“Your mind is only a part of you. Like the driver is only a part of a car. Irreplaceable but…
Most of us believe it’s the driver who tells the car where to go…
Well, the driver has to follow the road, obey the rules, interact with the other drivers, take care of their own needs… fuel and maintain the car… only then they are ‘free’ to ‘pursue’ the destination. Which destination is, more often than we care to admit, chosen by the heart rather than with the help of the mind.
So yes, it’s the mind who should tell itself what to believe. Only it needs to reach a certain serenity in order to make a proper decision. To be able to choose by itself instead of accepting, indiscriminately, ‘suggestions’!”
Not for a particular king! No. Not even for kings in general.
Only for all those ‘in charge’! As a reminder for the fact that their authority is very fragile. Goes for only as far as it is accepted. Protected by those who respect it.
As a reminder for the fact that fences not only protect but also separate.
The point being that whenever those calling the shots no longer suffer the consequences, the situation becomes extremely fragile. That whenever a ‘king’ needs to be protected from his subjects instead of by them…
We’ve burned fossil fuels. For a while. Now, after figuring out that the whole planet is about to become to hot for comfort, we’re slowly replacing fossil fuel with ‘renewable power’. Solar and wind… And we’re looking for ways to store that power for when the sun is powering the other side of the planet and the wind has stopped blowing.
Lithium to the rescue! Lithium batteries are the new fad. Powerful enough for Tesla to build around them the ‘coolest’ car ever. Accelerates faster than a Ferrari at less than half the price.
But is this really wise?
Lithium – like oil, has to be dug up from somewhere. Hence it’s not ‘renewable’. Only recyclable, but at a hefty price. Lithium – like oil, is really messy. To produce in the first place and to recycle. Lithium – like oil, can be found rather far away from where its needed. Hence has to be transported over large distances. And happens to be under ‘foreign’ control. Much of it, anyway.
So how much farther are we going to go? On the already ‘paved’ road? On the other hand, I’m sure Nansen had something else in mind. Other than repeating the same mistake.
An alternative method for storing power would be to use daytime solar and ‘excess’ wind power to produce hydrogen. Which can be stored where it is produced and will be used. Or ‘loaded’ unto fuel cell powered cars.
Art is, maybe, the first form of interaction between us and the place we inhabit. The first manner in which we ‘ingest’ that place, only to regurgitate it later. The first manner in which we learn about that place and the first manner in which we express what we have just learned. Esthetics is how we make sense of art. How we organize our ‘first impressions’ regarding the ‘place’ we live in. How we ‘edit’ those impressions in order to make them more easily understandable. Philosophy is what we made out during the artistic endeavor to learn. The never finished product put together by our ‘digestive system’ out of the artistic interactions we have had with ‘reality’.
Techne is what we do. The transformations we impose unto things in order to make them capable to satisfy our needs. Or our whims… Science is the process through which we gather information. The information which becomes more and more necessary as our doings take us further and further away from the original reality. Manipulation is what we do after we consider to have amassed enough information. After we have developed a certain understanding of the world and have decided that time has come for us to ‘take what’s rightfully ours’.
You know what ‘skills’ are. What we’re ‘good at’. Technology is how we pass our skills to other people. So that we can work in concert. To coordinate our efforts. The outcome of which is Reality 2.0. The reality we have brought about. The new reality which constitutes reality 1.0 for those currently alive.
Why on Earth would anybody invest their ‘life savings’ in ‘crypto’?!? Furthermore, why would anybody who has millions of dollars to invest would use a ‘custodial wallet‘?!?
Linkedin took the trouble to inform me that Frontex is looking to hire an Executive Director.
As far as I know, the ‘marks’ for this kind messages are chosen by some ‘algorithms’. Which are supposedly driven by something called ‘artificial intelligence’.
Which makes me wonder…
Are these algorithms intelligent enough to determine that I have the slightest chance of being selected for this position? That I have the slightest intention of applying for it? Alternatively, dumb enough to bother?!? Or are these algorithms intelligent enough to, for whatever reason, attempt to pull my leg?
‘So you’d better stop trying! Why don’t you just enjoy life as it is?’
‘What about Copernicus? Did he change the world?’
No, he only offered us an ‘alternative’ interpretation of it! It was us, those who had accepted his interpretation, who did the actual change. By acting as if Copernicus’ teachings were true.
‘But Copernicus hadn’t been the first to utter those ideas!’
Indeed! But until Copernicus, the world didn’t actually need that version of the facts. Up until those times, for ‘regular Joe’ it made no actual difference whether the Sun circled around the Earth or the whole shebang moved the other way around. The Sun dawned as advertised and spring always came as it was supposed to. Which circled around who made no difference but for the academics!
Only when ‘regular Joe’ had started to sail around the Earth – and needed to accurately plot the course of his ship on a map, the relative motion between Earth and Sun had become relevant. For those belonging to/living in the ‘real’ world!
For the last 15 last years or so I have pushed myself to understand what was going on around me. Each time I had the impression that I had discovered anything new I was soon disappointed. Very shortly afterwards I most often found out that somebody else had written about the subject. Describing it more or less in the same way as I understood it. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of the answers I had found had been reached by reading. My quest changed accordingly.
‘Why has this trove of knowledge been left aside for so long?’
Because regular Joe didn’t have any use for it? Until now, that is…
But, surely, the elite should have done something about this! After all, ‘understanding’ – a.k.a. ‘making sense of things’ – is our only reason to be, right?
Not so fast! The elite did something about ‘it’. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s nothing much to add to the things already understood by others and passed along to us from the depths of history. The very fact that all these pieces of information have been carefully preserved by countless generations of scribes and ‘book keepers’ is the living proof that the elite fulfilled its calling. It’s up to us to make good of their dedicated work. For our own sake.
And for that of our children!
So yes, I cannot change the world. Neither can either of you! Alone.
Quite a large number of people are complaining about how hot it is nowadays. So uncomfortably hot that they have to stay indoors until late in the evening.
And no, they are not pensioners. They work from home, earning enough money to be able to have everything delivered to them.
Which reminds me of my first job, right out of university. A big factory building where water almost froze in winter and temperatures rose to 41-42 degrees Celsius in August. Inside that building were, among other ‘run of the mill’ machine-tools, 3 top of the art automated Czech-built lathes. This story goes back to 1986 and happened in communist Romania. The lathes were very precise but couldn’t be used all the time. In winter they stopped working altogether and in summer they faltered. No amount of fine tuning could bring them back to yielding usable parts. It took a few years for the brass to figure-out what was going on. The lathes were designed to work in a ‘controlled environment’. The temperature was supposed to hover between 15 and 25 degrees for the lathes to function normally. Hence the lathes were ‘sheltered’ in an auxiliary building. A shed built inside the factory. And provided with efficient enough ‘temperature control’.
We, the people, had been left on the outside. Outside the shed but still inside the factory…. freezing in winter and sweat-drenched in summer. Still working, because we were sturdier than the top of the line machinery…
This morning I came across a FB post.
This brought about another memory.
Sometime in 1990-1991 I happened to lay my hands on a Newsweek magazine. Or a the Economist… I don’t remember exactly. Anyway… the article I was going to discuss with you was about the hard life endured by the American poor people. And was illustrated with a color picture. I’m going to make a small break here and inform you that in the 1990 Romania colored magazines – let alone glossy, were hard to get by. That picture, taken somewhere in the Bronx, contained a color TV and three pre-teen kids. All of them clad in blue-jeans and wearing ‘sports shoes’. You know, the likes of Puma/Adidas/ you name it. In those times, in Romania, bluejeans or ‘sports-shoes’ could be had mostly on the black market. Where you had to fork out the wage earned in a whole month if you wanted to buy a pair of each. Or you could buy them in a brand store. For twice the price….
You see, the communist regimes have crumbled because the leaders had lost contact with reality. The brass in the factory where I had started working couldn’t figure out – nor really cared about, the reason for which those lathes didn’t work properly. And didn’t care about the fact that the workers had a very hard life. On the factory floor and outside its premises.
The liberal-democratic and capitalist regime has created huge opportunities. People used to live incomparably better there than in the rest of the world. And continue to do so. On the other hand, in many of the ‘affluent’ countries people have lost contact with each other. The haves have no idea about how the poor live. Nor the poor have any idea about what it means to be rich.
We live in different worlds. In different realities.
Each of us on their own ‘tin roof’.
The problem being that all of them are becoming increasingly ‘hot’. And I’m not thinking ‘global warming’ now…
Communism had crumbled because the rulers couldn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t react efficient enough to changes brought about by normal evolution. Because the rulers had gradually lost contact with reality. Which inevitably happens in all authoritarian settings.
We are currently living in different realities. In ‘bubbles’. For now, these bubble still have something in common. We are still able to talk to each other. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding what the other has to say – or don’t really care, but the dialog is still possible.
I’m afraid of the day when the dialog will no longer be possible.
The guys in the pan are so obsessed about the taxes they have to fork out that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else. The guys attempting to collect those taxes are so obsessed about what they want to do with the money that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.
Meanwhile, the world is growing apart. The bubbles lose contact with each other. And with the hard core reality…
The cats can always jump down from the roof. Whenever it grows too hot or too cold. Where are those two frogs going to jump when things will become uncomfortable?
