Applied Spider-Man Theory

'With power comes responsibility' is Spiderman motto and a well observed rule that we can observe sometimes in our society throughout history. There are maybe though exceptions and to find these exceptions, I would like to explore to what extent is that motto true. If it was entirely true, would the Green Goblin really go on rampages like he does ? Well, that might not be the best of examples, since he is held responsible for his actions by Spiderman, and punish, maybe not accordingly in a fair way ( a lot of times Spider-man would be too nice to the different people who impersonated the Green Goblin, from my point of view).

Anyway, first we have to start with a definition of power, and I will use classic sociological theories to do so. First of all, any power is characterized by an inter-dependent relationship. You do need two people for one to exert power over another one and there must be a need for these two to be in such a relation. For example, it could be two lovers, in which case they are dependent on each other for their feelings to be kept alive.

First question that arises then is that most relations are asymmetrical at a given time, meaning that someone will always make a decision that the other(s) will have to follow. There is nowadays a view that power is unfair, but it is bound to exist in the sense that if two persons try to exert power on the other, they would nullify each others decision and nothing would move. That's why that in the example of two lovers, the decisions would have to be balanced, either in time or in the theme of what has to be decided.

Now that we know that every inter-dependent relations will have a power relation, we have to observe in which way the power goes. One has power over another one, if he controls some uncertainty to come. I hold a gun to your face, I'm dependent on you because I want your wallet, you are dependent of me because I'm holding some uncertainty about your future ( life or death). It does not have to be a threat but the uncertainty control can be a reward. I ask you to clean my shoes and you'll get a big fat check, I get to decide the quality of the cleaning.

The third element of power we need to find, if we want to see the verstehen, it is the will to make someone do something. It does not have to be conscious, but it has to be accepted. Back to lovers: I want new shoes and someone in love with me offers them to me. I can accept them and offer back gratitude or more or I can refuse them and reject the person courting me. Have I exerted power in both cases ? In the first one, I would say that I did, as I have accepted that I hold a way to make someone do something for me, in the other one, even though I made someone do something I have reacted in such a way that it will not ( hopefully) happen again. In the second case, I have not exerted power, but the image the other had of me did and as such, he forced himself.

Now, what are the different types of power we can observe in society?

The first one is the power of Coalition. Meaning that many can form peer pressure, or threats to make someone do something. Unions are a good example, though it has to be noticed that they are trying to counter another form of power. They do though exert a form of pressure to act in a certain way in an inter-dependent relationship by holding cards over the future.

The second one is Hierarchical Authority. I have a boss, I have to obey him. We both work for the same institution, but this institution has given this guy the power to tell me what I have to do otherwise he will ask that some sanctions will be applied to me. He represents the power of the institution into which I am a part of, and as such, it is not directly the person who has power.

The third one is the power of the person holding an Information. In social sciences, informations ( and it is slightly similar in physics) can represent anything. So someone holding money for example, holds information that will make anyone do something. A better example might be, in theory, the University professor ( in a perfect world) who can ask his audience to be quiet, otherwise he won't share what he knows.

The fourth one is the Mastery of a process. Imagine that a prisoner is given the right to serve whoever he wants in a prison, well, people will have, to some extent, obey him otherwise they won't be sure what they will be served. He is not an authority, as he was not given power, but is one in practice.

The fifth one is the power of the Expert. Everybody knows this power: the doctor who can prescribe you a good drug or tell you everything is alright and you should go to work. The lawyer who tells you you'd better settle or loose in court, even though in your mind you are totally right. The architect who tells you that another floor will really not fit the general symmetry of the building.

The sixth one is the power of the Network. It is a vicious power that everybody to some extent uses. You know a guy who knows a guy so you can do something that someone else, who knows no one, can't do. The person with the network, does not have a power of coalition, because it is not a fixed group, he does not have to be an expert or an authority, but he is just a pal with the person who has some power.

Finally, there is the Manipulation. It is all the form of power that are based on simple manipulation of the pathos of the other. The other one is in love with you, well you don't have to go and get your coffee anymore. The other one is stupid and get enraged easily, well you have heard that this guy you hate told something against him in his back and he better get his ass slapped. Someone you never met does not know you're bluffing when you say your his boss's son, he will also get your coffee.

Now, all these powers have limits and consequences. To have limits and consequences, the power relation has to be observed, felt and understood. If I went to see ' Eat, pray, love' 5 times with my girlfriend because I'm telling myself I love that film, the power my girlfriend has over me is probably limitless. If I suddenly become a pure existentialist in front of man holding a gun in front of my face and decide I might as well die here, he can shoot, but he won't have made me handed in my wallet.

The thing is that sometimes, we see the power and dislike it, but without observing what gives this power its limits. The limits of power are a lot of times set by the responsibility this power has in an inter-dependent relationship. For example, a King of France has an almost absolute power over his kingdom. He has so only though as long as he can hold his kingdom together. Now if he starts going crazy on spending and taxation and people do not recognize their country anymore, they will find a way to fight this power. The opposite is kind of true, someone who has a lot of power, but use it in such a way that everybody in the relationship is happy, will hold to this power very long. If women are portrayed as the weaker gender, men will have to be polite and courteous because they are the protectors. If now women want to be seen as equal, men do not want to hold the responsibility anymore.

With the loss of power therefore might also come the loss of responsibility, which might be the vicious side of this story. Imagine the owner of a company. He gets to decide who works where and what salary they'll have, and if he abuses of that power, like the king, he would be in trouble. But now, a CEO, who does not own his company, is not responsible for anything, as he would point at the shareholders and say that they hold control over future uncertainties. These shareholders though, will point at the market and consumers to say that they hold the control over the future uncertainties of the company. Everybody has some power, meaning that everybody is responsible, meaning that nobody is.

We can find this disappearance of power and responsibilities in a lot of strata of society I think. Certainly in politics, in economy, in class inequalities. The best way to avoid the costs of power is obviously the tendency for synopticon. The synopticon is the process of everybody looking at one person. This person will look as holding a lot of power, and yet it is only because everybody looks at him that he will look as being responsible. A National football trainer would look responsible for his team, but it is just because he is the one put up front by the team and the owners of the club. Mubarak is also good example of someone who looks like he is in power of a country and held responsible for the inequalities in this country, but he was just a front figure for a whole clique.

People are afraid to look powerful, because they do not like the cost of power, the responsibilities. They prefer to put up masks. If you want to make something positive for the world though, you do need to have power over what goes wrong. I don't know on this one if I really prefer Spider-man over Superman.

Socio Scooby Logy Doo

So I am writing an article on monsters and it might look childish but science is in the end just fiction confronted with reality and there are probably some realities in our cultural monsters. Of course, the fascination for monsters is not shared by everybody, the fact that I have grown in geeky culture through and through is either the chicken or the egg of this fascination. Now I will present here some observation about the contemporary monsters we encounter in our comics, films and books. While reading this, let's keep in mind that monsters have existed since the dawn of humanity and are as important memes as deities and some deities happen to be monsters. I will though speak only of contemporary monsters and I will not work on their evolutions as it would have to follow the evolution of society. ( Yey, I have here the idea for another article to come ).

Let's start with the basic for any analysis: a simple definition and a simple taxonomy ( an Aristotelian organization) of monsters. The definition will be 'a supernatural threat to humanity'. And the subgroups of monsters are the big monsters, the hunter monsters and the swarm monsters. As you can see, it is pretty basic ( basic reflexion has time and time proven to be really infinite and might actually be an oxymoron). Now we have to see what I mean by these subgroups.

Well the big monsters are most probably the oldest monsters humanity had. They are the giants and the titans, the cyclopes and the leviathan, the king kong and the godzilla. They are the top of the food chain that everybody expects but never meet. They have also been embodied in science with mega-volcanos, intergalactic crashes, surprising tsunamis and lunatic suns. The newest kind of big monster I can think of is the alien spaceship. The aliens in themselves can embody different kind of monsters, but the spaceship usually represents what is too big to be controlled. The fear behind monsters is probably the one of finding something we could never have control on. We have to thank though hollywoodian mythology which always finds a way to destroy the threat and makes us forget that destruction is not a synonym for control.

Now a monster that I think has appeared only at the end of the 19^th century ( though this has to be verified) is the swarm monster. The best example is of course the zombie. They have the power to increase exponentially and though they are small and weak, get us because of their number. I said that the first swarm I can think of in our culture are the morlocks in the H.G. Wells ' The Time Machine'. They represent the mass of workers having evolved in subhumans and are the enemy of the small elitist communities of Eloi. There is so this elitist representation of the proletarians that we can find in the end in zombie movies as well. Of course, swarms are also represented by science nowadays though diseases and infections, but the fear I think is the lost of power of the few who think themselves smarter against the mass of slow, small minded beings.

Finally, I add the hunters. The hunters are actually like human beings but generally feed on humans. The differences are only the differences we want to see. As such, it works like racism does, in the sense that we generalize an evil on a specie more or less similar to ours and the legitimization for hunting them down is the prejudice, without considering their weaknesses ( except as a mean to eradicate them). What is funny is that at the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century, we have seen an interesting evolution that tries to show an open-minded humanity which seeks to understand how these hunters are unique individuals that might deserve life. I am of course speaking of this attitude towards humanizing vampires, werewolves, witches and the such to involve them in romances with humans. We are now trying to glamorize their weaknesses and show their powers as tools given to the chosen few to protect humanity ( from itself usually). We could ask ourselves if in our culture, there is not a slow glorification in the media for the sociopath as a rational egoist, which happened to be the perfect human in a neoliberalist system.

There is a fourth group which I do not want to consider at this time: the ghosts. They represent too many things at the same time ( gods, hunters, different teleologies on life,...).

Ok, so we have different monsters, and we have humanity. What humanity represents most of the time is a specie-centered group which loses any ideal of being one with an ecosystem. Of course, modernity has disconnected us ( except through different resistance group which tried to present a positive organic perspective of the world) from this reality for the illusion of control. Monsters though show that we cannot control everything. As I have pointed out, big monsters cannot be controlled like sheeps and swarms are by definition overwhelming. Here, the interesting part about control and the environment is that when we have increased our capacity to travel, we have had to write down laws, as norms are not shared for every communities. Laws represents how everybody should act within a given-space. Hunters represents what laws cannot stop. Hunters are far more problematic for humanity because they also represent the excuse for humanity to be unlawful. Of course, in the middle-age, we managed to legally condemned witched through godly trials but we have stopped believing ourselves and now we have no laws to hunt hunters. We do now give them the rights we give ourselves or the one we give animals.

In a lot of cases with monsters, we become so obsessed with the survival of our species that we do not even consider other animals we used to live with. All the stories turn around the humans and how they confront the new threat. Of course, animal centered stories are not that common. It does show that monsters reinstate the dichotomy human vs. nature. They somehow legitimize our superiority because we can talk about our fear of them and find ourselves as victims ( what christian societies love to see themselves as). It is a human vs. nature where the sign-system disappears. With monsters, who cares that Britney Spears was a best-selling artist. The past and the future disappears, so knowledge of the signs created by humanity get in the background, excepted possibly for the hunters where their weaknesses are often hidden in some old books.

It is a paradoxical situation, to see that monsters represent the end of modernity and also the end of traditions. Traditions have never disappeared, but most of the time just transformed themselves. When I use the word tradition, I am speaking of ritualized social interactions. This is especially true with swarms. They oblige the humans to be constantly on the move to find an island of peace. This constant traveling, continuous escape, might be actually the ideal-type of true modernity, where no one is bound in a space or a time but has to always reflect. It does of course challenge our ethics, as knowing whether protecting the weak is something the group has to do, as it might put in danger everybody.

The final question when doing a laying down the problematics of a sociology of monsters is the question of the Nation-State. I will repeat the Weberian definition of the nation-state as the entity that has the legitimized monopoly of violence. Of course, this notion is anchored in the Hobbes' prince to whom we give all our force so this prince ( State) can protect us. The Nation-State though has rarely got the power to save us from monsters. It does echo the previous paragraph that states that modernity becomes ambiguous with swarm monsters, but the nation-state problematic appears with all the monsters. If the State cannot protect us, it is also too big to unite us all, it is too slow to pass useful laws and it is why militia appears and it is not even some form of idealized anarchism that takes place. The question of reinstating a State at the end of stories is not even often raised ( the exception I have in mind is Independence day where running the State becomes a hereditary profession).

So, I will stop here with just to never diminish the potential of fiction to question our society and I will dwell into more reflective entertainment now for our next discussion.

Distancing Through Clustering Theory

Well, I took a holiday from this job I gave myself to explore personally innovative ideas. I took a holiday from that means that I have arrived in this bleak town of Brussels, started fights with different administrations and administrative comities and read nothing particularly interesting. My life is the life of everybody, minus this blog and some other projects with other people less self-disciplined than I am.

It is though funny that discipline is not ingrained in me and in most people I know. The few people I know who have a need to be active and productive are people who grew up with limited television time, and my little sister. The rest of the population is easily satisfy by a screen and talk all day long about their failed dreams of being some day famous. I think that there might be some conclusion there about the influence of the television over our lives, but I am not sure.

I am an adept of cinema and find a lot of pleasure of watching most films and I have found what makes an annoying film for me: predictability. This is why I have found in these last weeks lots of pleasure watching Film Socialism of Godard, Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti, Outrage by Takeshi Kitano and The Housemaid by Im Sang-Soo were all great surprises for me. Of course, those are all well known controversial directors and it is just abiding by the cliché of the pseudo-intellectual for me to advise them to you.

Anyway, the idea that came up to me recently is the antagonism of the global village theory. As you probably know, most people would profess that the world is getting smaller as the phone connections, the internet, the television and the transports are getting faster. Indeed, an earthquake taking place in Kathmandu in a morning will be known to have happen in the afternoon in the rest of the world. But as much as information travels that fast, I think that we might actually see the growth of something quite opposite to a global village. I do not at this time have a name for it, but by the end of this article, I will have an epiphany.

Now why would I say something so counter-intuitive ? Well, it is just that distance is not calculated by speed. Speed is calculated by distance and time. Physical distance is, as far as we know, a component of our universe that does not change on Earth. Now time is something that is accelerating, as it is relative to our lives and we find the need to do everything quicker. Polls show that we get frustrated waiting for our computer to turn on. If time is accelerating, it means that what we are used to take one day, would actually in our mind take longer even if it takes one day. For example, we do get worried when we come back from holiday and our postcards have not arrived yet, when the post has never changed its habits we do find it slower and slower.

Of course, when we talk about the global village, we do not talk about physical distance, but relative distance is something quite different. Relative distance has different definitions, but I will explain it as the space created by every individuals at the moment. Which means that if you live in a city, you are closer to a lot of individuals, but you will feel more alienated from your neighbors as you do not have the same grounds for social interactions, compared to village folks who do know how to interact and what to interact about.

So as it seems that information makes it way quickly from one side of the earth to the other, you have to observe to what extent people are open to those informations. Here is another component of my theory: information saturation. Information is now distributed by individuals and institutions. More and more information is leaking out, meaning that everyday, every body has to increase its filter to see what they are willing to accept or not. As the filter gets stronger and stronger ( filtering out more and more informations) it means that the information collected will be more and more self-centered. Let's take as an example Facebook. The more friends you have, the less you hear about them all.

What we will see in the future is an increasing price for diminishing physical distance as well, which is exemplified by the rising cost of capital city's real estate price. I do not know if the price of prostitutes has risen as well, but I would not be astonished by it. We are becoming more and more individualists when we can become more connected and this is because we have not reach the balance between the outside and the inside, between in-group and out-group between aliens and friends. Uncertainty brings us always back to positions we know and we are now becoming conservatively hermits. I still haven't found the expression for the theoretical pendant to the global village. I really don't know, maybe the saturated agglomeration.

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.

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.

Unveiling the french veil problem

The question of the veil ( in all its forms ( niquab or burqua) and its interdiction in public spaces is the question that devides the population of France like the question on abortion is in U.S.A.. The question of the right of aborttion in USA is discussed without an historicity on the problems, something usual for the USA. My little brother pointed out to my attention that the moral compass of values of "pro-lifes", the christian churches, has only been recently considered abortion a crime.

Just like the lack of historical perspectives on the abortion question, there is an anachronistic element in the introduction against the veil. It is in the name of laicity that the interdiction is legitimized. Laicity was important in France in the 19th century as an ideology, because the church had still legal powers (e.g. over marriage) in the name of their god. The church being a bit of an ademocratic institutions, the battle against the church as hegemonic secular institutions ras rightfull. As much as atheism rights are not that defended, laicity is here used as an ideology to combat an evilized religion, not defend democraty.

So we can observed the history of the separation of the state and the church. But as much as French can defend whatever moral values they find behind their subjective opinion of laicity, they should admit that a deeply ethnocentered idea push too far can easily be seen as a violation of human rights. It's ironic that laicity has an element of trying to free people from ethnocentrism, but is used for such restricted ideas.

A solid argument, my mother's excalibur argument on the question, for the interdiction is that it is a symbole of patriarchal oppression. And in some ways it is. Families, husbands and cohorts who force women to be covered should be prosecuted for psychological harrassement. It is though also a form of symbolic violence when women are brainwashed to believe that they are inferiors or servants.

The other party has a counter-argument, individuals right. There are more women who chooses individually to wear a veil than forced to do so in our countries. More over, from my experience, and it is a shared perception, most of the musulman women I've met in the developping world where proud of wearing a veil. From the biology teacher in Thailand to the multilingual guide egyptian, intelligent women told me that they honoured their faith and didn't ask the west to come to their rescue.

This argument doesn't hold when we observed that embedded practice of oppression against women, that the veil represents, exist. So France said let's forget the right to practice a faith, let's protect women.

And what of the consequences France ? First of all, what about the limitless collateral damages of not allowing any religious signs at school? The law was passed against the veil, but not to look islamophobic, they decided it should extent to all religious signs. As an example, let's picture a sikh in France. These peacefull people believe it is forbidden to cut or shave their hair. They do then have to wear a turban hat to hide all their hair, explaining why they can be stupidly mistaken for a afghan hat. Sikhs have already abandonned their ritual knife, understanding the fear of it, but is the french government asking them to cut all their hair, or let the hair hang and be misunderstandbly stigmatised?

Another consequence that French do not want to observe is that they do present themselves as being on a crusade against Islam, but only their imagined version of Islam. They are fuelling primordialism and political racism in islamic countries by victimizing Islam. How can the west lead by example if it imposes sets of behaviors and dressings. How not to be insulted by being targeted by a governments because of a few dangerous people that shares the same faith in name only and not in practice. It is a good way to create anti-racism racism.

My final point is that all in all, it is a political decision that is only trying to look like the average voter is protected of his fears. The average voter is racist, so lets create a problem and proposes to solve it. But as much as the problem could exist maybe before, they don't tackle anything. Forcing people to behave in a certain way has no educationnal value. The veil can be a representation of oppression, but getting read of the representation only is not getting rid of the real problem. Other forms of oppression will exist as long as the social structures that feed that oppression exist.

And what about women magazines promoting a stricter body-discipline than men in the name of beauty? Women reading this message are victim of symbolic violence, but no measures has been made against it. We do tell ourselves that forbidding women magazines will not solve anorexia in top-models or the social construction of womenhood being only a beautifull object. Telling women what are the different forms of oppression and prosecuting the people forcing a symbol on them should be the solution. Restriction is no synomym of education. Also, giving them the informations so they can come to a rational conclusion was the central ideal of real laicity, not justified racism.

This post makes me look good when you read the one before!

Stuck in Social Constructions


Cultural relativism exists since I don't know when. It actually appear in lot of texts, not under the heading cultural relativism, but under the image of a heuristic device meant to criticize a society. Voltaire, a French philosopher of the enlightenment period would use it a lot to mirror the French society and its given ideas. Cultural relativism also implies that most of our thoughts, attitudes and behaviours are the result of a social construction. We are animals, but how we see the world is not in animal way at all, it is as a political animal. The Chinese would tell the Japanese for example that there is no hierarchy of Teas in nature, but only the person tasting the tea would make that hierarchy.

But this idea that everything is the result of a given society, and is therefore not absolute, can be criticize to be ameliorated is not growing as the technologies of the world are. Logic would have said that as we have more comparative examples to make, we could liberate ourselves more from our societal cages of thoughts.

Well this conclusion has easily some counter-arguments to be made. Cultural relativism was well explained by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who had the occasion to visit South-American tribes in the middle 20th century. Also, the different movements of the sixties were based on this idea that society wasn't and shouldn't be such a cements of thoughts and hierarchies. So what do I mean ?

Well I believe that as much as we have grown wiser maybe, we still have a long way to go to be free, and the first step is still to admit that we are far from intellectual freedom as we can be. It is in my everyday life that I do notice this conflicting processes of global-village and cultural absolutism growing without bring to us much more liberty of the mind.

The first example is the question of the nation-state. Throughout history, our spacial identity has changed. But this is something that we are not accept to see, except when our ethical education lets us use this fact as an argument. But there are not many people who are ready to accept that countries do not represent much. Coming from Belgium, it is maybe easier for me to say it, Belgium being a construction of foreign powers, and our national identity never existed before, and it is still an on-going discussion to know if there is still one. The thing is that it is the same for most countries. Belgian are maybe the only one ready to accept that there country is not an absolute.

I'll take the Irish as an opposite example. They are an island, so there is more an idea of a spacial identity there that has lived maybe throughout history. But that is the only thing. Their Celtic culture and origins can be found as well in Ireland as in England as in France or even in Spain. They do have their own language, but it is living alongside English, and as proud they are of their identity, when it facilitates them, there are not ready to get rid of the colonial language. But when it comes to Euro-phobia, they invoke, like their ex-colonial power, a defence of their culture and new nation-state as arguments against the facility of a powerful alliance. The logic of the nation-state is not a irrefutable one, since all nation-states are the products of an international history, of an international population, defending a nation-state has no real logic, except this illusion of protection of the immutable. ( I would also like to point out that nationalism is the excuse of lazy minds for not being capable of imagining an alternative global world).

An other example of social construction that people tend to favour and stick to are technologies. Technologies are embedded within a society, and other technologies, or information sources or informations tend not to change much. Even in the promises of the world wide web, individuals keep themselves to their society. A good example is the variety of social networks within the web which are restricted to only certain cultures and economies. Facebook might be a huge one, but it represents only a small part of the population. Facebook groups are only the one to which our close friends have invited us or we found, but our researches are restricted to our social knowledge. Facebook has never opened much minds, at most it embeds us into our identity because we use it as a tool of identity reaffirmation more than a tool of intellectual development. Of course, certain fields in society do use internet as the globalizing tool it should be. I have mention technologies, and to show an other example of our incapacity of opening our mind to other technologies: new operating system scare us. Who is not on Windows or Mac ? Who would want to get out of these operating systems of our prime cyborg resources to try a new things that could liberate us from this two multi-nationals monopoly? It does require someone to accept that our society can change, especially that we could be freed from a strict capitalistic system which took the appearance of monopolizing the technological field. But it is a social construct also that we are too deep in our societal structure to resist it.

Where cultural relativism does not find its place where it seems the most logical, in this global world is the field of cultures. I will talk about taste being a pure social construction because it is. We like what we like because of the society we've grown in, our education and our restricted degree of personal interest. It is no excuse that we are stuck within a taste, within a culture, to make fun of others. And that is what still happen. The most interesting thing to observe is how people stuck within such a frame will make fun of people with a high degree of personal interest. Our cultural paradigm is attached with ethical paradigm which forbid us of any openly tribal criticism, most of the time. Though how many people haven't I seen laugh at a witch doctor ceremony. But the restricted frame people find themselves in is most observable when on television, someone has a deep personal interest in one subject under all its angles. This people are treated by TV-shows and their spectators as modern freaks, because they are capable of ignoring the general consensus of taste and behaviours.

Culturally, it is funny to also observe how people selects their team in national sports. It has nothing to do with the sportive quality of the team. It is only mildly related to the region of the team. It is highly related to the media representation of the team spirit. The team spirit is not related at all to some sport spirit in any way. The team spirit represented is only an image of the socio-economic background of the fans. The big winning team of a country will most of the time be the one supported by the powerful class and the easily manipulable population of the nation. The rival team will represent the opposite majority. The third team will represent the new-comers in a high class, the people who believe in the American dream, the nouveau-rich. The other more local clubs will be supported by the local population, in a quasi-tribal way, and most of the time, there will be two teams so class conflict can be represented. Of course, cultural construction will forbid fans such observation to the selection of their team, and only pseudo-sportive arguments will be presented.

Finally, I would like to present two important examples of the impossibility of thinking of our culture relativity in the field of morals and ethics. My first example is on our political ideals. Population have real difficulties changing political perspectives. Fukuyama was really wrong when he said that the end of history was represented by our liberal democracies. African multi-ethnic populations will admit that democracy is only creating a battlefield for them. A dictator is not any better because he will have fight to have power without learning the responsibilities of powers. But are we, the previous colonial powers, ready to see a monarchy re-establishing itself once again in a country? No, just like no parties will propose a truthful universal welfare state on its program, because as much as it is proven the best social help structure, it involves to much change, and too much change or difference do scare us.

The second example is our view on genders. There are lots of voices still raised for gender equality in the world, but without considering that gender equality does represent only a culturally constructed vision of gender equity. Of course, our system is as biased as societies were choice is not given. But should a couple decide as a couple who has what kind of power through discussion and through giving and receiving power? So if men, for example, would help for the chores in the house, that does give him real power within the house, he can decide what furnitures and how to raise the children. But if he wants to have a bigger buying power for himself by working only in the office and not doing much for the house, shouldn't he have only a restricted power of decision within the house ? Then what is wrong with women working at home and having full power at home ? There is only the illusion, within each society, of gender equity or equality, at least at home, but not one society has reached a true fair system, so no society should allow itself only to criticize others.

My final point is the one where in discussions, has raised the most voices. It's my belief that our view on paedophilia is highly restricted to our social construct of it, and that we still have a long way of self-criticism to go before we can find a solution to the problem. People have a lot of difficulties to understand how paedophilia is a social construct. They have no knowledge of the evolution of the representation of childhood within our society, and our representation of sexuality and emotional involvement as well. The most difficult part for people to understand is that our social view of paedophilia probably created the atrocities that paedophilia has created. Because we have represented paedophilia as an evil incarnated, people who are attracted by children will fall into a vicious circle of shame and alienation which will not give them the occasion to openly talk about their fantasies. This self-hatred or the hatred for such a judging society can only lead to the preservation of this secret and if they are too pushed by society, to act on their fantasies in the secret, with evilness. Their intentions will not be in their eyes acceptable to anyone else, so how can they come up to people before to talk about and see if there is another way out?

I don't know, it seems to me that our incapacity to liberate ourselves from our social perspectives, to adopt, if not for only a little while, other perspectives is growing. Our history permits us to make giant steps towards real peaceful discussions. But weak people will hide themselves behind modern society as an unmoveable society, as the idea of a better world being impossible. Or worst, I do know people who can only imagine living in idealized past, like conservatives,or ideals of the past, like French republicans, both perspectives only representing limited minds.

The too bearable lightness of being

God is dead and with him is our salvation for eternity. Eternity died, and the present is constantly in our life. Which hollywood star got drunk last night is more worth knowing about rather than what happened in Venezuela in 2002. With the disappearance of this quest for truth in the past, the use of the irrelevant truth today, a vision for the future is now considered the dreams of the fool. Yet, people like Huxley and Orwell did manage to present dystopia which are closer to reality than ever before. But isn't the dream of the future the essence of mankind, or are we running for the sake of running ?

With the industrial revolution came the idea that economic growth is the answer to our problems. The use constant calculation of the cost and profit of our actions is acting without purpose. It destroys slowly values defended by the great thinkers of our past. All the economy works on a negation of the past: forget that Nike used child labour to sell low cost shoes but be reminded they sponsor big sport teams and videogames, forget that McDonalds was just a practical fast-food, be reminded that it is now a family entertainment place.

We are asked to forget our past, how near it is, so we can't learn from our mistake, therefor not asking for a better future. This behaviour we get from the economic sphere influences the economic sphere too. If a government can't solve every problems society have in 6 month, we consider it unworthy of governance, though it is true it's never the best. But who cares about long-terms political programs ?

This negation of the mistakes of our past has also got some twisted logic which is dangerous for society. The news show today's human drama, humanity is denounced for its evil deeds. The result is that we forget where society is coming from. Social trust is in decline because we look at the state of society today, but because we don't consider how it was a century ago. If we consider that society is bad today, how can we hope it could be better tomorrow ? We get strangely give ourselve the salvation of our minds. Stating or knowing the horror like we see on t.v., we all consider that we are better human beings. We are good, the others are horrible, therefor why care about the others. In a way I appreciate the mission of the missionaries on a deontological point of view. i don't support the fact that they thought that their religion was the best, but their was a real interest in helping people you didn't know.

Our individualist society, the overvalued present and the fact that we all play along, and so is the economic and political orders, without making any critic, destroyed the possibility of presenting great designs for a harmonious society.

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.

Gangster´s paradise, their friends the government and reality of Midsumner Murders - Utopia 3

This subject is actually a delicate one, so I’ll try to work on it gradually. An Austrian dad confined his daughter in a cellar and gave her kids that he confined too, gangs fight in the streets of Paris, teenagers get knifed by their school mates in English schools; those are the news given by daily newspapers. Crime is something that mesmerizes us, it is something that shocks us and we want to be protected from it. But I don’t know if the existence of criminality can ever be erased by fighting it.

To start with, we have to be concerned with the problems of criminality. The first one to my eyes is its representation through news media. Media will report any crime event if a press agency has a good article on it, and if the authorities PRs release enough information about it to make it interesting. This is why, in recent decades, the representation of crime has augmented, while the crime rate has fallen. Of course, we can’t blame it only on the authorities, the media corporations are guiltier. For example, the crimes reported have to be more and more violent, toward a common person and near our place. Media outlets will always try to make us identify with the victims, just like a Stephen King’s book. And the “Daily Mirror” sells more than any book of Stephen King, but it is a distorted mirror. The reality of the crimes is never objectively reported. We can never feel sorry for the criminal, who’s guilty before being proven so. We never hear the criminal’s story, we never know, and don’t want to admit that he is like us, with less chance and was given different choices.

I’m not saying we should automatically feel sorry for him (in the most common case reported, the offender is a young man whose “origins” will always be defined as the country of his grandparents, as if it was the reason of his misbehaviour). So yes, we do receive a bent reality, but mainly because we like to feel as victims of the wicked wrong-doer, it makes us feel like righteous saints.

I often heard the argument that criminality is decreasing, so we do something good enforcing the security of our places, having more C.C.T.V. ( we didn’t learn anything from “ 1984”), being noted that crime exists and is making us paranoid. Well it is true; if crime is decreasing, we must be doing something right. But this again is a simulacrum of reality. Criminality is a number created by the government and the authorities. For example, if crime varies in London, it depends on the chief inspector of Scotland Yard and his policies. If he does not consider soft drug users criminals, the numbers are going down. Another illusion of crime is that it is mainly a statistic that can be shown and used varying on the numbers applied. A right wing party will show that the numbers are really high and we are living in a dangerous society and that security should be one of our rights. But it is only a point of view, and security is only a right if crime exists... It is my next point and might sound weird, so please hang on.

Durkheim explained it before me, crime is vital for our system. Authorities, our modern day Machiavellian Prince, exist to protect us. But we only need to be protected if danger exists. If we postulate that we are wolfs against ourselves, of course we need protection against ourselves. But it is a hypothesis that serves mainly the people in power. And they do know it and use it, unconsciously probably, but it can be observed in history through prohibitions. Prohibitions appeared whenever a government wanted more power and so had to compose a danger within society. The sixties were a booming decade that didn’t have many problems, and then the general crash of the early 70’s caused smaller incomes, so a problem was created: heroin was declared illegal. Anyone going to the hospital before that who suffered was given an addictive substance like heroin, and could ask their doctor to continue to receive it, without it interfering with their daily life.

Once outlawing it, a new crime was running the street, and could be considered as the base for all problems. A dependent part of the population became the victims of an oppressive government and greedy crime syndicates, but they were society’s “enemy” during the eighties, because authorities had to exist to protect us from them. And we started to hear the dramas of heroin addicts, but heroin doesn’t kill; it is the result of greedy drug dealers who want to sell more and thus cut their products with dangerous substances. Authorities created problems to legitimate themselves. If we’d legalize and control what we now consider as criminal activities, wouldn’t we feel more secure and less paranoid?

But crime is not only ruled by organizations, there are thieves and rapists and other horrible persons committing acts that shouldn’t be justified. What I am going to say sounds naive, but every crime is justified. They are all created by our society, or our personal interactions. For example, thieves don’t exist in societies that don’t understand the concept of property, of course they don’t. It is a simple fact that shows perspectives. Thieves don’t exist because they need to steal to survive, we are not in the 17th century anymore, but they exist because self-realization is not our problem. Thieves exist because they are in need of consummation. The objects of robberies change with periods, only because our general consumerist conditioned minds will put more or less value on different objects. A society that would search for self-realization and not wealth wouldn’t have someone stealing.

I know that it is a dream, but theft exists because people think they need to possess to be. But that’s only because we think so too. A beautiful car gives me pleasure, why wouldn’t anyone be jealous of this pleasure, but he can steal it from me because it doesn’t bring me happiness ( first of all because I don’t have my driver’s licence, but also because it is only an induced pleasure). Just like the objectification of the woman kills our empathy towards her, and gives legitimacy to a rapist.

So what about murders? Well for that, I turn to Inspector Barnaby, Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes who surely know that all real murders (not the induced murders that defined the young thug because he wants to be seen as such) are passionate and reveal secret stories. They are private matters and actually, in a way, positive. They show that we are capable of over-passion, we are more than animals. But against those, we can’t do anything, except find the murderer and make him understand his wrong-doing. That is why in my Utopia, I would have only inspectors with a great sense of deductions, and a civil service that would be here only to help and not to check our behaviour, have “Lead by example” as a motto and be educated to do so.