships. 500 friends online doesn’t amount to squat come the real challenges of life!

But I digress – I didn’t always have such genuine people in my life. For the longest time, like so many of us, I surrounded myself with people that never reciprocated interest or concern for me. I was so busy investing time and energy in these people that I didn’t notice that if I stopped, nothing was being invested in me. It took a long time to learn that a relationship needed to be reciprocated, whether that be with a relative, friend or partner.

So when things were at their worst, in the early 1990s, and I was forced to stop investing in people – primarily because of the lengthy hospital stays – it dawned on me that not a single person I had thought were friends, were friends!

It took many more years to excise most of these people from my life, and to this day, its an ongoing struggle to not fall into the trap of one way connections. (There are still 2 or 3 people, I do this with, and that’s because they did support me either financially or emotionally for a brief period of time in the 1990s – the rest of these anthropomorphic mannequins are long gone.)

The interesting thing is that the truly important people are just there for you, as you are for them – the “humble servant”, in the best sense of the Orthodox Christian faith. While those who think they’re important, are never there for anyone other than themselves – and that really amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of things. Human islands, I have come to know, do not survive the rising tide of life’s complications!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Years ago, one of my social work colleagues entrusted me with the horrors she experienced during the break up of the old Yugoslavia. Much of what she described is far too graphic for the likes of this little blog, so let me give you the sterilised version. Both her and her husband grew up in a tiny village along the boarder of Croatia and Serbia, and identified themselves as Croatian Muslims. Their village was made up of both Roman Catholic Christians and Muslims who were descended from Ottoman Turks. The two groups had lived together harmoniously for decades, but when the Serbian army reached their village, the soldiers tried to separate out the groups. All the women of child bearing age were rounded up and raped and all the men, irrespective of age, were taken to concentration camps. Her husband, and a few others managed to escape, get back to the village and help her and some relatives get across the boarder into Hungary. From there, they eventually gained refugee status and migrated to Australia.

Why did this colleague share her ordeal with me? At the time I was an overly zealous young social worker and notorious for touting the virtues of Orthodox Christianity. Her experiences and pain very quickly brought my naivety about religion to an end. Interestingly, she never blamed the Orthodox Christian Faith for what happened to her. She believed that no genuine religious person could have done what those Serbian soldiers had done.

Her story did get me thinking about the sociological basis to law and order, and helped me come up with the following idea in the 1990s.

If an individual has genuinely internalised a peace loving religion and uses that religion to inform their conscience they cannot carry out such horrendous acts – even if society falls apart. Why? Because they carry around within themselves a sense of right and wrong.

On the other hand, if an individual has not internalised their religion and does not have an internal yard stick directing what is right and wrong, their morality is governed by external restraints i.e. like a society’s laws. Therefore, were a society to fall into anarchy, as Yugoslavia did, and were most of its citizens secular with no internal yard sticks of right and wrong, then its not hard to see how individuals without a personal morality could perpetuate the barbaric acts that were carried out on my friend’s village.

Unfortunately, as I’m no academic, I never carried out any serious research to back up my theory. Many refugee horror stories however, tend to support its premise, even if that premise makes people who lead secular lifestyles in stable societies like Australia very uncomfortable.

So my question to the good secular atheist is this: you live your life based on what external forces tell you is right and wrong i.e. the laws of society. What happens if those laws are suddenly removed, and you have no law courts or police officers telling you what to do or what not to do? What will you use as your reference point? What will pass as “right” and what will pass as “wrong” and who will decide it for you? Or do you think you are some how different to those Serbian soldiers who suddenly realised they no longer had to answer to anybody or anything! I fear that most people who are not bound by a code of ethnics, drawn from a higher power, revert very quickly to their animal state – we are not as advanced as we’d like to think!

Despite how untrendy it is to adhere to a religion and internalise a moral yard stick, I fear it’s the only thing that will save civilisation in the long term. Shocking case studies, such as those that occurred during the break up of Yugoslavia or the civil wars in Africa, add weight to my theory and the notion that just being “a good person” really means nothing. Nothing that is, unless an individual’s morality is drawn from God and written in their heart!

Post Update: 26/11/2010
A friend recently challenged me on part of this post’s premise, and on reflection, I have to concede that internalising morality and ethics need not be based on religion. The important thing is that one’s moral yardstick is (or has become) an internal construct and is not based on external enforcement! In this way even the secular can maintain law and order even if their social system has collapsed. Thanks for highlighting this John M.

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

While listening to the radio during this week’s unseasonal rain, I had the misfortune of hearing our illustrious premier, Ms Bligh, comment on the state of water restrictions in Queensland. Her public statement being – “our polling of the community indicates that people are happy for us to leave in place the current water restrictions, so that’s what we’ll be doing.”

Despite me not being in the best of health, I couldn’t help but fall on the ground in a fit of laughter or was that just me chocking in disbelief – I can’t tell the difference anymore. :) For those of you unaware as to what is happening in the city of Brisbane, we’ve been living under a regime of water restrictions, despite the fact that our dams are almost full. This week saw the dams, not only reach capacity, but the water authorities had to open the flood gates and empty an enormous amount of water into the Brisbane river which in turn spills out into Moreton Bay. As I write this piece, water is being wasted in huge amounts by the government while the average person isn’t allowed to irrigate fruit and vegetables on their own land because of an ad hoc daily water quota!

What is truly incredulous, is that our leader is unashamedly making decisions based on polls and ignoring common sense. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if the dams are full as we enter the rainy season, there is no longer a catchment mechanism to prevent Brisbane’s natural flood plains from being inundated with water. If anything, the premier should be encouraging people to use as much water as possible in the lead up to the rainy season – maybe even temporarily reduce the cost of water, so that the dam levels are lower and thus prevent a 1974 style flood. Such a decision, based on compassion for your constituency, might also ensure the water is put to good use instead of being flushed out into the bay.

Unfortunately, our politicians are currently incapable of adjusting their position to deal with changed circumstances and the general population will suffer the consequences.

So my question to the premier is this – Where’s your so called leadership Ms Bligh? I fear if you keep making stupid decisions based on what you think people want, not only will you and your right wing labour party be annihilated at the next election, your lack of common sense will endanger the state’s citizens!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Despite what goes on in Australia, sport should be an adjunct to life not the basis to life. If everything else is going well and there is time left over in the day, then sport, especially something like athletics, is a wonderful thing to add into the mix of a balanced life. I should know – in my youth I was an obsessed sprinter and used to love to run in my spare time. Even as an adolescent though, I could never have put “running” ahead of the well being of a fellow human being – not under any circumstances.

Today of course, we have career athletes who earn a good living out of athletics – a natural development I suppose when you look at the economics of other aspects of our society. In itself there’s nothing wrong with earning a living out of what you’re good at – what is a problem however, is when someone is determined to earn a living out of it and ignore the consequences of those actions on other people.

Lets take for instance the situation in Delhi. By simply participating in the current Commonwealth Games, people are indirectly supporting the fact that the local government chose to spend 15 billion (US) dollars on a two week event rather than create housing for millions of homeless people in that city. Attending, participating and following a sporting event under these circumstances, is sending a message to the Indian government that it’s OK to prioritise a transient thing over the life long well being of your own citizens.

Obviously, it could be argued that this also applies to any other field of endeavour, not just sport. In order to avoid being entangled in such an ethical mess, you need to think through how your action or inaction cascades and effects others. After living with my own head in the sand for far too many years, I now have a very basic rule of thumb that guides my social activism and that is – “if you ignore your effect on your surroundings, you are definitely part of the problem!” – a play on – “…if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.” [1977, C. McFadden, Serial xxvi.]

In living this approach, I don’t think you need to construct some grand solution and then be a part of that construction. All you need to do is tread lightly and minimise any detrimental effect you have on your fellow human beings, other creatures and your environment. If we adhere to this one thing, then any of us can participate in a sporting event, or any other event for that matter, with a clear conscience.

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Those living with a log in their eye should not be preaching to those living with a splinter in theirs. Reference – Matthew 7:3

We are unfortunately surrounded by institutions and personalities who claim a holier than thou stance, yet in reality do despicable things to other beings or have despicable personal lives. There are of course the very good (the saints) and the very bad (the demons) – both of which walk amongst us – but most humans fall somewhere in between. I’m definitely one of these middle dwellers.

Being neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad person, my life continues to be lived in the grey, no matter how hard I try to improve myself. I therefore think the best any of us can hope for is to be honest about who and what we are on a day to day basis. To pretend otherwise wastes everyone’s time and doesn’t allow for genuine improvement.

Keeping in mind this general shortcoming, I strongly believe having a single human role model is not only a nonsense but down right dangerous. No human being is that Godly and should not be placed on too high a pedestal. The God-Man i.e. Christ, is of course the exception to the rule.

In spite of this, at least one thing can always be learned from every individual. To not look for that lesson in each day’s interpersonal encounters is a temporal tragedy.

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

It astounds me how our political leaders don’t understand that new ideas come out of endeavours that aren’t necessarily associated with well defined jobs. Do they really think that people like Einstein came up with the “Theory Of Relativity” through their job training? The theory came out of Einstein’s thought experiments!

The current paradigm, that goes back to the late 1980’s, believes all you need to do is get an education or be trained for a job i.e. Vocational Education. The notion of eduction for life and eduction for innovation went out the window years ago. Dreamers and visionaries no longer have a place in Australian society – then again, maybe they never did – and you can see this, when you compare the budgets for the Arts and Pure Sciences against the applied fields and economics. History, Philosophy, Literature, etc. are viewed as irrelevant because they don’t lead to a direct job. Pure Mathematics, Physics, Palaeontology, etc. aren’t valued because it’s thought they don’t accomplish anything economically. The irony is, that without people having studied in these fields and “mused” over “irrelevant” questions, insights and discoveries which have improved society and driven technology would never have happened.

Take for instance your little USB memory stick – this device came out of pure research in solid state physics. At the time of its discovery, i.e. many decades ago, solid state theory had no practical use for the idea, but if those researchers hadn’t been allowed to pursue their research for the sake of knowledge alone, you wouldn’t have your little storage device today!

This issue was recently covered in ABC’s Radio National – Big Ideas presentation titled: Weaving the Rainbow: The Poet and The Scientist Speak. The presentation included Les Murray and Barry Jones talking about where Education has gone wrong in Australia and how there is no vision for the future.

Unfortunately our nation’s politicians don’t seem to understand that one needs to pay more attention to the nation’s thinkers – i.e. our thinkers are the true visionaries, guides and seers into the future. Instead of taking on board what people like Jones and Murray have said over the years, the current PM has down graded education to such an extent, that we now don’t have a Ministry Of Education in the new parliament – just 3 smaller ministries preparing people for jobs! We are well and truly on the way to becoming the region’s Eurasian trash. All the country will be good for in the long run, is handing over resources and doing menial jobs that drive the immediate economy.

I therefore fear, thinking and dreaming will have to be done elsewhere – God help Australia’s creative young who spend all their time “musing” on things that are deemed irrelevant! Not only will they be unable to develop their ideas into robust theories but they’ll have no means of earning a living from their intellectual passion!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Australia will have matured into a real nation only when it embraces its entire history and only when it sees its existence as stretching back more than 40000 years, not just 212!

Until we accept that indigenous history is also the nation’s history, and until the average person on the street understands and is proud of the fact that Australia still holds the oldest continuous cultures and society in the world – we will never get past the current illegitimacy of the nation. i.e. That since colonialists came to this land and occupied it without compensation and treaties, the business of settlement was never completed.

As we’re stuck with what has happened and as we’re unable to change the past, we should at least ensure the future is based on uniting our pre and post colonialist history in a just, honest and pride inspiring way. I look forward to the day when non-aboriginal kids wish they were indigenous and aboriginal kids are so full of pride they almost burst whenever the topic of their heritage is raised. What a day that will be and what a great nation we will have become – despite the mistakes of the past!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

Statistically, we are one of the few high order creatures capable of procreating without first preparing a safe and stable environment in which to raise our young. Almost all other complex organisms will try to build a nest (or equivalent) before bringing forth the next generation, but since we’ve managed to separate out our sexual activity from our need to procreate, children often arrive before an environment is prepared for them.

In addition to this, we’ve removed ourselves from the cycles of the natural world, swapped the nest for dependence on vast societies and allowed ourselves to get pregnant irrespective of whether we have access to food and shelter – please note, I’m not talking about women who get sexually assaulted here – that’s different. What I’m talking about, is couples who do not have the resources to raise children.

Living in smaller communities, unexpected offspring were usually catered for by the larger family grouping. The problem we now face however, is that modern societies tend to be apathetic, hostile and not orientated to look after their constituent’s babies – not unless they’re forced to – i.e. procreation is the individual’s problem! Groupings have become too large and impersonal, ideology too self centred and people uneducated in the need to gather the resources to build their own nests ahead of time. As a consequence, those unprepared for children, fall through the safety nets of society as there’s often no family or community to depend on anymore.

As a social worker, I saw this happen again and again – people having children first and worrying about a roof over their heads later. The instability and stress this has on kids is shocking, and having to deal with it on a daily work basis, scared the hell out of me. So much so, that I decided I would not bring a child into the world unless the nest was built and ongoing resources were available.

I therefore strongly believe we need to get back to basics when it comes to our young i.e. unless we have first built the nest – don’t lay the egg! Laying and balancing an egg on a branch can only end in disaster! How stupid has our species become! I really don’t see the logic in viewing this aspect of our lives as human evolution – if anything, its a backwards step for our species!

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

The Australian author David Malouf once said that Australia’s national day only happens every 3 years, and that day is the day of our federal election. Why? Because it epitomises all that is good about Australia and being Australian. i.e. That people can show up in an orderly fashion at polling booths and peacefully re-elect or change the government that is controlling the nation. In this country no one is abused, wounded or murdered when they try to vote. No one is threatened and forced to vote in a particular way, and people feel it’s safe to talk about how they’re going to vote while lining up to collect their ballot paper. I’ve always found the day to have a festive feel about it – where else in the world does that happen? An excellent example of this occurred yesterday at my mother-in-law’s polling booth, where voting was accompanied by a sausage sizzle. :)

Like Mr Malouf, I believe this defines us. There are few countries in the world where elections occur in a stable and safe way. So few in fact, that we are almost unique – especially when you factor in that every adult is obligated to vote. Our compulsory voting system ensures the elected government is a genuine reflection of the view of the people. Not even the US or the UK can match how our parliament is a true refection of the wishes of “all” its citizens.

Yet in spite of this, we will always have the wingers and those who think that voting is an infringement on their “right to choose to vote” and an inconvenience on their time. If these wingers had to swap places with citizens in Rwanda, (where people risk having limbs hacked off while trying to vote) I’m sure they would quickly appreciate what we have here in Australia.

As for me – I look forward to revisiting the cardboard booths and voting in three years time again. It’s the one thing about our nation that continues to fill me with pride.

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010

The ability to story tell is fundamental to the human condition. In many ways it probably differentiated us from other hominids and allowed us to prevail in our ecological niche. This idea is hinted at in the human palaeontological record but there isn’t enough data to empirically prove it yet.

So with story, our sense of bonding was raised above and beyond that of preening, survival and reproduction. It allowed us to carry shared adventures and history across time and space. It firmly established the notion of culture around our early camp fires, and also let us know what others were thinking and feeling – i.e. it seeded empathy. Story did all this, in spite of the fact that our ancestors may have never met the people it described. It even allowed early humans to relate to people who had never existed. Of course, complex language was the precursor to story and without language (externalised thought), story would never have happened.

On a personal note, I find story and the places where story is told almost sacrosanct. For me, its forums are as hallowed as the life filled rainforest or the life giving liturgy. This perception has been with me for years and I often feel that something has been defiled, a sacred place desecrated, when developers shut down and demolish theatres and cinemas. This is something we are especially good at in the greater city of Brisbane – which now has no theatres left in the CBD!

In addition to this, as I’m descended from a long line of story tellers, I’ve been indoctrinated with its basic structure from a very young age. i.e. That story has to have a beginning, middle and end – otherwise what’s the point! Many supposed story tellers don’t understand these basics. i.e. in movies for example, some directors like to leave out crucial parts, like endings! What really upsets me about this approach is that my wife and I often hand over our hard earned cash to these film makers who don’t understand their own craft. Take “Inception” for instance which has the ultimate “artsy” non-ending! What sort of smart alec is this director Christopher Nolan who chose to finish the movie in this way? If we wanted to not have an ending to a story, we would tell each other such nonsensical tales for free! If someone pays you to tell a story, you have a moral obligation to do just that, otherwise give the patron back their money and stop masquerading as a modern day bard!

Despite the people who don’t understand the sanctity of story and story structure, there are many more story tellers who do. For those of us who cannot live without the telling of tales (each and every day of our lives), I am eternally grateful that the Christopher Nolans of the world are still the exception not the rule.

Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2010