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)

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?

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.

You and I do nothing to help

We are all doing meaningless work for a meaningless future. We work to be comparatively ridiculously paid to buy entertainment and stuff we already have, to feel slightly better. Better than the neighbor who has slightly less, better so we are closer to the neighbor owning slightly more. I do not know if we can be proud of ourselves, of what we give to our children. We give the over-production of an earth with limited resources for increasing inequalities.



Society is built on the illusion that it is, like our portrayal of nature, a system, that works like a machine, that is controlled, that is sustainable by our reasoning, by the fact that we all live our lives. We live in the politics of daily life, in office politics, in family politics, and those are already hard enough without complicated it by taking a step back to understand the whole picture. There is an analogy between the whole earth and computers: we know how to work with them, it does not mean we know how they work. Earth and society are the result of a long history of processes, life world and system world being constantly in relations.



Society though is essentially wrong, when we compare it to some of the pragmatically perfect societies that we have thought off and keep thinking about. A few people around the world, through time, at least since the French Revolution, have imagined perfect societies, not fake-utopia stuck in a strict space-time, but a few things have prevented changes and these obstacles to the general good are mostly due to the one percent of the population that owns most of the wealth. They get to decide how global politics work, so they do not loose too much.



It all starts with the illusion of national democracy. Nations having democracies are also the nations have integrated into a global economy. Global economy works by having some organizations calculating a certain output of a country, called economic growth, and depending on this evaluation, will lend them a certain amount of currencies. We have here actually a microcosm of any service company, where all the employees compete against each other, though all in their own private work, to be the one receiving the best title (e.g. manager, partner, associate, director-manager, combined with the belittling definition as junior or senior,...), so the best salary. Nations compete against each other and have to make some sacrifices on their prosperity, as competition leads to sacrifices in the employee's life out of the office.



The people paying are the citizens of the nations. It is also the illusion of democracy that politicians do not make concessions to rich people. A good example here is England where the media make the politicians, obviously meaning that politicians will have to rub the newspapers' owners on their good sides. American politicians have to rub the different hedge-fund owners, industry owners, intellectual property owners, on their good sides to receive the party contribution to insure good publicity ( paying for posters, T.V. ads, grass root workers). That is also why politicians have been asked to eradicate the word 'working-class' from their speeches, so there are no more distinctions and everybody can feel like a consenting middle-class.



Why do we accept this? It is mostly for the same reasons that most people do not participate in work-unions anymore: it is the worst way to receive a promotion. What kind of factory owner would accept a worker who is ready to strike for some other worker's right. Solidarity is not productive, and this is how alienation works. Alienation from other workers is the best way to receive a slightly better salary, at the cost of the other poor soul. Same goes for the country… Why would countries unite against banks if they can receive a better estimation of their own growth ?



“What is the alternative?” is an argument proposed by the overall consenting population against any idea of change. And it is true, history has not proven many alternatives right. Of course, history is written by the countries which destroy the smaller countries. I said that Viet Nam had an interesting system and I was told that a famine in the 80's decimated the country. Of course, Viet Nam liberated Laos from the worst regime history has seen, with the help of the Soviet Union and North Korea. This desperate alliance from Viet Nam resulted in their outcast from the world. As much as there was a famine due partly to mismanagement, and the fact that the Americans created a fake market in the south during the war, the world never apologized for going to an ideological war with Viet Nam and letting them starve for an action that we would all approve now. Any socialist country was forced into poverty by the 'powerful' nations of the world (there are no powerful nations, just powerful owners of production backing up consenting nations).



We see this same portrayal of dangerous alternative in the image of Iran being 'utterly evil' or Anonymous being a destructive terrorist organization. I participate in some of the Anonymous forums, and I have to say that there is nothing terrorist about them, rather the opposite, they provide information that should be news in mainstream media. As an example, did you know that the mayor of Orlando made food donations to homeless people a crime? Did you know that the American government is legally forcing people to give testimonies against Bradley Manning (Do you know Bradley Manning? The guy who indirectly forced Western Governments to do nothing against the Arab Spring, who is being tortured at this moment in American jails).



Our capitalist society has produced great technological advancements, I am told. The problem is that even technological advancement nowadays is a decision made by big companies trying to make more profits, it has nothing to do with technological advancements improving our lives. Internet for example, this great invention, is now being reinvented so it will be entirely privatized. Even the dark internet ( the one accessed through Tor, I2P; the one that cannot be access through your mainstream browser) will not exist anymore, so all the big companies, and the nations working for them, will be able to control and destroy small alternate economy systems, like bitcoin. The game industry provides products that make us live faster and made my generation attention-deficit (meditation alternatively makes anyone smarter). Thank You technological advancement for your private transport raising the cost of public transports. Thank You technological advancement for always creating 'new' products where all the complimentary goods cost twice their real values. Thank you technological advancement for winning your battle against open source knowledge.



The world is now too big, too complex to provide an alternative, is another argument I am confronted with often. And I am afraid that it is true, that I have been brought up in the perfect environment to study mental environments (how do we come to think the way we do), when most

people have not had this luck. I do try to make most of it though.



We are all working for someone, and most of the time we do not know whom, even with the best of intentions. The German civil society does not understand they still work for a logical hegemony when it voted against nuclear energy. What they have voted for is lesser finance and support for research and investment into smart nuclear energy. Chernobyl incident killed 47 people since 1986. Why is this fact ( World Health Organization 2006 report) being left out of mainstream media ? The problem with nuclear energy at the moment is that we do not yet how to work nuclear fusion, so there is no waste and an eternal cycle of energy production, which theories actually find possible. This requires major investment, just like building nuclear reactors requires investments. Instead, the Germans have opted for 'sustainable energy'.



Sustainable energy is the lie of the energy industry, one of the best of the century probably. Why? Well lets take solar panels. Solar panels capacities work with processors just like our computers. Which means that they the industries come every two years with an effectively much better product, which means that all the old ones have to be thrown out and to be replaced. We have now a new consumption cycle for energy bringing in far more money than an eternal energy source could...



Am I a pessimist? Some politicians do go into politics so the future looks slightly brighter. Politics on the world scale works on compromises with the big companies, always threatening to outsource their industries, their labor, their revenues, or the little taxes they pay. So industries make promises to politicians. Politicians do not tell the people that they received promises from the industry owners about a slightly better future, because who would vote for a powerless politician? We are therefore left with the lies for votes. Or worse, with hypocritical liberals like Mrs.Merkel, having one of the most protective industries in the world, limiting competition in the country, and blaming the Greeks for helping their exports (a low Euro is good for exports...), telling the village Germans that the Turkish low-wage labor they have imported does not integrate well but hiding how much they need them.



I say nothing new, and yet most of the people I know do not want to do anything. Why? Fear of loss I would say. Of course fear of loss exists in everybody who has got something to lose. We are ready to make concessions only when we are more afraid of what we do not know. Naomi Klein's ¨shock doctrine” is a good example of a tool for change. An example of the shock doctrine is actually the United States, which never had a more conservative way of life (e.g. rate of women firefighter, decline in union membership, the freedom of liberal market,...) since 9/11. And this is not profiting the general population.



Another sociologist (most sociologists by the way are very left-oriented politically, except the crappy ones like A. Giddens), called Helmut Rosa observed that our society is accelerating. We compete to be faster constantly, which means effectively that we stress more and with stress disappears natural empathy. Our natural empathy disappears because of our entertainment as well. Accelerated games, accelerated films, accelerated television.



Television was problematic as the intelligentsia of the world for a long time did not accept this institution. It took the New-York Times's critics, and the fact that you had to pay for different programs (best Bourdieusian recipe to make a high-class taste) to make most of the society spend most of their evenings in front of it, myself included. Fact and fiction mingled to create the entertainment we seriously needed to not realize that we are the ignorant working-class, just like the poor workers of the third world, and that we accept our fate because we just do what we do.

Free Country - Utopia 2

Here is the all famous first article of the universal declaration of human rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948. Countries are asked "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories" :

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We are all aware that this is not the case, but still, we should be abide by that principle. We are not born equal in rights because of the where, when and of whom we are born. It is an injustice in this world that people do not seem to realize. " Fuck'em all, my parents worked their ass off for me to live this way" seems to be a good argument for not adopting a spirit of brotherhood. Of course, not everybody has such radical thoughts, but we do accept radicalism, because of our history, from which we seem to only keep the habits but not to learn the lessons. If you'd take a look at Italy now, you can observe another wave of extreme-right wing thought directed towards romanian gypsies, which scandalize countries like the U.K., Germany or France, which are actually no better, except that they are politically correct. Italy just adopted a law which said that illegal entry is an offence, just as the european countries mentioned above do, the difference of Italy though is that it has also allowed its mayors to expulse european residents judged unfit to live on their sacred land.

I could take the attacking position that everybody takes and propose the idea of putting an embargo on Italy, to let it realize how much it needs its foreigners, or not allowing Italians to reside in our "open-minded" countries. But we are not as good as we seem. We are still deeply stuck in our concepts of identity, nationality, protection, and fear of the other. We don't believe a bit in human rights. "Fuck humanity, I love my country." ( I'm sorry if I'm vulgar in this article, it's just that it is a sensitive issue to me. I sincerely don't swear often).

My country would have open-borders. Well, no borders except for the one the neighbouring countries would install. Even if everybody would be scared to see terrorrists coming in, lazy people profiting of the system or people stealing their jobs, I'll confront them with humanity and the help it needs. Coming from a inter-cultural environment, I can tell you that nothing gives such an open mind as that. Colliding cultures do push people to accept the other, and recognize the lacks in our own culture. I don't believe it would leave the country in chaos, because no-one emmigrates for no reasons, or for bad ones at least. So why should we think that immigrants create problems ?

It's a simple principle. Why would we, westerners, be allowed to live almost everywhere we want, and we are still so restristive on who's allowed to live in our countries. Supposedly we are richer so we have more to protect, but fuck that, we've distroyed cultures with our money(look at South-America, where the average family will spend more on a t.v. than on education), we stole the gold of our colonies and we still abuse deloping countries because we help them to have a better economy."But god forbid they try to live a better live next to us, they are savages". I don't know, I feel guilty for us, we are lucky to have our history, we are in a region that gave us the oppurtinity to develop like we did, and we don't share any of it, I don't think that's fair. I would allow everybody in. Anybody ready to live surrounded by others, and not in his well protected fish-bowl where he grew up, is good in my book and a true brother of mine.

Infra-structure for my thoughts

Well, I'm not that organized, but i like to have some base for my reasoning. Just like Descartes, but i won't go as far as him, since he did it, no need to go back. What he said is my mind is there, it can question everything. I firmly believe that our mind contains secrets and capacities. And that's why i believe in humanity. I know it is a common faith, but not practised that much.

My faith in the capacities of humanities led me to think about a few changes so we could live in a better world. But this faith toward humanity has often been attacked because it is an idealist believe. People won't believe in these ideas because they don't trust each other. Wise-guys, in history, always profited from the system, and made us suspicious of everyone. People getting money from tax payer without doing anything are a good examples. They are actualy the terrorist of my idealist work. Why do i call them terrorist is because they take in hostage the rest of humanity. Like terrorist, when we see them at work, we want to change the system so it doesn't let them profit from it, even if it is to our lost, like we try to limit our liberties after terrorist intervention. Not trusting humanity is giving power to the people who will disapoint us.

Another question of base in ideas is the old question of ethics. Should i tend for an ethic of consequences or an ethic of conviction. Well i always naturally believed that principles, if they are profundly good, should always overcome an idea that base itself on consequences. Of course having a new principle can have consequences. The order goes like that for me, if a principle is good, it should be followed, no matter the consequences ( there are exceptions for eveything, i'm only talking of theories). Principle should lead our life, they don't have to determine every aspect of our life ( it's impossible, and if we do it, we'd look like a boring utopia), but our moral decisions and political decisions should be based on them.

So an idealist hopes and principles are the base of my ideas. I'll try to be as open-minded as i can on every subject I'll post, and I invite you to reply to my ideas, because dialogues bring evolution to ideas, it is important. I might contreversial sometimes, but that's only because i do believe our world could be so much better, please don't take it as a sign of easy alternative anarchist position. Thank you very much !