ergio

Thursday, January 27, 2005

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

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

FUTURIST ARE DISENGAGED

The energies are accumulating always in the direction that is most willing to manifest them this regardless of the consequences. Those most willing to live in the here and now are the most likely beneficiaries of energy flows, as the fact that they are living the moment gives them the highest level of energy channeling possible for this region; thus being average is common because that is where the energies flow with the greatest ease, whereas being different is the least energy-cost effective proposition.

If you are a true futurist, not many are and the profession does seem a bit ludicrous, I don’t think the future needs midwifes, but a true futurist is the least likely person to guess the future, as a good portion of their activity would have to be dedicated to guessing the needs and wants of the future; unfortunately the future is diametrically opposed to prediction; this is not because prediction would eliminate the element of surprise and newness; as such a thing the future requires so as to impress us, and to change us, and to challenge the old folks that denounce it by becoming admires of the past; but rather because the future doesn’t know itself what it will become.

Being that the case the future isn’t going to channel energies backwards, in other words the future has no interest in backward compatibility or referential communication; it doesn’t care about the past and it doesn’t even care much for the present, and so this disassociation is what makes the job of prophesying so damn difficult; while the present and the past have time, time the factor that imprisons and allows for concordant determinations. Thus even if the future were interested in channeling backwards the problem for futurologists remains that desire energies only root where they are most likely to be manifested, the present.

The present is the highest manifestation of the resulting channeling of desire energies. Anyone that wants to live in real life, the here and now, has thus the highest potential ergio energies available for immediate use, and much to their benefit this requires little or no thought. This is one of the benefits that a rabbit has, even as the rabbit is a rather overly cautious creature, the rabbit doesn’t have the propensity to think too far ahead but rather has the propensity to react, a rabbit has a great potential of proliferation based on an incessant amount of energy, that is willing to manifest in its direction; the same applies to a rat.

Humans are a rather fragile species certainly you never see a tiger or a bear defining themselves by their looks even as their looks are impressive; but a bear doesn’t say “I need a nose job”. This is because the bear is manifesting his entire being on the earth and is only interested in surviving in it, a bear doesn’t want to make a profit, he just wants to survive and carry on the genetic composition, bears shall continue to exist says the bear essence but it doesn’t say much more, they are not saying “I want to care for the planet”, “I want to make a profit,” “I need to have my soul rescued for I am a sinner”, no bears don’t say things like that, I watched a bear eating a bear cub and I didn’t notice remorse, or sorry I have to do this, the macho bear wasn’t moralizing because moralizing requires the ability to project consequences and responsibilities; moralizing also diffuses ergio energies into metaphorical elements that have no consequence, such as contingency plans that never have to be executed or fears that never suffer their manifestations. Bear and rabbit and rat are wholly self centered on the here and now and sentient ergio energies will tend to favor them.

But then there is that fragile sentient creature, the paranoid scoundrel of the earth that does think “hey I think I will kill me a bear and a rabbit to prove to myself that I am an excellent hunter.” And thus mount the trophies up on a wall, there is the head of the bear that ate the little bear cub and there is the head of the rabbit that nervously moved back and forth too much over dead center. Now you might think “what good is that?” It isn’t any good of course but you couldn’t possibly convince the bear hunter that hunting bear is a useless proposition. Obviously bear hunters are neither geniuses nor puritans they don’t conserve energy, they are more powerful in nature than are puritans and are more likely to survive the apocalypse than Christians. Which presumably puritans and Christians alike, have convinced themselves that they don’t want to survive it because they have never banked in the here and now. Bear hunters like bears and rats and little bunny rabbits live in the here and now and ergio energies will favor them, because ergio energies are, remember, none moralizing, they just want essence representation in a particular state of being. As a hunter, as a bear, as a rat and so they represent themselves as such and will funnel all their intensity to those that are most likely not to squander them. A puritan spends far too much time dismembering their desires so they will be possesses by minimalist energies. Of course as all things this does create a weird paradox, a minimalist energy concentration does focus and so it is possible to imagine the puritans being effective moralizing hunters epidemically contaminating everything with overblown sterility.

You might be wise to ponder “why are humans so successful in reproducing in the here and now when they have time to dwell on the past and even become such absurd professionals as futurists?”

Well the thing is that humans are incredibly successful because they have been the highest level of what we call herd instinct, they are indeed an stampeded upon the earth, the bulls and cows are incompatible in stature. You don’t for instance see the catholic church trying to save the bull from the bull fighter even as one would imagine that the church and god would both be against cruelty to animals. This is because any institution first and foremost rests its power base on the number of ergio energy constituents. And so the church is fully aware that bulls are being harmed by its constituents but the bull is not a donor member, and the church may actually be seeing as tolerant if it accepts that its members will commit such follies; and so there you have it bulls are a way for the church to seem tolerant, and a way for the mass of the masses to be held in the bull ring as they never stopped bull sacrifices they merely metamorphosed into bull fighting. Finally all this represents the stampede of humans against the bull, at the end of the fight between toreador and bull it is the mass audience that decides if the bull shall live or die, a drastic form of “we shall overcome.”

In all it is a charismatic battle for energies even as we do not realize it; you don’t sit around thinking that the human species is one giant ergio energy being, but this is just what it is, the more closely you examine a being the more you have seen them all; the same is true of a cat or a rabbit, they are all the same. A rabbit, as rabbits are, is always nervous and a cat is always seemingly poised and calm. All cats are like that, why? Because they are all the same cat, there is no such thing as an individual and much less a cat independent of the species. If you come to this earth as a cat it is because the ergio desire energies manifested their desires as such, and there is nothing else to do about it but be a feline and the more cat you are the more the energies will effervescent within you and within their expression in the here and now.

In conclusion and the conclusion gets boring, the fragility of humans is somersaulted through humankind, and any and all manifestations of energy are greater the more tuned they are to the here and now, futurist are disengaged.

RC

Monday, September 13, 2004

American Innocence

I have been debating if there is such a thing as an “American innocence”. The term itself is ripe with pernicious consequences. Think of it in this respect, if America is innocent what does that say about the power that it possesses? If America is innocent does that imply that a nation may actually become a dominant world power without a comprehension of the implications and nature of power? Can the American people, the makers of America and the shapers of the modern world, be innocent?

Many Americans are crying out: “why does everyone hate us so much just because we are rich and live good lives?” There is some genuine assumption in the national psyche that the American public is benevolent, kind, concerned and generally unassuming. Even foreign enemies have gone out of their way to note that “they are not against Americans but against American government policies.” This, as if democratic peoples in a republic with the highest degree of participation in government, and oddly probably the highest level of government employment of its citizenry could somehow abstain from responsibility.

None of that rings true to the America that I know; living there for 33 years all I saw was a demonstratively aggressive society that does not very much think about the consequences of its actions and so rather than being innocent it is instead unwilling to check itself through the projection of consequences and analysis of effect. In this way it prefers to remain ignorant of what its powers may accomplish. I would not equate ignorance with innocence, though either one appears despicable from any angle. I don’t like innocent women and I don’t like innocent countries and don’t believe there is such a thing as innocence when one has the mass of destruction stored up in silos all over the yellow brick road.

I try to be fair but I am not in need of it. Anyone that believes that the American people are innocent consumers of the largest killing machine in world history can only be a beneficiary of that system. There may well be a need to look the other way to have the ability to use the “I didn’t know” coupon against personal guilt. The psyche of a nation is scripted in the results, the outcome triggers immediate feedback of what it is that we are, what it is that we represent, and the resulting symbology can be a cruel assertion. I don’t suffer for all the Colombians that suffer as it is obvious from a 40 year old guerrilla war and civil strife that the national psyche has invested a lot in suffering. Ireland is a poetic land the consequences of its savage poetic soul are embodied in its essence, the IRA and the infamous England a marriage made in hell, but a marriage none the less.

Saying that Americans are innocent is like saying Microsoft is innocent. Microsoft is a great generator of tax revenue, foreign capital, jobs, and national pride; technology being the least of its accomplishments but its hegemony over the technological industry is not based on the fact that Microsoft employees are innocent people. They are not innocents and they would feel insulted if they had an inkling that someone thought that.

General Electric might be the microwave oven for American Management, it nukes them clean of any morality and sends them off to kill, mane and mutilate the competition. Reality television amply shows that rather than being innocent the American public is insensitive, how else can the Trump audience derive satisfaction out of the firing and emasculation of people, or how can the ability to dip another in pig`s blood be entrainment.

American football is a sport based on the ability to inflict injury and to survive and defeat the opponent at all cost. American football is based on the assumption that everyone is willing to sacrifice their personal well being for the sake of the greater cause, defeat of the enemy an expectable of the debauchery of billions of dollars. Not unlike the political campaigns which further exploit the American psyche mandate for intensity, for a winner and a loser and the winner, regardless of the tactics is judge to be the right one for the job. American management gurus use sport as the metaphor for business practices, team spirit, offense, defense, win market share either by outspending your competitor or saturating the market with under priced goods.

American religious organizations with their blitzing proselytizing have left the inquisitions looking rather dull, the grand inquisitor was merely shock effect. No one at the New York Times writes about the modern crusades of Western religions, it doesn’t affect the columnists, they are part of Western culture, they see it as harmless that messiahs wearing ties are practicing their freedom of speech in Latin America so as to peddle faith helping to build churches and spreading the word with swords made of charity.

I met a lot of very nice people in Wisconsin, they played a lot of bridge, baked a lot of cookies for their neighbors, hunted deer, they loved good grub, hadn’t a mean bone in their bodies, read the bible or went to church. Sure they didn’t like the fact that the American Indian had titled rights to the fish harvest, and they didn’t like Mexicans because they just wanted to live off of American goodwill. But the Wisconsinites I met were a kind people, perhaps fully unaware of the dynamics of world politics. Yet as they meticulously trained themselves for the hunt, their dedication, their tenacity, their ability to camouflage themselves, sit still in a tree for 3 hours, was remarkable and no doubt helpful when deer hunting and in Iraq.

The Americans I have met are well intentioned, self taught and determined to perfect their race and their world, and to secure capitalism, freedom of expression and democracy throughout the world. This is what their president is doing, there is no innocence in inflicting self determination for others.

Of course if America were a pacifist power would it be a world power? Some historians have noted that the British Empire was good at conquering but not aggressive enough to hold on to their real estate. A dominant America might wisely claim ignorance of the consequences of all that it surveys but can it do anything else?

It is a trickier question to answer, benevolence doesn’t carry much weight in this world of slaughter your own lunch, and it appears that America is not going to be the empire that will represent a new world order, just like all the others it will fade into the sun set on that famous Wave Principle as any power controlled by the stock market must.

It is my conclusion that America is and has been helpless in its reign, it probably didn’t even know that it was its turn at the helm, and neither does it know what to do with it; Gorbachev displayed an uncanny ability to know when to end his own country, a rare treat for me as did De Klerk in South Africa. Now the American people have elected the man that can force their downfall, as it has to be forced, by way of his benign ignorance which is not innocent!

RC

Saturday, August 07, 2004

SEX

While it remains that I have written many things this one, because of the title stands to be probably the most read. That is neither a bad nor a good thing, it is simply a fact of life that the word sex and sex itself has the most in common with all of us, and us with it and with each-other through it. Time and time again we are reminded that perhaps the largest employer of women throughout the world is the sex industry, which, like it or not provides a living for many families and in some cases even helps them out of poverty, just like in other cases it buries with drug abuse, violence and ill health.

We spend so much time fighting the sex industry and the innate desire for sex in all creatures that we have never taken a genuine look at the matter of sex. Sex researches will disagree, they will point to countless studies that have been done on the topic, either by perverts or well meaning scientists. There might indeed be a positive value in academically understanding the properties of sex but I sincerely doubt it; coming out with statistics that teenagers are having more sex, or finding out that XY percentage of the population is gay hasn’t any socially significant relevancy. The study of sexual behavior only serves to promulgate the belief that there is something wrong with it, or to indicate that a portion of the population suffers from aberrant behavior.

Let us face the reality, the facts are that teenagers, specially in advanced civilizations, are probably having less sex today that ever in the history of humankind. This is because before the 17 century there was no self indulgent embargo on feelings. It was in the seventeenth century which seems to commence the official embargo of all human sentiment and mark the beginning of the inquisition of rational against feelings and unknowns; but that horrible century, which must and will be condemned in some future histories, that seventeenth century marks the most official denial of sex, for it was by the seventeenth century that religion was officially dethroned wholly by the rigors of secular thought; the idea that a church and a state did not have to share power had been fully absorbed by then, the concept of logic as being more important than faith had fully planted itself in the human psyche; after the 17 century it wasn’t a question of weather secular values could control the planet it was a constitutional mandate that no monarch, no person, no belief could dominate the earth but that all things must first be studied in order to say what we know of them, that we must dissect everything so as to void ourselves of all doubt and myth, that a turtle could certainly not be the pivoting point for an earth circling itself; that was proven beyond all doubt by the seventeenth century. And more, for it goes on, and prepare yourselves my darlings for this is going to be a long paragraph, it was in the seventeenth century that it was decided at last that there was no going back before the magna carta, that the doings seeded by the magna carta would hold, that power and decision making could be diluted so that no concentration of power could ever again be held by one subjective monarch; Napoleon becomes immediately the personification of this collapse of center, at once emperor at once the last possible idea of emperor; torrents of immensity collapsed, and the common man now had a chance at being a noble through the edification of his being by following the processes of organization. Ladies and gentleman this was the fatal century, this was the century where we would realize that by controlling sexual urges we could designate the inherent human sensual energy for industrial use. A sexually repressed people will become organized, clean and productive! Thank you seventeenth century! But it did not stop there did it? because the climax of the seventeenth century which may well rhyme for good reason well with the enlightenment, the climax of this beast was in turning the religious dogma against sex without reproductive purpose into a secular dogma where one could have sex for fun and not beget the earth its children; here enjoyment became the paramount reason for sex as reason could not accept any other conclusion for sex, people have sex for fun, you can have sex with anyone, casual sex was born in the seventeenth century! And from there it wasn’t difficult at all to secularize the intimacy of sex, because once you can have sex with any one or any thing, and society permits it, then you have the ability to rape yourself, and that my friend is a requirement in order to create a self that is constantly repairing itself. You see before the seventeenth century the world, tyrants, religion, gods, monarchs, barbarians abused the individual but after the seventeenth century the enlightened individual could abuse the self with complete impunity, and he or she could do this only because they were granted the authority to have secular sex, sex without intimacy, sex without feeling, sex for sex sakes; and thus is born the new puritan, a puritan that is willing to live completely outside of emotion, the new puritan where it is not religion that forms the alienation from the world, it is the self that alienates it-self from the world; no longer an external force, the seventeenth century finally manages to compact the world into one workable microcosm, a self sustainable individual that can judge itself and act as a policing-judge against others. No longer do we need monarchs, priests and gods to judges us and punish us, we can judge ourselves and thus is born the autonomous and lonely unit that we call modern civilized individuality!

Why is it so important that we become aware of this, because the cold blooded reality is that we have frozen ourselves in some static high-minded act which in itself becomes a puritanical bent to control ourselves, our senses and our lives to every minute detail. The modern individual is nothing more than a self contained unit of control systems which constantly monitor the reference points of science and state so as to correct their actions! No longer do they need the grand inquisitor, the new self correcting puritan doesn’t even need a puritan ideology, that is to say, they will voluntarily sterilize themselves. And this is only possible because secular lovemaking has no feeling, it is simply a circus act, a pure raw performance, in that world even a pill can give you sex.

Now of course that sex itself doesn’t just vanish simply because it is suppressed through a process of depersonalization, making sex secular doesn’t mean that it now becomes something that we can control, it merely means that we have the capability to funnel it, the less sexual the individual the more productive. The less sexual the individual the less sensual the connection to his fellow beings and this more isolate being becomes more loyal, pliable and amenable to social and systematic structures. This is why societies like Japan, Germany, England and America are so productive, they have managed to take sexual energy and turn it into productivity. The formulae is simple enough, a sexually frustrated individual has a tendency to want to be clean and to do work, the greater the restrictions on sexual wanton the more likely that the society will produce, but also the more likely that the society will suffer perversions. Societies that secularize sex eventually suffer greater degrees of sadistic and masochistic behaviors so as to compensate for their lack of intimacy. When an individual is sterilized of sensuality there is nothing left but to hurt or be hurt so as to feel.

The supremacy of the secularization of intimacy has other perverse side effects, it will turn the very productive societies that embody it into the most aggressive societies in the world, and as a result, in order to avoid internalized violence they will export it. They will externalize their violence in order to save their compatriots, the nationalistic embargo on intimacy forces the energies to turn into action, and that action mandates a destruction of the lack of intimacy, but sense the lack of intimacy is internal and the self repairing secularized citizen is taught not to self destruct, it has to externalize the feelings that tell it to destroy and so this automaton will go forward to rationalize the maniacal agglomeration of weapons so as to have the greatest amount of punch power, so as to be invincible. Repression creates a need for invincibility, a need for power is always the desired result of lack of intimacy! The most sexually repressed nations will always have the greatest amount of weapons and an endemic anxiety to make an impossible enemy so as to use them.

We are then now faced with a world that wants to avoid the topic of sex, everything about sex is a scandal, which is why even as the sex industry is one of the largest in the world and one of the most economically successful stories of all time, it doesn’t make the news in any other guise than a negative. It is the affair, the perverted politician, the gays, the whores, the porn stars, the libertines that make the headline news. This is because sex has to be kept mentally as some kind of perversion, it is only when viewed as a perversion that the individual can castigate him or her self for wanting it, for desiring it, “I must be a pervert if I want to have sex every day,” “I must be a pervert if I desire same sex partners,” and this self imposed inquisition will assured failed satisfaction and the most plausible outlet for it is cleanliness and work effort, desire energies are thus turned into work energies; the fruitless become fruitful.

The less aggressive the society the less inhibited. You don’t have to go to far to observe this reality, the societies that have the most children at a younger age will be the most sexually liberal; this is because they are inadvertly displaying a lack of trained restraint. They will be having sex with siblings, with cousins, with the babysitter, with their uncle, with every next door neighbor and so on, that shows that there is lack of an internalize taboo against sex, and so the flimsy mandate for the taboo is external, say for instance the church in the case of Latin American; and because the church is an external force it does not have the impact that the very same taboo would have on first world nations that have managed to secularize sex and turn the individual into a self correcting grand inquisitor.

In catholic Latin America it is the catholic church that is telling the people not to have sex for other than reproductive purposes, and not to consummate the relationship until after they are married by god and church. Yet Latin America societies have very relaxed morals and their peoples are so easily overtaken by the urge to have sex that they have it when they want it without much psychological maneuvering; and hence any scientific study of those countries should show a very low perversity ratio as compared to highly developed nations.

Homosexuals and transvestites are very common in Latin American societies, however these are repressed, heterosexual sex is held in high steam but homosexuals and transvestites are not as accepted, and so the repression of these should equally show that there is a greater perversion within each practice. However even in this realm, the third world catholic societies, due to a lack of systematic structures, are mostly silent on the matter, that is there is a silent approbation of the matter, a reluctant tolerance, they know it happens, and so the relationship that a bisexual husband has with some male partner is accepted through inaction. Unlike in more advanced countries, such as America, where it is supposed that homosexuality has gained greater acceptance, yet even the homosexuals themselves have an outing program to force gays who don’t want to become public figures, to be exposed as part of the freak show that gay parading has become. This is caused by the highly systematized individual conscience which has to turn any aspect of its personal life into a political statement.

But as sexuality is not an element that can be controlled by secular or religious organizations, or even as done in first world nations through secular puritanical-individuality or/and the medical establishment, then we must speculate what is the actual intent of sex. Is sex really only for reproduction and for immediate carnal pleasure as the majority would have us think?

The answer is of course no, that sex leads to reproduction is interesting and we re not going to dispute that that is one of its primary purposes; as well that sex satisfies should not be overlooked, a good orgasm has no attractions, that I can imagine, that can beat it; but the question lurks what is sex for?

As it is so often the case with other things I do have the answer for this one, and I am sure that that will be used against me; but I cant help myself for I am not self regulating as are others which must wait for expert professional conclusions or facts to reach them before they can know anything. Self correcting secular beings can be identified because they will only reprogram themselves after they have studied expert and professional advice as given to them through systematically approved channels.

In order to answer the question we must go back to first principles, one must assume that sex is part of a first principle because it is one of the primary activities of all creatures, you have it in common with everything that reproduces on this planet or in any other planet, it is safe to assume that sentient beings have sex in common, if you don’t have some form of sex, you are probably not a sentient being. So we have already made our first primal connection, sex and sentient are inextricably related. This is due to the interesting fact that in order to have sex or to act out the sperm egg dance ahoy you have to have a sentient connection, you can not interact with something that doesn’t place an emotional burden on your existence, at least at the sexual level. Still I should point out that asexual reproduction is both the most popular form of reproduction and the most abundant species in the universe do in fact reproduce asexually. But since our discussion is about sex then that doesn’t matter to us; though I should further state that asexual reproduction is equally within sentient being.

Everything sentient being in the universe is made up a sentient energy that I call an ergio, it is a miniscule but complete sentient energy, this energy is what allows us to sense one another and it is the energy which seeks to replicate itself throughout the universe against all other possible conceptions of energy, which arise from the nothingness to represent themselves in our universe. Sentient beings embody sentient energies-ergios and these all form a singular universe within the known universe.

It doesn’t matter what type of species you are, dolphins, whales and monkeys are sentient beings, your inability to feel them as such is simply a limitation that you have imposed upon yourself through reasoning, as reasoning tells you that you are one bright human being that you posses unique intelligence, etc. Rational is what separates you from the mud that you came from, rational isolates and so you can not feel the emotions a whale possesses but regardless a whale is a sentient being, and so are aliens living in other planets and all of them with all of us share one thing in common, ergio energies. These ergio energies seek each other at some level, specially when they are separated by distance or by ideas, if you use logic then you have distanced yourself from your emotions, even as logic is a result of those emotions. The space program is largely the construct of logical applications being used to seek out other forms of sentient life in the universe.

Our quest to seek other forms of life causes us to reproduce beyond the sustainable possibility of our earth environment, we subconsciously know that we have to reproduce and reproduce our sentient energy so as to reach out to the other sentient ergio energies in the universe. First principles tell us that there is no division between sentient beings other than that which is artificial or socially or physically contrived; irremediably there is a consciousness and a subconsciousness that unites us all as one, but we are not able to perceive this throughout all the dimensional aspects of its manifestations.

However since there are things like the akashic record which sustain and commune all the events and histories and memories of sentient beings, then these things equally seek to reunite us as a way to eliminate the vast coldness of all the disparate things that have apparently nothing in common with us. The true measure of our communality is in feelings and shared experience; what you feel for your cat or dog, what you feel for your children, for your soul mate, etc is constricted with what all of them feel for you. Such is the communion between sameness. These things construct and align and realign themselves throughout the universe even as we are not physically in touch with them, they are in touch with us through same essence habitations. The fact that civilized human beings have not realized that they are the same person as the aborigines is because they don’t comprehend action at distance, they don’t comprehend the embodiment of the concept of humanity. Any person that can murder another human being has isolated the concept of humanity, as one singular entity; in a sense when you stop having sexual relationships with the world you gain the ability to destroy it. This is because sexuality and sensuality are inextricably intertwined, which is why when you endorse the secularization and monogamy of sex there are only perverse results from it.

First principles then indicate a native connection that is shared by all sentient beings, all sentient beings, when the connection becomes extenuated through interference from local, global or cosmic forces seek to repatriate it through whatever means. We are seeking the unification of all sentient life forms in the universe. Sex is a means by which we generate and propagate sentient beings, but it is also a way to heightened our awareness of other sentient beings, and this is the truly why sex! Sex heightens our awareness of those that we touch through those that we touch.

Take the seemingly simple act of paying for sex with a prostitute. First the only way to generate money is through labor, like it or not money is the production of our sweat and toil and as such when we pay a prostitute for sex it is not just money, money is just a representation of a connection that we have to the rest of the world and that is being handed to the prostitute as a form of payment. The very word prostitute has in itself an ugly sounding tone and the harshness is defined to separate us from her, even as the payment unites us. After the transaction, notice the element of a transaction which is recognized, and which occurs the world over probably more times than married couples have sex, we enter into the world of what is presumed sex without a burden. But you need to look deeper than that, there is no such thing as sex without an emotional burden, as the very connotation of the act of sex is to unburden yourself through an interaction.

What is really happening is more fascinating, every prostitute is uniting humanity, is voiding out the civilized isolation of humanity, the prostitute is a vessel by which all the individuals that cannot touch may touch and feel one another, and transfer their ergio energies throughout each other. It is touching at a distance, it is sensuality removed through a third person, the urge for connectivity is such that it will not be voided through social straightjackets, the urge to unite and to feel one another is embodied in the prostitute, she serves humanity by becoming a vessel which all can touch, and through her, every man that touches her touches every other man that touched her, and equally touches every wife and lover that those men and their wives have touched.

Prostitutes are an affordable extension of the Harem, and in the same way so are extramarital affairs or cheating in general; this is all a reflection of our search to touch all the untouchables, made so by the narrow measuring eye of morality. We have Harems and Polygamy through these various means, and the means betray a profounder cause, the need to feel.

The prostitute is and has been throughout time the first and foremost social worker, acting out of her urge to sense the despondent nature of feelings, accepting the void which her vessel becomes by allowing men and women to congregate through her.

This is so. And it is so because when you conjugate with another, you leave a portion of yourself in them, and that portion of yourself travels with them wherever they go and leaves a portion of itself with whomever they touch; your sense of being is made greater by the greater amount of those that you’ve touched, either through sex or through kind acts or through business transactions. A politician and a movie star have all the energies of all the people that think of them, stare at them, all those ergio energies are at their disposal and accumulate within them, and give them more energy to go on, to be more to symbolize us, to represent us all, that which gets our attention gets more energy to go on, in part as part of us, and in part as part of it self.

Seeing in this light the propagation of our urge to become whole again, encourages us to violate moral imperatives with promiscuous want! Sex and even its vice prostitution, is how we sensually reach out and touch one another and the others within them, in a world that denies us that right.

RC

Generational Psychosis

Any reader that is with me up to this point understands clearly that there are ergio energies that transcribe who and what we are throughout humanity and on even to sentient beings here and elsewhere in the universe, and the Akashic record historically apprehends all vices and actions into the sentient archive for all beings to source and inherit.

A device like the internet is a web of these associations and is equally the result of them. When peoples seek to communicate they will divine a way, the internet protocols however mundane are an urged result by a desire for our mass of humanity to interact; the need for speed in aircraft and even the need for aircraft is the need to reduce the time to reach a loved one or to greet a stranger, and thus humanity seeks through varying methods, with relative success, to reach out onto all parts of itself.

The reason why we seek interaction via a tool like the internet or an airplane is because we either have not learnt how to use our psychic abilities, or because we do not conceive the possibility of metaphysical astro-hopping our soul form one place to another. A phone call might be more evidence of the limitations that we impose upon ourselves and than we overcome with the very phone call that dials up our limitations.

The reason why we invented science was to circumnavigate the wall we built by falling in love with material happenings; and the ever dangerous love of rationalization of events so as to explain that which is impossible to comprehend: the universe and our relationship to it.

In a sense we can be aware of the universe but we cannot know it, and if we attempt to know it then we cancel our awareness. The two are mutually exclusive, awareness and understanding don’t get alone, scientists understand, gods are aware. A god is capable of instant on action, a scientist has to have a lot things in place to turn on the lights.

When you look at a science such as is the science of statistics you have to ask yourself are there facts in statistics? Even as facts can not be a part of something that is a mere approximation. Yet the truth be told there are only approximations to reality which harden when we put a name to them, was Samuel Clements Samuel Clements or was he Mark Twain? He was for sure both, or was he, could Samuel Clements be Mark Twain or could the reverse of that be true too?

We know Samuel Clements because of Mark Twain, and Mark Twain was a person that Samuel Clements could never be, could never be as the real world person that he was; personification implied that his name had to change to represent what he was to society as a whole. It was however Mr. Clements that intuited that such would be the correct expression of his Twain essence; Mark Twain rings true to the writings, rings true to the sensibilities of the man, and either through suggestion or by his own initiative Samuel got the name right.

This is also true for those magnificently hardworking and yet seemingly frivolous movie starts, the name Hollywood carries with it all the symbolizing energies of the place. “Holly” of course is a religious term, which immediately dazzles with spiritual connotations and mass appeal; while wood is grounded on reality and burns up. The ease of the tone has enough superficiality on it that you will not let your mind be arrested by it; the word “syllogisms” could have never been the name for “Hollywood”, this is because “syllogism” has to carry a lot of intellectual heft and so it will not meet with your expectations, of lighthearted entrainment suspended in a reality of accurate disbelief.

And so “statistics” might themselves insinuate to take a snap of something, to hold the meaning static for a second, to stack up something so that it clicks, so that it pronounces meaning, where there might be a lot of dynamic stats are halting. The picture immediately generated by stats allows you to conjure a reality, it allows you to think of a possible reality, and it allows you to modify your thinking process and your actions. If for instance, you know that a candidate is statistically projected to win by a considerable majority you might not bother to vote. And if others think just like you, due in fact to the statistics, and so you and the others end up not voting, this may cause the wrong political candidate to win but for the wrong reason; because the statistics were in fact correct, even as they will be seen as wrong due to the outcome of the election.

And so you can see that it is not easy being right even for the staticians, as the very statistics by virtue of projecting change human behavior, and so become an added burden to any equation. Still what I have shown above is that statistics can no be objective as their very reading of a political process makes them immediate participants in the process. An intelligent statistician will want to correct his mistake and so will refine the data collecting process, use more varied sources, change the method of compilation, but in all honesty the stats cannot be taken out of the process, as they are tagged by it, the process defines the stats, the stats have to tune to the process, and yet when they refine themselves they will equally change the outcome in an uncertain manner.

The cruel reality is that the statistics and their corresponding professionals have now become so much a part of the campaign that they are in fact not an alternate source of information but rather part of the process, used by either side, to seemingly objectively justify its particular inclinations.

This is why statistics will tend to work better from hindsight, it is easier to know how many households had television in the 1950s because in the fifties most of the televisions sold were sold to households as businesses did not see any need for televisions. However here another truth is also telling, teenagers in the 1950s had a fad, they liked to grease their hair. Now project that to today, what do we have before us, teenagers are using gel to grease their hair, and they are wearing baggy pants, which was also true in the fifties, back then boys wore baggy pants; still we don’t know what the connection is, maybe it is a comfort zone thing, but why the grease on the hair? Are they looking for certainty of looks? Have they found some modicum of rectitude in the ability to control their hair and know its precise location, and know thus, how they will be seen by their friends?

We can speculate for ever but we are not going to do that, the reality doesn’t have anything to do with the grease in the hair or the baggy pants, the reality is that these generations are demonstrating that they do synchronize swimming. If they are all into a particular fad what they are defining is the communication that that generation will share across the passing years, hence the name given to generations, Y, X, called them what you will the reality is that generations speak to each other with a silent agreement.

People from the baby boom generation will be the happiest seniors the world has ever known. Why? Because it is the single largest most massive generation ever to retire, that means that they will hold the world hostage with their conservative vote and their vote for senior entitlement programs! That sense of communality however is accident, it is generational, that is to say that their sense of shared agreement is not based on the fact that they are seniors but based on their communal generational statistical sense and value. They intuit and perceive the world in an intrinsic manner as experienced by their generation. And their fads, when they were teenagers, and the global acceptance of their fads tells us how well the are subconsciously integrated and perhaps how successful they will be in living and changing their times.

This is enough for now.

RC

Competitive Inaction

Now my fellows as I have said sometimes fighting for our cause means letting our opponent defeat themselves. This is a counter intuitive maneuver, one is always afraid that it will not succeed as one has little control and one assumes that our opponent is not going to realize that they are pursuing self defeating causes and take the appropriate corrective action. Also at some level our imaginations fancy that if we actively participate in the defeat of our enemy that that would somehow speed up the process of their natural demise. And yet often enough nothing could be further from the truth.

Allow me to explain, if your are in a physically competitive sport, where societies generally train themselves for the challenges of the business and political worlds, it is logical that one has to be an active participant in the actions that will lead to victory. A boxer has to attack his opponent, and wrestler must also make the moves that will lead to an opponents downfall, certainly in golf a very methodical discipline against the competitor leads to victory, in the game of football it is a highly concentrated degree of offensive strategy entwined with an overactive defensive that wins the game. But while games teach us team effort and how to compete in the business or political arena they are not real world enough to comprise complex human dynamics.

In the real world the game is not played by a highly defined set of rules that are always the same, nor is the game played on the same type of environment over and over again, nor do the fans follow one around; and there aren’t any referees to constantly monitor for a semblance of fair play. Precisely the opposite occurs, the real world environment as determined by the consumer, the fan, the voter is ever changing in unforeseen fashion. There are some referees, justice, regulatory agencies and watchdogs attempt to create a level playing field, but these are reactive forces, they are not proactive nor preventive, which makes them inadequate at all times. When corrective action is applied by the reactive forces of regulation and justice the business or political game plans are operating on a different set of real time principles and thus cancel out most positive effects that may be had by the application of regulation based on past experience.

It is often very difficult to stand on the sidelines when one has deep beliefs that are being trounced upon by the apparent opposition; hence the reason why it is so counter intuitive to comprehend that one’s enemy might be his own worst enemy, and yet more often than not, such is the case. Consider the downfall of the Soviet Union or the ongoing economic changes that are taking place in China. China is changing not because it was forced to change by external forces but rather because it had to change or it would have collapsed, as indeed happened to the Soviet Union. Now the Soviet Union, contrary to popular belief, did not collapse because the republicans went on a weapons spending binge, but rather it collapsed because of is continued pursuance of self defeating policies without significant external feedback or interference.

The lesson has to be clear, any nation or economic system that isolates itself from world dynamics is likely to collapse from lack of external input, isolation implodes, witness the case of India which for decades pursued counter productive isolationist and reactionary politics and economics only to find itself in such critical condition that it had to renounce it all, so as to benefit from the economics of exporting talent and importing jobs and industry; all based on open market economics and an acceptance of international standards and education.

Close systems collapse, systems that are open will thrive though not necessarily without suffering the tremors and quakes that are endemic to intricately intertwined systems. Exposure to world dynamics is painful but it does have the benefit that it forces gradual change closer to real time rather than the negligent change forced upon closed systems due to their artificially controlled dynamics.

It is then in our interest to some times understand that allowing our enemy to become everything that they are may be the equivalent of feeding them a fatally poisonous poison. Neither the left nor the right of the political spectrum is 100% correct with their ideas, either system if allowed to concentrate based on its value system would undoubtedly collapsed, the centrist policies of recent administrations and political prodigies have resulted from a healthy recognition that extremes and absolutes will invariably fail.

The reason why the average person is so dominant is indeed due to a subconscious realization by the majorities that the norm gets its way.

Today we are finding a highly politicized climate, where the left and the right are taking their absolutist positions, these shall offer all of those involved in the fanaticism of the times a positive route to destruction. The anomaly of such extreme positions is usually an entitlement of righteousness, when neither political party is willing to doubt their policies they set themselves on a path where they have to win by destroying their enemy. Unfortunately for the dogmatics absolutes are never successfully embodied by societies nor by governments and nations.

When one observes extremes in action one is wise to let them proceed. Disraeli the very successful British prime minister, became a prime minister when he stopped trying, and beat the opposition to a pulp by letting them carry out their policies. It was after that that he cleaned up the mess they made, much to his merit and beautification.

We should be so wise today. To antagonize an enemy is often to help them take corrective action, in great part the Soviet Union collapsed because there was really so little input from the rest of the world. It is no accident that no one in the Western world predicted the collapse, nor is it surprising that Western intelligence services had wholly inaccurate economic statistics on the cruel reality of the USSR. It was the absence of Western influence that destroyed Soviet extremism; just like a very conservative Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, found his own way out of politics, just when he thought himself most successful.

Philosophers have long told us to learn from our enemies because they, unlike our friends, are most likely to point out our weaknesses. It is then perhaps wisest to allow an enemy to accomplish their objective without our interfering. We shall be fans of flaming actions.

RC

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Relativism & Its Malcontent

Some good people are against slavery for good reason. There are many levels at which one could be against slavery; one “I don’t want to be a slave,” this is a personal and subjective approach; two, “slavery is cruel,” this is a humanitarian perspective; and “slavery is wrong,” approaches a moral or ethical perspective, when we say moral we may imply religious and when we say ethical we may imply universal principles based on civic principles and law.

Contextually it is difficult to say that any of these ideas are themselves wrong since the goings of the day mandate that slavery is wrong just as much as they mandate that the right to vote is some kind of natural inherent privileged that needs to be the right of all peoples at all times; even as for instance, the right to vote is practiced by a few as perhaps naturally it should be, and so it is.

You would then not expect to go to any civilized parties today and engage in a conversation where a character might argue for slavery and its benefits. But let us remember that there are benefits to slavery which though perhaps inhumane, still accrue a benefit to an industrial or pre industrial production environment. The pyramids were built by slaves, we all like the pyramids, tourism aside the pyramids culturally connect us to our Egyptian heritage so we must in some ways, specially if we are historians, be grateful to the pharos and their crews.

It is then that I propose to make the argument that there was a time when slavery was the right choice and the correct approach to solving a particular environmental production issue. It was not feasible to approach the matter from another perspective, feudalism, slavery, serfdom were all, while not humane, constructive in their times and allowed us to migrate towards what might be construed as higher levels of civilization, technology and in its turn greater ethical constructs.

By noting that there was an evolution in ethical thought as slavery allowed the creation of a leisure class as much as it subjugated the lower classes, what we are saying is that the very condition of slavery gradually generates the conditions that abolish it. It was inevitable that slavery would be abolished be the very reason of its own existence; as a leisure class, created by slavery, was greater able to assume the sensibilities required to comprehend an ethic based on humanistic principles. There was however a time when it would have been dangerous to have those thoughts, at the beginning of the slave trade the prevailing wisdom did not question the use of slaves, further it treated them as property, and more it treated them as a subhuman species. This, hindsight tells us was a wise approach to the matter at hand, as societies that exploited and benefited from slavery could not bring themselves to question the practice, for if that were the case they would destabilize their production and economic progress.

But once slavery was had it had in someway to seed its own abolition and this would also come with the rise of the industrial age and its need to liberalize the labor, in a sense the industrial age gave way for the social dynamic to require a mobile and more alert and less dependant labor force. In short slavery due to industrialization became an unsustainable approach to the management of labor. For in the end that is all that slavery was, a way to manage a labor pool.

Slavery offered a squanderable supply of labor for an environment that was as unpredictable as the next season’s climate and crop. But the industrial age offered a higher degree of certainty, the birth of the production line added definition and certainty to the task of production. The rise in health care added longevity and so with that came a labor force that would be productive for a greater amount of time, and hence the need to imagine that labor would have to be retired and cared for, as they weren’t going to die on the job as was the case for serfs and slaves.

The production line also brought in the need for educated labor, which would indeed cost more for the society to produce and introduce into the laboring cycle, and so there was the need to gain as much productivity as possible from the individual and in part that productivity had to be managed by creating a more flexible worker bee, that could perform many mundane and varied tasks while at some point reaching some kind of tradesman, foreman experienced status.

That scenery would beget the argument, “have we really abolished slavery?” probably not, we just can not see our form of slavery because we are contemporary frontiersman living our times without the benefit of hindsight. Though one would have to go no further than the American/Mexican border to see the million slave march, where labor is constantly funneled so as to maintain affordable vegetables at the supermarket.

Still one could say that migrant labor has a relative freedom that is not afforded to a professional as it might be crueler still to be an entitled professional laborer; the need to maintain a resume’ and to demonstrate stability, proper training, discipline, community participation and self improvement could just as well be an indiscernible ball and chain.

The point is that it is possible that a mortgage, car and credit card debt create a different kind of slavery as such things mandate the slave; but more important what we are saying here is that slavery could have migrated into more fashionable constructs which could make it indiscernible and thus acceptable to a modern morality or ethic.

It is then under such arguments that we do not have the conditions to judge the practice of slavery when it was at its zenith throughout the world. To which any respectable human being will reply, “Slavery is wrong for all times and all circumstances.” That is a moral imperative, it assumes that morality is true for all times, a none evolving morality could be misconstrued as immoral; even the catholic church has managed to evolve its morality, just the concept of celibacy is rather modern for the church.

But what about the ethical argument as that is argued from the point of civility, that all peoples are born free as part of some infallible right and as such the individual has the right to his own freedom; thus slavery is wrong for all times and all environments. The ethical case is an argument that can equally go on for all time much the same as that of capital punishment or the right to an abortion; the premise of any such argument is the assumption that we know some truths beyond all doubt and hold them to be absolutes, the preposition for that mandates zero doubt: “we know what is right, we know what will be right for our posterity 3000 years from now.”

We could assume such things only today, and only to guarantee our rights of action hitherto, based on everything that we know, which by the way is not everything there is to know, but based on everything that we know today we think all peoples are born free; more we assume that they want to be free and perhaps we are willing to risk that they will know what to do with that freedom. All of these assumptions are true today, today and today only, don’t try to spend them 3000 years from now as they might be intolerable or unusable assumptions in the year 5005 AD.

I would be hard put to testify in front of the highest court in the land and say that I had better uses and knew better what to do with the hundreds of thousands of slaves used by the Pharos to build the pyramids. Is their labor not creative in the immortal monument that it created? I hate to answer my own questions but sure it is! It was, that was the most brilliant use of labor, and if only a job creation program that would give rise to new engineering feats, what magnificent accomplishment, I rather have the slaves building pyramids, no one much bothers to recognize the accomplishment of freeways. And besides all that the pyramids were the first monumental endeavor, and that alone immortalizes every slave that participated in it.

Nor is it for us to judge the harems as plenty of ugly evidence that is generally not redacted by revisionist historians that not only were the women happy with the arrangements but that a lesbian community thrived in good health; and even the eunuchs were handsomely rewarded for their castrations. It may seem horrid to us all this thing the harem, but there is more to the harem than meets the eye, just as there is more to be said for arranged marriages.

One thing is perhaps hesitantly true for all time: no civilization and no people have ever suffered for long the dictator or the law that didn’t meet with their expectations. A people, a civilization, a culture all have an innate awareness of what is right for their times, and they will those intimate rights to themselves and live within them their times; haphazardly perhaps but within their restrain and potential all peoples are willing victims of their epochs and only barbarians to posterity.

RC

prophecies of our progeny

The mobility of the brotherhood of mankind often serves to disadvantage any possible association that we may make of it. It is easier to believe that we are individuals, that we are independent of our community and environment than it is to believe that we indeed are one giant mass portrayed with individual traits as benefits the global entity.

One doesn’t have to go to far to identify the system, take the “unique politician” an oxymoron for sure, yet every politician is out there saying that they are different and yet that they identify with each and everyone of us. More interesting is how a politician will run against the system, noting how corrupt and incestuous the system is while running on its foundation. More interesting is how we are willing to accept that when they get elected they will change everything without group and bureaucratic participation. It is not going to happen, we know it is not going to happen, that is precisely why we elect them anyway, we know they are inadequate, and we know that with all they shout they will simply make a small contribution to continuity and a modicum of tolerable change at their own expense.

Of course the very fact that a person is a politician implies that they are very much a part of the system, as no politician ever created anything as much as worked with what they found “within hands grasp”. It is exasperating to imagine that we would even benefit from a political figure that was willing to stand out side the system when the only way that they could serve us is if they could work the cogs and pulleys to help us each with our organized self interest.

In fact a politician is the ultimate and glorified representation of organized self interest. Every politician is but a manifestation of a common will that reaches a high level of organization so as to acquire political essence through collectively reinforced self interest.

I will make the case, and when I say “I” allow me to qualify it after these words, but I will make the case that artists, that is actors, comedians, painters, poets, are but representations of a common aesthetic will power that super imposes itself as a statement within the context of the social fabric!

This is true of all major creative elements, futuristic car designs are hindered by the fact that the designer can not march faster than the recombinant nature of his ideas takes to coalesce within the mind of car designers throughout the world. Why is it that if straight lines are in, every designer has to design cars with geometric straightness; we came from the Ford Model T where you could find as many straight lines as could guarantee the puritans that it was perfect, and then it evolved to curve city all over from the forties forward, and at some point, which was probably the seventies, we begun to see a revulsion through the absolutist adoption of minimalist curvature and greater fin and straight laced confinements. Even the eighties followed through on mostly straight structures with feigned curvature, and then suddenly came the nineties and someone put a full uncompromising curvature all over, every automobile had to be aggressively curbed and aggressively straight almost at the same time. Still regardless of the manufacturer and the machination you could see car design simply simmering, the nineties were the last decade where car design could argue that it had continental independence, hence forward we have a silent subconscious agreement that all futuristic cars must look retro futuristic, the digital touches of analog, and the colors harking back at a time when everything was peachy cream and at the same time some hot rod moment is screeched out.

You don’t have to ponder why that is the case, it is the case because the common mind defines the leading edge of car design. When the average Joe goes to buy a car he buys the car that he and his buddies designed in secret a few years back, in the corners of their minds, in their creative whims which may have been molested by the way a beer tasted or the way that the sun went down and caressed the paint job of their first car, those guys put that feeling in the air and somewhere else, in some academy, a sensitive fellow, mostly a loner that had more in common with a TV-tuner than with a TV, sensed the direction of car designs future, and felt it and felt it because he had something in common with it which he was willing to deny and not accept and so had to redesign the existing concepts in order to accept them as his own. Under such guidance is the child’s creative mind, at the mercy of the will of the masses. A silent design team that allows others to upset and test and evaluate the status quo so that they come as close as possible to satisfying the common individual desire.

Of course the common person can never be fully satisfied, but a common person is as close to satisfaction as one can get without getting there. The world belongs to the common folk, everyone else, specially those people from New York, London and Paris work for the masses even as they disdain us!

In some ways the disgruntled artist is more a conception of the artist mind than a reality. The artist far from being at war with his world is merely a representative of the angst and instant pleasures that a common mind wants to experience but prefers to experience through proxy as is the luxury of the privileged. We don’t need to be Kurt Cocaine or Rona the Suicide Mamma, we can let her be that, we can assume that they will make total asses of themselves in the public stage, paid handsomely with fame, we can expose them and challenge them to go further into the gutter or primal exultation of the extreme parody, and watch them overdose in their mirrored privacy and fallacy, we can watch them think themselves unique and sneak the millions that they can not imagine we are willing to pay to watch them perform for us, the circus that we demand to see. They will think they are getting away with something, we will be amazed at what they can get away with, and we will judge the future value of their essence and even tighten or loosen our silent mass imaginations here and there to tune or increase out their evolutionary characteristics.

True artists of course are not amused by the cruelness of this reality, on the contrary they are abhorred by it, they usually cut an ear off, or walk into a creek with a rock or do some other devastating thing, it is not all artists that are born so lucky as to be blind.

In the case of the Hollywood or Bollywood star it is the same, the star is born from the desires of the mass to recognize her on the screen, the mass feels the energy that it has channeled towards the actors, once the projected figure appears it is instantly recognized and subjected to the harrowing occasion of immediate approval and stardom. Every actor and every actress serve their times well, but they are servants, kept in check by a common will and an image that has to be the image that the masses have allowed for projection, a quick downfall would be met by anyone that does not buy into their allotted fame. You can not be all things to all people, you can be the thing that people have allowed you to become. Anything else is wayward bound and sure to find its own demise as critic fodder; as the critic is the interpreter of mass desire..

Of course fortunately as a rule the avatar of mass appeal is generally toned to its intended destiny, and as such will generally meet cordially with fame, fortune and happiness as such it was for a certain one called Bob Hope.

There is as always a utilitarian presentation to all this, the beauty queen represents a socially normalized beauty, be her with big smile, large teeth, high thin eyebrows, outlined eyelashes, large eyes and curves etc as mandated by the social regiment of the times, this beauty serves a higher purpose than just the ideal, the beauty queen serves as a representative model of the stile types of allure and erotic attractions. Of course as an idealized form they don’t exist in anyone type of woman though in theory the beauty queen or the Hollywood actress should conform to a great number of the socially approved traits throughout her physique and character. The service provided here for the mass is actually rather tremendous, for one it serves to appease the mass by giving it access to what it believes is not obtainable. Most girls know that they are not beauty or diva material. But when you see a modern Diva as one might call such Madonna, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Lulia Roberts they all have something rather striking in common, they are not spectacularly beautiful, they are rather average, there is nothing seemingly unobtainable about their beauty, they seem like a normal girl that had a makeover and it mostly worked. That, that very thing implies an immediate trendyness, a folksy acceptability assures them an instant following, this creature is now not so idealized, she is more normal, she really inst a beauty queen, and we know she inst; playboy magazine will ask her to pose not because of her beauty but rather because of her fame. And their fame comes from the fact that the audience feels at home with them.

Now in the case of the playboy bunny, the girl has to look spectacularly sexy and in fact she has to look unreal and unobtainable. Joe Smuckatelly inst going to masturbate to something he can not fantasize about and for the average Joe that mandates an unrequited love, he must not be able to reach the object of his affection. Sure a playboy centerfold is a real girl, even after playboy prunes her up, but in the end the average Joe isn’t going to marry her, he doesn’t imagine that he deserves her, even as her posing for playboy makes her in fact rather average in ambition.

The beauty queen serves precisely the same role but the audience is now the female, the beauty pageant is to allow women to measure their beauty in relationship to each other and to what appeals to males. But the beauty queen has to look less fuckable than the centerfold, she has to be able to make a living professionally perhaps, and she has to sound intelligent, she can not appear a slut or claim accessibility, she must in a sense remain in a pedestal to get that crown. This is because females are harsher judges than males, the males will be happy with a bunny but women want to see each other or actually themselves in a better light. Beauty Queens everywhere are then propagating the look and feel of a working woman or a housewife, that has the ability to pay bills, work, raise children and perhaps do soap commercials on her spare time. But more interesting the Beauty Queen is also a valve that allows the women to propagate their own sense of beauty through any and all association that they might have with the beauty queen. Their husbands will corner a moment with the beauty queen if their wife looks at them a certain way, if her eyes or lips are similar, if her hands share the imperial hand traits, even body movements bring forth this association. In the grand excursion into the primitive sexual encounter and the passionate mad embrace, there is the alluring magnification of a moment essence magnified a thousand times by proximity, you are holding the female essence!

In this charitable portrayal of what must seem to some of you a rather despicable apparition, there are no saved souls, the philosopher and the writer falls victim to this whole. Philosophers and writers in general all represent a segment of the populace that has franchised its belief and mandates expression, when I write I often say I am taking dictation. The fiction that I write is the products of the whims of the average imagination that wants to read itself and connect to others with similar comprehensions, and when I philosophize I am accepting the prophecies of our progeny. I am just a note taker, an avatar, an amanuensis, for the aspirations, the desires of the common will as they fallibly simmer within me only to be regurgitated. It is this reality that guarantees that I will be published, my reader has dictated, if I executed correctly I will be published, if my reader is not of our present time I will be published posthumously, the only thing I have to do is just type, the rest is done.

RC

Character Individuality and Community

In the plunge to become a civilization we endure the depersonalization of the individual so that we can build the coherent whole. Perhaps we can assume that there was once a nomad, a solitary man, a true hermit, and that this creature would travel through the savannah and occasionally pause to rape an equally solitary wanderer so as to guarantee the survival the nomad species.

It gets a little more ridiculous than that, we have to assume that the herd instinct was something that we developed after being born into the environment. It was to our benefit to join forces and act as part of a primitive social group so as to round up the prey with greater ease and at a lower physical toll. There was however a charge, sharing, we had to be willing to accept the others, not necessarily as equals but certainly as participants that would have to partake in the feedings from our prey.

Again the assumption here is that through conditioned we realized that if we became like a pack of wolves, perhaps we learned it from them or a pack of dogs, or hyenas, or any of those that have hunted in packs, that we could also do the same. It didn’t even have to be so direct even just seeing the ravaging success of stampeding cows we could surmise that mass behavior had its advantages; and sense it was new to our experience we could not have foreseen its flaws such as the birth of averageness and franchised existence.

Only that is very doubtful, the human species as it came into existence did not have time to learn to socialize, it is highly unlikely and even impossible to believe that a human child with the mother having 9 month gestation period, and with the new born being a highly vulnerable from the perspective of its learning curve which may well reach into the fifth year of existence before making the nomad child competent enough at lest to avoid major dangers and to assist in basic food gathering activities such as the gathering of grains and perhaps even to assist with noise making during the hunt. And even if the child could survive we must assume that a pregnant woman has at least in her last 3 months of pregnancy some action and perimeter limitations. It is therefore not difficult to conclude that there was not time to learn group associated food gathering and herd ensured security.

If it wasn’t a learnt instinct, then it must have been something innate to the species, we must have been endemically aware of what we needed to do from birth to form the tribe; and it naturally follows then that we were never nomads, we were always social creatures, and inherently acted in the interest of the unconscious tribe.

The problem for evolution is that it assumes that homo sapiens had time to learn, you don’t, there isn’t any time to learn and this is specially so in a dangerous, volatile and primitive environments. There is no time to learn, all learning takes place at a supra consciousness level that mostly appeals to the next generation, the existing generation must do with much of what was learnt by the previous one.

It can not be overstated that there is no greater argument against evolution than the fact that it is based on associations, it is the axiomatic evolution of evolution itself that throws it into the dilemma box; if all things are on the planet earth is it then a greater possibility that they have something in common with each other than not? And if so, if it is possible that because I am on planet earth that I have something in common with a diamond, fungus, turtle, a snake and even a dinosaur, if this is so then is it because I am in the same habitat, is it because I am in the same environment, is it because we are all carbon based, oxygen breathing? And if that is the case then how can evolution which can not be observed but can only be surmised from continuous assumptions of continually broken links, which are themselves surmised from logically imposed continuity, how can be that an absolute truth?

And it is not without some reverence for evolution that I dare say it is by some assumption logical to believe that there is something wrong with the nature of our logic and with the logic that argues against evolution; as there must be an equal and troubling doubt to the logic which annihilates faith and grotesquely utters rational standards. To some degree evolution must be a victim of its promoter, it must suffer at the hands of its master, logic stands above all of its children and it must be able to evolve against them if necessary.

Which leads us to the character of the person, which does not have to have anything in common with the human being which it exploits to its own benefit; and that in itself does not have to be a benefit to the possessor of character which in the end result is only a necessary product as the flower caters to the plant and bee caters to the sexual interaction between strangers that have everything in common.

And with that we come to our final phase, community. The aspect ratio of individuality is cornered by community. You are not yourself an individual, you can not recreate humanity from yourself, you don’t have the ability to generate an entire humanity, rather humanity creates you, the very concept of your existence is an end result of your social conscience; society allows you to feel your individuality because it is inconsequential, it doesn’t affect the whole, if it did it would be abolished.

It is perhaps the most difficult aspect of being to endure, that we are not special, and yet we can not ignore it, the need for us to be special has to have a genuine association with reality. And indeed it does, your need to feel special allows you to seek approval, it makes you seek a reference to your humanity, either of approval or disdain, either of caring or indifference, but the aspect ratio is based on the congeniality or not of your self essence to your humanity, you decide but your decisions are based on the parameters of your interaction with humanity; you seek its recognition of yourself essence but in truth your need for recognition allows for your subservience to the social entity; of which your individuality is presumably greater.

In relationship then, we must assume that it is logical to be logical because it is the safest approach to any given conceptualization hence the reason why evolution feels good and works for us. In the same manner that evolution can be a default so too can the characterization of personality. So as we approach the concept of being we must bring into suspicion the concept of self, as it is more likely to represent a greater concept still and not in it self fundamental to what we are, to what we wish to become or to what we endear ourselves to be.

If it is logical to see associations in evolution then it stands to reason that there are associations in the build up to personality. Character is born from the imprint of the humanity that possesses it. Individuals will have character as a result of the society that they live in. Character then has its limitations, bound to the culture and to the times of the country and the world from which it rises.

The independence of the individual is locked within a framework that is invisible to the very individual that possess it, as is the species locked into the environment that it inhabits. Characters as they define their personality have no way of seeing their limitations nor do they comprehend the perimeter of character as it is define by conditioning or exposed and moved by social dynamic.

As character and the range of its individuality is defined by the society so in turn community will be born from those limitations, however community becomes a greater influence over the very individuals that define it, even as community is fragile and prone to tragedy through the actions perpetrated by individuals. Community isolates the individual by process of ignoring individuality and that causes a reactionary character that seeks to define its essence away from the massification that community silently enforces. Community is a gentle creature and as such it seeks only a semblance of balance, which is precisely why it can be raped by mere character.

The conflict between character and community is a modern one, there is no such thing as an individual conflict against the social, the community and the cultural whole, that is until the rise of the modern world, where individuals have been arrested through the inspiration of individuality. Individuality of course has no value or context outside of the social fabric, which in turn exposes it as a fallacy.

But if that is the case then why is the social allowing for the rise of the individual? It is very simple when a society needs to alter its dynamic, when community requires a modification of character, it must cause its individuals to react and to create an unstable condition so as to allow a social alteration and reformation. Currently we are faced with such a condition, the rise of character is the equivalent of the bricks revolting against the wall so as to deconstruct and reconstruct themselves.

That this is all done within the confines of the social order and the community is of course not apparent to anyone, hence the faith that we have in individual freedom of action.

RC