A parable about politics: My great-grand father, doctor and politician

My great-great grand father was a doctor and a politician. His family of doctors and pharmacists was part of some hundred thousand conversos to Christianity during the XV century, in Catalonia. Among the many myths of fundamentalist Judaism, there is the myths that Jewish cannot convert to more evolved perceptions of mankind. This is one of the many inquisitorial myths of Jewish fundamentalism. Perhaps as much as 1/3rd of Jewish converted to earlier Christianism. In Catalonia where the biggest Middle Age community of Jewish people existed, in the commercial border between Islam and Christianity, thousands converted. When the 'non-ethic' behavior of his brother-cells in the Middle Ages - the bankers, tax-collectors and lawyers of Sepharad, that exploited the people for their benefit, and that of the king-warriors of Spain - provoked massive riots, pogroms and tragedy in XV century Spain, the good "neuron-cells" of the Sephardi Organism, who have helped and cured the people of Catalonia were protected by that people. Many doctors converted to social ideals, such as those of Christianism, and stayed in Catalonia. The Madrid-based inquisition did not bother them. The inquisition was not very popular in Catalonia. It was considered an instrument of repression, used by the king-warriors of Madrid that mismanaged and took to the abyss of corruption and perpetual war the Spanish nation. So a converted group of doctors and pharmacists lived in harmony with the common people during centuries in Catalonia. It was sort of a caste that married among themselves and created on that tradition one of the most recognized schools of medicine of the Western World. When the industrial revolution came, from those ranks and files of very intelligent people - neuronal cells that generation upon generation had been learned people - came many of the most prominent Catalan industrialists, including Dr. Robert's family. Many kept also their professions as doctors, with a social attitude, that has made today Catalonia one of the better Health-care systems, and nations in the world. Today in the Catalan regions - Catalonia and the Balear Islands - Jewish blood runs deeply, in the castes of doctors and economists, with funny surnames like those of my grand father (vellon-alhambra, which means money-exchange house in middle age Spanish), while it has mixed with the mass of population. (as much as 1/4th of Balear surnames seems to have a Jewish origin). What is more important, in as much as the old Catalan regions from the Iberus river to the Rhone, were the center of Middle Ages Judaism - a period of around 1400 years, as long as the period Jewish were in Palestine - Jewish behavior has permeated the family structure and social behavior of those people, which is similar to that of liberal Jewish communities (such as New Yorkers): Matriarchal societies, with a extreme density of feelings that does not exclude great exigency to the children , inward behavior, limited communication with other social groups, passion for money, love of art, aesthetics, and all forms of information... Even a sense of national victimism against the 'warrior Castillians', that traces in the books of Catalan history its own cycle of Trader Vs Warrior Holocausts:

Yet despite all those parallelisms, Catalonia is a liberal country, where Catalanism is not taken as seriously as Judaism is, and it is not fundamentalist in his acceptance of other people. In that sense Catalonia, an example of social harmony and human wealth. Catalonia, we might say, is what America or Israel could have been, if the doctors, and liberal Jewish of the 60s revolution instead of the fundamentalist banker-priests of Aaron had ruled those countries.

This was what happened in Catalonia, when people like my great-great grand father took power a century ago. He, as a doctor became the president of the world association of doctors at the beginning of the XX century. As a politician, he was a co-founder of the Catalonian political movement that rules now my country, 'Cataluqa', the north-east part of Spain - what you might call in America, a Founding Father. He also became major of Barcelona. The organic architect Gaudi made him a statue, in collaboration with Llimona, an art-nouveau sculptor. Llimona placed Doctor Robert, on top of a spiral of people that represented each and all of the different social classes of Catalonia, that were in harmony thanks to the political wisdom of Dr. Robert. Gaudi made the fountain, with several mouths of water that looked like the tits of a woman. Those beautiful marbled seines, gave water to the students of Barcelona University when - during the Republican years of Spain [1936-1939] - the statue and fountain was put up on University Square. The statue was meant as a parable of good politicians, that nurture the people of a nation, if their policies are right, and have the guts to apply them.

My great-grand father had the guts. He became famous for his fights against the militaristic, central Spanish power of Madrid. He bargained for money, that Catalans paid on taxes, and Madrid spent in weapons for Moroccan colonies, or wasted among political friends, of the corrupted Spanish democracy. Things escalated and doctor Robert, took measures which were at the time and still are quite difficult to implement: he allied himself with the bankers of Barcelona, and closed business for a few days. Since Catalonia was the industrial region of Spain, [the equivalent to New England in America], with a tradition of factories that went back to the XVIII century, the effect was devastating. The answer from central power did not take long. Madrid declared war to Catalonia, and the major had to step out. He went back to his practice as a doctor, both in his consult for the wealthy and his clinic for poor people [a sort of personal social security at a time when such concept still did not exist in politics].

Yet he kept talking about politics among friends. His vision of a nation was very much that of a doctor, who sees the body of a human being, as a collection of individual cells, joined by two basic networks, the blood network of energy and the nervous network of information. The main learning a doctor requires to keep his patients healthy, is called 'physiology'. Physiology ensures the understanding and well-functioning of the energy-blood and information-nervous networks of the body. When those two networks are healthy, all the cells of your body receive energy-food and proper information, and survived. Dr. Robert saw his nation in a similar way: as a social organism, that politicians - the informative brain of laws - and industrialists - the blood system of goods - had to keep healthy, giving the proper energy and information to all the social cells, to avoid their collapse and death by the main sickness of historic organisms: war, poverty and ignorance. To him poverty and ignorance were anti-natural, a symptom of physiological sickness in those two organic systems. A sign of corrupted laws, and a corrupted system of credit that reproduced lethal goods, which the body-cells did not require.

After all every single cell of the body receives from its energy-blood system, and its nervous-information system, a minimum quantity of those two precious goods needed to survive. The nervous system informs the cells who trust the nervous system and move the social body to escape danger. The blood system feeds them so they can run away. Yet when the systems of energy and information of the body fall sick, the entire organism suffers. Then, when both systems collapse, the body dies. So happens to a society, where collective sickness such as external or internal war, and the expansion of 'germs', of lethal goods, such as weapons, are often the product of a bad ruled organism, with unjust laws and lack of production of human goods, that cells need [education, food, housing, etc.]. To him the minimal rights of the cells - the right to have fair prices in those goods they needed, the right to have health care, and available jobs, were natural rights for all cells of a healthy organism. Unlike many politicians that blame the people, [the cells] of the sickness of the social organism, my great-grand father knew better. He knew that in most social bodies, when the physiological systems, the energy and information systems worked properly, the cells responded, and worked hard to maintain the blood and nervous systems. Yet in any social organism the main responsibility for collective health was not in the individual cells of the body, but in the privileged cells of those systems, who controlled the information and energy of the nations, the organic resources of the country. So he wanted the blood system of industrialists and bankers [who controlled the money, the salaries and prices, the organic energy that made the social cells work] and the nervous system of politicians, [who created the laws, the organic information of the nation] to design healthy organic systems, the best possible systems for Catalonia and its people.

Organic nations, their human cells and social systems

He saw a society and a politician in those terms. Society was a group of human social beings, of human cells - you might say - that shape a collective organism - an organic nation. The 'organic-nation' requires as any organism, that all cells have a minimum quantity of the right energy and information to survive.

The former does not mean, that all cells of the organic nation have to be equally rich in energy-money, or equally cultured in information, since organisms and cells are not equal. Each cell has a purpose, and it becomes differentiated soon after birth. If you are born in the brain region you will become an informative cell, which is the top cell of the organism, with unlimited supply of blood, and a lot of knowledge. If you are born into the feet, you will become a hard working cell, supporting with your physical strength the entire organism. Yet still you will receive blood, and you will be able to complain when the body treats you bad, sending pain messages to the brain cells. Otherwise the organism would collapse. Since if your feet cells die, or suffer too much, they will refuse to move you. The worker-cells will go on strike...

My great -grand father saw societies in this manner. He felt that working people who suffer in excess, require fair laws and salaries from the privileged blood and neuron cells like himself. Yet the systemic cells often forget, lost in their fantasies, that they belong to a social body, that they would not exist without the feet cells. They abandon their social responsibility and then the body falls sick.

In your mind, the brain cells think about God and the Universe, about Love and Fun, about pleasures so remote to the working cells of the feet, that often they forget the pain messages of those down-to-Earth individuals. If they could cut the nervous-pain messages of the feet they would do. Yet the organism is wise, and does not allow the neuron cells to degenerate in their duties, to run amok into their fantasies. So they take care of the body. Unfortunately historic organisms are not so well put together. They are recent inventions. In the social, evolutionary scale of the Universe that grows from atoms to molecules, from molecules to cells, from cells to organisms, from organisms to societies, the historic society is the last one to appear. It seems it is not yet perfect.

Certainly there have been improvements over more primitive social systems such as monarchies. Today human societies have found the right concept: a democracy in which the government cells are chosen by the body cells, and are controlled by pain messages, by judges, and laws, to oblige them to use their legal privileges for the welfare of all the people. Yet it happens often that those politicians prevent with unjust laws the proper workings of the democratic system, that should allow a feed back from citizens to government, from muscle cells to neurons.

Obviously we have not built the perfect social organism, since we suffer still wars, and hunger, and lack of education among our people. There is still a lot to do, a lot of responsible work to accomplish by the privileged neurons before they can sleep over into the realm of imagination and say: our nation is a perfect running organism. Many reforms are required, many laws ill-designed need to be changed. Yet where else but in Nature, in the way Nature constructs its perfect social organisms, can we look to find teachings to our collective goal: the evolution of history and economics for the betterment of the Human Kind?

Historic organisms, and their biological needs: Wealth and health.

My great-grand-father understood as a doctor, that nature indeed, the physiology of organisms was the best example of a well run organism, where all cells have a minimal quantity of energy and information. So he wanted that all Catalonians had at least food, health and basic information-education so they could survive and keep healthy our society. For him it was the task of politicians and economists, men that created the informative laws, and the goods that money gives to men, to maintain all the cells of the body in perfect health. That was the responsibility of those privileged people, that mostly by birth [as Doctor Robert himself], have the luck of ruling the organic-nation.

Llimona understood his vision, and so he put all the social classes on the monument. On the bottom the farmers and steel workers, who created the energy the entire body needed. On the middle, the traders, shop-keepers, and other 'distributive cells' that took those elements of survival to all the individuals of Catalonia. On top the information class, that controlled the organism; and ruling them all, Robert, the doctor-brain, the man who had to take care of all the Catalans, and rule them for the common welfare.

Doctor Robert died of heart attack. He had been diagnosed earlier, and he was told to rest and no longer attend patients, specially those poor patients, who called him home, and had no lift, and lived far away, from his residence. Yet he did not abandon his patients. Maybe he was no longer the major, but his family of sephardi origin, had taken care of ill-people since the early middle ages. My family still works on the business of social health. My 3 brothers are doctors and pharmacists. I am an 'organic economist' known by his biological models of economics and the organism of History, from the perspective of a doctor, that would like History, the organism of mankind, and America, the leading nation of that organism, and my second country, to heal and become, not only powerful in economic and military wealth, but also in collective happiness and health. Since it seems to me, that in the pursuit of selfish 'freed', freedom of greed, in the pursuit of absolute wealth, the physiological cells of mankind, his politicians and industrialists, have forgotten the importance of health and social harmony, the basic human rights of the people. Those rights to education and a fair job, that no long ago were the pride of many nations, such America - the first country of the world to establish those rights for all its people - are today endangered. Since the physiological systems of mankind and their privileged cells have lost all sense of social responsibility.

Doctor Robert liked wealth. He was an elegant man, a collector of art, a dandy, but he liked even more health. Since he understood that without health no nation is happy, no money is enough to be safe. My great grand father, also a doctor, used to tell this things to my grand mother a painter and a poet, who told me when I was a kid, how to be good, and how to love other people. So people would love you and respect you. I tried my best in life, and I wish I had been better but things are getting rough, and it costs each time a little bit more to be good. Nations are no longer healthy organisms. People-cells suffer. They have no food, no proper information, and those who rule nations from above, have forgotten, their privileged position as the creators of money and laws, the power languages of our societies. Each cell caters today for himself, so the organic networks resent. Some of those cells, that we might call 'the Homo bacteria', are totally selfish, and no longer use the nervous network of verbal thought, that make us humans to deliver orders [I think therefore I exist]. Instead they argue with weapons, money and violence. They want it all for them. So, our societies suffer on their collective and individual plane of existence. Since indeed, all organic systems have two interrelated planes of existence, that of the individual, and that of the nation; and you have to be responsible in both systems.

When doctor Robert died, his ideas, had been forgotten by the new politicians, that wanted to make money and loved power, more than they love the citizens of Catalonia. Yet the people of Catalonia had not forgotten. Half a million of them, went out in a rainy day to say good-bye to the good doctor. Some had been individual patients of him, some had been collective patients of the politician.

Since Europe had not many politicians like Doctor Robert, soon the continent felt sick, people suffered hunger, and lacked 'Human goods' - healthy energy and information, to survive in the hard road of life. Instead Europe ran into wrong ideas about what health and power should be. Nations invested on 'lethal goods', germs-like weapons, and information became corrupted. It became propaganda to cover up, such false 'wealth', that showed up in all statistics as an impressive growth in GNP Totalitarism arrived. Nations suddenly preached the doctrine of 'action ' and 'violence', to solve the problems of our age. Sustained by the weapon-germ industry, fascism and Stalinism terrorized Europe for 2 long decades. Yet people in fascist and communist countries did not know they were reproducing 'germ'-products, because the networks of information - mainly radio and press - were optimist about the future, and praised the beauty of war; denying systematically any wrong doing by those politicians and entrepreneurs, on top of society.

To that aim, words and economic numbers were 'read' in a convenient way. So Germans and Russians thought they were very 'w-healthy', while marching under the banner of industrial progress. Their minds were brain-washed, and their love for things like sports and technology, filled up their life Everybody looked at Germany with envy. The economical miracle of Hitler was very much praised by the press of that age.

Germany had the highest rates of economic growth, even if that growth was in lethal machines. It did not matter. Numbers cheated people. Germans were all at work making lethal, expensive weapons, that counted in the optimist statistics of Economics. As America - the paradigm of modern wealth does today - Germany had the best weapons and best communication systems... who delivered an unending stream of confusing, propagandistic news, and violent speeches...

Indeed, nations with a lot of weapons and high-tech goods look very rich, because weapons and high-tech goods are the most expensive items of society. So a nation who had many of his people without basic attention, and basic goods, like communist Russia, fascist Germany, or XXI century America, but had/has a lot of weapons looks very wealthy. Yet weapons had to be used, and they were used, and I world war, came, and II world war came. Europe suffered as never mankind had suffered before.

It was a hard lesson, that Europe learnt after the war. Enemy nations who seemed irreconcilable like Germany and France, suddenly realized all was militaristic propaganda and 'the endemic cultural racism' among them, disappeared. Nations joined together. The rich switched from weapons production to human goods, that fed the social cells. The politicians decided to keep the poor healthy and educated, instead of teaching them how to use weapons, that could turn against the elite. Guided by the nervous-legal system, thanks to subventions, the economy soon was able to produce the human goods that every cell of society required to live with the proper energy and information [such as food, health, housing, and education]. It worked. Europe did not have a war for the rest of the century, till last year in Kosovo.

It seemed that Europe had evolved his pre-war, primitive free market system into a more natural social organism, that made people happier, avoiding war and violence, and ensuring the rich, their position in society, as responsible information cells. There were no more revolutions, civil unrest, pogroms and other penalties against 'freed' without feed back, proper of less evolved societies.

The health of Catalonia, the wealth of America

What can we learn of all those old stories about history for the betterment of America, the microcosms of mankind, and History, the social organism of the entire species?

We might say that there have been always two different approaches to the goal of societies. Those who thought wealth was the most important sign of progress, and those who thought health, and social harmony mattered enough to sacrifice part of that wealth. Our comparison between Catalonia, a healthy, small, unknown country where people are relatively happy, without great gestures, and America, the most powerful nation of the World, the wealthiest, yet the most disrupted in their social tissue, goes straight to the point. What is the aim of human societies, of history; but to create healthy social organisms, to evolve the 'Homo bacteria' into the 'Homo organicus', the bloody 'freed' market, into the nervous, highly developed mammal brain?

After the parenthesis of Franco's dictatorship in Spain, Catalonia became again free to rule his destiny as a single nation, within the Spanish, and European community. It was then when in the spirit of men like Doctor Robert, politicians decided that Catalonia would try first health than wealth. Money was thereafter invested in those business and products that people required to become happier. Unlike the other Spanish 'independent' region, the Basque country that opted for weapons, as a way to reassure his independence, Catalonia opted for social dialog, and Human goods. Soon it achieved a major feat with the organization of the first Spanish Olympic games. It dedicated huge amounts of money to model through urbanism, and art the decaying landscape of his coast. This did not came cheap. I remember the big tax increases it required, but it paid off. Tourism jumped, to make Catalonia the nation with more visitors per capita of the World. The dialog with other 'nations' of Spain and Europe, brought in a profitable relationship between North and South nations. Catalan agricultural products, and sunny beached paid for the BMWs and expensive machines we use. Catalans stopped migrating North, Northerners learnt that Spaniards were quite sensitive and intelligent. They broke their myths about the poor Latinos, and came to live among us - to the point that in the Balear Islands, Germans are becoming a majority. All this of course meant that the wealthiest Catalonians would never figure among the 500 Fortune, neither the poorest group of population had to resort to survival violence, without culture=information or energy to survive. Murder rates and jail rates are minimal. All residents have social security. Unemployment rates are low - since human goods like tourism and education require much more workers than expensive machines such as computers and weapons. So I can say proudly that the concept of my great grand father - to rule a society as a harmonic, dynamic organism, has worked out fine. The measure of that kind of society, was recently established by UNO economists, with a new economic indicator, for the health of societies. Spain came very up that list, Headed by nations like Australia, Canada, and France. Yet Catalonia alone had it appeared in the list would rank the third on that list.

On the other hand America after the II WW did not take note of the lessons Europe had learnt. It did not reform its blood-freed market system. Instead it opted for wealth at any price, as Germany had done. It made of 'GNP' numbers which are biased to weapons and high-tech, the main statistics to show the wealth of the nation. It ignored its 'human development'. The rich thought they would be happier putting more zeros to accounts they already could not spent in an entire life, instead of sharing part of that wealth to create a healthy nation, where they could walk around without fear. So those industries with higher profits - weapons and computers - despite their clear dangers for the national well-being, became the backbone of the American economy.

Indeed if we measure today wealth by the quantity of money and expensive items, such as weapons and complex machines a nation has, America is on top of the world. Yet in the list of healthy nations it appears way down. Since in that list certain goods do not add to the health of nations. To have more missiles in the statistics of GNP growth does not make a nation healthier. To have hundreds of TV channels, and internet connection, instead of libraries and good schools does not make children more intelligent, sociable, and happier. To measure all the things and humans by their monetary value, price or salary, make us economic objects. Yet monetary values are different, sometimes completely opposed to human values. For example murder and weapons are very expensive. They have however a negative human value. Yet human values is what make us happy.

America and Catalonia, the big and the small nation, the wealthy and the healthy, the nation ruled by abstract economists, weapons and digital numbers, or the nation ruled as a social organism, by concerned citizens, seem to be opposed in many ways. Which one is a better nation for its citizens?

Perhaps we should ask to the neutral people of the world, that vote visiting one and the other. Their decision is clear, because despite so much propaganda and hip about the American way of life, provided by its media companies, tourists go to Catalonia more often, and hardly travel across America. Obviously they do not want to share the main wealth of present America, its weapons, and the growing discomfort of a people that despite their many qualities, hard work, and thirst for life, are suffering the consequences of ill-devised physiological systems, that rule the American nation, and are converting America into a dicatorship.

The fourth American revolution. It is possible to avoid the extinction of the Jewish-America culture?

All this leads to an unavoidable fact: it is needed a fourth American R=evolution, an evolution of the American system, in the line of EU, able to control lethal goods, within a market society, that has as higher values, social rights over machine rights. Or else the extinction of the Americans, as the Mullah Omar, predicted, will happen, not by the will of Allah though, but by the will of the company-mother and its lethal machines. And America Inc. will rule supreme.

Are we dreaming? It is possible an American r=evolution? Can America evolve? Can Jewish-Americans evolve, or are they slaves of their myths and traditions? There are any place on Earth, in which a Jewish group has evolved and still in control of a nation, has created a paradise, not based in Fundamentalism, but in social history?

Could the Jewish-Americans build a different America, with a different concept of history, politics, and economics, in which human values were paramount?

Indeed, they can do it, if instead of their bid for primitive, fundamentalist ideologies of history and economics (Aaronism) they would finally reform as all other cultures of the world have done, their culture, secularizing it, and using scientific concepts so embedded in the Jewish tradition of medicine, such as an organic body of history, to analyze and rule America and the world for the benefit of the people - cells of the organism of History. To show you how this could have been done, I brought you an example, of a small country, in which the right policies and the right understanding of history in organic, scientific terms, has brought a better world. My country and city, which no long ago, a civilized 'Homo Organicus' politician, my great-great grand father, a doctor of Jewish-sephardi origin, ruled for the wealth and health of all his community...

When Israel seems to weight more and more with his Cultural fundamentalism against the voice of liberal Judaism, it seemed to me a good example of the goals International Judaism should try to achieve, given that cultural fundamentalism has brought once and again the cycles of Holocaust, and war History knows so well.

Paul Mann, webmaster, "The Bioeconomist", Barcelona, Fall, 2001