MAD AS HELL!

 

In Paddy Chayefsky’s film Network, an on-air presenter has had enough. Railing into the camera he demands that the audience expresses its solidarity with him by going to their windows and shouting out into the streets, ‘I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE…!’. Then, remarkably, people start doing so and for a few moments there is a real sense of revolution in the air. A few moments later, those who are indifferent to the cause but want to be part of ‘what is happening’, join in. The TV executives think, ‘ah, this is profitable’ and give the presenter his own show where he can rant at the audience (think the film A Face in the Crowd) and get them to be angry about whatever he is angry about for a moment or two. After the first few moment of the live breakdown, where he just wasn’t going to take it anymore, the whole thing descends into a farce as the emotion (anger, frustration, humiliation) is picked up by those without an attachment and is then marketed and packaged for cable TV.

 

Network is a very good parable about society. Any real emotion is quickly oppressed or sanitised for a popular audience. Countries where protesting is powerful quickly respond with military force (note: the US band, The Dixie Chicks were in the UK playing a show in London. One remarked in passing, whilst she was tuning her guitar, that she was ashamed to be from the same state as the then president W Bush. The band were then dropped from their label and received death threats, even from children) or in other countries the protests are given theme tunes on the news and people in studios sit around speculating about, well nothing really, until the next advert break. As I have said before, Fox News was created for one purpose- to make money. It is very good at doing so, except recently with a record number of sponsors leaving the shows, and it did by one thing. It played on the emotional vulnerabilities of its audience. The presenters are outraged, like in Network, and pass their outrage onto the audience (until they leave Fox and then go on talk shows to distance themselves from the network). The other day, watching Fox, I saw the absurd spectacle of the presenter Tucker Carlson playing a clip of Sesame Street and explaining to the audience what they had just seen, to paraphrase, Elmo, who teaches children to use the potty, is a SOCIALIST who wants to destroy YOUR COUNTRY! (it’s always the cute, quiet ones, eh?)

 

Such is the nature of the hegemony of society, the only emotions allowed are those which are popularised. You may recall my case studies of the lady who was tortured by her workplace. She was warned not to show real emotion in the meetings otherwise people would turn against her. The Black Lives movement, which was sparked by a man being slowly suffocated whilst police and bystanders watched, and filmed, was a justifiable MAD AS HELL! moment which quickly was personalised by the news networks for their agenda with Fox expressing an outrage that people cared that a black man was murdered by the police (note: as a result of the movement a school has agreed to keep its weapons of war and tank but have given up their grenade launcher- yes, you read that correctly, a school…) yet when a Native American was almost beaten to death by the police there was no public outcry, why? Because society has now said it is ok to be offended by black people being murdered by the police, it is ok for news anchors to be intimidated intellectually and emotionally by a (mu)puppet on a show which teaches children their ‘ABCs’ but it is not ok to have emotions without the bounds of these concepts.

 

People may recall my cynical take of the recent outpouring of love for health workers et al. as my take was that they were just going along with the societal norms for that time and had no genuine feeling for the situation. Well, as lockdown was lifted slightly, 1000s flocked to the beaches etc. thus showing that all of their pretences of caring were just that, a pretence as with the Network presenter’s show.

 

It is no secret that our lives are controlled by popular opinion, and those who are what is, surreally, known as ‘free-thinkers’ often come to a sticky end, but as we look closer and closer at society, it is disturbing just how much of our personality and opinions is shaped by society. Notions such as truth (as we have spoken of before), emotion etc. should be presented with an asterix by them to denote that these are not real truths or actual emotions but rather are facsimila created by a culture which is too scared of what it is- human.

 

‘till next time

Statues of Limitations

 

There are few sights more frightening for a dictator than seeing footage of your people tearing down your statue. As they cower in their bunkers, they know their days are numbered, that Damocles is sharpening the blade and fraying the thread just a little…more…

 

But imagine the man has been dead for one hundred years and his ghost has become a ghost. Then what would he think seeing his legacy tarnished and, literally, torn down? Well, not knowing of the dead I can hardly say, and even if an utterance is made, I don’t think it will matter.

 

 

After years of systemic racism, people believe that a change is gonna come, to reference the Sam Cooke song from the 1960s, they think change will happen. If we have learnt from history, it is that every revolution removes the topsoil and leaves an equally corrupt system. Ah, but the past had been, wry pun intended, whitewashed, how can the future not be better? How? Because lessons from the past have not been taught, let alone, learnt.

 

 

Imagine 100,000 people tearing down statues. A powerful image, sure, now imagine 100,000 teachers educating children of the past. Less sexy, sure, but let’s move to the next frame. The statue is thrown into a river and then people scamper off to avoid littering fines. The whole thing is forgotten in a day. The 100,000 teachers each tells 100 children that this person founded the city, for example, and helped people to thrive, however, engaged in the then socially acceptable (prestigious) act of slavery, an act that should not have happened and here are the reasons why. 10% of the children find this interesting and go home and tell two people, they then each tell six people who then etc. (it’s like a pyramid scheme which is ironic as recent discoveries suggest that the pyramids were made (mostly) by contractors and not, as believed, slaves).

 

In example one, we have violence and headlines. In example two we have the education of those who will go on to shape the future. What about, not tearing down statues but rather putting plaques in place? This man did this but, unfortunately, also did that causing these problems. How many people would see that and then tell others?

 

People, proudly, shun the greatest teacher if all, history, and what should be learnt for posterity is only seen as posteriority as people bury their heads in the sand and all is seen is their backsides glinting in the fading light of the past.

 

Yes, it is important to speak up, yes, it is important to stand up, but it is also important to learn otherwise the sins of the past become the virtues of the future

 

 

’till next time

 

 

Afterword: note how it is only when one is personally affronted that one acts? I wonder what the natives make of immigrants fighting over their land?

Echoes of Eternity (part 1)

 

 

‘Pride will vanish/Glory will rot/but virtue lives, cannot be forgot’

-Dylan

 

‘It seems to me that the nobelist of our sentiments is the hope of continuing to exist even after destiny has apparently returned us to a state of non-existence…[everyone] will tire of everything except living, and the fact that no one attains the goal he has so ardently sought’

-Goethe

 

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. Son of a King, and the sea nymph, Thetis, Achilles was a prince. When he was born he was dipped, by his mother, into the River Styx, one of the six rivers into the Greek Underworld, Hades (note: the River Styx, known as Black Water, due to its toxic qualities, is believed to hold the explanation for the mysterious death of Alexander of Macedonia (I won’t call him great, as he was not) who, apparently, drank form the river, unknowingly) who inserted all of his body, except for the ankle she was holding making him invulnerable to all forms of death, bar old age. When the rascal Paris ran off with the wife of another man, Helen (note: she ‘ran off’ freely which is more than can be said of the circumstances of her marriage) the king of the kings, Agamemnon called all of the kings together to go to Troy to get Helen back. The greatest of the warriors was Achilles, who, bored by the politics of kings, didn’t bother to turn up. When the envoy turns up, the wisest of the Kings, Odysseus, to persuade Achilles to join his mother tells her son he has two options. To either go to war and die in glory, his name echoing through eternity, or to stay at home and die in happiness. Achilles chooses glory and thusly his life ends.

 

Later, on his way back home, Odysseus ventures into the underworld and meets the great Achilles and greets him thusly:

 

O- Hey, it’s the great Achilles! All the guys dig yuh, man. You are totally echoing through eternity!

A- (grimly) Ah who gives a ****, when you’re dead, you are dead, and you know what, o wise king? Being dead sucks.

 

From an early age, we are taught that we must be special. Although this chance to ‘be special’ is often thwarted by others trying to be special (as I have written before, the dominating spirits of our lives are the petty divinities, the Insecurities) yet we are not taught what this means. We approach it as an individual- I must do this, I must do that, yet, as Goethe alludes to, we can never fulfil that which we hope to obtain. Why is that? Because as Leonard Cohen wrote, ‘The goal falls short of the reach’, i.e. we can do more than we think but we settle for the warm comfort of mediocrity.

 

The dominating forces of our times, of all times, of time itself (if, indeed there is such thing), is what I call the law of consequences. Often, we act without thinking of the actual consequences. We may be guided by the spirits of the Insecurities:

 

• What will other people think?
• How will this make me look?
• How will I think of myself?

 

When, in reality, the questions must be- what is this and how does it help me now, if I remove all of the insecurities? If we wish to think about consequences in the full sense, then the greatest judge of our lives must be Time. When are memories turn to dust, and our ghost evaporate into the general malaise of forgetfulness, what is it of us that will be remembered? As Dylan alludes to, whether we were kings or receptionists to kings will not matter, all that will matter is how we lived our lives, who we were and thus if we were ‘good’ people will matter much more than all of the gold, titles and social media likes one receives in life. After all, did not the wealth, legacy obsessed, Egyptians show it best? When one reaches the afterword one’s heart is weighed against a feather. If the feather’s weight is less than the heart then one’s wealth cannot buy them into ‘heaven’, but if one’s heart, filled with a life of virtue, is lighter than the father then all of the glory, often deprived from one on earth, will be theirs.

 

 

‘till next time

 

Check back for Part 2: Echoes of Eternity: Legacy

Opposites Attract: A Critique of Comparative Judgements/Temporality and Meaning (two mini essays)

Below are two mini essays, the former being too short to stand alone and also having a direct impact on the second.

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Opposites Attract: A Critique of Comparative Judgements

 

 

I recently alluded to the notion that everything is created in relation to what we call it’s opposite, in my instance that nothing can only exist if we know of something as nothing is the absence of something.

 

Reading Goethe alluding to the same principle (without Good there is no Bad) awakened my critical faculties and led me to realise that my initial statement was little more than hubris, or in other words, my ignorance of the world as a whole, in it-self.

 

What do I mean by that? Well, in my asinine notion that nothing is contingent on something I was not alluding to, as I believed, the natural state of things, rather I was alluding to the perception of them, something Kant would find repulsive as he had already clearly stated that we can only see what we ‘see’, and not how something is. (Side note: I was once asked for a picture of myself and I submitted the picture of a mirror with a text explaining that when you see me, you only, actually, see a reflection of yourself given how we view everything through the prism of our own subjectivity)

 

If I already knew this, and as Kant had reinforced my belief, why did I then state that nothing is dependent on something?

 

The answer is, actually, very simple. Given our limited abilities as humans to know anything, we see life as a comparative study (ugh) and thusly, as I alluded to before, meaning, for us, can only come as a negation.

 

What do I mean by this? Well, if we have something, we know we have something. If that something is taken away, then we have the negation of something which is nothing. I.e. I had it but now it is gone.

 

Goethe’s notion that good and bad are contingent on one another is also flawed as he does not take into account what things are away from our synthetic judgements. Notions such as good and bad exist in isolation from one another. To do unnecessary harm is bad whether one knows of good or not. Yes, this is still a judgement stemming from reflection ‘what I did caused harm’, however, good is good in it-self, regardless of how it is judged by us as a reflective judgement based on the notion of comparison.

 

’till next time

 

 

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Temporality and Meaning

 

 

As we saw in the previous essay, our understanding of ‘being’ comes from relation, an understanding that is flawed and thusly cannot be considered ‘true’. The fact that one can discern such illusions, as knowledge, stems from the temporality of existence. Or in other words, without a concept of time, there is no meaning in the sense we generally accept as truth

 

Let’s consider two examples:

 

Example One:

 

If I drop my keys at the bottom of the stairs, unknown, and then ascend the stairs to my door. I then go to my pockets to find the said keys. However, I cannot and grow more frantic in my panic and searching. Why? Because without my keys I cannot enter into my home, an event which is dependent on temporality to give it future meaning. I thusly descend the stairs, searching as I go, to retrace my steps. Upon seeing my keys on the floor, I am relieved and experience the three states of temporality within the same temporal moment:

 

 

1) I am relieved to have found my keys

2) I think that I must have dropped them there and relive, in my mind, in that moment, a past event of which I have no prior knowledge (based on assumptions- I must have dropped… When, for all we know, a pickpocket had removed them and then placed them thusly as a cruel joke)

3) now I have found my keys, I plan to go into my home

 

Here we have seen that the mind is not bound to the linear construct of time in thought, however, for the thoughts to have meaning, they must conform to a linear notion of temporality

 

 

Example Two:

 

This concept is not only within ‘reality’, it also is within the fictional construct of reality from which we learn most of our ‘real’ lives.

 

I am at a play. It is hot and sticky. I am uncomfortable and my mind wanders. Suddenly, a character runs on stage and shouts ‘he is alive! Your father is alive!’. Whilst this utterance would-be devoid of poignancy if it were to be said in a daily conversation, or even within a play, the temporal structure of the said play gives it meaning.

 

The character running onstage and addressing Hamlet as thus is shocking, a moment given great poignancy given my knowledge of the play based on temporal experience. I know that the play Hamlet is about a dead father who creates the tragedy of the play by passing his burden onto his son. Instead of going:

 

‘I know you miss me, I miss you too, I love you, kid, grow up to be a great man’

 

His father tells his son that he was murdered by his brother and demands revenge. Thusly, the young prince, imprisoned by past and future temporal meaning is broken to the point of suicide and homicide as past events shape the meaning of the future, his future which now belongs more to his dead father than to him. Thusly the unexpected reprieve of the announcement that the father is still alive has great meaning but only meaning which is contingent upon there being knowledge of the past and pseudo knowledge of the future. Yet again, the three states of temporality, as depicted in example one, exist within the same moment:

 

 

1) Hamlet is relived that his father is alive

2) he thinks it must be some kind of false information

3) Hamlet’s future now belongs to him again

 

But not only Hamlet but also me, in the audience, undertakes three different temporal states, linked to the same event but with different, subjective, meaning

 

1) I am stunned that the father is alive

2) I rehash my memory of the play to see why the unexpected is happening

3) the closed structure of the play, in my mind, is suddenly opened and the future, of the play, becomes, to me, unknown as, although the context is different, the meaning of the play becomes similar for both Hamlet and myself, a state hitherto unknown since I first read the play.

 

 

However, if we can conclude that true meaning does not come from relation (no pun intended with the Prince’s father) we are forced to acknowledge that even though, for us, meaning is dependent on temporality, we can never have true meaning of anything as we are only able to understand events in a temporal timeline and not, in them-self

 

’till next time