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)

Project for the future

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B5a-s9kLo5kaZjZkY2M3ZWMtZTg3Yy00OGIyLWJhMjItY2Q4YjE2N2I3NmRl&hl=fr

 This is an alphabet that can be written from any angle in any direction as all the signs are different, which means that it is not constrained by direction as most alphabets tend to do ( see Lara Borodotsky). Great for the dyslexic and for spatial awareness ( increasing spatial awareness increase the capacity for empathy).

 And learn Esperanto.


 Two projects to add to my constitution as international ways of communication.

 ( I have already learned the alphabets, I just need to learn Esperanto)

 The idea is not to have language-based inequality to start with.

Arts and thinking about arts

A few months ago, one of my flatmate had advised me to turn this blog into an art critic blog as well as a social critique one. Somehow, the idea was that showing how polymath I could be in different areas of life would attract readership and show that I am not a stupidly single-minded revolutionary looser. It is true that presented as such, something he did not do by fear of me feeling insulted, I do see his point as holding some truth and I might actually start doing so. It is not easy though to set myself as a critic when I have a slightly universalistic approach to manufactured goods. I will not either be Kantian and declare that the beautiful can be found solely in the landscapes and the complexity of the world where we realize that we are part of something bigger.

The transcendence of the 'what-makes-us-feel-but-we-do-not-know-why' is of no interest for me here. It is though an interesting debate as to why should it not interest me when I say that I have a universalistic approach to the arts when some of the cultures of this world have worked at imitating the world. I am of course thinking of the Nippon culture, that has worked so well at imitating the beautiful chaos of the world.

Well the imitation and the real are two separates objects and it is actually the imitation that will find a defense in this article. Art is purely imitation and imitations should be brought back to the stage as being the center of all that is worthy in art. The real question is how complicated and hidden are the imitations unto which we are going to find some pleasure.

It is here that is revealed the slow downturn of our culture in the 20^th century as observed by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Salinger. What the heck am I talking about? Well, Tanizaki's “Praise of the Shadow” is one of the best essays written explaining the essential differences between Western Culture and Far-Eastern Culture at the beginning of the 20^th century. What people have called modernity was not about the objectification of nature ( most social theorist have defined modernity as the phenomenological switch of nature as being a controllable force rather than something in the power of the Gods) but rather about fighting off our fears and to present the obvious as we like to imagine it.

Adaptations of our reality have rarely been as obvious as the one we have found them in the 20^th century. It is just a fact that auto-biographies and biographies have never been sold so much. Films are re-made constantly so the subtle critics of our reality are in our face with a loud noise so we do not need a cultural context to understand the origins of the music. Sciences are now in the domain of the everyday life as we see no problem at qualifying people around us as schizophrenics, bi-polars, depressed, demented, neurotics or closet-homosexuals when this lexicon is vulgarized in newspapers.

At the same time, while we reiterate all the known-knowns of our world's universal consciousness, we have now this slight tendency of forgetting what are the problems for which we have never found an answer and for which there are always ways to find new ways to illustrate the problematics. We take what we know for granted and do not look back unto how this knowledge has been founded. We watch whatever we do not want to discuss, we ignore the illustrated problems, what are the dimensions of human nature we do not yet understand, what the author might have tried to find in himself and instead get entertained by what we are satisfied to know.

Subtlety. Subtlety of course does not mean that anything produced has to be buried under an arrogant vocabulary and in a saturation of cultural references. Subtlety is best found in originality. “Me, you and everybody else we know” is a film with interlocking unusual stories reflecting on our lives. It is simple, has no special effects and half the cast is played by children, so hardly the Shakespearian trained talent. And yet there are so many grounds for discussion that the point of the film, the meaning behind, cannot be understood. It is not absent. It is just that it shows the known-unknowns of humanity.

Of course, it is so easy for me to come with my cultural references and shout: “ Be simple but be smart” and then drop a Nipponese author unto your lap and you might feel stupid not having read it ( you should be! [no, I'm just joking- it is in the end just a comparative analysis of toilets]). This is though not the point. The point is that something somewhere did not go right. I will not say that it is the democratization of culture that made ignorance and entertainment the dominant steam-roller of our culture, as did Adorno and Horkeimer hinted at.

I was for a time-being tempted to say that it is the problem of domination in our history. That we have forgotten the secular culture of the people against the high culture of the aristocracy. Brining back everybody to the same grounds so we can equally build from that was the solution defended by Mao should be considered. That is just the antithesis of A&H and it keeps us stupid though. We do need historical references as they show more about ourselves than any modern craft ever can. We do though need to understand the historical contexts unto which every references have been made and constructed to emancipate ourselves from the domination of high-culture.

The problem though might be as Adorno and Horkeimer proclaimed in their theory of the culture industry. The culture industry theory states that the producers of culture are the holders of the mean of production and as such, enlightenment is not in their profit. Why would Time-Warner or NewsCorp. let their public known that they sell just corrupted imitations that do not provide any content that might help us towards emancipation. Even in the mode of production there is something weird and hegemonic: why was Trafalgar square un-kettled by policemen when it was invaded by ignorant zombie-wizards are the release of the last Potter film? No one wonders.

'Made in Dageham' was declared by all its public the best British film of 2010. It made me cry. Have you heard of it? Now, have you heard of 'The King Speech' ? What did you get from it? Nothing obviously, there was nothing in it, I do not think it is repeated enough. Nothing! More than nothing, it has erased all the interesting psychological aspect of the poor guy not wanting to be King and his little brother not expecting to be king because he does not know what it means. Should I talk about ' The Black Swan' that portrayed women as being incapable of being professional and sensual at the same time for fear of going crazy ?

This corruption of the arts by the producers was made very discreetly through this innovative mode of ideological domination that is the intellectual property. Intellectual property did not exist before the 19^th century. What this concept, now widely blindly accepted, made is creating a new unlimited resource for production so the limits of capitalism could be extended for a few centuries. It also created the illusion that everybody could make something and gain some money out of it. The film industry though is the clear example that as much as it has developed through capitalism, diversity in it has disappeared because of the oppression of the big studios, the big producers. What about Youtube?

If we do nothing, it will be the same story.

Internet will be controlled because it reduces intellectual property back to what it should have been: the collective patrimony unto which humanity can constantly relearn itself. Museums should be free, of course, but should not represent either the art market of the rich. What is presented in the museums is what has been established by rich owners as good art and some of their painting are kept in sight for everybody so the other paintings they own still holds their value. Paintings should be shared, for free, as should books, as should music, as should dances, as should philosophy.

Why, oh, why, did I mention Salinger alongside Tanizaki about the lack of arts in the 21^st century? It is just that Salinger heroes always look at the world around them and are slightly depressed that it does not represent all the potential of humanity. The potential of humanity exists only for the un-atheists, the people capable of reflecting about a world before their existence and after their deaths. The potential of humanity has existed sometimes, in parsimony, if the few examples found in its history. I was reading a reference to Kipling trip to the United-States where he was corrected on a reference by a farmer (“It is not Montaigne who said so, it is Monteskiew!”). It made me think of Oscar Wilde's trip where he made conferences on literature and life to interested miners.

The Big Fat Lady exists, somewhere.

They all held the belief that humanity had the potential to see in arts something that can emancipate. But to do so, we do have to be critical and show our criticisms. More than that, we do have to beat ourselves constantly for not looking further into the depth of any crafts, to the point where there is just darkness and try to make sense of the obscure within humanity, of what cannot be understood, because otherwise we are as good as pigs satisfied to live in mud and ready to be eaten when it is too early. 

  to read : "In Praise of the Shadow" by Jun'Ichiro Tanazaki, The complete collection of J.D. Salinger ( do not stop at " the Catcher in the Rye" otherwise you will never understand Holden Caulfield but will make me feel like him),  Civilization and its discontent by S.Freud ( not an art piece, still relevant), Maps and Territory by M.Houellebecq. Everything, in the end, might be worth reading. 

  And do watch "Made in Dagenham" to understand, in relation with the King's Speech, what is wrong with our world.

Sociological imagination 1.7

I have hopefully completed my bachelor in sociology this week, so I thought this week's article should relate to sociology. I don't really know yet what paths my thoughts will go through, but I was thinking about linking different thoughts and ideas related to sociology, neuropsychology and social psychology to illustrate a small path towards emancipation. I don't think I'm setting myself an easy task here but being over-ambitious is my personal curse. Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with being self-critical (paper from Berkley uni this week).

I will therefore start by explaining that in every interaction, there are tensions. It all starts with pulling or pushing, antagonism and attachments. You speak with someone, and some things will push you towards that person, some things will push you apart. Similarity is probably the most powerful tool for attraction, and the opposite is true as well. People will try to blend into a selected group. Now, from there, we can already see how networks of culturally-categorized groups are built. We cannot escape categorization.

As Aristotle observed some time ago, we tend to make universalizations to make the world more easy to understand, but for every rule we make we can find exceptions which is what we call particulirisation. And the new exception can make a rule. We have to accept this paradox of how we socially construct notions, that a notion is both an over-generalized rule as well as just a unique exception from another rule. That's why the quest for knowledge is an infinite path for a complete language.

Language is indeed the first and most important tool of our social life nowadays. It is the imperfect tool of communication. It is imperfect because somehow, and that's again greek antiquity knowledge of rethoric, any affirmation raises a question. Even a 'hello' raises the question of 'should I acknowledge you' as silence could have been the other answer. Blinding people from wondering about the possibility for other answers is a rule of power. Language is also the best tool to push or pull people.

The rules of powers are also multiple. Power is mainly the name for an imagined societal order which silences any other possibility of interaction. It is the instance where traditions take over innovations and it probably constitutes most of our days' activities. Power restricts everybody's movements. It conditions everybody and the degree of interaction to the extent that a 'Yes,sir' is a powerful answer, as it conditions superiors to keep their distance from a subordinate.

That's where the project of emancipation is difficult. As most interactions are restricted in languages of power, just understanding it is not enough to control it. Most changes lead to an unknown place where the script can either be directed by the person creating the change or by a clumsy consensus that re-establishes a more equal dialogue. It is like meeting someone from the opposite gender from a country you never heard off. How do you greet them and how much personal space should there be are unresolved scripts creating awkward confusion. Now imagine going to a shop and telling the owner you'll work two hours for him to pay for your grocery instead of letting money be the pillar of the script creating the power relation. That would create confusion and most probably distance, or the shop keeper can laugh it off to keep the usual degree of interaction but not allowing the possibility of questioning the power of money.

Our interactions with the world are constant to a degree we still do not understand. Wearing fake luxury glasses does not boost your ego, quite the contrary, you would score a lesser score at an I.Q. Test. That's why emancipation starts not by copying imagined 'superiors' because that just legitimises their position. Real emancipation is understanding one's position within a global network of categories and their power position. To do that in a good manner though, a very large degree of empathy is needed to understand everybody else's positions. Confront people with their own position in a grand scheme and they might understand why you ask for a little change.

Empathy is a hard game to play. To do such a thing, the more data you collect the better off you are. Understanding where a person comes from means understanding more about them than they do themselves. For example, if Argentinians, Canadians, Germans and Japanese work more than Costa Ricans, Texans, Greeks and Cambodians this is because there is a correlation with a sense of time and your distance from the equator. Just like 7,3,6,8,2,5,9 if asked to be put in order will be put in the order of the language you write. An Arab would more naturally write it 9876532. The way people read affect their entire behaviour.

Empathy requires actually more than understanding the persons motivation or point of view. It is trying to understand their real ideology. Zizek, a guy I like, defines ideology as the things people do without knowing why they do it. They do give a motivation, but even if they know it does not make sense, they still do it. For example people will smoke for self-destruction, everybody knows it is lethal, and yet the excuses are addiction, stress relieve, social habit and so on. Most smokers will deny their first reason to smoke is to die.

Now there are instances where stimuli can change someone's behaviour. Here, I am going to outline 7 types of external stimuli that have high chances of triggering positive reactions.

The first one is the simple principle of contrast. You're out buying shoes, you see two pairs you like, the seller tells you the first one costs three times the normal amount for a pair. You ask about the second and he tells you its one time and a half more expansive. You will most probably buy them there even though you know you could go to another store in town. You would actually re-evaluate your standards for the price after the first one is given.

The second principle is reciprocity. Reciprocity is a bitch. Someone you hate helped you, now you owe them. It is something engraved in them. That's why you should always be the first one to offer a gift.

The third principle is that if you ask someone to take a certain point of view, ask them to defend it writing it down and afterwards reading it out loud and they will internalize that point of view. That's why the Korean army had the only really successful brainwashing camps.

The fourth is sympathy. Someone mimicking you, associating himself with someone well regarded, known for being helpfull and constantly self-critical is impossible to hate.

The fifth is that everybody respects some form of authority they have never met. Everybody will trust some people blindly just because of their position or their good publicity.

The sixth is that rarety is always attractive. If you know you hold something no-one else has got, you will cherish it. Also, it explains why we we do not want to loose more than we want to win more. That's also why souls are so important.

The seventh, I find, is an interesting one. It is that in uncertain times everybody will be a sheep. That's why you want to point at someone if you are in need of help. You shouldn't wait for someone to break the pattern of inactivity of the herd. This is why if you have big groups unaccustomed to each others interactions patterns these groups will stick together. If they are directed to help for a greater shared goal, they will start to break their distances.

Now, as I said, the sense of time is an important factor in our lives. Even if we think that the world should go faster because we are confronted with people on television who do not spend real time doing things, we do not see that we are breaking and changing all the patterns of previous generations. At the same time, we are provided with internet which gives informations about anything. We do not have the patience to read as much as we could on it. Instead, we use the internet as a security for the invented motivations for our lives.

Accumulation of knowledge in itself is not emancipatory. First of all, you have to train your memory like a London cab driver. Our brain is a sensible receptor that can be manipulated. As such, people who have to learn more actually have or develop a brain which reacts faster. Other stimuli make the brain react. While the perfectly calculated satisfaction of classical music can give you peace for sleeping, playing jazz cuts off any sense of inhibition of thoughts in the brain to let free-expression through. Finally, meditation, training for extreme attention unto one subject for a long time, relaxes you more and is a great training for being capable of having a deep concentration in any activities afterwards. Those are only examples where self-discipline should give us better tools to deal with our multi-dimensional social world.

There on all thoughts can be collected and will interfere in all your activities to create hybrids scripts and thoughts. Creating attraction by knowing the comfortable script is a good beginning. From there on, asking questions and deviating the script lets you know the limits the person has set him – or herself.

Distance is the drive behind too many of the scripts and it is the best drive also for cementing power relations. If someone lets you know they have a private space they would like to respect, most people will take it badly and keep their distance from there on. A king cannot be talked to by the lay person. You don't need to have met the person you elect.

Distance might as well appear to be positive for us, without us being aware of it. No matter how universal the declaration of human rights is, we always interpret it so we can judge someone else, claiming higher moral grounds just because of our relative moral system. And everybody does it daily. How do we make sense of the world without judging? I don't have an answer for this one, except for the yet unreachable goal of constant empathy. Meaning knowing everybody through their lifes and the way people knew them. More than six billions people is too much information for anyone.

This is one of the moments when I would like to know my maths to calculate the moment when memory capacities could be powerful enough for empathy, one of my impossible science-fiction dreams.

Historical hermeneutics is the science of interactions, the study of the evolution of language and meanings. I don't know yet its value, I don't know to what extend history repeats itself. It does show though that we do lock ourselves in ways and that changes are always slow to happen.

Print, radio, television and internet have accelerated our exchanges of languages and information. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing. Are we accelerating towards the better or not? As scripts get re-adapted constantly at the moment, I'm afraid material inequality at the moment rises as well. More levels of distances are put between the owners of the most important source of power nowadays (money). Companies, countries, wars financed by banks owned by hedge funds directed by a front man called CEO owned by unmediatised individuals who have accumulated power to cause beneficial change, if change wasn't against their own interests.

Scripts get changed constantly and we don't have the time to study the power relation they have created. We can study how an interaction is now and we can study how changes have operated in the past but predictions are still impossible. It is an impossible quantuum study that we operate unconsciously whenever we bring a new script into our life. We calculate the probabilities of others to take our point positively or negatively without knowing exactly how their standards are at a given point. And whatever works on an individual level can reflect on a group category, through universalization.

I don't really know what conclusion to bring to all this. I have just written down some little things I have learned and tried to integrate this year. It might have been helpful to me so I thought it might be useful to you as well.

The opium of our society

What about the general presentation of my thoughts on the way societies politics is seen nowadays.... I needed a retreat, away from everything, and my books and notebooks to understand the general picture. I tried to get the picture. Our world has evolved and it is what it is nowadays. US of A are is the country that has, from economics point of view, the best competitive country and yet, is one of the worst to live in. Yet, all the countries wish to have such an economy. The example I m always given is China, which has a great economic growth, to sustain a quasi-dictatorial country. And in this last sentence lies the infrastructure of the end of our society nowadays : Economic Growth. It is what all governments promise their inhabitants.

This is not going to be a small article, but I ask you to bear with me.
Economic growth is the calculation of the potential output in products and services of a country. To vulgarize the meaning, it is the augmentation of the cake that exist for a whole country. The biggest achievers for this growth are big companies, since they can produce more than an independent, that is why countries try to attract them. To achieve this growth, companies don't go 50 ways about it, they create a product, try to manifacture it the easy way, so it can be produced in large quantity, and don't try to vary it to much. We get loads of the same product, everywhere.

For this product to be economically rentable for companies, it has to have a demand, thus a creation for consumers for the companies. We are in a consumerist society, because without consumers, these companies can't survive. Companies create wishes from us, they advertise they product, or create, more viciously a wish for these products by making them unattainable for us, but only for a certain part of society ( the richer). Because it is in our nature to want what we can't have. And then they make it attainable, so we do get what we dreamt of having, to finally discover (or not if we are that blind) that it doesn't fulfill us as much as we thought it would.

Of course, this system creates also a simulution of production and services. Industries or businesses that have no sense ecept in our system e.g. advertising. Which our society still "needs" because these industries are creating output, therefor growth.

So where does that leads us.

Well companies are competing to get more clients. But countries are actualy the main competitors. SInce economic growth is what countries wish, they have to offer companies and corporations enough so these companies are willing to produce in their country. Countries have to compete to be the one that offers the more than the neighbouring country, whatever the cost, since it will give them the growth they want.

The other form of competition that exists is the competition of the workers in the system. Companies and corporation are seen as the first employers in this world, therefor we are to be fit to be engaged by these companies. Even a shopkeeper has to be competitive to another shopkeeper, not for it's client, but for it s retailers.

All in all, our standards have to be lower down as human or as a society, so corporations are willing to work with us.

Are corporation thus evil ?

No, it is a clear answer, corporations have no will to corrupt the world and make them theirs. BUT, corporations abide by only one rule, be profitable to attract shareholders, so they can invest more money to create more money for them, whatever the costs ! And this is where lies the evil, which cannot be blame on corporations, since they only do what they are meant to do. So shareholders are evil because they are too demanding ? No again, shareholders, just like corporations, are not people making choices. Shareholders nowadays are funds, investments of thousands and millions of people who want more money, not knowing exactly where and how it is invested. They just know that it is investements which are bringing money, so they can spend more. All in all, no one in this system makes an ethical choice, no one is actually guilty, everybody is suppose to do what they do, in this system.

So is society suffering from that system in the end ?

1) To be more competitive, countries have to take back rights to the workers, companies, to make more profit too. A recent example is the draw back on working hours in France. Because France want to augmnent it's growth, they decided to erase the law on the 35 hours work a week. They want people to work more, so companies can make more money. They make more money too, but they don't make time to spend that, if there is actualy a need to make time to spend money. If you look at the evolution of music for example, songs are getting shorter by the years. Our leisure time is shrinking, and so are our hobbies. Books are getting shorter. The production of popular art is not worked on, bands have to produces album every year to satisfy the production companies. Nothing takes time anymore, except work.... And have less time in our life to know what we want to be.

2) Education is getting more pragmatic. Our society asks today that education prepares us for work. Education use to be to bring knowledge to the people, but not anymore. The sole purpose of education nowadays is to prepare us to this system of competition. Knowledge is back at the rank of leisure. Education nowadays just represent a skill on paper so we can get a job later on. An example is the secondary school certificate in UK. A school kids have to select from 2 to 7 subjects at their end of secundary school to pass, so they are prepared to go to universities. I think the general choice is of four, practical, subjects. Which means that they have no general knowledge. I came across this years of english students who had no idea who the Tudors were, who didn't know that there prime minister wasn't directly elected, and such basics lacks. How can we have a democracy that doesn't bring an education that prepares to make civic choices ?

3) We are living beyong our basic needs, and even beyong our wishes of life, without knowing it...

4) Inequality in distributions and of chances. Since countries have to be competitivie, their can't ask as much from the companies, or from the people, to help for everybody in the society to developp. Countries have to invest in what is good for the companies, and cannot be asked to let people sustain other people as much. The companies profit from the competition, and lower the wages because people will compete on their wages too. So people which don't have the skill on paper will receive a lower wage, and cannot help to the education of their kids. Also, people with lot of money are the one receiving more money from their investment in the corportations, a sum of money which is not taxed as a revenue, so not as much. A clear example of this lack of social elevation is the US of A, which has the lowest rate of social elevation in the western world.
Education system getting privatised too, only rich people come out of the good universtities, and do donation so there kids are the only one to get into it...

All in all, we have today no time for self-development, self reflection, time for ourselves, the understanding of what is making time. Spirituality and philosophy are no use in this pragmatic society, so why spend time on them. And yet, we hide to ourselves, but we do need it.


What is the problem exactly then ?

I call it the Economic Growth Myth, the dogma on which our society is build on today. It is the infrastructure on which our society has created itself the last century. The corporations, the marketing system, the consumerist mind, are suprastructures, institutions which are reliant on this dogma. The worst part of this myth is while religions promised us heaven, this dogma doesn't give us any promess for the end. We want economic growth, without knowing where it leads us...

But is there some truth behind it ?

Just like religion has a truth behind itself, economic growth sustain some truth :
Production is a way for every human to self-fulfill itself. We do need to produce so we know we've lead a useful life, a life where we did something, where we created something. What the infrastuctures of this economic growth didn't give us is the individual choice to know what to produce, and in final, what we want to be.


Is there a solution ?

Well, there are some. A revision of our social system, try to promote social trust. If everybody is ready to understand that we can evolve as a society, not as an economy, we could give way to changes in our society. Promote social trust, so people would be ready to install a universal welfare system, so everybody has the same chances in life. Promote independent workers, real creators of productions, which are the substances of our culture. And give perspectives to our life to know what we want, need and should have, for everybody.