Chess of life

I have the luck of having been introduced to chess quite early in my childhood and taken a liking to it. Of course, in the digital age, it is a game that tends to disappear and it is not one of the games that spurs creativity as a recent academical article as noted. On the other hand, chess has many advantages for self-development, and it is also a tool to a certain understanding of the world, in an ideal-type of way.

The concept of ideal-type is actually a good one to start up with the subject of chess, as no ideal-type exists in reality. The problem is that every words represent an ideal-type. For example, “ chair” represents something in our mind, but we never see it in the world exactly as we see it in our mind, so we create a group of things we observed that can belong to that group. The problem now is that such groups make sense only in relations to others as the limit of a group can exist only if they are other things that have borders as well.

So if concepts that make sense of the world is stuck in borders of this world, we find our thoughts on a checkerboard. BOOM ! Here I start with my chess concept ( it is not mine, it is actually more Wittgenstein's one, I have just adapted it). So we are stuck with generalisations in our mind of everything that surrounds us. Each generalizations have its limits, and our mind can only collect a limited amount of rules-concepts-generalizations-heuristics-devices. 8 by 8 cases, separated by black and white so we know every time what are the limits more or less. So we have a structure of understand that is a checkerboard. What you can see though is that a checkerboard will never move. It is 8 by 8, it is black and white. Point. It won't transform. It is a tabula rasa of understanding that is slightly useless as though we have understood more or less the limits of our understanding, no one can say that they have not changed there minds and that the relations between concepts have not changed.

So we need pieces. The pieces are the words we are going to define, the cases we are going to give depth to so we have a dynamical understanding of the world. Pieces are shit complicated to understand as they represent something for their modus operandi but their m.o. are useless if they would have been alone on a checkerboard. Indeed, a rook can move everywhere, and then would represent everything, if he had nothing to stop him. Something that represents everything, represents nothing. So again, a piece functions is only defined in relation to others. A bishop can move far and well, compared to a King, but it is kinda stuck, compared to a rook.

So we have dynamical concepts moving around in relations to others, but also in relations to where they start from. And here, we observe a hierarchy of concepts, where we have loads of little understandings, which can be sacrifice because they can be replaced easily by others. Who cares for the word chair, as I have the verb seating, I have stools, I have sofas and armchairs. On the other hand, I do care for future, past or present, because they are important for me to know where ( when actually) I am. And what about Me. Could Me be a king, that I might lose on a checkerboard? Anyway, we have a hierarchy of pieces, that is assigned rather by their uniqueness than by their function.

I would like to make a parenthesis here concerning pawns. A pawn can go a very long way and be transformed into a key piece for someones understanding of the world. Let's say use the color blue, which is not that important ( it didn't really exist in ancient greek, and there are a multiplicity of blues in Inuit ). It is a color. The thing though is that in relation with, let's say phenomenology or linguistic or history of art, we can start detail the color in all its specificities in a culture at a given time and how it might represent part of the view of the world this culture has. Bam ! The blue was a pawn of daily language that became a Queen to understanding the world. The pawn had to travel from its original position, to the furthest point it could go, and by always sustaining its relations to other points without falling out because its position was to be taken by a stronger piece.

What is weird though is that the responsibility of a concept and the power of its modus operandi are different as well. Indeed, let's look at the fundamental concept for a game of thoughts: the King. It's function is to go slowly where it will find a safe roof, which is not really impressive, and yet it is the most important piece. As such, it is only because we have a game that we have King, and it is the importance we put on this singular concept. If we take the Queen, we can make it as relevant we want to the other pieces as we wish. The Queen is the other singular piece of the game and it can do pretty much what we want her to do. Would we wish though to let her stay at home to care for the King, she wouldn't be that important anymore. She has a defined function, but her importance depends only in the relation she has been put with the others.

So what is left within a game are the rules of the games. Indeed, the modus operandi and the rules are slightly different. First of all, the rules are set in the times of the games. For example, first moves can be different from other moves, and the clear example is that a pawn can move two steps if it is its first move. It is afterwards restricted. Another example is the King and the move called castling, where he moves two steps to hide behind a rook. He can't do so if he moved previously, or the rook moved previously, or if he is moving through a mate. Such moves are therefore constricted by the rhythm of the game. Rules are also quite tricky as they are sometimes unknown by most of the players. For example, en passant is a rule that not everybody knows, where a pawn can take a side pawn that moved its initial two steps. So the more rules a player knows, the better off he is.

So now we have introduced the player. Rules apply to him. Would he touch a piece, he has to move that piece and would he stop touching that piece, he can't change his mind to move that piece until it is his turn again. The player is constricted by the rules but like a piece can move within the rules limited by him. The main rule being the goal: mating the king ( not as finding him a suitable queen, but attacking him and living him no escape). The player assign the importance he wants to each of the pieces to defeat his opponent. That's where the opponent enters our realm of understanding. The game is Manichean, it is one against the other. To play well, the importance is not only to put your piece in a favorable place in relation to the other pieces ( and even the pieces of his own colors which assure his defense but also his moves to come) but to anticipate the other players move.

That's where it becomes tricky. Concept fights one another, over an important idea. We are almost in a Hegelian fight between a thesis and an antithesis. We are actually exactly there. As personalities that compose the self are nothing more than define in opposition with other personalities. We anticipate the other players move and most of the time, you anticipate the other player's best possible move. This is where the game gets tricky, because the best move can be set three turns afterwards by a succession of apparently irrelevant moves. We have to put our shoes in the other player's mind and assuming that he is slightly more stupid than we are ( would we think he'd be smarter, he would anticipate our anticipation and counter the our own counter-move). Would he be more stupid though, we can find ourselves at lost, since we foresaw wrong and would change tactic in mid-way leaving maybe an unexpected opening. The argumentation never goes as expected.

That's why we can fight ourselves at chess ( and the here-presented symbolic chess). Indeed, you just need to turn the checkerboard to see from the opposite perspective what has been going one and even better, you know what is anticipated from the opposition and go on this eternal fight of counter-anticipation. Internal discussion over what is right or wrong, over we should follow passion or reason, are set within a checkerboard, where there is a king one side and the other, and there are different arguments for one and the other, which are set within the limit of our mind and sometimes, unexpectedly, a pawn through experience would become more important that when it started and would reverse maybe the game we thought was set for ourselves.

Of course, we can cheat. To cheat we just have to be sure the opposition hasn't seen what we did or ignore the rules we have set ourselves. A game of chest, professionally, is noted down, so there is always a repercussion to inconsistencies of a game.

There are so many things to say about the games of chess set in our lives. We can observe that it is a relation game, and it is not necessarily because you have a lot of concepts on your side that you will win. It can for example mean that you did stay on a good defensive the whole game, but you went nowhere to attack the other, and worse, you stuck yourself and an opponent horse came through to stalemate you where you haven't left place to escape. Too many words can block winning an argument because of confusion when the other can move its concept freely to counter or attack.

The infinite variations of games means it is impossible to know how a game will end. It does depend on the players level of the game, but even then, every body forget pieces or make mistakes. It is of course impossible to apply a chess game to reality, but somehow, all of reality is applicable to a chess game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose but we always lose a little, rarely it is a stalemate. And there is always another game coming.

Applied Spider-Man Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lure an Instant Blast. Past-Present-Future

Well, it is almost confirmed: neutrinos go faster than light. Which raises the question of what else could go faster than light? Well, if a fundamental particle goes faster than light, can we still believe that the rest of the world follows the speed limit? There are no sanctions against going faster than light, otherwise Switzerland ( and I love this scenario) would have been warped in a black-hole and never heard off again.

The recent study that is left apart from the mainstream media is a research done at Cornell University where a psychologist managed to prove that some people are precognitive, when compared to the average. Which means that they could guess the event coming, even if that event was random and not capable of being calculated. I know, it sounds crazy, but how come it sounds more crazy than neutrinos going faster than light? Isn't it in the end maybe the same paradigm forbidding anything to go faster than light that forbids us to think that the future exists before we make it ?
So here is the theme of this article: the paradigms of time.

It will of course be composed in three, because so far we are only capable of doing such a taxonomy: past, present and future. What it might be is also an evolution in humanities evolution, in a very weird way and I hope that I am wrong, because Copernican revolutions are starting to be annoying, in the sense that we always restart from the start all our thoughts and at the same time feel the need to work at filtering the ideas from the past that should not be taken for granted.

I'm not sure how to structure this article, as dividing in it three and it looks like I'm repeating point, but if I work thematically, it will be worst as I would lose myself or repeat arguments, the perfect ingredient for boredom ( if you aren't already). Just to throw out my thesis before everything, and try not to be too linear, I will try to defend the idea that we have not concentrated enough on the future, though it is, in the public, only part of our society since the end of the nineteenth century ( thank you sci-fi), it will become ever more important.

How and why and what the fuck are three good questions to this erratic claim. What I want to observe though is that in antiquity and in our history, until I don't know when, it is actually relative to societies and individuals, we have concentrated ourselves on the past as a way to see the world. It is of course logical, in the sense that we can more easily generalize and make sense of the world if we have examples we can build on. It is though more than the logic. The past has been a way to legitimize our present and our future.

We were anchored in rituals and mythologies that would tell us 'eternal' truth that guided us. It is why these societies had a slightly more deterministic outlook that our present. It wasn't scientific determinism, in the sense that everything was the consequence of some cause indirectly related to the Big Bang, but that everything was already written or the choice of some unearthly human-looking god figure. This god(s) figure would also be related to the human in power, through some kind of story or ceremonial selection. And the gods always came from a long time before humanity and only our memory served us. Knowledge, then represented the accumulation of stories and rules.

Then came the present in our mind, and we killed the gods, and we invented free-will. Free-will is the lie of the present. When the past uses memory, we uses perception to make sense. We look left and right and study how the world goes through repeating experiments and transforming them into formulas. No matter we know that the formula can always be discussed. Which is the bases for contemporary knowledge: discussing what has been accumulated. The present is the most important time at present ( haha), in the sense that we tend to see history as something that glue us, but we are not ready to build a better future because present problems seem more important. The present is also seen as somehow accidental, so legitimacy doesn't come from the past, but from the fact that things are the way they are.

And the future will come some day as the main perspective. Of course, I will not be there to see a society of individuals future-oriented I think. Hopefully though, I will help towards that like many others have in the past. How would that look though. Well first of all, we would be more morally responsible, as a better future for each of us is the only reasonable answer to the ultimate question of ' why be good ?'. More than that, the future is based on imagination, which might be the faculty the makes us different from animals. It is also the faculty that made our reality nowadays. For all the Ian M. Banks readers out there, if they do read scientific publication, they would understand that a lot of the new physics theories or engineering marvels come out of his books, just like Isaac Asimov invented ethical robotic and the concept of Earth as a self-regulated-system otherwise known as Gaia.

Overall, it is difficult to understand that we need to forget our memory, we need to not trust what we see, but only imagine what is to come to jump unto the next realm of understanding. I know that it is still a limited way to absolutely understanding the world, but it is always within limits that we have understood the world, and every time the limits have grown. Which might also be the center of limited-rationality, that we act as rationally as we think we can, but only because we do not understand our limits. Would we consider a future, where our limits have augmented, we already are opening our frame of decision and extending our rationality.

So now, I will try this difficult task of considering futures, even near futures and then think about how the present can lead to the different scenarios. The past and the present will then be mixed into one since they are the same from a future perspective. The question about the present will only be how it will be judged, though that's actually a trick of our present-oriented mind, since a future-oriented mind won't have to judge the past. All in all a difficult question, where I've lost myself in this free writing exercise which I feel will lead to somewhere.

Socio Scooby Logy Doo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distancing Through Clustering Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short History of Nothing

 History really starts with language and painting. Language provides the common ground for compromises and communication. Sharing was already done materially, but it could not be organized in time. The point of painting is that it provides lasting symbolism. With lasting symbolism set within a ground of compromises we can see slowly the 'real' disappearing. The real is here defined as the organic existence of one human, his tribe and nature. It is the present, but language has introduced the possibilities, hence the future, and painting has introduced the past. At this point did the present and everything that goes with it started it slow death. Here in time, at the end of prehistory, we can find the beginning of a super-structure, the ideologies of humanity, set in rituals explained by language and pictorial representation of the ideas.

 The second changing process of humanity has been the settlement. Settlement was consequentially the creation of an order different than our primate order, though we did not see the eradication of primate power-relations, we saw growing a different orders in parallel defined by possession, not affected by the physical appearance of the person. Agrarian modes of production meant that there was no need anymore, needs used to be the foundation for the daily problematic of survival. It was not an entirely prosper society as nature would always have its way to annoy humanity, but it was not either a period where someone would tell someone else to do their own job. Everybody had something to do.

  In parallel with the development of agrarian society still existed hunters-gatherers societies that would help the legitimization of stronger and bigger countries. The Chinese empire could not exist if it was not for the Mongolian invasions. Same goes for the Greeks cities and the roman empire. No empire existed without its counter nomads society, liberty grew in parallel with necessity. With the prosperity of agrarian societies, humanity also saw its rate of survival rising, meaning a rise in population, then a human surplus that meant that all societies would find the need to expand.

 Consequentially, surplus of production appeared. Surplus of production is an unintended consequence of our life-style that we have not really managed to control. We produce more than what we need, meaning a few things. First of all, it legitimizes not working for some. Secondly, it legitimizes exchange and gives a new form of power to the one who owes more of what is less, or harder to produce. Necessity of the product disappeared behind the rarity of the product.

  As any form of power needs language to save itself as well as material power, super-structure really developed with production surplus. The symbolic legitimization too different forms through time and the most famous one is probably religion. The questions of religious rules and how it legitimizes power are different from region to region, but some are possible to be generalized. Religion created a notion of group beyond the one of the family. Something important as in-group/out-group generalizations would expand in their complexity in time. It could be said that you could include someone in your group or not through language but important language did spread at some point of the other. Religion was rarely something taken for the sake of communication. Religion grew in most civilizations as a leverage to power. It was a branch of power that would try to control abuses of power, when it was not abusing of its power itself.

Religion has managed also to legitimize the present, through its interpretations on institutional scales. Religious messages were not always messages of conservation of the present order, but most of the time were. It might have been the revolution of Christianity if it would not have been institutionalize by Constantin. Of course, there is no difference between philosophies and religions except the question of institutionalization and the degree of adoption by populations.

Largely adopted philosophies or religion were also the way to show dissent to the order of power at a given time. They were always based on a shared belief asked to be the new traditions, though most of the time not yet transformed into cyclic rituals. Rituals are the transformation of the belief into mechanic repetition as a reminder of the foundation of the believes.

Believes, as zeitgeist, are understood in history through art and changes in art forms. The obvious example of an early change in art form demonstrating a change in belief is the art under Akhenaten. As much as art is nowadays considered independent from any religion, belief or philosophies, it is just the proof of the diversity of believes in the masses legitimizing the incapacity for change. As such, we can observe that as much as social movements in the twentieth century appeared to be important and changed slightly society, they never had the expected impact, if any impact at all. The civil right movement was just the process of introducing already established social norms from the north of the United States to the south, the sixties did not create the expected society.

Print created the change in taste and the spread of different philosophies. Taste is an important factor as it is linked to art's form. Reading is though an activity that requires times, and writing even more so. It is the only place where the worlds of possibilities fight each other to represents the truths and future truths of the world. ( nothing is false as we understand it, but only not true in our world at a given time). It has though been hard to understand the effect of reading unto our world, and fortunately, the Lumière Brothers and Edison appeared and got championed to develop their inventions as they lead to television, cinema and radio: ways to distract like reading can but without training our capacity for attention ( hence making our brain more flexible to new ideas).

As taste got widespread, ideas conflicted, we managed to spread ideas further and came our capacity to keep big accounts, create big economies and industrialization made its way. The most important factor for industrialization was the development of cities. Cities represented the destruction of local cultures, myths, stories and musics. It imposed a top down approached to art ( and art is the form of the ideology of a moment) so was destroyed anything local that was brought and only the owner of shops who had history within the town got to make the rules of the city. ( the first cities in the renaissance and middle-age where the first places that fought off feudalism through signed charters).

They were the places where only shops existed and consumption as a sign of a well-lived life became the way to live for everybody. It was not directly a need for industrialization, it was a consequence of the expansions of cities. New traditions were consumption and as such taste became the tool of domination. Attention, private taste was different from exposed taste. As such, the high-class maintained tastes for old music when any new money tried to impose its style which was since always changed. Taste became an ephemeral tool of domination as if you 

dress like yesterday, or tomorrow for that matter, you still do not dress right.

Of course, upcoming bourgeoisies tend to always think that slow change is for the best and always believe that they are good to everybody. This has been the form

of 'liberalism' since 18^th century. It maintains though the need for conformity, and this can be seen through the use of badly drawn humor making fun of anything out of fashion. This desperate need for conformity actually reflects every position of insecurity, as you can see in every countries in a conflict people tend to be more conservative you can see that most of the newly bourgeois get scared of their conception of the ridicule.

 As taste has its constant war, humour starts to be a shared space. This is why we can see that the most successful forum on the internet is 4chan, as it is the place where everybody exchanges their funny pictures. No content is needed, except a demand for freedom to make fun of everything without any necessity. It is of course the strange foundation for a new belief, something for the future where knowledge economy ( the jokingly given name to our 'service-based economy' - as service use to be something helpful and given, and the only knowledge needed is to know how to present oneself). This subject requires quite an extended skill in social forecasting....

I see you and Big Brothers watch nothing

A recent research established that a company will have better results if the face of its CEO was larger than average. Well that was the conclusion of the research and the exception established is if the top management does not see the world in a black and white way. People who have a tendency to not discuss generalization obey better to authority, and a large face is actually a sign of authority in our world. Top management capable of understanding relativity do not abide by their CEO's authority constantly. The idea is that people who feel powerful in some aspect of their life will tend to look at the big picture in that part of their life ( yours truly). 

What is the point of that fact? Well that we do live in a synoptic society and that Foucault might have been seriously wrong. What do I mean by a synoptic society? Well, Foucault had an idea that society worked like a prison invented by Jeremy Bentham ( he actually stole this idea from some one else I cannot place at this moment). Anyway, the prison was in a circle with open rooms and a tower in the middle. The guards were in the tower in the middle, meaning that every prisoners could be seen by the guards. The trick was though that the prisoners could not see if the guards were watching them ( because the guards were behind some kind of tainted windows). So prisoners had to behave constantly because they could not hide, as you can hide only from seers you know. Society worked like that in some institutions said Foucault, and people interpreting him thought the expansion of Closed Circuits Television (CCTV) reflects this articulation of power.

Well, it is a slight misinterpretation of Foucault as Foucault's main idea is that we have to self-disciplined ourselves constantly just in case we get caught. It is among the ways that society regulates itself. High society establish rules, that people will feel they have to copy to look good, even though no one is looking. So panopticon is the idea that everybody get watched, synoptic is the idea that everybody is watching someone. And we are effectively in a synoptic society.

An objection: I thought you just said that we self-disciplined ourselves to look like a high-class society even when we are not watched. Well, yes we do, but not really the high-class society. What we copy is just the class higher than ours, the one we can see and what we see, because we are all trying to enter the club that does not accept us as a member. We do not try though to get into the club that will never accept us as a member. As such, the panoptic self-discipline society is a theory that is not complete enough and I will ask you to see the theories of Bourdieu to understand that the articulation of power are far more complicated than Foucault made it look like.

The synoptic society is though a theory of power that we can all relate to as it is the illusion of responsibility we are all subject to. Not our responsibility, but the responsibility for what is wrong with whatever we see in our world. My first example will be Mr. Mubarak, who's been for more than 20 years head of state of Egypt, as you might have recently learned, and has now been deposed by the army. He was seen as the problem of the country, and his removal seemed like the solution for all the problems. Everything was centered on him. Now, how can a civilian rule a country for so long with the agreement of the army and when some people demonstrate, as they did repeatedly in these decades, suddenly the army drop the arms? Well we don't care. And it is not the news anymore when Mubarak is not head of the country anymore.

Would we have been in a panopticon society, we could observe that the son of Mubarak was building contacts with american companies in the last 5 years and there were talk of him succeeding his father. Of course, the problem were the demands from these American companies. What companies generally ask is for a neoliberal economy, which means that the biggest company just walk over the small companies and establish their monopoly on a market. In the case of Egypt, the market was and is still dominated by companies created or owned by the Egyptian army. Mubarak junior tried to dismantle these companies and this aggravated the Army. So came the Tunisian revolution, the army jumped on the wagon against the Mubarak... A panoptic society, everybody is guilty.

A real panoptic society could exist only in a state of constant guilt and public confession. We are in a synoptic society, were the guilty are always the one person on top we like to see as the master of evil. A synoptic society is also the one were the winner is the one person we think is the genius. If we look at apple, we can see that everybody cares one way or the other about Steve Jobs. Do we care only that he had done nothing directly for the changes in Apple, but the real change was only the change in marketing agency for the company in 1999?

What regulates our daily life is the not the fear of being caught, it is just what the people left and right do. The clearest of examples are my home countries: Belgium and Greece. Both countries vote heavily for socialist parties. The problem is that as much as their political ideology hold the name of socialism, both countries' population have no problems in cheating on their taxes. It is not a taboo at all. The irony is of course that it is the political parties that are seen as the root of the problem, when it is mostly the social norm that is problematic.

Of course, the question is how to change the social norm? Surveillance could work. Surveillance is seen as evil. CCTV in Belgium and in England are soaring, but I know from police source that they are used a posteriori of any crimes, never as preemptive tools. CCTV is evil, as it is really misused, surveillance though does not exist. I do not know. Knowledge and surveillance are not the same and yet there are sometimes intersections. If we could see everything, if we could propose change for everything, be listen and vote on everything we are interested in. It does not work that way.

What I see it is just that we take some individuals as scape-goats, for the worst and the best. The worst though is our fault. It is never one company, it is never one banker. Of course it is hard to judge ourselves and our friends. The solution is to ask for a change, but this goes on the domain of the ethic of consequences, and god knows all the horrors of our world has been done on such ethic ( the greater good). So how to change our bad behavior ? I really do not know anymore. I would just say that when Warren Buffett and rich French people tell you that they should pay more, just ask yourself what they have paid less in the last decade and what percentage of their fortunes it represents compare to what they propose to pay... It is never one person, it is never that person good action that repairs the bad. The only advise I find this time is in the chorus of Dan le sac Vs. Scroobius-Pip

just be nuts and lay (it) down

In the last twenty days, I have finished reading books and essays from Lenin, Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Freud and Chuang Tzu. This is quite a heavy mix for the mind and as a result I will blurt out the little conclusions I can come to when thinking about our present times using as an inspiration what they have written a bit less than a hundred years ago ( except for Chuang Tzu).



To start with a joke, my conclusion with these authors is that I agree with Habermas when he states that the Enlightment was a halfway done job. (Drums) These authors did not help my sense of humor, I know. Anyway, I actually disagree with Habermas to some extent. I think the first point to make is that Enlightment had never started and could never end. It rather got expanded through the Korean invention of print (take that euro-centrics!) and its quasi-democratisation in Europe ( oooooh :'( ) I say quasi because depending of the countries, censure would heavily exist or be ineffective.



The development and circulation of literature and ideas brought the reverence of eternal arts to the home of everybody. Indeed, books, unlike conversations, can be read and re-read at leisure to find new ideas in new lectures or confirm old ideas. The mind has changed there onwards. Religious clerks, the little priests from the countryside, were not the sole people to hold the cultish ideal of the Word in their hands, but the whole village could have it. Everybody could read, or look at pictures and it did not have this special ideal of being the sole power of the church or the few chosen intellectuals to states possible answers to big questions. It was the not the business of the aristocracy anymore, but also of a rising bourgeoisie and at some point, even the proletariat were allowed the skills to read.



It was not enough to emancipate the world, but it was enough to destroy some institutions that relied upon the lack of capacity of the people to reach informations. Notably, the Catholic Church soldiers could not wander in their ways and sell VIP tickets to heaven anymore. Would Martin Luther not have told them, someone else surely would have come along and tell them something in those lines, as nowhere in the holy printed book does it say that VIP tickets could be sold by Peter's descendents. The print made the people who read realize how much of a scam the Catholic Church was and, though rituals are important in the sense that they commemorate knowledge that should not be forgotten acquired by humanity, liberated us from this institution.



Of course, people did not have much to read at the time. That was an important factor. The Bible was the super-ego of society, in the sense that it dictated the rules of society or unto which society ought to abide by. Violence was only the repress sense of guilt of the non-following of these rules. That is why Christian society was as violent as any other society, and probably more, as the rules set by Jesus can be hard to understand and follow. He did indeed set a more than conflicted super-ego, creating a society that did no know whether it should let its instinct go wild or its reason. Secular versus Eternal, Kings against Popes, represents the internal conflict of the mind on a societal scale.



And society became neurotic a little bit when came the Protestants. Why do I say such a thing? Well first of all, we can observe the internal tension and masochism of civil tensions and exterminations of unbalanced beings that cannot find an enemy outside, but rather punish themselves for not knowing who ought to be guilty. The massacre of the protestants, the catholics, the jews inside our own borders is again a societal psycho-pathology that can exist in an individual requiring rejection to feel that it has a judging father. An eternal god ready to set the rights and wrongs against our instinctive will, something that will be there before and after our mind, to be sure that we exist and we do not make everything up. We did not know what was right from wrong anymore and everything was up for discussion. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as it is a public debate, which it was, between the forces in power. The unconscious though was stable. The main population knew its place. It was a repressed part of society, the most important part repressed, and represented what should never be in power if we would have to be civilized, except if it could sublime itself.



Wait a second, it does not seem like society was neurotic, and it seems I am with such writing. Well, both can be true and false. I can represent the state of society as it is now as I am a mega-digester of artifacts, I do not hold one god, I do not have one father. And I know that values are laws and I do not know the laws.



So back to square one to make sense and make of this article a synopsis of my psycho-analysis, or rather the one of society. Print diluted at first the instinctive response to corrupt civilizing process on a large scale. Print made us realize that the Bible – the transformation of human nature into a sensible story- was not what our human nature transformed it into – the Catholic Church. So what happened is that we were both confronted with the realization that we had a human nature – every day's corruption of values- and we had a way out: the Bible. (I am talking only about Europe and an analysis of China could come later on, as for other civilizations, I do not hold enough knowledge – I could try Japan as it is an interesting counter-example of a strong unchanged super-ego).



The Bible did not seem to be enough. We did not like it and did not like the multiple interpretations and we were lost. We took it on ourself and so killed some of our neighbors. It was hard to be lost. And it was hard to be without a sense of what is right and what is wrong. So came the idea that we could write what is right and what is wrong and instead of following an oral tradition ( god bless the Hasidim) or a wise-men re-adapted word ( J.C. in da houze) we could make our own in a constantly evolving law. We mixed the idea of an eternal super-ego and a living-evolving ego.



It worked because people who got to make the laws were the people in power and they had a super-ego of their own in the fact that they possessed everything: eternal knowledge, philosophy and arts. By the way, whenever I use the word eternal, I use it only on a human phenomenological level, meaning that it means it will survive before and after my death. It makes me care for the world before and after me and I do not have to consider the idea that it exist only because I think it exists. Would I choose this later case; I could have gone on a Norwegian rampage with a Colt Peacemaker just for the cheer pleaser of looking like Clint.



So the bourgeoisies held in their hands education (the capacity to read books) and arts ( the ideology of the eternal), and they could make societies super-ego as their was no sense of right and wrong dictated by one single book anymore ( there was never actually a sense of right and wrong in the Bible, but god forbids we would read the book and get free as J.C. would have wanted us to be! - fuck John and his apocalypse). So they made up, to replace the idea of God on Earth (the Catholic Church), the Nation-State, which held a cult art, a cult history, a super-ego.



And it was good. Until the ego felt the need to kill that super-ego because it knew that the father was corrupted ( down with Chronos !) or it received a slap from the super-ego because the ego grew too fast. The slap was fascism and the war. It has to be said that the simple super-ego of most of the western world was really good between 1900 until the end of the 1930's. It was bound to go wrong as there was never as much international economic exchanges and such a spread of education. The masses indeed got to know what was unfair in the word through books and newspapers. They asked for system that had more justice for everybody. The practice of the law did not make the justice (go Kafka).



I realized that when I've learned this week that the most successful in term of votes American elections was the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. in 1936 after he made this speech:



“...For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”



Fear gets our instinct out if we do not have strong eternal injunctions. We forget yesterday's acquired knowledge and what we made of it. More than that, if democracy is the eternal psycho-analysis of our need to have a sense of guilt and shame for our dos and donts, we need to discuss constantly the foundation of our system of justice, of its origins or accept one once and for all and let the rest of our instinct go wild, but we cannot be in a in-between state.



Of course, the World War 2 was only a small catharsis and it was not over for our history. First of all, it has to be remembered that though some communist regimes were repressive, there economic system did work until the 70s. The 1970’s were the strange period of the world. It was the period where countries and civilizations were close to a break down. The USA got unto imperialism though discreet through shock therapy, Europe got to deal with itself and the different dictatorial system it still had, Russia lost their hope when they learned they could not get on the moon (it is still hard to believe we got there). I do not know why the Chinese accepted Deng Xiaoping reforms, except that they did not accept the repression of their human nature.



The idea is that art as it is, is the reproduction of our internal tensions. It works for an individual, but for society, art gets a position a priori and dictates whether the tensions have been accepted or not, they dictates or shows the commands we have chosen for ourselves, they represent the super-ego or its lack. Cinema and television represents a form of atheist polytheism where values are saturated, just like law can be, and our values are mixed up to make us a neurotic civilization.



We are back to square one and we can either accept that the super-ego and where it comes from is wrong, but we need then to know what it is and where it is from. Or we need to accept its slap, in the way the German and the Italians did, but understand that it won't last. We can observe that in both the sadomasochism is emerging as the Germans are the first one to hate them in the name of the ecosystem and the Italians are so as well in the sense that they constantly elect the mafia they used to abhor. As for the American, they have either too much super-ego, in the number of laws that cannot be accounted for or the lack of super-ego in their culture industry.



Freud said it so himself, it is not only the case to get rid of the super-ego that has been created in our civilization by the holders of the means of productions, and we have to build up our own super-ego and the constantly changing nature of the ego.



I will state I think what should be the lines unto which a civilization might want to adhere, without making a fuss of making it a cult, as cult have come to be as well the object of discussion and rebellions as every civilization feels sometimes like too much of oppressed teenagers. I will just outline what I want my super-ego to make me feel guilty about and internalize it without having to discuss it too much afterwards:



'And moreover men are liable to eight defects, and (the conduct of) affairs to four evils; of which we must by all means take account.

' 1 To take the management of affairs which do not concern him is called monopolising.

2 To bring forward a subject which no one regards is called loquacity.

3 To lead men on by speeches made to please them is called sycophancy.

4 To praise men without regard to right or wrong is called flattery.

5 To be fond of speaking of men's wickedness is called calumny.

6 To part friends and separate relatives is called mischievousness.

7 To praise a man deceitfully, or in the same way fix on him the character of being bad, is called depravity.

8 Without reference to their being good or bad, to agree with men with double face, in order to steal a knowledge of what they wish, is called being dangerous.

Those eight defects produce disorder among other men and injury to one's self. A superior man will not make a friend of one who has them, nor will an intelligent ruler make him his minister.

'To speak of what I called the four evils:



1 To be fond of conducting great affairs, changing and altering what is of long-standing, to obtain for one's self the reputation of meritorious service, is called ambition;

2 to claim all wisdom and intrude into affairs, encroaching on the work of others, and representing it as one's own, is called greediness;

3 to see his errors without changing them, and to go on more resolutely in his own way when remonstrated with, is called obstinacy;

4 when another agrees with himself, to approve of him, and, however good he may be, when he disagrees, to disapprove of him, is called boastful conceit.





These are the four evils. When one can put away the eight defects, and allow no course to the four evils, he begins to be capable of being taught.'



I chose those because I was confronted with them recently, they are not only stubborn to an ethic of moderation and they can be rules of national and international politics as much as rules for individuals. I have written for way too long now, and I need to print these rules for my desk. I did not want to take on any Christian interpretation because J.C. had too much faith in humanity to think that we can handle ourselves without fathers. We will have to come to term though with our conflicting nature ( Eros and Ananke; Instinct and civilization) as we will be the parents ourselves, soon enough, of artificial intelligence, and it would be sad to be horrible parents. I will leave you on a poem I came to love and love to hate:



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

( Philip Larkin ; This be the verse)

Kaiser Chiefs: The contemporary Cassandras

 ( I'm not fond of Kaiser Chiefs)

Well, I guess that everybody will talk about the riots this week and they are right to do so. The riots are not riots. There are no riots, riots is only a question of perspective. Riots, protests and demonstrations are all the same form of destructive ( even in peace, it has a sense of destruction ) assembly due to a common disagreement by a large enough group. What is interesting to note, as always, is not the causes and articulations of the riots but rather the reactions to it.

First thing first, it has started as a protest against the police and soon enough was this element forgotten by the public and the media. It is repeated that the parents of Duggan ( the alleged dealer who got shot) asked for the rioters to not use his name as a reason to protest and I entirely back up this argument. The police should not be criticized like that on a sole unique example but it should be reminded that a dozens of people at least die each year while in custody, that the police have undercover agent provocateurs for few protests ( caught on camera but never mentioned by mainstream media) and that though we are reminded through a few documentaries every year that policemen are racists. We do not mind that newspapers put pictures of only minority ethnic people on their frontpage for the riots though. The police service has decayed in the last century and this deserves a long lasting demonstration on its own. Also, the fact that the police does not know how to calm down rioters, let them for the first few days go wild so they can afterwards use violent deadly tools does not make the police better.

Of course, I repeat weekly that it is hard to do some self-criticism especially when it implies the lost of the devil we know for a deep blue sea ( a new system, a new policing service, or anything new is scary) . I am though in the fortunate position to be a self-hating bourgeois in the style of Gramsci and Lenin ( and self-critical enough to know I have no humility when I compare myself to these genii of the 20^th century). What I observe is the main reaction to these riots as there were for any demonstration in the last twenty years in Europe: we just want to see the worst in them.

Even the 'left' media just centered there pictures and examples on the opportunistic aspect of the riots. Those are riots exploding on a sudden urge, it is normal that they have an opportunistic, unorganized, apolitical aspect. Are we really astonished at that ? The police has let the riots go for two days so we can forget the police shot a man, twice and accused the deceased of violence. They have let the media go on to say that the rioters are undisciplined and destructive so fear can run among the general population. Would it have been any political demonstration, police would have been geared up and ready to direct and hit whoever would have been problematic, knowing that an organized demonstration has in our minds more legitimacy and can overthrow a government. Harry Potter fans can overcrowd Trafalgar square when anticuts protests get kettled.

In the Guardian of Tuesday, we can see the happy well-paid bohemians of Tottenham brandishing their brooms to say: 'Yes, we'll clean up behind the rioters' to show their sense of community. On the picture, they were all whites. Those are the people not minding that much the consenting liberal approach of the s ystem. They do not care that money = poverty ( logical saying from The Culture in Ian M. Banks fictions) because they have the money to pay. What were they doing on a Thursday during the day cleaning up the streets when the rioters are required to look for jobs? What kind of system is it where economic imperialism is in theory frowned upon ( all these london bohemians vote 'labour' or 'liberal') but its consequences are ignored?

We all know that these riots have started in places where you find extremes in wealth. The rich lives next to the poor. We all know that the English government at present does not mind such extremes and indeed favors it as it means lower wages for the people owning no mean of production. We have also now more good reasons now to dislike the 'Chavs' and 'hooded youth', even as liberals. The liberals are the blind submissive population of England and this is the conclusion of these protests. When they see racism, they see horror, they do not see that misery creates racism and economic oligarchy creates misery.

We are all aware of the reasons for such riots. The BBC made an interview of a West Indian writer who's grandson was in the riot and lived there ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o&feature=youtu.be) and it is funny to see that while he explains in details the frustration of living there, his interview cannot be found anymore on the BBC website. We prefer to see the looting and make fun of it because it either reflects on how much in a consumer society we are, or how stupidly unpolitical the looters are. Doesn't it show the extent to which the society is fucked up?!

The rioters live in miserable conditions in a system that has crushed any perspective of a descent future for them. Those are good excuses for demanding for a better society, from our educated perspective. Yet, they are not educated and go loot for what they have been taught to want ( result of basic hegemony) and what do we, well educated left-wing liberal thinkers, get out of it? ' Stupid pricks looting the small shops'. If we had there balls, real empathy for their outrage, if we would have an ounce of integrity, we would go down the there with them and go for the parliament, whether with a broom in hand or a baseball bat.

I am not going to extend too much on this because all the media are against them. We all want to see only the violence under our eyes rather than the symbolic violence it stems from.

Why are you Guy Fawkes ?

Not many people will complain for the delay, but I have quite a cool explanations. I was away in Freiburg and I have put up 250 flyers up with printed masks and invitations to join the Anonymous forum whatis-theplan.org.

It took me a while to think about the subject of this article. I know that it looks most of the time as I am just writing it on the go, and I am but it is after I spent time thinking and self-reflecting and very rarely on a sudden urge. The ideas were various and I think I should start with simple questions.

• You take a chair and take out the back-support and armrests, is it still a chair ?
• There is so much emptiness that under a microscope, two fingers can never touch themselves and yet, why is it so hard to see void ?
• If you see a bird, and it starts swimming and lays eggs giving birth to fish, is it still a bird?
• If you'd have to, would you kill a sibling of yours to save two strangers?
• Is it natural for a person to change sex?
• If we make a colony on Mars, what will be our definition of a year?
• If you are like no one else, what is humanity?
• 47,9 + 32,6 =..... ? You can touch a calculator, but you can't touch the mental process that gave the answer to that question, so what comes first, your mind or your body?
• You wait. Is that active or passive?
• I speak French because it is my mother-tongue, yet I made the decision to speak Esperanto to my children. Would Esperanto have been my mother-tongue, would I have made another decision?
• Yesterday, I saw Santa Claus in an empty street and he told me a secret. Do you think this could be true?

Ok, maybe those are not simple questions and I congratulate you if think they are as you must have accumulated much more knowledge than I ever managed to. I will reformulate by the way the questions at the end of the article I think, just to make sure we are on the same wave.

So let's assume that you and I share a real world, as it is laid out under our eyes. I will ask you by the way not to assume I am too crazy when I say that the world under our eyes might not be it. I just like to nourish some doubts sometimes. I do know the objections to the doubt: 'whether or not it is an illusion or whatever, why does it matter?'. Well, I think I will make a point why doubting sometimes does matter. Maybe it is just that I think we should not ignore our past and recognize that we have been wrong quite a few times so we might as well think we can still be wrong.

But on the reality of our world, let's say that we live in it. As the poet said to the bishop:' Fuck, this hurt – now do you see it's real!'. History did good I think to forget the poet as it was just in profession that he was such, and not in mind.

So the question to ask ourselves after that one should be: why don't we make the world a better place?

Anyway, we live in a world with other people and we abide by the rules we are told by our parents, our friends and by what we see. Of course we do not exactly abide by every rule and we all adapt them to the circumstances and most of the times we act on them without reflecting on them, not even afterwards. We do reflect on negative consequences to some actions and tell ourselves maybe not to repeat them. But rarely does reflection come unto any significant habits of daily life as we take habits for granted. We have to take it for granted. Otherwise, if we applied reasoning on everything, we would probably go crazy rather quickly.

I have though yesterday come to discuss the question of death penalty with someone I had just met. This person had to write an exam where she was to make a defense of death penalty and refused herself to do so. I pointed out that this was as smart as a person in favor of death penalty refusing to write a defense against the death-penalty. Apparently though, the principle against death-penalty is morally superior enough not to be asked such a task when the belief in favor is not. The lack of self-reflection on the matter, the lack of incapacity to find the origins of this sense of moral superiority, was for me the most problematic aspect of her position.

Of course I am against death-penalty, but I do know why and that is why I can do a pretty good defense in favor, as it does not make me doubt my belief. Somehow, I am afraid that Europeans are still capable of extremism as they judge so easily and are incapable of empathy. Empathy for the devil does not mean you support his actions. It only means that you see and understand his point of view and would you be good at empathy, you would see that it is only frustration leading him, as he was only an ignored second son and not because he is inherently evil. 

This latter position is an easy one and truthful as much as the other one, it leads though to no resolution and not possibility for peace.

Anyway, I am going off my intended path. I am just amazed everyday at our capacity for judging individuals when we are so incapable of self-reflection and acting on those few self-reflections. My point from this last anecdote was that I want to try not to get common sense to hit me too often and allow long defenses for any moral arguments. The foundation for my morality is that tomorrow will be better because yesterday was worse. It is just a belief and I want to work towards that belief. I do not want to act good because of a possible punishment after death, or because I am afraid of society's punishment, or worst of all because I do not know why. I have already detailed this in one of my first posts.

I was just wondering why there is so much apathy in the world. When were the children in us killed? I do think that we are more insensible than we used to be, but we just love to lie to ourselves about it so we do not have to find the root of this problem. Of course, for example, death has become a great taboo and could be the example of the scared souls we have become, except that sending our dying off to places we do not deal with it is not sensible at all. Students in U.K.went down in the streets and the same day their tuitions fees tripled and they did not get angry. We care for our children, and yet we are fully aware that we will leave them worse off. We leave them to be kids for a while and then we tell them the dreams of youth are gone.

I am just wondering why we cannot ask for world peace anymore. Why do we have to still have weapon production when history proves that you do not need weapons to win a war? Why does starvation exist when we can travel the world faster than Earth can spin on itself? Why do we think that corruption is not surprising anymore and why are we cynics about it when it is so easy to have a political conscience. I do not really know yet. I am trying to work it out.

I will say this. I do believe that social movements changed the world for the best every time they appeared. I do want to learn from history and I will use our Christian heritage as leverage for making people feel guilty about the way they have let things go. I have joined Anonymous, which is not about anonymity as much as it is about asking for real change for a better world. If you believe blindly the mainstream media about Anonymous being only about hacking, then you are a mediocre human being blindly accepting serfdom. The hacking is the destructive ( though not physically hurting anyone, as it is a motto of the social movement) part of movement, but if the bullseye were the CIA, the FBI, other armed forces and a lot of military contractors, I am asking you this: Why have so far only eight people aged in their teens been arrested?

Teenagers, let's put an end to this myth, do not have the capacity to do serious hacking. Police just arrest people who have put out their voice to say that they want change and the ones who did not do it discreetly got publicly arrested. Adults could have been arrested in this investigation as well, but the point of the arrests were to morally pressure the whole social movement. You say the soviet union put a bad name to communism, I will ask you please to think what the future generations will think of us! Yes I am allowed to say such things, but I am not allowed to act on my believes.

Of course, I am just hoping now that out of our civilization’s ashes will come a better one. We are having increasing military budgets, declining energy productions (hence rise in food cost), and we are raging wars we cannot win. We have a deadlocked political system consenting to the owners of means of productions. We have a systemic growing unemployment with a decreasing redistribution of wealth. And we all have a delusion of grandeur, individuals, but a society that is worse off as a whole, thinking that we can survive this great historical recipe for disaster.

I just like to think about the old questions because they do not cost a thing:

• Is an object one object of the assembly of many?

• Is the universe a tiny thing in emptiness, or so big that we do not get it?

• Is any being revealed by its appearance, or the idea of it?

• Can liberty exist independently from necessity?

• Which is more important: reason or passion?

• Is Culture emancipation from Nature?

• Can Time last forever?

• Has everybody got a unique self or is the self similar to everybody?

• Are we bodies limited in a time-space coordinate or minds imagining the world, the history and that might be immortal?

• What is the difference between being passive or active?

• Is a human being’s existence the result of a series of causes or the new start of a series of consequences?

• Can a lonely individual express objective truth?