The first word that comes to mind about the blogger know as the Rebel Jew is respect. He was a reader, correspondent and participant on my old forum and my only regret is that we never actually met, even though he lives in the neighboring Connecticut. He is also one of the bloggers who have been writing long, distinct and thoughtful posts since the early days of the craft. One of the things I learned from Jaron Lanier is that it takes at least ten years to overcome emotionally internalized ideas, in other words, one can’t speed up the process by using a rational argument. Ideas accepted as identity are not easily or hastily discarded. So its been about ten years really. Thoughts on Judaism – Why I am no longer Chabad.
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identity
I have been thinking about Jaron Lanier’s “mob switch” concept. The fundamental component of any big or small clan always includes a designated group or an individual to hate inside and outside of the clan. So any group requires the internalize hate as part of the membership package. This is a big dilemma for me because I believe that the human need to be part of a group is our prime evolutionary instinct. Can you be part of any group without the negative component, without the hate? Perhaps hate and mobs are inseparable. I can’t think of an example that goes against this theory and I am saddened by this. Here is the original quote:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
Jaron speaks about this in the video interview by Guardian.
What’s with the Promethean prose, he said. This got me thinking. I started with the certainty that if only there is a forum, the ideas and the meaning are inevitable. May be it was the osmosis fake, the “wisdom of the crowds” fade, indeed the heroic Promethean idea of the collective gravity take down, the unwise belief that the slaves at the bottom of a pyramid just really want to have coffee, figuratively speaking.
This concept got undone slowly. And then it resonated with ‘All that Music that rises to the Middle’. I realized that the middle is really stupid, not the exception but the rule, and always been that way. So this was the big change this year, perhaps it’s naive. Suddenly the fascinating problem was not why the dictators are holding the people down but how can you rule and control the unpredictable, irrational and mediocre herd. Dan Ariely pointed to the irregularities and Nassim Taleb cast the wingspan shadow of the foreseeable black swan. As the year ended John Nash outlined the game theory. What was apparent has been interpreted, humans are scheming, and to borrow from the cold war metaphors, only mutual annihilation can guarantee friendship.
Speaking of friendships, this was the year when the nominal friendships supplied the game theory with some real case studies, turning disappointment into betrayals. But the good news I am still drunk with curiosity. Not to sound like a geek but just today I figured I can download the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast on my iPhone and it literally changed my understanding about the past 2,000 years of history in one day. If the past can turn so quickly, it is certainly true for the future. I raise a musical note to that – Time After Time.
Lord Leighton, P.R.A., Tracing for 'The Daphnephoria', by 1874-6
Every culture from Twitter to the First Vatican Council adopts a mythology. Every mythology is a mixture of repeatable patterns and mystery. Many people who live with a mythology defined culture are fully aware of the hyperbole. These are the lies that a culture agrees to agree about. Yet it begs to question the sustainability of a business, a religion or an organization animated by acknowledged lies. Here how it works, I think:
5% Leaders: A tiny group of people in charge of the gold mine that enabled them to scale a myth and extract value and power. The leaders are fully aware of the lies but always dream of a marketing plan to rival the Marlboro Man.
60% Followers: These are people who are aware of the lies but they also recognize that no matter what group believes in, there are benefits of a social structure and since we are all social creatures, it’s only in our own interest to perpetuate the mythology, to strengthen our society, our team.
5% Fools: The only group that actually believes in a myth. Usually consist of people with some emotional imbalance or outright morons. They do an extremely important social function. For a rigged system, similar to a lottery, it’s imperative that someone occasionally wins. The “leaders” strategically elevate the “fools” into the prominent positions; just to create a doubt in the mind of the “followers”, perhaps it might make sense after all. This very doubt together with the practical benefits of belonging to a group keeps a culture going.
20% Geeks: In every culture there individuals who are in love with the process and couldn’t care less about the implications or meaning. Like people who talk about iPhone apps and other gadgetry all day long. The geeks are oblivious of the fact that iPhone is a telephone. Every culture has some geeks who do apps. Talmud is a Judaic app, the sports stats, etc.
10% Rebels: People with arrested development plus a grudge, they embarrass the rest of the good citizens by pointing to a naked king. In other words things that everyone understands but is polite enough to keep to themselves. Any culture exerts a significant amount of resources to make sure the rebels pay the price. So when a rational human being makes a list or pros and cons, he or she will inevitably choose the lies.
Royal Academy Diploma Work given by Sir Frank Brangwyn, The Market Stall, 1919
Hugh MacLeod tweeted yesterday: “Three things worth doing in life: Breeding, loving and learning. Everything else is filler…” I will take this aphorism for a spin.
- Breeding – Offspring and fertility. A woman’s life long obsession with being attractive, the confidence of being able to arouse a man. A man’s sense of self worth depending on his ability to meet the challenge.
- Loving – the intoxication and the yearning. The “loving” is never complete if unrequited. “Speed” Levitch said it must be reciprocal. Love is about being loved, about validation of what you are. Loving includes being respected, the accolades and appreciation. If you love a man or a god and they don’t love you back, you can’t put a check mark here.
- Learning – Trying to understand your place in the universe, an opportunity to satisfy the natural thirst, an opening to quench the curiosity. The desire to travel and see the world. By no means is this a textual manipulation.
I have never met a person who had all three in the bag. If you imagine the world as a puzzle and the goal of the game to line up all three, the jackpot is theoretical. The vast majority of people manage only one of the three life essentials. There are a small number of the lucky bastards who lined up two of those. But the fascinating human condition is that even if a single goal is at bay out of the three, humans are in a state of constant agony, like a chronic plain, the realization that a defining component of life is missing. They constantly think about it and if you are a friend you have the privilege of always hearing about it. Perhaps the wisdom is the recognition of the bargain, and if you managed to score two of the three, acceptance of your luck. Just like at the end of his remarkable speech Alain de Botton says that “every vision of success has to admit what it is loosing out on”.
When people say “money is not important” they mean it isn’t amongst the three essential goals of life but no one ever argued that money indeed can facilitate all three. Or on a more nuanced level the traditional “bazaar” is treated in the Middle Eastern cultures as an elaborate ruse to cover up the transactions in the intangibles, the ritual of pretending to trade in physical objects. Pay respect to haggling, a breeding dance with love and knowledge.
P.S. I was thinking where creativity fits into the scheme. I have to say that creativity is a part of learning. People dance, paint, write code, do scientific research, play ball, all in order to think. These are the rosary beads of learning. As McLuhan said an artist confronts “present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life.” This is the process of learning and occasionally there is a byproduct, a breakthrough of discovery.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
The entire interview is enlightening but few quotes are really illuminating: Beyond Life Inc: Talking with Douglas Rushkoff:
6. Home Sweet Home Depot
“From the 1920s to the 1970s an iconography was developed that turned corporations into our heroes [BA: note the rise of the corporate ethos mirrors the ideological era of fascism and communism]. Instead of me buying stuff from people I know, I actually trust the Quaker Oat Man more than you. This is the result of public relations campaigns, and the development of public relations as a profession.”
Did the rise of PR just happen, or did they have to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control?
“They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from “the masses.” Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.
It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family.”
So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?
“The definition of home as people use the word now means “my house,” rather than what it had been previously, which was “where I’m from.’” My home’s New York, what’s your home?”
Right, your town.
“Where are you from? Not that “structure.” But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.”
So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.
“Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.”
Didn’t I write it in Suburbia versus Urbanity or a Round Trip from New York to Newton, MA. There are people who live in Newton who got upset at that post. My guess it not only they dont know better but there are desensitized, unable to imagine the word differently from what the history cast at them.
The need for acceptance is the most profound and most pathetic human emotion.
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It’s a pleasure to highlight the forum post by Trent Reznor. Trent’s conclusions are something I have been advocating and pointing to forever.
1) In a drive for numbers there is a serious erosion of conversation. As Trent put it: “Idiots rule”.
2) You can’t have a beneficial discourse with anonymous participants. Anonymity is death for any online forum.
“I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.
I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it’s participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you’re conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you’d have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC’s heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I’d value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs’s “opinion”. Know what I mean? Anyway, we’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.”
Photo by Rob Sheridan via Nine Inch Nails Live @ The Pearl – Las Vegas, NV, 5.18.09 on Flickr
This sketch is my variation on the original found now at ouroboros (by saintgasoline.com)
Pieter Pauwel Rubens, St. George Slaying the Dragon, Pen with brown ink and brown wash, Musée du Louvre, Paris
- You don’t want to play a game you can’t lose - wouldn’t even qualify as life. It lacks the essential purpose, the mystery, the adrenaline of meaning.
- You don’t want to play a game if you know the plot – a tale with all familiar characters is cracked. The very definition of boring.
- You don’t want to play a game when your only opponent is time – the game that doesn’t have a lethal monster ready to block your every move. We know we can’t advance unless we “slaughter” them. There are three types of the blocking monsters:
- Monsters we expect and prepare to fight;
- Monster that jump out suddenly, we need to be on alert for those.
- Most lethal type of monsters are in a benevolent disguise. This creature has the magic ability to look like your best friend, your career counselor, your guru, your rabbi or priest, even your parent or “your god”. In the game of life watch out for those, they are your hardest hurdle.
I often hear from friends – “I was going to be “X” but that one [insert here] turned me away, blocked my path”. Man, that’s the whole game!
Image courtesy Web Gallery of Art
I am going to write about this, I have to. The text is gut-wrenching, difficult read, but there is no escape, this is the single most significant chapter of literature ever written (kolbayar comment got me remembering). I am talking about The Grand Inquisitor chapter in Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
So I went to the Newton Library to look for the book. Ah, “all the Russian Books on the 3rd floor now” they told me. I found only two books by Dostoyevsky but no Brothers K. I complained to a 70 year old man next to me: “you can’t have a library without Dostoyevsky”. The man looked at me with a smirk and said, in a very Talmudic fashion, “you supposed to be finished with Dostoyevsky by the time you are twenty”. Yes, but can you understand Dostoyevsky at twenty?
In the story, one of Karamazovs tells his bother about a dream, a vision, a poem, something like that. The dream unfolds “in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God”. Christ reappears at that very moment and is recognized. Christ proceeds to perform several miracles and is promptly arrested by the Grand Inquisitor who instantly puts Christ in jail. The next day the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and the dialogue unfolds, it’s really a monologue by the Grand Inquisitor explaining the cosmos to Christ.
El Greco, The Adoration of the Name of Jesus (detail), 1578-80, Oil and tempera on pine panel, National Gallery, London
The Grand Inquisitor first challenge to Christ is that He violated the two fundamental principals of the Church that you can’t add to His own, Christ’s original teaching and that His appearance violates freedom of choice, the greatest gift to mortals.
“The old man has told Him He hasn’t the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. ‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and all, therefore, is still in the Pope’s hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.”
The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that the greatest gift of freedom was also an incredible burden for people and the Inquisition succeed in lifting of that terrible burden.
“For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it’s over for good? Thou lookest meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell Thee that now, to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.”
And now that the freedom was banished: ►►►read more
In his New York Times article The Rank-Link Imbalance David Brooks described our ease of movement along the vertical axis, namely our effortless discipline with people who are above or below us in a social or antisocial order and conversely the challenges of relating to others horizontally, on the same level. I glide beyond the metaphors of talking down to servants and being subservient but more broadly, I navigate any hierarchical system and observe the vertical axis demanded by an ideology. Above all I strive to relate on equal footing, in a horizontal plane.
