Saturday, November 21, 2009

As above-so below

It is believed that the significance of this phrase, coined by Hermes Trismegistus, holds the key to all mysteries, and what is love if not mankind’s biggest mystery?

Mea culpa. I admit, I was human and weak and I erred: I loved. It is said that most people don’t admit their mistakes as this would mean to admit to themselves and to others that they will not mistake again.

I don’t want to “chill” and “keep it light” when comes to love. I don’t want to stop questioning my human nature and what it invokes. Is our desire for atonement and immortality that makes us pour our hearts into making our dreams and ideals a reality?
Is our demoniac nature or our divine self that push us into wanting to experience this amazing amalgam of pleasure, pain, laughter, cry, stolen moments of happiness, sacrifice of one’s liberty and personal drama?

A friend of mine asked me what I thought love was. How do I perceive it at 34? Was it different at 23? Will it be different at 42? It is said that love is like measles: the later it comes in life, the deadlier. Goethe’s immortality was at stake because of his sexagenarian, tactless and reckless love for Bettina, 20 years his junior.

Let me ask again: is love staying up all night with a sick child? Isn’t that just selfish gene-protecting love? We want to insure that our offsprings will survive so they can carry our worthless genes. Is love for our children selfless?

What is love? Is it true we can’t love others unless we love ourselves? Is it true masturbation is the only sincere form of making love with someone you love most? How much from the love we think we offer is selfless love (we love ourselves for who we become when we are in love, and we hate how we decay when we fall out of love) or is just genuine selfless love? Can we live without it and still be good people? If I tell you whom I love, can you tell me who I am?

Is love something you do against your own pleasure just to satisfy a person you care about? Is love the emotional rollercoaster that takes you up and down to only discard you like a breathless and exhausted but fulfilled rag doll?

Can the butterfly in the stomach be labeled as love or infatuation? Is there any difference? Is it the habit, the closeness, the drudgery of routine where you just comfortably know what is next be defined as love? Can love co-exist without being swept away or suffocated by the much stronger voluptuousness, eroticism and emotional freedom?

Can a full-blown dreamer really love without idealizing it? Were Bettina’s feelings for Goethe (this deceiving father of “Young Werther” and an entire generation of romantics who committed suicide in the name of love) pure and platonic or she clang on him because she feebly hoped she will be tied to his fame, thus becoming immortal? Is platonic love real without being physically consummated?

Is love Mother Nature’s trick to insure the continuation of the species and a word invented by men to get free sex? Does love wipe out our senses and exacerbates our sensibility? Does love make the world go ‘round with a little help from intrinsic angular momentum? Are you sure “gravitation is certainly not responsible for people falling in love”? Is love “all we need”?

Quantum Physics tells us that the very act of observing something changes it. According to this concept and to Parmenides, the moment we start observing love, we start killing it, changing it, deteriorating it. Death begins when we are born. Love starts dying when we fall in love. Quantum Physics killed love.

The Butterfly Effect of Chaos Theory says the tiniest flap of a wing can produce a disaster. A butterfly wanders around and two people disastrously fall out of love. Nature is against people falling in love. Mother Nature only wants us to perpetuate, hence she came with this wicked concoction, this drug of which we want more, about which we have the impression we cannot live without: love, the two years lasting hormone. Think about it, the devilish plan is so perfect is almost divine. Two years would suffice to support the: incipient coupling phase, mating, impregnating, pregnancy, giving birth. Once the offspring is out, Mother Nature rests her case and ends human love, leaving instead the common goal of two adults protecting a defenseless creature, only tied by, sometimes, friendship, some respect and closeness, as accomplices in committing the act of perpetuation. As sociologically proven (one in two couples divorces), closeness is not enough. Unfortunately, that’s all we got. So, we can settle for these leftovers of human affection, formerly known as “love” or we can live without it. No one died out of lack of love. But do we want to live without it, poorer than dirt and drier than Sahara? Do we desire emotional states that cannot or are not worthy to be expressed in words? If destiny is a matter of destination, what takes us there then? Love?

Monday, November 16, 2009

The New Emotional Shortage Dictatorship

For those who are not familiar with it, hikikomori defines a psychological trait that was believed to be exclusive of the Japanese society. However, by extension the term can be applied to all societies where this aspect is being signaled, although the rate of coincidence out of Asia is quite reduced.

En bref, hikikomori (term coined by Japanese psychologist Tamaki Saito) literally means "pulling away, being confined" and represents an "acute social withdrawal".

Initially, it was noticed among the Japanese teenagers, a few years ago, and was used to describe their tendency towards seclusion and alienation. Long story short, the Japanese teens have chosen to withdraw from social life, leading to extreme degrees of 'isolation and confinement due to various personal and social factors in their lives'. The concept begun to be used to “officially classify reclusive youths who refused to participate in socially established norms”. If it isn’t the definition of every teenager on the planet! Show me a teenager that wants to "fit within the established norms" and I will eat a live toad on an empty stomach every morning.

The number of hikikomori teens was thus estimated to one million (20% of all male adolescents in Japan, or 1% of the total Japanese population- numbers not reliable though).

In order to understand what leads to this self imposed seclusion, we need to speak about the expectations a modern society imposes on children and teenagers currently.

I've never been to Japan, so I have to take this guy’s word for granted when he says ‘though acute social withdrawal in Japan appears to affect both genders equally, due to differing social expectations for maturing boys and girls, the most widely reported cases of hikikomori are from middle and upper middle class families whose sons, typically their eldest, refuse to leave the home, often after experiencing one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure.’

What is wrong with the Japanese? We all experienced failures in life, one way or another, but how many of us choose to lock themselves in the house and become emokids? Ooops, hold on! I was about to start finger pointing and mocking the more developed Japanese society, claiming they do this out of sheer boredom and out of too much “brat spoiling” syndrome. So, I went back on the line and deleted until I reached to this word: emokids. Romania’s hikikomoris.

Although initially it started as a punk genre in the mid 80s, today’s emo is equivalent with being emotional, sensitive, shy, introverted, or angsty. You are emo, if you are true. And you are true, if you are over emotional. You are emotional, if you are sensitive and what is more sensitive than a child about to become a teenager? I guess we all made fun of the kids with tight jeans, long black fringes brushed to one side of the face, studded belts, canvas sneakers and thick, black horn-rimmed glasses. We didn’t take them seriously and maybe some of us smiled sympathetically remembering our old good days, when we were Metallica fans and had nose rings and ripped off jeans and ran away from home to see them performing live in Budapest. Hey, why do you look at me?

The emo trend became so popular these days that even a cell phone company is using it to promote a telecom pack (Cosmote: Get rid of the ‘other network syndrome, stop staying in the dark, come join us’).

Of course, since a society is a living organism that breaths, eats and defecates like any other organism, it immediately fined the new trend with jokes (the emo pizza, which cuts itself; the new E.U. approved pig slaughtering methods, with self-stabbing pigs). Pretty much like a language, which is another living organism that keeps society’s pulse and rhythm and grows and modifies with it, the trends also denote the state of health of a particular society. The outcome is not encouraging and if trends and language express our state of health, I am sorry to tell you: we are pretty sick.

In his book "1984", George Orwell foresaw that excessive usage of short words would soon lead to incapacity of using the mind at its full extent. He called it the “Newspeak”. Replacing the already consecrated terms with their encrypted new, short, form could damage not only the language and its evolution but our inclination in using more and more words to express a feeling.

More poetically said, before being a written matrix, the language is a lively animal that needs to be fed and taken care of in order to grow up. Less poetically said, it is a system of sounds, words, and patterns to communicate thoughts, feelings and our deepest tribulations.

Orwell's Newspeak intended to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforced the total dominance of the State. As the schoolbook says "a staccato rhythm of short syllables was also a goal, further reducing the need for deep thinking about language".

Let’s see: sms, mms, tx, 10x, asl, pls gr8, brb, 4get, how r u, u2, luv u, luv u 2, 4c, bbiab, bbl, roflmao, afk, lol, fubar, c u l8r, abt, are only a few of the new Orwellian language we are happily embracing.

Is language’s decadence curable? Moreover, is our tendency to repress our feelings, in order to pass as emotionally mature, curable?Are we doomed to become victims of the Newspeak and of the New Emotional Shortage Dictatorship? Will we end up using indeed 10% of our brain, according to the myth? If we stop feeling, will we stop thinking?

So, let’s recap the paradox: on the one hand, we have the highly emotional teenagers which salutary want to go through all range of emotional intensity. On the other hand, we have “sms syndrome”, which might lead, based on Orwell’s prediction, to a case of emotional aphasia.

Reverting to our state of health and emo kids, I however wiped that smile off my face when I've read that a bunch of these kids committed suicide, in an attempt to reject a society dominated by too many “isms”! What a way to get attention! Our children alienate and kill themselves in order to reach us, and we are too busy labeling and studying them like lab mice, or running after bigger incomes, higher positions in carnivorous mammoth corporations, or after academic titles, bigger houses, fancier cars, and prettier mistresses.

In our insane rat race we forget about our most precious accomplishment, and ultimately about the ones we claim we do everything for: our children. I feel ashamed, sad and empathetically emo today.

Our children are killing themselves while we are busy making other plans.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Riddle me this, riddle me that


Philosophy’s main purpose is to understand man, his values, his quests, lusts and thirsts for knowledge and quench this thirst. Philosophy’s shortcoming is however that it can hardly understand itself let alone understand the man.

Leave aside the colorful palette of multiple gnosis and the rich offer of explanations that have the clarity of jungle lianas, philosophy cheats the young brains by pretending it is here to offer answers about the existence of human beings; that its sole purpose is to enlighten us.

The painful and naked truth is that philosophy doesn’t step up to its metaphysical and pretentious plate. Philosophy is purely a gathering of conundrums for a chosen few. Even though considered - and no one denies or detracts this, - man’s ultimate intellectual refinement, it is not something everybody can joggle with. Philosophy ultimately claims that it does not demolish citadels, it does not destroy certainties, it does not tarnish faiths, and it does not kill idols. However, it does throne answerless questions, unquestioning agreements, while promoting false idols advancing hocus-pocusing hypothesis for the sake of logorrhea.

What is even more amazing about philosophy is the totalitarian request that it should be applied by everyone with no restrains, that human values are at stake, which is mankind’s ultimate knowledgeable achievement. No other science has this absurd and condescending pretension. Oh, right, but this is maybe philosophy is not actually a science.

I am not philosophy’s stone caster; I don’t dismiss it because I consider it an abstract, lifeless topic with an odd terminology, a futile and gratuitous game of a bored human mind, whose futility is directly proportional with the uncertainty of its theoretical and practical findings.

I dismiss philosophy because it is a lie and because as a practitioner of complete freedom, with everything what freedom entails, I consider philosophy brings nothing practical while promotes and encourages doubts, fake semi gods, and futile observations about life and man, engulfing and sucking dry all the joy one would have, should have not encounter it.

I believe that while pretending to help mankind discover its true values, morality and genuine self, philosophy brings nothing instead, depleting man’s natural inclination toward happiness and transforming it into a monument dedicated to unhappiness, doubt, depression, sadness and uncertainty, without answering any question or offering any feasible or viable solution as per how virtuous a moral living should be.

History proved so far that man’s development was so far due to scientific, economic, medical discoveries, which perfectly applied to pragmatism. Mankind evolved because it was practical and searched for practical solutions and achieved a state of happiness due to its economic welfare rather than intellectual findings such as “cogito ergo sum”.

To paraphrase a philosopher, philosophy is for the weak, not at all for the Ubermensch. None of these persons has brought up a feasible or practical contribution to the world’s development or welfare.

I am not an immoralist and my intention is not to demolish a system of moral values, but to emphasize the uselessness of philosophy dogmas. I am rather an amoralist from this point of view and I am certain that people who have never heard about philosophy have moral values as well. How many of philosophy’s parishioners are genuinely moral people? Isn’t philosophy’s primordial rule that one should practice what one preaches?

Callicles summed it up amazingly well in Socrates’ Gorgias “it seems to me a ridiculous thing, Socrates, that a man that reached maturity is still (into) philosophy. Philosophy is demeaning for an older man”.

Indeed philosophy should remain what once was: a topic of study for young Werters who got unlucky in love or for the hormonal and vivacious minds of gymnasium boys, who between wrestling matches can challenge themselves to an intellectual ping pong about abstracts, God, happiness, moral values, immutables, and plurality of natural objects.

To conclude in philosophy’s endearment terms: “How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown” (Parmenides).

God might or might not be dead. Philosophy certainly is. Deal with it.

Additional notes: Now, copy and paste the text into a word doc. Go to Edit, then go to Find What, type in "philosophy" and Replace With "Religion" (or any other set of dogmas that you dislike).

Monday, November 09, 2009

Bury me standing. Not.

Not until we dare to regard ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we gain the esteem of others, or rather only then will it come of its own accord. (Albert Einstein)

Romanians are obsessed with death. Mioritza, the anonymous national ballad which encounters some 900 versions, is taught in schools at frail ages. The subject proposes a magic “ewe that discloses the plot to her master, whose two fellow shepherds plan to kill by the time of sunset, looting his larger and worthy flock”. Now, instead of allowing his natural surviving instinct to kick in and think of an escaping plan, the shepherd indeed praises the imminent death, and “transfigures it into a grandiose, cosmic marriage”. “”Lamb, my little ewe/If this omen’s true/If I’m doomed to death/On this tract of heath/Tell the Vrancean/And Transylvanian/To let my bones lie/Somewhere here close by/By the sheepfold here”.

What is wrong with us? The poem basically tells children that the Romanian way to cope with a foretold plan is to simply accept it, as there is no use to fight destiny, thus annihilating the idea of free-will. In a wider perspective, this was transposed in a collective conscience of submission to various powers more or less real: destiny, political ideologies or despotic rulers. Romanians are the exact opposite of what Emiliano Zapata said: "It is better to die standing up than to live on your knees”.

Romanians prefer to live on their knees but moreover they assume no responsibility for their destiny, preferring to either accuse others for their misfortune and imminent doom or to just kneel and humbly bow their heads. I know, I know, right now a bunch of patriots are ready to swear, crossing their hearts, praising and backing with historic documents the Romanians’ courage and bravery in front of blah, blah, blah, and blah some more. To be read: external forces; international plots; Yalta, Malta and other Alta; enemies who wanted to fracture, rip, pillage and tear the voluptuous body of our motherland; about the devilish Islamic destructive forces of the Ottomans who tried to conquer us for hundreds of years; the Germans and the Hungarians who require Transylvania back; the Moldavians who want their independent enclave; the Ukrainians who want the Island of the Snakes and all the oil under. Have I left anyone out? In case I have, I apologize for not including you on the list of real or imaginary enemies that Romanians had during centuries and I let this fragment of the Romanian National Anthem to speak for itself:

"Didn't we have enough of the yatagan of the barbaric crescent
Whose fatal wounds even today we still feel?
Now the knout is intruding our ancestral homes,
But we give witness before the Lord that alive, we do not accept it
(…)
Romanians from the four corners, now or never
Unite in thought, unite in feeling
Proclaim to the wide world that the Danube is stolen
Through intrigue and coercion, sly machinations."

I am not apologetic for underlining the obvious but Romanians are not brave. They are neither feisty nor courageous. At times they have outbursts of unjustified rage based on their national and individual feeling of helplessness that all small and cocktailed nations have, all wrapped up in an inferiority complex of living half a century under an atrocious communism that impoverished them culturally and materially and which emotionally and spiritually mutilated their souls.

Romanians are not a proud nation. They are humble and sometimes perfunctory gregarious trying hard to please the mightier and richer. They never fought wars because they were valiant. They fought because they had no other choice. They didn’t have ideals or cravings to enlarge their territory. When they were attacked, they defended themselves the best they could, sometimes cheating, lying and concocting devious plans or selling themselves out and short. Their national proverb is “sa moara capra vecinului”, which can be vaguely translated by “if I go down, I will take you with me” as the literary translation would be hard to understand for the Anglo-Saxon culture: “I wish my neighbor’s goat to die” with its modern corollary “I will kill my neighbor and take his goat”.

Romanians are half-breeds: not civilized enough to join the exclusive and elitist club of Western Europe, but also not original enough to join the oriental, exotic of Eastern Europe. They are happy and noisy like the Italians and Spaniards, but not Latin enough to join the brotherhood of Latinity. Smart but not genial. Hard-working but not conscientious, looking for easy ways out, mostly cheating. Open and extraverted but neurotic and disagreeable, wanting to permanently change the system but not willing to change themselves.

These are Romanians. And this is who I am. And at times, I feel inferior without my consent.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Socializing for dummies


Lesson 1: Never be honest. Deep emotions are laudable but no one needs or wants that kind of intensity.
In order to properly socialize, we need to know how to smoothly and socially lubricate the people we come in contact with. Otherwise said, ‘socialize’ is ‘to make fit for living in society’ (Clausen).

Dang, I thought I was pretty fit to live in society and I have always found the idea of becoming a nun in some ashram highly improbable. Although personally and pragmatically driven, I refuse being labeled as Homo Oeconomicus "which is a totally egoistic, rational omniscient creature who is supposed to accomplish a rational free choice" and I stick to my forehead the “Homo Socialis” label. Sometimes, just “Homo ludens”.

While emotional expression is highly appreciated in arts, music, poems, literature and we all pretend to be touched by it, when comes to personal encounter no one wants or needs your emotional expression, although highly laudable. Agree so far?

As defined by dictionaries (some of them), sincerity is the virtue of one who speaks truly about his or her own feelings, thoughts, and desires. However, sincere expression and honesty carry risks and cause misfortune to the speaker, “since the ordinary screens used in everyday life are opened to the outside world” (Dr. Wikipedia). At the same time, we expect our friends, our lovers, our leaders "to be sincere".

Aristotle says that "truthfulness or sincerity is a desirable mean state between the deficiency of irony or self-deprecation and the excess of boastfulness”.

Now, although truth was highly valued, most of our dissensions are basically due to the way honesty and emotional expression is perceived in our societies. Think about it.

The key concept here is the emotional sincerity which is not always regarded as a virtue, although was considered ideal by certain societies. In order to socialize properly you need to mask a certain amount of sincerity in social wrapping (you need to be culturally smart for that). So yes, truth is indeed overrated and yes, we are required to lie in order to be socially accepted! Lying about how we feel, about what we think of a certain situation or person. There, I said it! To be accepted means to keep your feelings (positive or not) restrained. We are turning into emotionally mutilated machines as apparently, modern psychologists view sincerity as a construct rather than a moral virtue, although certain philosophies suggest us that by surrendering control and making yourself vulnerable, you will facilitate change in your life.

Some cultures go even further and regard the open expression of emotions as a possible threat to the social order. Remember George Orwell’s “1984”? Hence, the norms are of not-showing personal emotions. One may feel as one pleases, as long as one doesn’t express it. Unless they are “two minutes of hate”.

Honesty, unfortunately, has fallen short to become a cultural norm. Some ideologies have worn away the practice of honesty by imposing their “my way or the highway” kind of truth. I can’t be bothered to give examples but we all think at the same thing.
Some people claim they appreciate honesty and straight-shooting. However, truth and emotional sincerity always backfire, according to the proverb "no good deed goes unpunished". Ask me about it. Men, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, pals, or bosses do no want to hear your version of the truth or honesty. They don’t want to hear about your emotions (“too many details” as our emotionally crippled pals would say- no important name comes to my mind) or your honest version about a certain situation, circumstance or person. Get sad and get over it, just don’t express yourself. Are those who are emotionally honest, also emotionally immature? Don’t think so: as long as we acknowledge a certain state of facts, we identify the range of emotions and we bear the consequences of our “emotional” behavior, we are emotionally mature. Well, that and a bit hyper, maybe. Way too often and way too quickly, we are in a hurry to label people as being out of norms, just because they fail to correspond to some rigid and strict book definitions. Can’t we re-write the books? Can’t we redefine the concepts? Can’t we remove the labels? “The emotional reality is therefore taken as subjective: different people are expected to have different emotional worlds and to react in different ways to the same experiences”. That explains why my Northern American friends are flabbergasted by my emotional honesty. We think they are emotionally handicapped, they think we are emotionally undeveloped. Huh. Who is going to referee?

Lesson 2: Small talk is just small.
“How are you?”, “Are you OK?”, “How is life treating you”? “What have you been up to?”, “shall we have some fun” are just rhetorical questions, meaning no answers required. Now, you still ought to be polite, witty and funny in order to be sociable attractive. So what do you answer when asked “how is life treating you?”
a) Life is great, thanks;
b) If you want fun, go to the circus;
c) Oh well, you know, the world economic crisis affects us all;
d) Life is a bitch which keeps on biting me in the ass;
e) I am still waiting for my ship to come in, let me know when you see the lighthouse;
f) Life is like the hair on the ass, short and full of shit;

Now, if you ever want to socialize again, your answer – as a good obedient and sociable accepted robot should be: a) “life is great, thanks; what about you?” and smile idiotically, showing your new veneers and just nod your head.

Lesson 3: Be romantically and socially intelligent
Specialists say social intelligence is "the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations".

To be considered smart, you have to have a high IQ (although recent studies give George W. Bush as an example of someone with a supposedly IQ over 120…-no further comment), and be emotionally intelligent and romantically smart, meaning to have the ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the romantic relationship of oneself with others.

Sure, good looks, big boobs or equally appreciated washboard abs, colorful designer rags and a nice scent in which you marinate might help as well. To be romantically intelligent, however, means to present a specific palette of feelings, which are romantically appealing to a potential mate. So whining about your past, failed relations, dead wife, abandoned husband, post-divorce healing sex encounters is definitely not a good idea, although it might squeeze a tear of two to some sensitive gay bartender with Freudian ambitions who might ask you if you had a happy childhood or had sex desires towards your mom. Become an emotional literate, and you’ll score as often as you please. Also dress to impress and lower your standards.

Lesson 4: Never appear to be who you really are, by restraining your affect display
Sociologists say affect is a factor in emotional development, mood, arousal, and consideration of the present moment.

We will end up liking, falling in love with or disliking another person than we are in reality, as in our insane strive to be socially acceptable we put on a mask we forget to remove and get used to it so badly, we end up forgetting who we are. To be sociable likable and accepted, we lie, thus wrongly setting the basis for a fake and superficial relationship. No wonder 1 in 2 couples divorce, as you never know who you end up taking home. We sleep and eat with people we don’t (want to) know. Emotional truth is more than we can or want to handle.

Don’t fall into the trap of replying the question “Are you OK?” with “No, I am far from being OK”. Don’t admit you are afraid, as courage is not necessarily the absence of fear. It is just a mixture of “personality traits, self-efficacy, hope, resilience, values, beliefs and social forces”. Above all, it is the mother of all virtues. Guess am not that brave, after all.