Understanding values as general sources of happiness
Motto: Who are to be the New Intellectuals? “Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.” Ayn Rand
What is something valuable? How can you define the value of something? To be politically correct, value is “ the usefulness of something considered in respect of a particular purpose”.
My vision of “value” as a basic concept of our modern society is that “value” is meant to be a tool of moral awareness and a form of obtaining happiness for you and all around you. The pursuit of happiness begins thus with cultivating and creating the opportunity for your body and mind to be enlightened with the idea of correct values.
People can be happy only by trying to serve the greater good, being valuable to their society, and empowering their abilities to do so. “Values” become now, an activity that can be “learned” to find and do the greater good, or seek the essential omnipresent happiness in “things”.
Focusing on EU values as administrative mechanisms meant to create social cohesion and discovering the value of one, and the power of many, we can understand freedom, security, and justice as prime aspects of good governance, together with the perfect triangle of democracy: opposition — power and the civic society. Applying what was said before we can thus conclude that good governance can be described in the EU’s Plan D, — a wise construct of dialog, debate, and a good act of democracy.
The first principle or value that occurs to me when talking about Roma’s values in analogy with the EU’s values, is the basic idea of union and togetherness. The Roma family is so tight and so evolved in unity, that nothing could ever break the harmony of an entire society based on cohesion rules, rules that have a natural cause — the need to help themselves.
To apprehend those sensible mechanisms that occur in this study, I invite you to open your mind to the Roma people and their challenging history. Can you explain why they didn’t disappear like other nations? They stood together and at the same time in a paradoxical way they lived apart having the possibility of seeing and understanding other cultures. From “this” derives a certain way of living inside and outside their space, evolving and developing a new culture em-bettering the ones achieved by traveling and transforming the true essence of those seen, heard, and felt.
The value of “unity in diversity” is a basic EU concept, omnipresent in the Roma society that drives us to the conclusion that the Roma people have maybe a more common sense of what a union means and how to be treated than a non-Roma person. Furthermore, the fascinating culture of the Roma people can be revealed as one of the many values they have and conserve with a holly faith. Unique and incredibly diverse, values of a culture that were European before Europe itself stand in front of us today, like a limitless river of information and tradition transferred from generation to generation.
The power of emerging from “problems” confirms a more focused way of life on the needs of Roma and how to resolve them. This practical way of seeing the resolution and the common sense answer to questions makes Roma persons eligible for true knowledge. We can once again ask ourselves now, “Who are to be the New Intellectuals?” and answer with no shame or regret that Roma people could be the new stage in moral, ethical, and intellectual evolution. Want to participate in my studies? Make yourself heard! Comment!