Thursday, January 27, 2005

Recommended Reading

Well to be very blunt I know nothing about Colombian society, culture, literature or peoples. Fact is I don’t know if I remain ignorant so as to keep an open mind but it must help to annoy the stereotypes. I am currently reading The Penguin History of Latin America but I think it has a very pragmatic approach to the matter and I believe we are a metaphysical people so I wouldn’t recommend it.

I think to comprehend Latin American character it is better to read the following:

Miguel de Unamuno: A must read The Tragic Sense of Life, it is the bible rewritten by a Spanish Catholic heart that never had the faith. Unamuno does a wonderful depiction of the impossibility of our people, why we are not rational and why being rational is anti life. Thus from there it becomes easy to understand why we will never be productive and consumers regardless of material enticements.

Sense I believe that we Latinos have a vivid intent in defeating life, Jorge Luis Borgess is another fantastic fellow, and certainly a must read, particularly his collection Labyrinths. There you will find what is perhaps the best short story ever written: The Immortal. It is a masterly depiction of our metaphysics and why Latinos are generally unable to pickup after themselves and why they wont lift a finger to help anyone else. It sort of doesn’t matter in the grand scope of things, hence the reason why we would never write a book like say “Being in Time” we are never on time because we don’t tick to a calendar.

To read another one of our finest philosophers you must enter into the realm of Jose Ortega y Gasset, he wrote a book that I thought particularly illuminating, “The Revolt of the Masses” a fine elitist point of view, you will find it absolutely hilarious; more important it depicts what our Latin founding fathers believed, that they know what is best for us all.

I don’t want to sound a classicist but if you have plenty of time in your hands Don Quixote de La Mancha is the fictionalization of Unamuno’s philosophy though ironically Cervantes came first, but as Unamuno correctly pointed out he died and Don Quixote lives on.

As you might take notice I don’t stay within the continent to define the literature of our character. This is because I have a globalized ability to stereotype, our people start in Spain, trip over Portugal and flow from Mexico down the throat of the Yucatan Peninsula strait throughout the Amazon until hitting bottom at Tierra del Fuego. The fact is that there aren’t as many peoples as there are countries.

ricardo

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

JAKE AS THE MONSTER

Jake, well Happy Birthday man.

By the way you will not know it that my favorite video game, “Hunter Hunted” has a main character called Jake. Hahahaha! My wife and I used to play it often during our courtship years. It was a silly game but we loved it and I hope that playing it doesn’t imply that we are stupid or silly or that we don’t read The Nation. Occasionally Jake would encounter a terrible monster, (read hard to kill,) and the monster would very condescendly say, “you cannot win, put down your weapons you cannot win.” I always found those instructions hilarious, they really got your optimism down, whenever the stupid monster came out he would make all kinds of voided of syllables noises and you knew, you just knew things were going to get ugly.

Of course after a while as with all games, the Virtual Intelligence repeats its logic errors or reaches its rationalizing limits and an average human being learns that if he ducks or jumps at just the right split second the monster will react differently and give the human a chance at victory. Through repetition and error correction and of course the ability to restart the game, the eventual victim becomes the monster. The game becomes such an obvious little plot that the human being becomes bored and ignores the game and the monster, and both game and monster fade into obscurity.

You know Jake that I am going to give you a “moral to the story”. The puppet masters, in this case the game makers are aware that if the game is too complicated the majority of the people will feel dissatisfied with the game-play and abandon the product. And the disillusioned will tell their friends the game is too difficult and this in turn will lower sales expectations; and so the game has to be just right, just hard enough, just fun enough to satisfy the greatest number so that the sales figures are properly aimed at a mass market. Which is also why the cheats are available online so as to help those of us that are not gamers by nature to enjoy at least a simulated victory.

In your worldview the game creators are manipulating the gamers so as to get their money, in my world view both parties are manipulating each other and one cannot exist without the other. Your assumption that the elite and the masses are two separate entities is the equivalent of imagining that a tiger and the jungle have different priorities as far as the rainforest is concerned. They don’t!

Why would I take issue with your world view? Because it is condescending; you remind me of the monster that thought I was doomed without knowing that indeed I had more power over his existence and my own happiness. You see without me playing the game monster would be truly dead. In fact the objective of monster was to keep me alive, more than wanting to kill me the people at Hunted Hunter incorporated, which I think was Interplay, were working hard day and night to keep my attention, without that they too would be dead.

You can rightly imagine all the game designers working hard to comprehend the dynamics of my game play and mindset; “what does Ricardo like about the game? What does Ricardo dislike? When does he play more? What will give him greater satisfaction so that he buys the sequel?” But more important the game designers, undoubtedly fanatic gamers themselves, were also sacrificing their purity of game design so as to meet my less than exemplar gaming aspirations. The game designers were busy dumbing down the game so that I could be a part of their universe, so that I would play in their world, but obviously not at their Creator level of game-play.

Of course the CEO of Interplay was involved with a bunch of futurologist asking them to please guess what I was going to like next. While the Marketing group would call my house and offer me a 50% discount on any future game if I just answered a few questions so that they could best meet my expectations. Meanwhile the Sales Staff was dully working to meet sales quotas by trying to shove the game down my throat through every outlet possible.

You see Jake, perhaps because I am a common man, getting my attention is lot of work. And I must admit that getting my money is a little harder still, in part because I have limited resources, (read poor,) and in part because I am really not a consumer. And to be more honest still I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, so I didn’t even pay for the game, I got it for free and because I liked it so much I gave copies to my friends.

I don’t know how much money Interplay lost in Hunter Hunted but rumor has it that it wasn’t a very successful title, it was discontinued as sales figures did not warrant a sequel. My wife and I lost our copy and we are still trying to find one so as to recollect that period of our romance where we didn’t fight.

I think what I am saying is that the problem your Elite/Common Folk aspect ratio has is that the boundary cannot be clearly drawn. You fault the masses for not reading The Nation or Foreign Policy Review but you fail to administer the fact that it is, for instance, The Nation and what it values that has failed to capture the average imagination. I have read Foreign Policy Review and The Nation and frankly The Nation sounds like a forever in angst teenager, feeling cheated at every angle. Alexander Cockburn is surely a master of the verb and more a master at the ability to insult others at every turn. The Nation of course does have a way with words, it is purely an intellectual diatribe where the ability to toss superlatives around is only outstripped by the cult of character absolutism. Frankly I am not surprise people don’t want to read it, it is an intellectuals child’s den.

I use to read The Nation when they were still in that old newspaper print magazine format, and I seem to remember that they trashed Mother Jones for going to a colorful magazine format, it wasn’t for intellectual papers to be flashy and colorful, they must be serious and cold and sterile.

Mother Jones itself is another interesting case, I call them “the good earth people” I mean this people still think that the Indians were nice to nature, that they were one with the universe. You know I know that the American Indian wasn’t that nice, the Incas and the Chibchas and the Aztecs were even less nice, but according to Mother Jones only the white man is brutal and insensitive. One has to be blind to history to not realize that the entire evolution of humanity has been a savage adventure; and that it is only through squatter-incorporation of territory and DNA-mergers that we have grown this thing that we call a civilization.

The Nation, I don’t know how many subscribers they have, last time I checked I think it was around 170k, that is probably an accurate representation of 10% of the 3% of peoples in America that are wholly dead to their emotions and live purely in Intellectual hubris. At least The New Republic, another lover of things intellectual, has it in their sights to cater to popular opinion by expressing a liberal conservatism that tells us all that they are one of us even though they feel elitists and in fact are comfortable being elitists! The New Republic is not saying we are with the masses as The Nation likes to clamor, rather it is saying we are elitists, join us and you can be elitists too. As my favorite economist once said, “the masses more than wanting to overthrow the rich more want to be like them.”

As for Foreign Policy Review, why would you expect a publication that is a feeler for prospective policy with political insiders to be popular with the general public? I don’t read Trains and Caboose Review and don’t get me started on Slate. But to my point is that you are faulting the masses for not paying attention to obscure values and ideas. You are being just like The Nation, that is, condescending by assuming that you know more than the masses what is better for the masses; and that they are being controlled by an elitists clan and that they don’t know it because they don’t have the attention span that apparently you do.

First it must make you feel smarter to do that and if it does good for you. But allow me to pose an alternative view, that in a world of common people lucky are those that learn to be common quickly. When ever I feel special I am amazed to find my favorite rare sauces at the supermarket; throughout the years I have learnt that much of what I considered original about my philosophy was based largely on my own ignorance.

A common person has a world that caters to common people, if you are then satisfied by common undertakings this is a perfect world. How fun it must be to enjoy the Super Bowl, a sport that is glorified all over the place and that allows you to have something immediately in common with a lot of people. I myself despise violent sport so I don’t like watching those men smashing conviviality into each other, but certainly those that enjoy it are indeed in synch with each other, and that builds both family and community and nation. The fact is that the masses are tuning to each other every time they watch a basketball game or a game of golf or tennis, or dance and listen to a popular song, this is how they sync with one another, from there it is easier to be with anyone that has shared similar experiences. Under such terms you might well argue that the Elite synch with each other by going to Film Festivals, the Opera or reading droll Shakespearian witticism.

The massification of thought, ideas and interests has positively unifying aspects, uniqueness after all, even the cry for individualism has been dimmed by the commonness of such an aspiration. It is sort of the same with the ego, we all have one and it stands in the way of unification but it is equally one more thing we all have in common. Further one should always worry more for those that think they have the formulae for liberating the masses from themselves; after all they have a huge misunderstanding of the scope of the problem, for before we can liberate the masses we must be sure that the world is not a pragmatist dream come true. The masses by an large don’t try to change the world because they are generally ok with it, and more they realize that as often as the world has changed it largely has remained the same.

Personally I wished I liked McDonalds and Disneyland because I would then have more in common with Americans and the world masses, and besides that my lunches would be cheaper. The masses dominate modern society, they are the ones that are leading the world consumer order; public opinion is the marching order of the day. I don’t think that you should worry about the masses more worry about your won uniqueness which makes you a rare and endangered species.

I am limited in my beer drinking but a can never resist a Guinness Irish Stout.

Cheers.

Ricardo
A sophist

Sunday, January 23, 2005

I respond to Jake on “American Innocence”

His argument, well posed as it is, makes the assumption that there is an intelligence base, an elite core that manipulates the cogs and pulleys of society so as to control the masses and keep them ignorant of what is truly happening in the world.

The assumption that there are controlling interests is not wholly wrong, certain lobbying groups and class structures permit a certain degree of control so as to maintain existing social and economic structures. The conservatives and the liberals act as true manipulators of the infinite degrees that a society can hope to move up or down, left or right. But none too much in the extreme is Nationally or Globally permitted because this would dissolve the consistency which adds social order; and more important a sort of economic and social autopilot so that we don’t have to think our lives away. I mean that all successful systems are by nature conservative.

It is not uncommon for our ancestors to believe that the Illuminati, the Jews, Skulls and Bones, Order of the Bull’s Blood, etc administer civilization. This is an important concept among the majority of the populace because at once it gives them a reason to feel good about themselves, as they are helplessly not responsible for the world that they have to live and act in everyday. Two, it gives them the comfort that at least someone is really planning everything and that there is some kind of an elite mastermind behind everything.

The counter idea, that no one is really in control of the world and that it mostly aimlessly moves through a sort of silent agreement between all parties, as ideas, thoughts and actions combined to make a sort of obtuse compromised reality, is not acceptable nor comfortable.

However I propose just such a truth. While I cannot claim to have access to central bankers and Chief Executive Officers psyches, I do believe that they are mostly reacting to events as oppose to thinking forward their master plans. In fact most of anything that happens at the political or corporate level is a reaction and usually a helpless reaction which when executed is not optimize but rather a consequence of “even the circumstances” which impose themselves as yet another option for action.

We are deterred from the view that the world is a happenstance because we are control freaks. And we believe that others, the elites, the corporations, the supra-entities are in control because we know for a fact that we are not. Obviously we cannot circumvent our knowledge of our own impotence besides the world order and so we attribute control to all the others.

The American public would like to imagine that someone is in charge of their nation, that someone is checking the plan of execution against the constitution and thus ensuring a true course. The reality again is a little different, the founders of America had an idea and with it they created a national psyche but this was only a figment of the imagination, there was no truth to liberty, independence and the good will, those were just pillars of hope against the greater reality that it was through greed, religious fanaticism and civil righteousness that the country was founded and obtained greatness. The concept of America as a democracy or an individualist nation is not a factor in its current reality. America performs well against the world because of its “blind” single-mindedness, because Americans come together as a single National-Psyche, because they are willing to overthrow individuality, because they are mass thinkers and mass consumers and mass creatures with an immense sense of social duty to a larger cause! This cause might be the church, the state or the corporation, or even simply an endeavor like the space program. But Americans depersonalize themselves, they subtract the “I” from the equation and more rapid than most societies actually accomplish a social norm, a civic and national league that with its singularity of focus will outshine brighter ideas.

Mass behaviour depersonalizes it refuses individual control. America is indeed a democratic country but not because of the national right to vote but rather because the stampede always wins. There is a national herd instinct that becomes a national will to power. No one controls this and everyone must get out of its way.

America is a synchronized country, from sea to shiny sea the country has managed to take any nationality and to give them all the same idea, that they are unique, that they are special, that they live in the freest country on earth, that they have the right to chose their government, and their neighbors, and their religion. The reality of course is a little more harsh, most Americans are Christians, is that a sign of choice? Most Americans want to spread democracy. Is that open minded? Most Americans believe capitalism is the best way to manage an economy. Is that humane? Most Americans are consumers. Is that environmentally responsible? Most Americans believe that property and intellectual rights are titled deeds to be kept away from the rest of the world. Is that a global mindset?

In a sense Americans are a particular psyche, one can generalize because any and all national psyches are the dominant aspect representation of a given nationality. Colombians are by nature incapable of organization, they are self absorbed individuals that can allow their nation to suffer a forty year war without acquiring the energy or volition to accomplish genuine change. They watch their forty year wound bleed and have nothing to do about it, because they don’t have the energy to bring change or to suffer the repercussions of change but prefer the tragedy. Unlike Americans Colombians prefer their family to the nation, they are more united by soccer than by nationhood; and the nation as a whole, well it is something but nothing warranting their immediate attention rather their immediate disdain. Colombians don’t trust governments and so they keep their government weak and corrupt to justify their perception. That is our national psyche, Colombian is a loose fitting coalition of a people that have never had the guts or combined energies to form any significant civilization. At the same time we are not of the here and now, a forty year war its just an itch. That too is our national psyche, suffering is inconsequential to our metaphysics.

But be we Greeks or Americans or Colombians there isn’t anyone person or organization that can control our interests because our interests are controlled by the clash of our desires with reality which in turn equal a national sense of being; that at best represents no one and everyone.

Jake I do hope you are a wine drinker, it is part of my human psyche. Here is a red to you.

ricardo

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Compulsory Confinement

Original sin is a conceptual explanation of how one human is responsible for what all of humanity represents. According to religions we are all guilty of sin by virtue of the fact that we are born. From there we must seek redemption even as we may not have enjoyed the sins committed by our ancestors. We did not kill our brother Able, we did not betray Jesus for a few coins, we certainly did not cooperate with the Devil in his failed coup d'etat, nor were we in anyway participants in the phenomenal and inspiring act of eating from the tree of knowledge where Adam and Eve dared for a few seconds to transcend God and demonstrate their new found independence. But perhaps the greatest transgression of all was when science took the stage to demonstrate that there really wasn't much mystery to the universe that it could all be explained through knowledge, and perhaps this act could never have occurred had not Adam and Eve taken the liberty to eat from the tree of knowledge.

The phenomenally impressive thing here is that we acquire responsibility through the act that others commit, that we become victims of all the sins and beneficiaries of all the goodness committed by our ancestors; it is as if there were a subconscious moral and emotional DNA that replicates itself just as our biological self chains itself back to its primordial origins. Do we have to believe in this moral lock-down? Can we isolate ourselves from the consequences brought forth through causation?

We must not decline the historical process, there is somehow retribution for everything that we are as a matter of simple consequence if nothing else. The universe and all the things in it have a vested interest in themselves and are not going to sit quietly letting the concept of humanity march up to the podium of energy habitations without some struggle. In order to inhabit this realm we must assume energy reservations then it stands to reason as reason we must that other forms of essence will want to challenge our right to absorb cosmic energies and thus a sort of consequence of our existence is conflict; which interpreted with some latitude could be viewed as a consequence of sin and as such a retribution. The universe of course is always trying to simmer not because it wants to simmer but because it is unchaining itself from the agglomeration of energies that it has become, and it is doing this because the nothingness is all absorbing, and so we must not take it personally that the universe wants to diffuse us as it is a consequence of its being and not a true factor of its nature as its nature oddly depends on the agglomeration of energy, in the form of desired essence such as ourselves.

We must teach ourselves the world in order to unlearn ourselves. As a sort of way of reaching an acceptance of the accumulating effect of our histories we reach to externalize the consequences so as to salvage our soul from having to endure the universe crawling all over it. In this light we come into the transgression of self against the whole of our humanity, in order to endure life we subtract ourselves from the global nature of our sins or from another angle the global impact of our actions.

In short, there is a moral lock-down, we propose it to ourselves every time we attempt to escape from it, and reinforce the lock-down in the process. Rather than escape our escape merely incarcerates us in an isolation chamber, this due to the irreconcilable fact that we do not want to experience the consequences brought forth by the nature of our humanity.

RC