Finnish narrative

The Finnish narrative:
Background to the NATO misjudgement
The Finnish government and the president have justified Finland´s application for NATO membership by the Russian military operation in Ukraine. Obviously the present crisis has sped up the final step of applying for NATO membership. It has stoked anti-Russian sentiment both in the political elite and among ordinary citizens. However, the membership option has been in the programmes of all governments, whatever their coalition, for a couple of decades. Furthermore, russophobia among a fairly large part of the population (not a majority I believe) has deep roots in history. This can be traced back to the two wars between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-1940 and 1941-1944, at least in the historical memory and narratives of contemporary Finnish people. After those wars until the collapse of the SU Finland had officially friendly relationships with the SU, but later they were mocked as "Finlandization", meaning submission to Soviet goals. Since the beginning of the 1990's the rightwing parties as well as the social democratic party have changed their orientation towards the west, and now (2024) the Left Coalition as well. After Finland joined the EU, the NATO option was included into government programmes. 

The great narrative that has passed down the generations is the idea of a small heroic nation unified against the mighty Russia in the Winter War, in which Finland ensured its sovereignty almost alone, supported only by a small number of Swedish volunteers. That was the Spirit of the Winter War. One cannot say that it is a total lie, because after the war broke out, Finland would have lost its independence without strong resistance. However, it is not the whole truth either. This is because the outcome of the war was worse than what Finland would have achieved had it come to an agreement with the Soviet Union on the territorial demands the SU had concerning the defence of Leningrad. In the Moscow peace treaty after the war Finland lost more of its territory than the SU had demanded, and the battles and bombings resulted in 29,000 casualties. People were not told about the negotiations, but as the government was convinced that people would not accept the territorial concessions, the official story began from the actual Russian military operations after the negotiations had broken off. This story has been kept alive ever since the war 1941- 1944, in which Finland joined German attack on the Soviet Union in order to regain the lost territories with some extra area in Karelia. The second war ended not well either from the Finnish perspective.

To put the story into a context, let´s get back to the weeks and months preceding the beginning of the Winter War. In 1939 Europe was in chaos. Germany had already annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, and in September it attacked Poland, dividing it with the Soviet Union. The UK and France declared war on Germany. Germany and the Soviet Union then signed a non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), and Germany, having now tackled the possible second front in the east, was able to turn its attention to western Europe. The Soviet Union, nevertheless, anticipated an attack from the west, probably from Germany despite the peace pact. The tactical purpose of the SU was to prevent a western alliance against it. The SU had first tried to achieve an agreement with the UK and France, but the UK was reluctant, apparently for ideological reasons. It was also confident that it could win Germany alone if needed. All these were miscalculations. The SU then pressed the Baltic states to accept Soviet military bases on their territories. All three countries were too weak to put up military resistance against the SU. The Soviet Union had Germany's permission to its operations, as agreed in a secret appendix to ther Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In all these events Finland took a neutral position.

One can therefore understand why the Finnish government was concerned about these developments and how it viewed the subsequent proposals of the SU. These included moving the borderline in the Karelian Isthmus further from Leningrad and leasing certain islands in the Gulf of Finland and the Hankoniemi Peninsula to the SU. The government, especially foreign minister Erkko and defence minister Niukkanen, were strictly against any territorial concessions. However, there was a certain amount of understanding for Russian security concerns in the Finnish military. Mannerheim, commander-in-chief at least, expressed these views. While Finland considered the situation from an ideal perspective of the rights of nations, the Soviet Union was concerned about what was really happening in Europe, "realpolitik". Stalin remembered that Finland had allowed the British airforce to make attacks on St. Petersburg from the Finnish territory (Karelia) after the Bolshevik revolution. The Soviet Union sent the Finnish government an invitation to negotiations in Moscow on these issues. The Finnish government sent a delegation of four to Moscow, led by J.K.Paasikivi, with very strict guidelines and a limited mandate to make any concessions to Russian demands.
 
There were seven sessions in these negotiations. Stalin took part in six of them. He was absent only from one discussion on technical matters, which indicates that the Soviet Union took these negotiations very seriously. Finland stubbornly rejected all Russian proposals, especially those concerning the Hanko Peninsula and the borderline in Karelia. In the end Stalin would have accepted some islands on the Finnish coast instead of Hanko with compensating areas, but Erkko was adamant. He thought that the Soviet Union was bluffing and would not start a war about these issues. He also claimed that western governments were backing the Finnish stance, but this was wishful thinking. The negotiations then came to a dead end and Stalin ordered preparations for an attack. Finland made a miscalculation about how serious the Soviet Union was, and Stalin was poorly informed about the capability of the Finnish defence. The war began on the 30th of November 1939 and ended on the 12th of March 1940. The Soviet Union gave up the plan of marching to Helsinki but Finland had to surrender all the areas that the Soviet Union had demanded and a little more. The Finnish army was on the verge of collapse and the Russian army had suffered more casualties than it had expected before the war. In Finland the treaty is called the interim peace (the term was apparently invented soon after the war already).  If the Finnish government had shown more flexibility in the negotiations, the result would have been better (which Paasikivi regretted many times after the war). But in that case the political elite would not have the narrative of a heroic fight against a super power, the narrative that was glorified with the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers. The next war against the Soviet Union alongside with Germany was to add to the count another 60,000 dead heroes. There you have a heroic tale.
 
The NATO application shows that Finland has learned nothing from its history. Two years ago, inspired by the Covid pandemic, I checked how Finland has been prepared for the changing environment in the official risk analysis documents. Pandemics were recognized but the main concern was: "The unity and identity of the nation are mainly based on the jointly acknowleged history and the narrative of who we are. If we ourselves do not tell our narrative, it can be dictated to us by some outsider." The risk analysis considers the military capability as the main means of securing Finland's sovereignty and integrity. There is no mention about diplomatic endeavours to maintain good relations with the neighbouring countries.

Reference:
Pekka Visuri & Eino Murtorinne, Hitler's and Stalin's trading on Finland 1939-1940 (in Finnish)

Media and communicative reason

News and discussions in digital media

Abundance of information in the various media moulds our lifeworld all the time. This information is chaotic as rumours and deliberate lies, opinions and allegations are mixed with matter-of-fact reports and analyses. Writings that help us to arrange this flood of information seem to be rare. The media live on attention but peoples’ interest is not necessarily directed to the messages that give a profound view of matters but mainly to stories that tickle their immediate curiosity. The more peculiar a headline is the more interest, and sales, it will raise. Often this also means that the story tells little about anything that is important to our life. For example, gossip about the relationships of celebrities hardly affect the fate of nations, or economy, except by increasing sales of tabloid press (and ironically, most papers are now in the tabloid format). Another important thing is how quickly the media can publish a scoop. The facts are not often checked carefully enough. This is a specific curse of web pages. While the quality press wants to maintain its credibility, it feels under pressure to comment on rumours that some unprincipled medium publishes. It is not possible for the reader to check the truthfulness of news directly from the sources. Fake news is unscrupulously used for political purposes. 

The flood of information and misinformation gives rather an absurd and fragmentary view of the world. People do not have time to read a plethora of long reports and often content themselves with headlines. We are more motivated to read stories that strengthen our existing beliefs, which again are likely to be those that the media mostly offer. What seems to be the general opinion is taken as the criterion of truth. This situation is an obvious corroboration of the fact that the lifeworld is always an interpretation of the world. The disintegrating concept of truth will erode our lifeworld as well.

The commercial media live through the interests of audience; thus, some sort of populism is vital to their success. There can hardly be any field of science that tells us in almost real time what is going on in the world. I am not familiar with academic paradigms of journalism, but I guess students of the field learn about the criteria of what kind of information is reliable enough to be published. This challenge has been addressed in the press many times, but at the end of this analysis there is a million pounds' bonus.

Our worldview is being shaped by our choices of news that support the view of the media or appeal more to our emotions. One moving human fate sells better than statistics about thousands of equally sad ones, especially when a touching photo is attached to the human-interest story. Destroyed acres of rain forest do not break the news, whereas the decision of a celebrity to pay more attention to his or her carbon footprint does so. What we regard as essential depends on our values, and we should be critical with regard to the order of things as they are represented in the media. We need something more substantial for the framework of our understanding than the daily selection of news. Even the pieces of news that tell about new findings of sciences require critical reading and understanding the preconditions of scientific research.

Every now and then papers publish good essays that give ideas about how we can make sense of what goes on in the world, but these texts do not form a cumulative whole. Instead, the columns usually give advice about how people can cope with their everyday problems. So, newspapers and magazines become an ordinary part of our lifeworld, they inspire daily chat over a coffee and strengthen our sense of belonging to a community. The forming of the overall picture must inevitably be left to historians. 

The world viewed through social media is even more chaotic than what we see in edited papers and TV, including their web pages. Social media are open battlefields of ideas and stories. There you find every­thing that comes to peoples’ minds. On the one hand, it provides a feeling of community, shared experiences, and valuable building blocks to our lifeworld. On the other hand, channels of social media can bring on to you the feeling of strangeness, of being an outsider, or even hatred. It is difficult to interpret correctly the tones of textual messages, and people are quick to answer rudely to the comments they find offensive. So far, rational argumentation is not the standard mode of debate, to say the least. 

It is easy to support ideas put forward in a chat platform, but it is equally easy not to commit oneself to anything. Social media provide a quick channel to opinions, and when they become the public opinion they may influence political decision making, consumer behaviour and so on. When an opinion becomes public, we can hope that it is then open to critical evaluation which is based on facts. No one can guarantee that, however, and the impact can be for good or bad. 

The situation raises questions about the position of the media in our lifeworld. If the core of the lifeworld is what we take as the given truth, what part can the media have in it? Obviously, we learn to trust some sources more than others, and after sufficient corroboration, we accept some texts as true, with the same reservations as other things that we consider to be true. However, it is not unusual that people rely blindly on selected sources on ideological grounds. We have seen rather scary examples of people having lost faith in the truth in general. They may believe more in the authority of strong persons than corroborated research results, or if you happen to be the strong personality, the truth may be harmful to your purposes. Then you can invent “alternative facts”.

Encyclopaedias and evidence

Responsible users of the internet also try build solid edifices of knowledge that are more reliable than random collections of webpages. Encyclopaedias as accumulated storage of knowledge have also naturally taken a digital form. Wikipedia is the best known of those. Almost anybody can contribute to its contents, write new texts, or correct the existing ones. In the background, there are maintainers who control the integrity of Wikipedia. This editorial freedom results in miscellaneous content. The amount of irrelevant information is not a big problem, because the encyclopaedia is not meant to be read in the alphabetical order, or in any order. You find the interesting writings by means of search engines. According to Wikipedia’s own statistics half of the accesses come through search engines. Again, writings in Wikipedia are not often written by experts who have a university degree on the topic in question (nor does a university degree always guarantee the best expertise, either). There are competing encyclopaedias in which experts have written the articles, but they are far behind in popularity, perhaps owing to how search engines have indexed the sources. The idea of gathering and linking individual pieces of information together by means of computers goes back to the 1940’s when Vannevar Bush wrote his article “As we may know”. 

It would be absurd to think that we could rely only on the externalized knowledge, stored in books and digital storages. It is good that we need not burden our memory with a plethora of details of everything we consider worth knowing, but we do need in our mind a framework that gives an order and meaning to elements of knowledge, or at least the power of reason, a method to evaluate the given information. The basis of our worldview is our conviction of what is important to ourselves and to the world. This knowledge is the culture we have grown into through education. It gives us the ability to evaluate the flood of information critically, and, of course, with the help of documented facts. Any constraints to the freedom of thought and speech is a serious danger to humankind. 

Whereas controversial information of the media and social media threaten to shake the integrity of our lifeworld, the critical observer can also use valuable pieces of information to keep his or her worldview sound. But if one does not rely on one’s ability to absorb this information, it is alluring to look at things from a narrow ideological perspective that gives an interpretation of everything irrespective of the facts. Due to the complexity of the world nobody is totally safe against this danger.

Not everything that has been printed throughout history is replicated in the internet yet, but about almost every piece of text, picture, historical monument, or commercial product there is some sort of trace in the WWW. at least an item in a catalogue or other metadata. By means of search engines we can access this vast amount of information. Without those search engines, there wouldn’t be any chance to grasp that information. However, the order of hits does not necessarily agree with your expectations, or the order of significance in your lifeworld. The order of hits is often manipulated by algorithms or users that want to raise the visibility of certain views. One must look at the search results with a very critical eye. The convictions of your lifeworld give the first basis of interpretation, and if the new pieces of information contradict your existing view, you will check the claims from other sources. The situation is challenging, because those other sources are often other websites, too. 

One solution for providing reliability in press and online media would be the same procedure as science uses: if a newspaper, TV channel or an online channel publishes a piece of news, it must give all the media access to the original evidence. So, the claim is submitted to the same kind of peer review as research result of scientists.

The possibility of communicative reason

The main purpose of the essays in this blog has been to inspire confidence in the rational worldview through which the results of science, art, and our ethical reasoning deepen our interpretation of the world where we live. The present situation is rather controversial. Paradoxically, it seems that the only thing people agree upon is that there is no agreement on anything. Well, the goal cannot be that we are unanimous about everything, but we could hope to have a common ground to understand each other, i.e., the shared lifeworld. One of the latest signs of desperation is the phrase that we are living in the post-truth era. It does not matter what you say any longer. Well, what we say is not as important as what we do. If we do not react to signs of climate change, increasing inequality or international conflicts, we will encounter catastrophic consequences. Is it so that humankind can only learn through disasters? Influential thinkers have warned us about what is coming, Stephen Hawking among them. Yet, by expressing those warnings they try to say that we may still have a chance, even if it is the last one. 

People do know the menaces, but they do not see what they can do about them. The political behaviour of masses seems to be rather irrational, which again is a consequence of their confusion. People wait for a messiah who can save them, but the major political characters of today frighten us with their solutions to step backwards in time, to the era of nations fighting against one another. Those whose power rests in their wealth are prisoners of the system they themselves have created, even if they had seen that this road would end in a major catastrophe. Such great human figures as Gandhi or Mandela are rare. No one person can save us from global threats. 

When Bertrand Russell wrote about major risks to humankind during the cold war, the greatest cause for fear was a nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union. Russell saw as a realistic alternative that one party would lose the ideological and economic competition. If I remember right, he hoped that it would be the west, mainly because it was a less totalitarian system. This is what has happened, but there are new threats, beside the previous one – even if that may have diminished in importance. It is still there, and there are new, influential powers with nuclear weapons. The ideological dispute on the economic system is no longer between countries but globally between those who have and those who have not. Those who have not seem to be ideologically very poorly united and give no challenge to those who have money, wealth, and power. However, the major threat is now the risk of environmental catastrophe due to climate change, pollution, and extinction of natural resources. “The good news” is that this risk is common to all people, although perhaps more painful for example to the people living on islands that oceans will cover. The struggle between extreme nationalist ideas and competing religions has replaced the ideological dispute over economy. Terrorist attacks spread fear, which is their purpose, but they also tend to bring about irrational reactions. These confrontations make rational discourse very difficult, almost impossible. Hate talk seems to label social media.

One would hope that the leaders of nations could stay calm and maintain the ability to rational debate. This does not seem to be the case, and actions are taken to emphasise what is said, and what is said is not often what is meant. But if there are anywhere niches in which rational communication still is possible, those marginal spaces must be protected from declining to the same irrational mess as the rest of society. We must hope that someday people are again ready to listen to reason.

The preconditions of communicative rationality are truthfulness, sincerity regarding one’s purposes, and freedom of speech (applied from Habermas’s theory of communicative action). This also means respect for others, decent language, and acceptance of criticism. The guiding principle is: “let the best argument win”. This is possible only if the participants share common understanding of some set of facts, a common lifeworld. When discussion takes place in the net, it would benefit from an AI-tool that could support claims by representing accepted facts as evidence. There is already one application that checks if statistics of research papers are correct. As we can see in the online debates of newspapers, a big problem is the vast amount of comments that nobody has time to read. Comments repeat existing ones. This could be avoided if the support tool elicited a pop up window showing the topic that is being discussed and the writer could reconsider if his or her comment brings anything new to the discussion. I am not quite sure if this might be a killer application – it wouldn’t kill Facebook – but I believe that it would attract people who are eager to take part in a serious and constructive debate. A respectable newspaper should order the system from an innovative software firm.

Essay V, economy and technology

Lifeworld, economy and technology

Technology is one of the most influential factors that define our lifeworld. Homo faber is an essential part of the definition of humanity. The development of technology with its inventions moulds all aspects of life. In the dawn of humankind, the use of tools made it possible for people to utilise natural resources in ever more multiple ways. At first technology meant just the means of interchanging material resources between humankind and nature. Now technology has occupied communication between people as well. Technology has come onto and under our skin. 

Economy is the way to organize production and the interchange of products and services. Economy and technology are deeply intertwined. From the economic point of view technology means efficiency, using as few resources as possible to produce as much as possible. This is the rationale behind the development of technology. It is easy to “invent” ways to do things less efficiently than it is possible with available means, but it is not the rational way. This of course depends on the goals, but are new gadgets themselves the main goal? Technology seems to develop in its own intrinsic ways. The risk here is that we do not see alternative ways of doing things. We act guided by short-sighted economic interest believing in technological determinism. Technical development has become a value in itself, although technology should only be the means to an end.

The overwhelming strive for efficiency of market economy has blinded people to what the consequences are to nature: means of production that are too efficient are exhausting the resources of nature. Economic result is considered quarterly and we do not see gradual changes that imply eventually fatal consequences to life. It may also be that those who mostly benefit from economic growth just do not care, and yet they are the ones who would have the power to change things. Of course, we all consume natural resources and can choose products and services that help to keep consumption on a sustainable level within the limits of the market. However, as retail chains have been organized into vast hypermarkets in out-of-town locations, you must drive ten kilometres to do your shopping and at the same time make your contribution to the greenhouse effect. Then you may be inclined to buy cheap tuna fish (endangered species) instead of more expensive pike from your nearby lakes (benefitting the condition of lakes). The costs incurred to nature are not sufficiently added to the prices of products.

Economic rationale directs our behaviour as well as the development of technology. It seems to be a law of nature although it is as such a product of market economy. Money has become the sole standard of value. Marcuse said this clearly in his One Dimensional Man: “If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator – the commodity form.” So, technological reason takes the position of ideology: technological progress, previously a means of achieving well-being, is now an end itself, to which other ends are made subservient. Marcuse does not long for the poverty and toil of the past, but sees that economic system needs a new foundation for the distribution of goods. Marcuse published his book fifty years ago and was more concerned with the consequences of market economy to our form of life and culture than its ecological effects. The now lurking climate change and ecocatastrophe were not such a critical issue then (or it was not yet recognized in public discourse). 

Habermas explained the controversy over the system and the human being raised by Marcuse through the uncoupling of the system from the lifeworld. According to Habermas the lifeworld is maintained through language and communicative action, while the socio-economic system imposes itself upon actors through the media of money and power. On the one hand this economic rationality and technology do seem external powers that set compelling conditions to our lifeworld, but as we take them as given facts we cannot separate them from the lifeworld. There is a great deal of talk about the necessity of economic growth by increasing consumption and productivity. This is the main message of politicians and economists of the finance sector and industry. The punters do not see any alternative. They argue for economic growth with the argument that unemployment will soar unless economy (in fact profits) grows at the same pace as productivity. However, in the case of bulk products the main means of improving competitiveness is to decrease production costs by means of automation or by transferring factories to countries with cheaper labour force. The problem is what Marcuse saw fifty years ago: the distribution of well-being based on the sale of labour time. 

We must break the fetters of the instrumental-rational ideology and free our thinking to rebuild our worldview starting from the genuine values of humanity. We do have a choice, and ironically, we must make that choice, otherwise we will be doomed. Fortunately, making technological choices is not so extraordinary. It happens every day. The planning of a new technical gadget or production line always takes place by means of evaluating various alternatives. The problem is that the criteria for choosing the best one to be implemented are too narrow: too often the criteria of choice are purely technical and economic. We encounter this situation every day in the clumsy usability of electronic devices, for example. This again impairs our moral fiber, or at least, increases the use of bad language. Seriously speaking, the criteria of choice should include the consequences to nature and society. This can be done by means of legislation (as is the case in the EU to some extent) or adding the costs of correcting the damage done to nature and society to production costs. These broader values should become part of our own consumer behaviour too. We should be aware of them as principles of our lifeworld, and not be guided only by the prices of goods, in order to rise above the narrow vision of economic rationality.

The primary cause for this short-sighted economic order is the investors’ urge to collect profits as quickly as possible. An extreme manifestation of this covetousness is the fact that the handling of stock sales is given to computer algorithms that make decisions in milliseconds. There can hardly be any hope that the transactions take into consideration the consequences to nature or people. Stock values guide the firm managers’ decisions because their bonuses are based on the profits brought to the owners. On the other hand, the problem with planned economy is that it restrains the creativity of actors. There is no such thing as an omniscient administrator who can foresee people’s needs. It can only be some sort of a middle way between a free market and a planned economy that can bring about as good and equal standard of living as possible with constraints of sustainable growth. Adam Smith’s argument for a free market (the invisible hand) was that it would bring about more prosperity than any other economic order. We have, however, seen that the market requires some regulation to guarantee a fair distribution of well-being and the sustainability of natural resources. Net trading gives an illusion of perfectly free market where buyers have the same information as producers, but behind the screen algorithms all the time analyse consumer behaviour and direct pricing for everyone separately. Great research effort is now given to the question of what kind of legislation is needed to control marketing actions made by algorithms, for example to protect consumers from paying for goods more than the market price in a free market situation.

Rationalising production in order to use a minimum of labour, energy and raw materials is a rational goal but its social implications should be taken into consideration. Over-production is one of those risks and it has brought about serious periodical fluctuation in economy. Developing new products and procedures of production requires investments, i.e., capital. Firms can finance their investment by borrowing money from banks or by means of share issues. To motivate investors to buy issued shares they usually expect to gain some profit on their investment through dividends or by being able to sell shares at a better price. The better price is based on expectations about the success of the firm in question. 

However, pure speculation on the stock exchange does not bring about any additional material well-being to society in general. The speculators may get their quick profits (or losses) but the capital in circulation remains at the same level, the money only passes from one pocket to another. Stock speculation is another cause of economic instability. It is a dilemma that the stock market provides motivation for financing industry but at the same time it takes the focus from the real economy that alone brings material prosperity. Would the solution to this problem be something like private investors only being able to sell their shares to publicly controlled finance companies or to public funds, and the profit from selling to another private investor being highly taxed? The main purpose of the funds is to support the strive for the common good, such as pension funds and funds supporting research institutions. Certainly, entrepreneurs can sell their business to another entrepreneur or firm, if the other firm does not get a monopoly in the market. This kind of trade is already regulated by legislation. Speculation on land should also be prevented, because it only hinders the progress of productive business. Market economy is a very complicated thing and its invisible hand should be made visible and controllable.

A major challenge for people today is the development of artificial intelligence to the point that it can totally beat human intelligence and (as some people fear or hope) can subordinate people to computers. This issue is important from the point of view of the lifeworld and humanity. The reasons for developing artificial intelligence are both economic and intellectual. Why shouldn’t we use computers to do complex calculations that exceed our own capabilities? Computers are tireless workers that do not make mistakes. However, we cannot call computers to account for their decisions, they are not responsible actors in society. The responsible one is always the person who has set the computer to do a task. He can again accuse a programmer, but you cannot claim compensation from the computer for the wrong decision. Computers are not fellows of our lifeworld, and they are not moral actors. So, they should not have the ultimate power over us, although we can set great store by their calculations and suggestions. The predicted point of singularity in which computers themselves can develop better computers won’t change this relationship. 

The humankind should use all available means to secure its existence and life in general. People with normal intellect would naturally have an interest in safeguarding their free and moral will. I can imagine a science-fiction scene in which doctors Strangelove and Faust sell their souls to a super-intellectual machine after having reached the conclusion that the human being must give way to intellectually more perfect forms of being (can we call them life?). I look forward to a production of Faust in which a computer sings Mefisto’s role. Its faultless performance would enchant Faust and the audience as well.

Technology gives an expectation towards future in our world view. That expectation gets its psychological tone from our experiences, our view of history and our personality. My personal view is controversial. On the one hand, I believe that I am an optimist, but on the other hand my confidence in the capability of the human kind to control technology and economy is not very high. The chaotic information flow from the media clouds the vision further. The worst fear is that the intellect that has lost its reason will destroy a significant portion of life on earth. The hope lies in the wish that reason will overcome, and that is why I take the trouble to write these essays. Technology is not the answer to all problems. We must also be able to change our way of life. Reason is our ability to set our goal for a better life and subordinate our intellect to that goal.