A friend of mine shared this link on FB. Click on the picture above if you want to read a poem in which Nietzsche tells us that we have just killed God.
This notion of man being able to murder God suggests that man is also able to give birth to God. In fact this is what we have done during all our history. We tried to recreate the world according to our needs. Most of the time we have been doing it naively, without a plan and without even being aware of what we were doing. And things went on relatively OK, in the sense that the lot of the entire humanity had gradually improved. Not in a linear manner, not equally distributed across the globe but nevertheless, on average, a certain improvement. For the last 100 years or so we, or at least some of us, have started to figure out what was going on and to come up with ‘fresh’ ideas. I wonder where this intended/looked for/carefully planned development will take us.
Meanwhile I cannot shake Goethe’s The sorcerer’s Apprentice from my head. Do we really know what are we doing?
As I was strolling by I was wondering ‘why on Earth is that boulder still standing there?’
Rather dangerous, less than a foot away from the endline… didn’t make much sense, did it?
Until this guy started to relieve himself…
What’s happening to this world? What’s the point of building a soccer field in the middle of a village if you’re not going to make it safe, and decent, to use?
While the facts remain – there was a thinly clad teenager shivering in the middle of Manhattan and a lot of people passed by without offering any assistance – the whole incident raises some fresh issues besides those flagged by the ‘pranksters’ who staged the whole thing.
The person starring in the so called experiment was almost certainly underage. Exposing him to such temperature for so long is cruel. To do such thing in order to demonstrate the obvious – that we, the inhabitants of larger cities, have become rather insensitive – is rather… you name it!
Self serving callousness, to say the least?
It doesn’t matter that the authors purportedly want to promote a good cause. That’s no way of winning somebody to your side.
“Public shaming as a blood sport” is the difference between keeping the public up to date with what is going on in the public square and transforming the same public square into a stand up comedy venue.
When this happens the public becomes hypnotized by the antics presented there and forgets to choose himself which are the really important issues and what to be done about them.
The public becomes easy prey for callous political operators (they don’t deserve to be named ‘politicians’ since they don’t give a damn about the ‘polis’) and democracy becomes mob-rule.
That’s what happened before the fall of (Ancient) Rome.
So how come BBC dropped Clarkson despite Top Gear bringing in some 50 million pounds each year while Putin is still at the helm of the second most powerful nation, from the military point of view at least, in spite of the heavy economic hardships the Russian population has to endure as a result of Putin’s antics?
So, while Clarkson – no matter how brazen he is as a person or adulated as a TV personality – is not high enough above the rest of the world to be impervious to the effects of his own deeds, Putin stands, at least for the moment, atop a very tall pedestal. So tall, in fact, that I’m afraid he no longer sees clearly what’s going on at the street level.
Only this pedestal is made of the flimsiest of construction materials – popular sentiment. When the Russians will finally understand that ‘the emperor is naked’…
Also, did you know that it covers a lot more than ‘divide and conquer’?
For instance, a rather successful computer game and a problem solving methodology that recommends the original problem be divided into smaller, and hence easier to manage, sub-problems.
Going back to the original meaning I must admit that both the ancient Macedonians and the ancient Romans made ‘good’ use of it. Alexandre the Great had conquered everything between Greece and India while the Ancient Rome had been, for a while, the most powerful empire known to man.
In more modern times the same strategy had been used by Germany, among others. Again, with relative success. During WWI the Kaiser had facilitated Lenin’s access to Russia and by doing so he had split the coalition he was trying to defeat – as a result of this manoeuvre Russia had asked for a separate peace treaty, eventually signed at Brest Litovsk. During WWII Hitler took great care to keep Russia at bay while he conquered the Western part of Europe.
Now the same strategy is being used by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the current Czar of Russia.
If we put two and two together and then add the result to what has already become evident – that the Russian (more exactly Putin’s) Propaganda machine has been revved up in a massive way for quite a while now – the pattern becomes visible.
Putin is ‘doing his worst’ to convince those uncomfortable with the spread of ‘liberal values’/globalization that if they want to ‘preserve their national traditions’ they have to ‘unite closely around’ the only leader that can save them from being engulfed by the ‘decadence of the West’. Around him, that is.
In fact this is exactly what the ’emperors of old’ I mentioned at the beginning of the post used to recommend. Instil as much fear in your opponents, individually, as you can and try to rekindle the smallest differences that ever existed between them.
There is a small problem though with this line of thinking.
No matter how much we respect/admire some of them or hate/despise the others none of those who had used this strategy ended up in a ‘comfortable’ manner.
And all of them had brought great misery to the people under their rule. Including Caesar. A civil war is no small thing, not now, not then!
While we ponder what to do in order to counter this nefarious propaganda, we need to keep in mind that Russia is not Putin and that the Russian people has never had a taste of what real democracy feels like. Blaming the entire people, wholesale, for what Putin does in their name ‘is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake’.
PS. Same counter-strategy should be applied to all would be ‘dividers’ who try to become ’emperors’.
For the eco-friendly multi-millionaire. (NanoFlowcell)
OK, this is not a technology blog.
And yet. As an engineer I have a ‘natural knack’ for this kind of things.
Where most people see a really beautiful car I see a huge breakthrough in energy storage.
These guys at NanoFlowcell AG have invented a technology that stores electric energy in two tanks filled with a ‘salty’ solution. The way I see it very soon, as soon as prices will make sense, each of us will have a solar panel mounted on the roof and a device in our basement that will store the electricity produced during the day into those two liquids developed by NanoFlowcell AG so that we’ll be able to light up the house (and refill the car) when we come home in the evening.
Modern politics used to be about dialog. People talked to each other and when a conclusion was accepted by a majority it became a policy and was put into practice.
Contemporary politics seem to be about hiding behind ideological smoke screens – values, rights, political correctness, platforms, you name them – while scheming about how to implement usually self serving and too often very short sighted policies.
I’ve spent the first 30 years of my life – practically my entire youth – under communist rule. The worst thing was the complete lack of alternatives. One ruler, one party, only one opinion that automatically became law. No way to escape the mistakes made by whomever happened to be in power and who, unfailingly, ‘lost it’ gradually as he spent more time at the top precisely because there were no ‘checks and balances’, no real dialogue between the various sections of the society.
The Western part of Europe – the area currently known as the EU and which was the starting place for the most destructive wars in human history – is crisscrossed by water filled channels. Some of natural origin and some build by the people living nearby. In peaceful times they were used as shipping lanes, in wars as trenches.
Political parties evolved as public platforms. Virtual places where likely minded people got together and discussed their opinions before proposing them to the society at large. Now-a-days they seem to have become fortresses where ‘frightened’ individuals congregate so tightly that no outside influence penetrates to their ears.
Bona fide negotiations have all but disappeared and have been replaced by ‘pork barrel’ laced with veiled threats.
What are we going to do from now on? Resume trading in good faith or prepare for war?
And no matter what the ‘talking heads’ are babbling incessantly IT’S UP TO US. After all it’s our own lives that are at stake.
If you think I’m exaggerating click here and read some of the comments. They were posted by regular people, the likes of you and me. For now they are still willing to share their feelings but don’t you think the atmosphere is just a little too tense for our own good and that nobody really listens anymore?
In Romania we have a saying that goes like this: ‘A fish rots from the head and should be scaled/gutted from the tail’.
We need to clean up our own, individual, act first. Only this way we’ll be able to convince the powerful-s of the day that we really mean it.
We can start by paying attention, real attention, to the persons living next to us. To our colleagues, to our employees… Of course we pay attention to our bosses and to our families, that’s how we survive in the short term.
Time has come to pay attention to the rest of the people. If we want to thrive in the long run.
The answer depends heavily on which side of the fence you are when considering the problem.
If one looks from the inside of his conscience and is aware of his own limitations – nobody ever had at his disposal all pertinent information about anything and, anyway, nobody is able to use ‘perfectly’ whatever meager information he is able to amass, for various reasons – one realizes that his representation of the universe, his universe that is, is indeed dependent on ‘observation’.
If, instead, one mentally transports himself on the outside of his conscience – assuming that there actually is anything outside his conscience – then the universe becomes somewhat independent of observation. I say ‘somewhat’ because any action performed on something, and ‘observation’ is an action, transforms – no matter how minutely but it does – the object on which that action has been performed.
So my answer would be ‘Both yes and no depending on which side you are when considering the matter‘ but we have to keep in mind that the (relative) independence that becomes apparent when looking from the outside of our individual conscience (?!?, 🙂 ) ‘depends’ heavily on the huge disproportion between each of us and the Universe.
nicichiarasa 
