I see you and Big Brothers watch nothing

A recent research established that a company will have better results if the face of its CEO was larger than average. Well that was the conclusion of the research and the exception established is if the top management does not see the world in a black and white way. People who have a tendency to not discuss generalization obey better to authority, and a large face is actually a sign of authority in our world. Top management capable of understanding relativity do not abide by their CEO's authority constantly. The idea is that people who feel powerful in some aspect of their life will tend to look at the big picture in that part of their life ( yours truly). 

What is the point of that fact? Well that we do live in a synoptic society and that Foucault might have been seriously wrong. What do I mean by a synoptic society? Well, Foucault had an idea that society worked like a prison invented by Jeremy Bentham ( he actually stole this idea from some one else I cannot place at this moment). Anyway, the prison was in a circle with open rooms and a tower in the middle. The guards were in the tower in the middle, meaning that every prisoners could be seen by the guards. The trick was though that the prisoners could not see if the guards were watching them ( because the guards were behind some kind of tainted windows). So prisoners had to behave constantly because they could not hide, as you can hide only from seers you know. Society worked like that in some institutions said Foucault, and people interpreting him thought the expansion of Closed Circuits Television (CCTV) reflects this articulation of power.

Well, it is a slight misinterpretation of Foucault as Foucault's main idea is that we have to self-disciplined ourselves constantly just in case we get caught. It is among the ways that society regulates itself. High society establish rules, that people will feel they have to copy to look good, even though no one is looking. So panopticon is the idea that everybody get watched, synoptic is the idea that everybody is watching someone. And we are effectively in a synoptic society.

An objection: I thought you just said that we self-disciplined ourselves to look like a high-class society even when we are not watched. Well, yes we do, but not really the high-class society. What we copy is just the class higher than ours, the one we can see and what we see, because we are all trying to enter the club that does not accept us as a member. We do not try though to get into the club that will never accept us as a member. As such, the panoptic self-discipline society is a theory that is not complete enough and I will ask you to see the theories of Bourdieu to understand that the articulation of power are far more complicated than Foucault made it look like.

The synoptic society is though a theory of power that we can all relate to as it is the illusion of responsibility we are all subject to. Not our responsibility, but the responsibility for what is wrong with whatever we see in our world. My first example will be Mr. Mubarak, who's been for more than 20 years head of state of Egypt, as you might have recently learned, and has now been deposed by the army. He was seen as the problem of the country, and his removal seemed like the solution for all the problems. Everything was centered on him. Now, how can a civilian rule a country for so long with the agreement of the army and when some people demonstrate, as they did repeatedly in these decades, suddenly the army drop the arms? Well we don't care. And it is not the news anymore when Mubarak is not head of the country anymore.

Would we have been in a panopticon society, we could observe that the son of Mubarak was building contacts with american companies in the last 5 years and there were talk of him succeeding his father. Of course, the problem were the demands from these American companies. What companies generally ask is for a neoliberal economy, which means that the biggest company just walk over the small companies and establish their monopoly on a market. In the case of Egypt, the market was and is still dominated by companies created or owned by the Egyptian army. Mubarak junior tried to dismantle these companies and this aggravated the Army. So came the Tunisian revolution, the army jumped on the wagon against the Mubarak... A panoptic society, everybody is guilty.

A real panoptic society could exist only in a state of constant guilt and public confession. We are in a synoptic society, were the guilty are always the one person on top we like to see as the master of evil. A synoptic society is also the one were the winner is the one person we think is the genius. If we look at apple, we can see that everybody cares one way or the other about Steve Jobs. Do we care only that he had done nothing directly for the changes in Apple, but the real change was only the change in marketing agency for the company in 1999?

What regulates our daily life is the not the fear of being caught, it is just what the people left and right do. The clearest of examples are my home countries: Belgium and Greece. Both countries vote heavily for socialist parties. The problem is that as much as their political ideology hold the name of socialism, both countries' population have no problems in cheating on their taxes. It is not a taboo at all. The irony is of course that it is the political parties that are seen as the root of the problem, when it is mostly the social norm that is problematic.

Of course, the question is how to change the social norm? Surveillance could work. Surveillance is seen as evil. CCTV in Belgium and in England are soaring, but I know from police source that they are used a posteriori of any crimes, never as preemptive tools. CCTV is evil, as it is really misused, surveillance though does not exist. I do not know. Knowledge and surveillance are not the same and yet there are sometimes intersections. If we could see everything, if we could propose change for everything, be listen and vote on everything we are interested in. It does not work that way.

What I see it is just that we take some individuals as scape-goats, for the worst and the best. The worst though is our fault. It is never one company, it is never one banker. Of course it is hard to judge ourselves and our friends. The solution is to ask for a change, but this goes on the domain of the ethic of consequences, and god knows all the horrors of our world has been done on such ethic ( the greater good). So how to change our bad behavior ? I really do not know anymore. I would just say that when Warren Buffett and rich French people tell you that they should pay more, just ask yourself what they have paid less in the last decade and what percentage of their fortunes it represents compare to what they propose to pay... It is never one person, it is never that person good action that repairs the bad. The only advise I find this time is in the chorus of Dan le sac Vs. Scroobius-Pip

just be nuts and lay (it) down

In the last twenty days, I have finished reading books and essays from Lenin, Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Freud and Chuang Tzu. This is quite a heavy mix for the mind and as a result I will blurt out the little conclusions I can come to when thinking about our present times using as an inspiration what they have written a bit less than a hundred years ago ( except for Chuang Tzu).



To start with a joke, my conclusion with these authors is that I agree with Habermas when he states that the Enlightment was a halfway done job. (Drums) These authors did not help my sense of humor, I know. Anyway, I actually disagree with Habermas to some extent. I think the first point to make is that Enlightment had never started and could never end. It rather got expanded through the Korean invention of print (take that euro-centrics!) and its quasi-democratisation in Europe ( oooooh :'( ) I say quasi because depending of the countries, censure would heavily exist or be ineffective.



The development and circulation of literature and ideas brought the reverence of eternal arts to the home of everybody. Indeed, books, unlike conversations, can be read and re-read at leisure to find new ideas in new lectures or confirm old ideas. The mind has changed there onwards. Religious clerks, the little priests from the countryside, were not the sole people to hold the cultish ideal of the Word in their hands, but the whole village could have it. Everybody could read, or look at pictures and it did not have this special ideal of being the sole power of the church or the few chosen intellectuals to states possible answers to big questions. It was the not the business of the aristocracy anymore, but also of a rising bourgeoisie and at some point, even the proletariat were allowed the skills to read.



It was not enough to emancipate the world, but it was enough to destroy some institutions that relied upon the lack of capacity of the people to reach informations. Notably, the Catholic Church soldiers could not wander in their ways and sell VIP tickets to heaven anymore. Would Martin Luther not have told them, someone else surely would have come along and tell them something in those lines, as nowhere in the holy printed book does it say that VIP tickets could be sold by Peter's descendents. The print made the people who read realize how much of a scam the Catholic Church was and, though rituals are important in the sense that they commemorate knowledge that should not be forgotten acquired by humanity, liberated us from this institution.



Of course, people did not have much to read at the time. That was an important factor. The Bible was the super-ego of society, in the sense that it dictated the rules of society or unto which society ought to abide by. Violence was only the repress sense of guilt of the non-following of these rules. That is why Christian society was as violent as any other society, and probably more, as the rules set by Jesus can be hard to understand and follow. He did indeed set a more than conflicted super-ego, creating a society that did no know whether it should let its instinct go wild or its reason. Secular versus Eternal, Kings against Popes, represents the internal conflict of the mind on a societal scale.



And society became neurotic a little bit when came the Protestants. Why do I say such a thing? Well first of all, we can observe the internal tension and masochism of civil tensions and exterminations of unbalanced beings that cannot find an enemy outside, but rather punish themselves for not knowing who ought to be guilty. The massacre of the protestants, the catholics, the jews inside our own borders is again a societal psycho-pathology that can exist in an individual requiring rejection to feel that it has a judging father. An eternal god ready to set the rights and wrongs against our instinctive will, something that will be there before and after our mind, to be sure that we exist and we do not make everything up. We did not know what was right from wrong anymore and everything was up for discussion. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as it is a public debate, which it was, between the forces in power. The unconscious though was stable. The main population knew its place. It was a repressed part of society, the most important part repressed, and represented what should never be in power if we would have to be civilized, except if it could sublime itself.



Wait a second, it does not seem like society was neurotic, and it seems I am with such writing. Well, both can be true and false. I can represent the state of society as it is now as I am a mega-digester of artifacts, I do not hold one god, I do not have one father. And I know that values are laws and I do not know the laws.



So back to square one to make sense and make of this article a synopsis of my psycho-analysis, or rather the one of society. Print diluted at first the instinctive response to corrupt civilizing process on a large scale. Print made us realize that the Bible – the transformation of human nature into a sensible story- was not what our human nature transformed it into – the Catholic Church. So what happened is that we were both confronted with the realization that we had a human nature – every day's corruption of values- and we had a way out: the Bible. (I am talking only about Europe and an analysis of China could come later on, as for other civilizations, I do not hold enough knowledge – I could try Japan as it is an interesting counter-example of a strong unchanged super-ego).



The Bible did not seem to be enough. We did not like it and did not like the multiple interpretations and we were lost. We took it on ourself and so killed some of our neighbors. It was hard to be lost. And it was hard to be without a sense of what is right and what is wrong. So came the idea that we could write what is right and what is wrong and instead of following an oral tradition ( god bless the Hasidim) or a wise-men re-adapted word ( J.C. in da houze) we could make our own in a constantly evolving law. We mixed the idea of an eternal super-ego and a living-evolving ego.



It worked because people who got to make the laws were the people in power and they had a super-ego of their own in the fact that they possessed everything: eternal knowledge, philosophy and arts. By the way, whenever I use the word eternal, I use it only on a human phenomenological level, meaning that it means it will survive before and after my death. It makes me care for the world before and after me and I do not have to consider the idea that it exist only because I think it exists. Would I choose this later case; I could have gone on a Norwegian rampage with a Colt Peacemaker just for the cheer pleaser of looking like Clint.



So the bourgeoisies held in their hands education (the capacity to read books) and arts ( the ideology of the eternal), and they could make societies super-ego as their was no sense of right and wrong dictated by one single book anymore ( there was never actually a sense of right and wrong in the Bible, but god forbids we would read the book and get free as J.C. would have wanted us to be! - fuck John and his apocalypse). So they made up, to replace the idea of God on Earth (the Catholic Church), the Nation-State, which held a cult art, a cult history, a super-ego.



And it was good. Until the ego felt the need to kill that super-ego because it knew that the father was corrupted ( down with Chronos !) or it received a slap from the super-ego because the ego grew too fast. The slap was fascism and the war. It has to be said that the simple super-ego of most of the western world was really good between 1900 until the end of the 1930's. It was bound to go wrong as there was never as much international economic exchanges and such a spread of education. The masses indeed got to know what was unfair in the word through books and newspapers. They asked for system that had more justice for everybody. The practice of the law did not make the justice (go Kafka).



I realized that when I've learned this week that the most successful in term of votes American elections was the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. in 1936 after he made this speech:



“...For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”



Fear gets our instinct out if we do not have strong eternal injunctions. We forget yesterday's acquired knowledge and what we made of it. More than that, if democracy is the eternal psycho-analysis of our need to have a sense of guilt and shame for our dos and donts, we need to discuss constantly the foundation of our system of justice, of its origins or accept one once and for all and let the rest of our instinct go wild, but we cannot be in a in-between state.



Of course, the World War 2 was only a small catharsis and it was not over for our history. First of all, it has to be remembered that though some communist regimes were repressive, there economic system did work until the 70s. The 1970’s were the strange period of the world. It was the period where countries and civilizations were close to a break down. The USA got unto imperialism though discreet through shock therapy, Europe got to deal with itself and the different dictatorial system it still had, Russia lost their hope when they learned they could not get on the moon (it is still hard to believe we got there). I do not know why the Chinese accepted Deng Xiaoping reforms, except that they did not accept the repression of their human nature.



The idea is that art as it is, is the reproduction of our internal tensions. It works for an individual, but for society, art gets a position a priori and dictates whether the tensions have been accepted or not, they dictates or shows the commands we have chosen for ourselves, they represent the super-ego or its lack. Cinema and television represents a form of atheist polytheism where values are saturated, just like law can be, and our values are mixed up to make us a neurotic civilization.



We are back to square one and we can either accept that the super-ego and where it comes from is wrong, but we need then to know what it is and where it is from. Or we need to accept its slap, in the way the German and the Italians did, but understand that it won't last. We can observe that in both the sadomasochism is emerging as the Germans are the first one to hate them in the name of the ecosystem and the Italians are so as well in the sense that they constantly elect the mafia they used to abhor. As for the American, they have either too much super-ego, in the number of laws that cannot be accounted for or the lack of super-ego in their culture industry.



Freud said it so himself, it is not only the case to get rid of the super-ego that has been created in our civilization by the holders of the means of productions, and we have to build up our own super-ego and the constantly changing nature of the ego.



I will state I think what should be the lines unto which a civilization might want to adhere, without making a fuss of making it a cult, as cult have come to be as well the object of discussion and rebellions as every civilization feels sometimes like too much of oppressed teenagers. I will just outline what I want my super-ego to make me feel guilty about and internalize it without having to discuss it too much afterwards:



'And moreover men are liable to eight defects, and (the conduct of) affairs to four evils; of which we must by all means take account.

' 1 To take the management of affairs which do not concern him is called monopolising.

2 To bring forward a subject which no one regards is called loquacity.

3 To lead men on by speeches made to please them is called sycophancy.

4 To praise men without regard to right or wrong is called flattery.

5 To be fond of speaking of men's wickedness is called calumny.

6 To part friends and separate relatives is called mischievousness.

7 To praise a man deceitfully, or in the same way fix on him the character of being bad, is called depravity.

8 Without reference to their being good or bad, to agree with men with double face, in order to steal a knowledge of what they wish, is called being dangerous.

Those eight defects produce disorder among other men and injury to one's self. A superior man will not make a friend of one who has them, nor will an intelligent ruler make him his minister.

'To speak of what I called the four evils:



1 To be fond of conducting great affairs, changing and altering what is of long-standing, to obtain for one's self the reputation of meritorious service, is called ambition;

2 to claim all wisdom and intrude into affairs, encroaching on the work of others, and representing it as one's own, is called greediness;

3 to see his errors without changing them, and to go on more resolutely in his own way when remonstrated with, is called obstinacy;

4 when another agrees with himself, to approve of him, and, however good he may be, when he disagrees, to disapprove of him, is called boastful conceit.





These are the four evils. When one can put away the eight defects, and allow no course to the four evils, he begins to be capable of being taught.'



I chose those because I was confronted with them recently, they are not only stubborn to an ethic of moderation and they can be rules of national and international politics as much as rules for individuals. I have written for way too long now, and I need to print these rules for my desk. I did not want to take on any Christian interpretation because J.C. had too much faith in humanity to think that we can handle ourselves without fathers. We will have to come to term though with our conflicting nature ( Eros and Ananke; Instinct and civilization) as we will be the parents ourselves, soon enough, of artificial intelligence, and it would be sad to be horrible parents. I will leave you on a poem I came to love and love to hate:



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

( Philip Larkin ; This be the verse)

Kaiser Chiefs: The contemporary Cassandras

 ( I'm not fond of Kaiser Chiefs)

Well, I guess that everybody will talk about the riots this week and they are right to do so. The riots are not riots. There are no riots, riots is only a question of perspective. Riots, protests and demonstrations are all the same form of destructive ( even in peace, it has a sense of destruction ) assembly due to a common disagreement by a large enough group. What is interesting to note, as always, is not the causes and articulations of the riots but rather the reactions to it.

First thing first, it has started as a protest against the police and soon enough was this element forgotten by the public and the media. It is repeated that the parents of Duggan ( the alleged dealer who got shot) asked for the rioters to not use his name as a reason to protest and I entirely back up this argument. The police should not be criticized like that on a sole unique example but it should be reminded that a dozens of people at least die each year while in custody, that the police have undercover agent provocateurs for few protests ( caught on camera but never mentioned by mainstream media) and that though we are reminded through a few documentaries every year that policemen are racists. We do not mind that newspapers put pictures of only minority ethnic people on their frontpage for the riots though. The police service has decayed in the last century and this deserves a long lasting demonstration on its own. Also, the fact that the police does not know how to calm down rioters, let them for the first few days go wild so they can afterwards use violent deadly tools does not make the police better.

Of course, I repeat weekly that it is hard to do some self-criticism especially when it implies the lost of the devil we know for a deep blue sea ( a new system, a new policing service, or anything new is scary) . I am though in the fortunate position to be a self-hating bourgeois in the style of Gramsci and Lenin ( and self-critical enough to know I have no humility when I compare myself to these genii of the 20^th century). What I observe is the main reaction to these riots as there were for any demonstration in the last twenty years in Europe: we just want to see the worst in them.

Even the 'left' media just centered there pictures and examples on the opportunistic aspect of the riots. Those are riots exploding on a sudden urge, it is normal that they have an opportunistic, unorganized, apolitical aspect. Are we really astonished at that ? The police has let the riots go for two days so we can forget the police shot a man, twice and accused the deceased of violence. They have let the media go on to say that the rioters are undisciplined and destructive so fear can run among the general population. Would it have been any political demonstration, police would have been geared up and ready to direct and hit whoever would have been problematic, knowing that an organized demonstration has in our minds more legitimacy and can overthrow a government. Harry Potter fans can overcrowd Trafalgar square when anticuts protests get kettled.

In the Guardian of Tuesday, we can see the happy well-paid bohemians of Tottenham brandishing their brooms to say: 'Yes, we'll clean up behind the rioters' to show their sense of community. On the picture, they were all whites. Those are the people not minding that much the consenting liberal approach of the s ystem. They do not care that money = poverty ( logical saying from The Culture in Ian M. Banks fictions) because they have the money to pay. What were they doing on a Thursday during the day cleaning up the streets when the rioters are required to look for jobs? What kind of system is it where economic imperialism is in theory frowned upon ( all these london bohemians vote 'labour' or 'liberal') but its consequences are ignored?

We all know that these riots have started in places where you find extremes in wealth. The rich lives next to the poor. We all know that the English government at present does not mind such extremes and indeed favors it as it means lower wages for the people owning no mean of production. We have also now more good reasons now to dislike the 'Chavs' and 'hooded youth', even as liberals. The liberals are the blind submissive population of England and this is the conclusion of these protests. When they see racism, they see horror, they do not see that misery creates racism and economic oligarchy creates misery.

We are all aware of the reasons for such riots. The BBC made an interview of a West Indian writer who's grandson was in the riot and lived there ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o&feature=youtu.be) and it is funny to see that while he explains in details the frustration of living there, his interview cannot be found anymore on the BBC website. We prefer to see the looting and make fun of it because it either reflects on how much in a consumer society we are, or how stupidly unpolitical the looters are. Doesn't it show the extent to which the society is fucked up?!

The rioters live in miserable conditions in a system that has crushed any perspective of a descent future for them. Those are good excuses for demanding for a better society, from our educated perspective. Yet, they are not educated and go loot for what they have been taught to want ( result of basic hegemony) and what do we, well educated left-wing liberal thinkers, get out of it? ' Stupid pricks looting the small shops'. If we had there balls, real empathy for their outrage, if we would have an ounce of integrity, we would go down the there with them and go for the parliament, whether with a broom in hand or a baseball bat.

I am not going to extend too much on this because all the media are against them. We all want to see only the violence under our eyes rather than the symbolic violence it stems from.

Why are you Guy Fawkes ?

Not many people will complain for the delay, but I have quite a cool explanations. I was away in Freiburg and I have put up 250 flyers up with printed masks and invitations to join the Anonymous forum whatis-theplan.org.

It took me a while to think about the subject of this article. I know that it looks most of the time as I am just writing it on the go, and I am but it is after I spent time thinking and self-reflecting and very rarely on a sudden urge. The ideas were various and I think I should start with simple questions.

• You take a chair and take out the back-support and armrests, is it still a chair ?
• There is so much emptiness that under a microscope, two fingers can never touch themselves and yet, why is it so hard to see void ?
• If you see a bird, and it starts swimming and lays eggs giving birth to fish, is it still a bird?
• If you'd have to, would you kill a sibling of yours to save two strangers?
• Is it natural for a person to change sex?
• If we make a colony on Mars, what will be our definition of a year?
• If you are like no one else, what is humanity?
• 47,9 + 32,6 =..... ? You can touch a calculator, but you can't touch the mental process that gave the answer to that question, so what comes first, your mind or your body?
• You wait. Is that active or passive?
• I speak French because it is my mother-tongue, yet I made the decision to speak Esperanto to my children. Would Esperanto have been my mother-tongue, would I have made another decision?
• Yesterday, I saw Santa Claus in an empty street and he told me a secret. Do you think this could be true?

Ok, maybe those are not simple questions and I congratulate you if think they are as you must have accumulated much more knowledge than I ever managed to. I will reformulate by the way the questions at the end of the article I think, just to make sure we are on the same wave.

So let's assume that you and I share a real world, as it is laid out under our eyes. I will ask you by the way not to assume I am too crazy when I say that the world under our eyes might not be it. I just like to nourish some doubts sometimes. I do know the objections to the doubt: 'whether or not it is an illusion or whatever, why does it matter?'. Well, I think I will make a point why doubting sometimes does matter. Maybe it is just that I think we should not ignore our past and recognize that we have been wrong quite a few times so we might as well think we can still be wrong.

But on the reality of our world, let's say that we live in it. As the poet said to the bishop:' Fuck, this hurt – now do you see it's real!'. History did good I think to forget the poet as it was just in profession that he was such, and not in mind.

So the question to ask ourselves after that one should be: why don't we make the world a better place?

Anyway, we live in a world with other people and we abide by the rules we are told by our parents, our friends and by what we see. Of course we do not exactly abide by every rule and we all adapt them to the circumstances and most of the times we act on them without reflecting on them, not even afterwards. We do reflect on negative consequences to some actions and tell ourselves maybe not to repeat them. But rarely does reflection come unto any significant habits of daily life as we take habits for granted. We have to take it for granted. Otherwise, if we applied reasoning on everything, we would probably go crazy rather quickly.

I have though yesterday come to discuss the question of death penalty with someone I had just met. This person had to write an exam where she was to make a defense of death penalty and refused herself to do so. I pointed out that this was as smart as a person in favor of death penalty refusing to write a defense against the death-penalty. Apparently though, the principle against death-penalty is morally superior enough not to be asked such a task when the belief in favor is not. The lack of self-reflection on the matter, the lack of incapacity to find the origins of this sense of moral superiority, was for me the most problematic aspect of her position.

Of course I am against death-penalty, but I do know why and that is why I can do a pretty good defense in favor, as it does not make me doubt my belief. Somehow, I am afraid that Europeans are still capable of extremism as they judge so easily and are incapable of empathy. Empathy for the devil does not mean you support his actions. It only means that you see and understand his point of view and would you be good at empathy, you would see that it is only frustration leading him, as he was only an ignored second son and not because he is inherently evil. 

This latter position is an easy one and truthful as much as the other one, it leads though to no resolution and not possibility for peace.

Anyway, I am going off my intended path. I am just amazed everyday at our capacity for judging individuals when we are so incapable of self-reflection and acting on those few self-reflections. My point from this last anecdote was that I want to try not to get common sense to hit me too often and allow long defenses for any moral arguments. The foundation for my morality is that tomorrow will be better because yesterday was worse. It is just a belief and I want to work towards that belief. I do not want to act good because of a possible punishment after death, or because I am afraid of society's punishment, or worst of all because I do not know why. I have already detailed this in one of my first posts.

I was just wondering why there is so much apathy in the world. When were the children in us killed? I do think that we are more insensible than we used to be, but we just love to lie to ourselves about it so we do not have to find the root of this problem. Of course, for example, death has become a great taboo and could be the example of the scared souls we have become, except that sending our dying off to places we do not deal with it is not sensible at all. Students in U.K.went down in the streets and the same day their tuitions fees tripled and they did not get angry. We care for our children, and yet we are fully aware that we will leave them worse off. We leave them to be kids for a while and then we tell them the dreams of youth are gone.

I am just wondering why we cannot ask for world peace anymore. Why do we have to still have weapon production when history proves that you do not need weapons to win a war? Why does starvation exist when we can travel the world faster than Earth can spin on itself? Why do we think that corruption is not surprising anymore and why are we cynics about it when it is so easy to have a political conscience. I do not really know yet. I am trying to work it out.

I will say this. I do believe that social movements changed the world for the best every time they appeared. I do want to learn from history and I will use our Christian heritage as leverage for making people feel guilty about the way they have let things go. I have joined Anonymous, which is not about anonymity as much as it is about asking for real change for a better world. If you believe blindly the mainstream media about Anonymous being only about hacking, then you are a mediocre human being blindly accepting serfdom. The hacking is the destructive ( though not physically hurting anyone, as it is a motto of the social movement) part of movement, but if the bullseye were the CIA, the FBI, other armed forces and a lot of military contractors, I am asking you this: Why have so far only eight people aged in their teens been arrested?

Teenagers, let's put an end to this myth, do not have the capacity to do serious hacking. Police just arrest people who have put out their voice to say that they want change and the ones who did not do it discreetly got publicly arrested. Adults could have been arrested in this investigation as well, but the point of the arrests were to morally pressure the whole social movement. You say the soviet union put a bad name to communism, I will ask you please to think what the future generations will think of us! Yes I am allowed to say such things, but I am not allowed to act on my believes.

Of course, I am just hoping now that out of our civilization’s ashes will come a better one. We are having increasing military budgets, declining energy productions (hence rise in food cost), and we are raging wars we cannot win. We have a deadlocked political system consenting to the owners of means of productions. We have a systemic growing unemployment with a decreasing redistribution of wealth. And we all have a delusion of grandeur, individuals, but a society that is worse off as a whole, thinking that we can survive this great historical recipe for disaster.

I just like to think about the old questions because they do not cost a thing:

• Is an object one object of the assembly of many?

• Is the universe a tiny thing in emptiness, or so big that we do not get it?

• Is any being revealed by its appearance, or the idea of it?

• Can liberty exist independently from necessity?

• Which is more important: reason or passion?

• Is Culture emancipation from Nature?

• Can Time last forever?

• Has everybody got a unique self or is the self similar to everybody?

• Are we bodies limited in a time-space coordinate or minds imagining the world, the history and that might be immortal?

• What is the difference between being passive or active?

• Is a human being’s existence the result of a series of causes or the new start of a series of consequences?

• Can a lonely individual express objective truth?