Archive for the ‘ Philosophy ’ Category

What the American Way of Life has Become

Americans seem determined to be a stupid as possible. And they have succeed admirably.

And the rest of the world seems to be following their example. The American Way of Life (actually a way of death) is infectious. Because it is  so simple, as I said in a recent posting Obama has Taken Advantage of America - where I accidently stumbled on a label for it – the Topsy-Turvy World. Where everything is the exact opposite of what it seems to be.

The emotional appeal of this is irresistible. We get the satisfaction of being good – when we are actually being bad (what we actually want to be). And not only that – we can make money doing this.

This is possible because our minds conceive of opposites as being the same thing – and can easily confuse the two. We have always been this way, but until now common sense has usually kept the two separate. We have now found a way of overriding this – to our great detriment. But to our topsy-turvy minds it seems to be to our great advantage.

Actually, as much as I hate to admit it, this is not a new idea. Freud touched on it in his Civilization and Its Discontents. But he didn’t dare offend his readers by accusing them of being stupid – and liking to be that way. Even though the Nazis were all around him – and doing just that. As a result, all his four sisters – women in their late seventies, died in Nazi concentration camps.

People have often been stupid – but now we cannot tell the difference.

2013
05/07
CATEGORY
Philosophy
1 comment

Remembering How Bad it Was

The world of my childhood was bad – but no one wants to remember that. Or realize that it produced people who have died cannot be brought back to life.

One exception is the book Fun Home. It is a family autobiography in pictures – an adult comic book. It is a best seller.

From Wikipedia:

Fun Home (subtitled A Family Tragicomic) is a 2006 graphic memoir by American writer Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel’s laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.

Being totally isolated, living in rural Costa Rica – I learned about this from a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) I am taking – which is about the Modern – Postmodern transition.

Our instructor (the President of Wesleyan University) has his own take on this – which does not particularly impress me – but he is a well-connected intellectual, in touch with what is going on.

One person who impresses him is Slavoj Žižek who has an article in the London Review of Books called You May! about the post-modern superego. I quote:

In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.

This is dynamite stuff – and helps me understand my own bizarre personality. But for the average person it might as well be written in Sanskrit.

All this says one thing, in plain language – that we have been screwed over in some very sophisticated ways. Which only a few of us can barely comprehend.

2013
05/05
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
1 comment

Being and Doing

These are two different things, but we tend to confuse them. We should consider their differences carefully (there are advantages to both ways) – but we seem to be determined not to think about them at all.

The basics are simple – being is organic, a part of life. Doing is mechanical, a matter of developing a routine, and then following it. This routine is usually unconscious and socially dependent – but it is mechanical – and very difficult to stop.

Being allows us to be emotional and socially interactive. Doing allows us to get things done. This fine balance was permanently disrupted when we got more emotional satisfaction from doing than from being.

The practice of meditation is very useful in helping us tell the difference. Once we get the mind quieted down (no small task) we can feel what is going on in our bodies and our minds (really the same thing).

Why don’t more people meditate? Because they don’t want their being to interfere with their doing – which is what they want to do to the exclusion of everything else. They want to be human doings.

Almost everyone will agree, in theory, that we should be more human – more compassionate and considerate. But in practice they behave entirely differently. And are completely unable to notice this.

This is our problem – not that we don’t have fine ideals – but that we have become so unaware, we cannot tell if we are following them or not.

This is, it seems to me – is a deliberate policy. We are the exact opposite of what we think we are. And this, we think, is very clever of us.

When, in fact, it is very stupid of us – because we have destroyed ourselves.

2013
05/04
CATEGORY
Meditation
Morality
Negative being
Philosophy
2 comments

The Problem of Being Human

“This is a problem?” You may ask. “What else can we be?” My answer is straight-forward: “We have been, and we are, many other things. The last thing we want to be is human.”

If you are still with me, you might ask “Why not?” And this is the question I want to answer. Why do we not want to be human?

The answer must have varied many, many times. But when we became civilized (a huge, huge subject in itself) we did develop an aversion to what we had been before that – and saw that way of life as inferior. When it was not at all.

I once did a trek through the hill-tribes of northern Thailand. When I got back to my hotel, a  powerful thought hit me “When the original people are gone – we are doomed!” Those people know how to live - how to be human.  On that trek, we met an anthropologist, and I asked her how much longer they would last. “Maybe thirty-five years,” she said. And that was over forty years ago.

The situation in Thailand has deteriorated so badly since then I cannot bear to think about it. And the same could be said for every other country in the region. They have gone from bad to impossible. And American (and Chinese) intervention has only made the situation worse.

But I must get back to the subject. What happened in America in the last half of the last century? Most of the world is clearly finished, but what about us? You will not like my answer “We are finished too.” And for the simplest of reasons – because we have stopped being human.

This will take some explaining – and perhaps a whole book would not do it justice. But I will attempt an outline. The basic idea is simple – we have stopped being people and become something else.

These alternative realities (what we have become) have been a whole series of economies - the latest being the information economy. The very idea of an economy implies much more than we care to admit. One thing it implies is that people have become consumers - and have become helpless to change that.

To understand our situation, we would have to revert to being human again – something we can no longer be (and don’t want to be).

2013
05/03
CATEGORY
Economy
Philosophy
Leave a comment

Modernity According to Foucault

I am reading his What is Enlightenment? for the second time. The first time it did not register – and I concluded he did not know what he was talking about. This time, I think he is on to something.

From page 40 of The Foucault Reader:

Modernity of not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to “heroize” the present…

This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain it or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity.

The man of modernity goes hurrying, searching – this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert…is looking for whatever element of poetry it may contain within history…Just when the world is falling asleep, he begins to work…Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.

What to make of all this? Actually, I can make quite a lot from it – from my own personal experience.

In my last job, I made it my business to understand what the company’s product was. A product that they praised to the high skies. It was not only great – it was going to take over the whole world (and make us rich)! If you had been in Silicon Valley at the time you could have recognized the attitude – pure BS – but you dared not say so.

I set to work, interviewing the people who had implemented the product for their first customer. I simply asked them “What did you do?” In some detail, of course – first this, and then this. When you did something (I thought) – you have to have a method for doing it.

A number of tools had been developed for doing this: Business Process Modeling (BPM). I found I was a natural at doing this – which involves looking behind the usual smoke-and-mirrors to see what was really going on.

Eventually I realized that our product was a common one: vaporware – nothing but hype. I knew I was in trouble – big trouble – and tried to hide my discovery. But I couldn’t.

Business people have an sensitive nose for smelling out things like this. And they fired me. But I had gotten a good smell of them too – and I did not like that smell. I got out.

I can still see myself as a Modern person – or more accurately a Post-modern person. And I can tell the difference – because I have played the game and I know the rules.

I know my insights have wandered into a land where they have become invisible. And there is nothing I can do about that.

2013
05/02
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
Leave a comment

Focused Hatred

Hatred is probably our most powerful emotion – and certainly our most misused one. We must learn how to use it properly and get it under control.

Most people would agree with that statement, without giving it the slightest thought. Which proves to me how out-of-touch they are with their emotions.

They have been told, many times, that hatred is bad – while being shown, many times, that it is everybody’s favorite emotion. How do people respond to situations like this? They become completely helpless – because there is no way they can deal with it correctly. And not only that – angry!

The only safe way to handle it is to be like everyone else, and have the same feelings as everyone else does – instant by instant. In situations like this, hatred flourishes – and becomes a dominate social passion. Often masked by intense displays of love.

In America – and probably elsewhere as well – hatred has been so mixed up with everything else we have become completely incompetent. Unable to do anything but destroy ourselves.

This is hatred in it most intense form – we hate ourselves.

Is there a solution? Yes, we have to keep our hatred focused where it belongs – and there are no lack of appropriate targets. We have to practice identifying these targets – and keep refining our focus.

2013
05/02
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Leave a comment

Death

I know, you do not want to think about this – in fact it is the last thing you want to think about. But you really should.

“Fine,” you may say, “I know I am supposed have a  new, more correct attitude towards death – but what is that?” As if an attitude was something one could acquire easily, much as we acquire everything else. And we could put it on, like a new (or old) suit of clothes. If we know what we are supposed to do – we will simply do it. And easily adopt the correct attitude towards our death (and others). No problem.

But it is not that easy. To have the correct attitude towards death – we have to have the correct attitude towards life. And we will not acknowledge that life really exists.

I must confess, however that these fine thoughts are not my own. I got them (more or less) from reading The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke – who is well-known as a poet, but less so as a novelist.

At one time, he was forced to live in Paris – which he found to be a living hell. Full of dying. Which prompted his own thoughts on the subject.

I have had the great good fortune to live through a death of my own. I became a failure in Silicon Valley (locally referred to as Silly-Con Valley) and after fumbling around, found this little coffee-growing town in Costa Rica – with high-speed Internet connections. Where I sit this morning – blogging in my pajamas.

I have made plans for my death, which will probably happen in one of the hospitals of their public-health system. It has been paid for in advance – and I have donated by body, in advance, to University. What else can I do?

I will answer that question myself. I can go on living – and concentrate on that. I have so many things I like to do – I have to force myself to not overdo any one of them.

At my age (76) I still ride my bicycle – very slowly, to be sure – but what difference does that make? I plod along, enjoying the view. My life is remarkably illusion-free – compared to the past when practically I lived on (and in) them.

I have tried living and not living. And I prefer living.

2013
05/01
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Leave a comment

The Need to be Wonderful

This, it seems to me, is one of the strongest compulsions of the modern world. It is fueled by the belief that there is something wrong with us. Something very wrong. Which comes directly from Calvinism.

We like to think of ourselves as being preoccupied with getting better – because that sounds so much better. But, in fact, we are preoccupied with how bad we are – and are desperately trying to get away from that.

This concern used to be fully conscious, at least to the religious part of the population. But it has now become unconscious, while still fully operational.

We are now intent on destroying ourselves – for the best of reasons. Because we have become such awful creatures – the opposite of what we should be.

We are now flying on automatic pilot – and consider this a huge improvement. When, in fact, it is a disaster of the first magnitude. We have, in fact, become not what we are (networks and computers) – instead of what we are (people).

It seems to us we have become gods – that we have discovered what the gods really are. What else could they be?

And we do not realize any of this at all.

We have become that perfect.

2013
05/01
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Religion
Sociology
Technology
Leave a comment

The Discovery of the Real World

This was the discovery that made the modern world possible.

By modern world I mean the developed (and affluent) world of Northern Europe and North America – as contrasted with the undeveloped (and impoverished) world of Southern Europe and Latin America.

Before this discovery was made, it was assumed that the world was whatever we believed it was. The real world was whatever the human world was (including our religious beliefs). Then it dawned on us (gradually) that there might be a difference – the real world might be something entirely different.

It might have its own rules. And if we played by those rules we could be much bigger – because we were part of a much bigger world. This was the assumption of Science and even the related worlds of Technology and Industrialization. Neither of which happened in the South – which burned any such heretics at the stake.

Then something interesting happened – we thought we could cheat Mother Nature. We could exploit her natural resources (use her oil, for example) – and she would never notice. I have used an anthropomorphic description here (speaking of Mother Nature) a but a strictly scientific description (such as that provided by Climate Science) came to the same conclusion – we were only fooling ourselves by thinking we were getting something for nothing. We were part of the real world – whether we liked it or not.

The same thing has happened in religion. Religion has never been part of the real world – only part of the human world. But we have overlooked this. And become more religious than ever – in all kinds of ways. Business (united with technology) has become the religion of progress – as well as money.

The real world has been left in the dust – we think.

2013
04/30
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
Technology
1 comment

We Cannot Be Good to Ourselves

I had an unusual night last night. All kinds of things were mixing it up in my mind and body. First there was Adrianne Ross’s Dharma talk, which I wrote about on Dharma Seed. I had also finished listening to A Visit From the Goon Squad. Neither one knows what is really going on – and doesn’t want to know.

In a dream I had last night, I was in a large construction tunnel with two huge movable projects underway – both starting from opposite ends of the tunnel and meeting head-on in the middle. I was part of a small group of humans watching them meet. I was even given a video camera to record what was going on. If the dream had lasted longer, I would have seen these two projects destroying each other – with no one at ground level aware that anything was going on at all.

The Goon Squad says a lot – but says it subtly – and from all kinds of directions. In the last analysis, it comes to the same conclusion – but sugar-coats it. We think we are wonderful – do we ever! – but we are not.

I was terrifically impressed with Ms. Ross. This gal has been everywhere and done everything. But she hasn’t seen the big picture at all. I remember Spirit Rock (the finest meditation center in the world) once had a retreat that was supposed to solve this. They put all the top meditators in the world together in an a intensive situation that would guarantee great results – they thought. They even did some advance publicity about this.

When no such thing happened, they said nothing. They were telling the truth (they had no grand answer to the world’s problems) – but not the whole truth (that the world (the human world) was destroying itself). When it came to this, they were as ignorant as everyone else.

Our intellectuals cannot see this either. I am reading Foucault, for example, and was tempted to write about his ideas on normalization - one of the techniques of control that our society uses – without being aware of it. In our schools it is called grading on the curve. Everyone’s progress is compared to all the other students in the class. The teacher (who knows perfectly well what needs to be learned, and whether or not the student has learned it) is pushed out of the picture.

Applied to society as a whole – it means society has no way of detecting its overall trends – since everything is referenced to itself.

One of these trends is what I am writing about – society has become hostile to people. Something that could be easily detected if it referenced its gut feelings. Exactly what meditation is supposed to do. But meditators have the same unconscious instructions as everyone else – and do not do this. And society suffers from all kinds of problems as a result – including self-destruction on every scale.

Amazing!

2013
04/30
CATEGORY
Meditation
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 366 other followers