Diplomacy and International Respect

Authored and read by Mayasonette Lambkiss

1/20/2024

Episode #11 of the show SPACESUIT MADE OF FLESH

An Academic Voicecast Publication of

The Institute of Universal Human Rights - Hawaii

What is diplomacy? Diplomats are authorized and highly trained communication mediators in sensitive international and domestic affairs between individuals, organizations and government. Literally, anyone involved in public life in a state level, federal, or international arena will need to be skilled at strategic communication styles. Diplomats are professional relationship specialists using skills as advisors of political decision makers, writers and strategy creators of treaties, negotiators, and alliance builders. In a nutshell they face interhuman diversities and they are in the frontlines to negotiate and mediate potential misunderstandings, troubleshoot, remedy unfavorable conditions.

Diplomacy is firmly required to respect a diverse set of values and often categorically different from what the diplomat holds true for themselves. As the public face of international relationships, a prominent level of self-examination and self-control are vital qualities. Ethics and etiquettes of diplomatic protocols are taught and need learning to help bridge communication between radically diverse cultures and produce mutually beneficial results between nations, and on all levels of government. These high-level communication skills need time and relevant long-term exposure to acquire them, nobody is born with them.

The attitude of open mindedness and actualized diplomatic skills are not enough to combine collectivist and individualist cultures. The truth is that one without the other is catastrophically dysfunctional. In a healthy society everyone is using both philosophies, placing themselves on a scale between the extremes in a healthy zone. The more individualist you want to be the more you need to seek unusual opportunities but there is no need to do that at the expense of communitarianism. How can you stand out if there is no one around you who doesn't? How can you lead if none is following? Pay your taxes, don't commit a crime, and everyone will leave you alone. And if you can afford to be alone, you don't even have to work and compromise your uniqueness. My best friend always emphasizes how unique, eccentric, and unusual he is. It frightens him to realize everyone is just as unique, true to their own self, and an extraordinary person as he is, because it would make him the same as everyone else: special. We all need community, we depend on each other, and our shared natural resources, infrastructure, education, and greater variety of food than the pots can grow in the window. We need each other, but it should not interfere with our uniqueness, our hearts' concerns. Martin Luther King was courageous in fighting for his own individual equal rights, only we all do that in our own ways. But he was unique for doing that for the masses, he led his aching community. It is the tiny freedoms of his youthful formation as an individual that raised him as a leader. but without the community, he would have influenced nobody's life. Martin Luther King is an excellent example of how individualism enriches, even makes communal life fundamentally better. Without his soar as an individual, an entire community would have missed a revolution.

The Foundation for Economic Education published on July 2nd 2022, in their article: Individualism, a Deeply American Philosophy:

"It would take many decades before the laws recognized that women and blacks were just as equal as anyone else. However, with the overthrow of caste systems like slavery, Jim Crow, and the legal subjugation of women, America has come much closer to living up to its individualistic founding principles. And hopefully, this progress can serve as an inspiration for further steps toward the protection of individual rights in the future."

When you enter a college, or any kind of school, training, you are joining a community of students and applying etiquette to fit in. But you are learning in your own way, with your own individual goals in mind, and your unique interpretations form you into the individual that you will be on your graduation day. When you enter your dorm, you will be sharing facilities with your floor-mates, but you don't have to sell your aunt's house you inherited to join the college commune. It is called boundaries. Sects are extremes, something neither healthy citizens nor public life diplomats will be supportive of.

History and Government Expert Robert Longley wrote on June 29, 2020 in his article on Communitarianism in the Thought CO. online academic magazine:

"Developed in 1990 by Amitai Etzioni, responsive communitarianism seeks to strike a more carefully-crafted balance between individual rights and social responsibilities to the common good of the society than authoritarian communitarianism. In this manner, responsive communitarianism stresses that individual freedoms come with individual responsibilities and that neither should be neglected to accommodate the other.

The modern responsive communitarian doctrine holds that individual liberties can be preserved only through the protection of a civil society in which individuals respect and protect their rights as well as the rights of others. In general, responsive communitarians stress the need for individuals to develop and practice the skills of self-government while remaining willing to serve the common good of the society when needed."

In a healthy society individuals learn the basic norms of collective living and use boundaries as means to achieve comfort for everyone involved. On an international level it gets way more complicated. While all European countries living in an international community called the European Union have laws to regulate their economy, armed forces, police activities, businesses, academic institutional learning, sports, and tv-channels, the boundaries between the nations remain to stand and are essential for governmental control. Such control is there to protect and represent the locals' lifestyle, economy, safe living. But even though they separate nations for the sake of better control, and therefore better-quality interactions between nations, they are also determined to connect them by elements of basic human nature. Nations cannot exist in isolation either, or any that has ever tried woke up to a very dire realization of failing hard. Survival and business will still always be the major motivator for networking, but there is also curiosity, intrigue, a desire to be heard and seen, sharing cultural achievements.

By explaining the difference between liberals and conservatives, Jonathan Haidt in his TED-Ed, talk in 2013 compares the individualist liberals with the conservative communitarians on a scale of openness:

"It really is a fact, that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience'. People who are higher on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel; people who are lower just like things that are familiar, safe and dependable."

In politics interactions are either to limit someone from overstepping, or to draw them in for increased economic benefits. The American society is incredible, because it sort of follows the rule of agreeing to disagree, or more aptly put, it has been established to build communities of individualists. Diplomats are authorized negotiators to mitigate international disagreements and avoid conflict, therefore they build a commune of individualists on an international level. Negotiations between members of society is an ongoing cultural activity, for there is a customized need for community and a customized need for individualism to make it all work together. Communities are not produced in cookie factory assembly lines. Communities are custom made, and that is their superpower.

Aloha

Thank you for listening to the SPACESUIT MADE OF FLESH human rights promoting voicecast from Hawaii, authored and read by Mayasonette Lambkiss