Friday, March 30, 2007

Read me, Like me, Read me not

There are three kinds of literature. One is which consists of must-reads for everyone. Which contain wise thought and will lead to a general betterment of all that read it. The poems of Robert Frost, written in a relatively simple language and essays such as Francis Bacon's "Of Studies" are good examples of these.
The second are those which cannot be appreciated by the lay mind and are purely works of art. They might not even be liked by all connoisseurs of literature. They often contain radical ideas and techniques, and are often intriguing to say the least. Examples include Franz Kafka's Surreal stories and Emily Dickinson's Lachrymose Poetry.
The third kind is that of literature purposefully written in a manner that appeals to only a specific section of the masses. These contains lessons and learnings that would do great harm if they were to be taken seriously by the wrong people.
A case in point is Emerson's Essay "Self-Reliance". If fools were to live by the essay, we would be surrounded by idiots who would abide by their own distorted version of the essay, living out their lives refusing to believe anything anyone says and refusing to follow basic social norms and laws.
For this very reason, I believe that the essay has been written in a convoluted style with curious word play, double negatives, heavy use of Old English and Unorthodox use of current English.
A fool would either be unable to understand it, or else would get frustrated by his constant need to refer to a dictionary.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Okay ~ Part 1

Here goes...
People couldn't care less about anything that doesn't concern their immediate future or doesn't affect them directly. People lack foresight, are too busy living their lives to bother. People go around getting manipulated like pawns by people who do look ahead. People have a short memory, live in the present, caring about neither the past nor the future. The overflow of information around us brought by the Media and the Internet causes our "information filters" and our memory to grow, respectively, stricter and shorter day by day.
How many people remember what they ate for lunch yesterday? What they wore a week ago? When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me there was a time when people did. Those were the times when people had so little to think about, to worry about, and to remember. No TV, little radio, the occasional newspaper.
Look at today. TV with a hundred+ channels, the almost never ending Internet, magazines, celebrity gossip, and everything the media flings at us.
With all the noise, only things that are the most hyped about come out on top.

Sure, thats what news and gossip is about right? The latest? But what about things that DO matter? Like our country's budget? How many people know about that? Or if they know, care about it? Will it affect their vote? Will they even vote? I'm drifting here. Back to the point.
Humans survive change by three means:

  • Resisting it

  • Adaptation

  • Evolution


People have constantly tried to resist change. Its an instinct. When they can't, they adapt for now and start to evolve. But evolution takes time, and when change occurs too rapidly, adaptation is the only way out.
But adaptation has its limits. You cannot change physical capacity with adaptation. You can only optimize it to a certain extent. And that's what's happening. We are getting stretched out. We cannot handle this world we have created.

People are lost.


Democracy will lose its meaning (almost has), Society its point (pretty soon), the Media will become a medium of pure entertainment (already has) and everything will decay (most of it is already is). The powerful will slowly become more powerful while we just sit and stare. It will happen too slowly for much notice, and before we know it, we will lose everything we stand for. Freedom, equality, justice, and life.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Boink.

Blog Post to tell you all that I am still alive.
I just have waaay too much to write about. When that happens, there are two kinds of reactions by people. Either they go on a blogging spree, or they stop blogging.
I'm too lazy to do the former :P