taking a wrong turn

it is part of a life experience, as i have encountered so far, to savor the many bitter and sweet endeavors that our journey provides. likewise, those experiences end up shaping us like the river stream shapes brutal rocks into rounded pebbles. however, is in the nature of living beings to react in random ways to events, adding the factor of unpredictability to the large amount temporary outcomes that in time overlap and add a sense of lack of continuity to our stories, given the limited hindsight that our memory can provide. some seek homogeneity in their living manners in an attempt to compensate for the whirlwind; a projection of security to avoid having to face with the inevitable encounter of many and varied events that escape control.

i found no security in life, and if there was any, it was either an illusion or a leading way to an unsatisfactory chain of events and circumstances. failure, yes, but always as a temporary condition. falling in despair is quite common amongst those who want to believe in fixed structures, in rigid and unmovable concepts of life and death, of love and hate, of joy and sadness, as dictated by standards that pretend to be centuries old, yet are mostly revised every second. thus, stating that we took a wrong turn is from the start admitting that there is actually a path to follow, a path to a definite success that is one and only end of things.

as far as my experience is concerned, you can actually walk outside the path, the guidelines that are set, for they are not but chalk lines painted in the ground, when it actually rains heavily these days. the ground outside the path is as irregular as inside, and nor better or worse, but complex and sometimes lonely. it is like this that i have learned, or say, guessed, that failure or victory are relative at best, when not simple delusional states of mind that put more chalk in the ground that says where we can't walk. and we stay in our quiet limits of our chalk paths, even when we can find ourselves in miserable places, in unease with our life expectancies, and therefore we don't dare to change, and if we change without telling, we rush to change back, and if it rained, as it is usual, we draw again our paths, or somebody else does it for us.

but the lines are never drawn exactly the same after the rain is over. and generations may pass before that change is noticeable, if that is conceived by the record of history. that leaves the stiff unmovable individuals walking unwillingly through an outdated and flawed system, changed with its many reconstructions, crowded with shocking contradictions, and lacking the benefit of walking freely through the fields of our lives, amongst the imperfections that reflect our own singularity. it is then when conflicts happen, call it faith philosophy or politics, and people throw their frustration and anger through each other, all of them believing themselves protected by their fortresses, painted with chalk on the ground.

for those who from their sure paths think low of me, who is outside their domains, i can feel but pity, for my value is proven and rely on those who truly an uninterestedly love me. maybe on the next shower, they run out of chalk and see themselves in the need to take a walk.

the day we wished everyone was a critic

most of the time we tend to complain when people who ignore what we do, criticize excessively our doings from said lack of background. that's when, defensively, we tend to sing the usual chorus, that already famous sentence: "everyone's a critic". we wish, however.

in this first world we inhabit, where almost everything can be recycled into entertainment, we are becoming less and less involved in reverse engineering any train of thought or manifestation of such. we watch things happen and nod to it, as the inevitable course of things. paradoxically, in this alleged society 2.0, where communications are supposed to be based on participation, life passes by as a show in which we are no longer involved, being reduced to a role of spectators.

it has come already. we have lost critic sense. no matter what you have to say, it doesn't matter much anymore. most of the intellectual streams flow downwards, and every argument is accepted or refused in terms of the authority that exposes it, not by arguing the reasoning itself. thus, matters are solved by deciding which authority dictates what to do with them, instead of discerning, analyzing and confronting the terms of conflict. rational thought is not encouraged. instead, citizens are expected to behave as consumers, but not just consumers of goods and services, but also of consumers of concepts, passively subjected to the downward stream of dogmas that enforce the idea of the goodness of power, the existence and need for better and worse people, the oligarchy and the peasantry, never allowed to oppose or even question the ideological support of said first class citizens.

the whole point of all this ideological cascade is getting out of our heads the need to question things, to own and encourage an analytic mindset that would allow us to improve as persons, not just in an economical or, for that matter, social plain. problems are solved by pointing out guilt, instead of searching for solutions, partly by cultural heritage, partly by the loss of that ability to discern, due to the lack or the cultural repression of the philosophical tools that help us unraveling the threads and order the complexity of our every conflicts in life.

rationalism is decreasing in numbers between our social layers, the common people, those some call peasants, more intentionally than it might have seen in a first place. in the new world order, multinational corporations are the new feudal kingdoms. their CEOs are the royalty, having politicians at their service. they control the world's resources and, through a complex system of subletting, have peasants back where they were at the good ole middle ages. of course, this system can barely sustain itself with a rational lower class. this would create an excessive discomfort in them that might as well ruin the whole organized scam of deregulated capitalism, the new feudal system.

in the world of shocking news in real time, reality shows where the behaviors of the mediocre are seen as a source of amusement, where the available culture is barely definable as entertainment, being a critic is considered as a questionable behavior. numbness is the rule, thought is the exception.

who said competition was progress?

again, my memory might be failing me, but here's reality to slap me back with the consequences of such statement. watching behaviors everyday, competition is set as the main dynamic for achievement. then achievements are poor, if they are ever reached at all. we are ever forced to compete with our equals to presumptually achieve the goals we set to ourselves, but such dynamic is not absent of negative forces. for a winner to exist, there must be losers, and situations of unequity are created. for those in favor to competition, that loss of balance is the goal itself, rendering useless whatever benefits created by the work invested in the task at hand. but the pleasure of winning is not made to last, so you need to compete again, either winning of losing next time. then, what do we get from competition?

when we focus on competing with others, we tend to get more concerned about deprecating our competitors, rather than improving our capacities. we pull down the bar, instead of jumping higher to better ourselves, tending to destroy rather than create. competition creates confrontation, which generates damage to all sides involved. yet we are still encouraged to compete, because it's the only way to get what we need.

or is it?

when we cooperate, we coordinate and join forces between a number of individuals to achieve objectives. it takes a process of thinking to organize the task in the most efficient way possible. in most occasions, the energy employed for this process is neglegible compred to the amount saved in the completion of the task itself. even when the organizing phase is more consuming than the completion of the work at hand, the learning acquired is a collateral reward itself.

however, we are constantly told the opposite: cooperation does not work in the long term.

but does it?

i'm not doing quite well lately, so i'll just drop this here. now it's up for you to complete this post with your own thoughts about this matter, which applies, by the way, to all posts in this blog. please, do.

open letter to the big timers

this is a message to all those who will pay the attention anyone thinks they deserve. but mostly, this is a call to those in power to make a change, yet again, for their own convenience. humanity is changing. it does that all the time, but it might seem that this is one of those moments in history when that movement leaps forward in a more percievable way.

down here, where the workers are, there is discontempt. that, not being news at all, is taking a certain shape, defining itself to a more aggreed and homogenic discontempt. up in the first world geographies, we are witnessing riots, fear amongst authorities, unexpected reactions and some familiar images in a supposedly different scenario; a staging falling apart that reveals a different appeal to our modern societies, a shift in values and culture that no longer can hold its masks to end up showing something we might not have wanted to see.

we liked to think of our modern civilization as a bright result of the teachings acquired from the best past cultures: the civilized greeks, egyptians and romans, the honorable africans, the spiritual asians or the passionate americans. a smart crossover that covered from nietzsche to buddah, from the agala to the zulu. that was indeed a beautiful mirage.

we drank from the fountains of the finest cultures, to end up digesting commercials between soup operas. we cultivated a pride of the exquisite to end up falling to the easiest and most obvious of those philosophical traps: the thirst for power.

that sophisticated social structure on which we take so much pride, ended up being our own mousetrap. and we fell on it good. who took our cheese? we denied the cheese, we chose to screw with the mouse next door.

that happened to be tasty at the begining, but we just can't stop, at any level, just as the cheese runs out right in front of our clouded eyes. when this lust for power escalates at a social and globalized level, which has been happening for hundreds of years now, when the rich get richer, the poor get pooorer and the middle classes carry on with their sustaining role in this mess, the idea itself of power unveils more and more in the shape of slavery, genocide and denial. a cannibal society with an unbearable dead weight that keeps it from moving onwards to more developed stages, turning instead, back to the darkest version of middle ages.

it happens, though, that this stagnation leaves several distinctive cultural marks, contradictions and uncomfortable collective states of mind that create reactions, convulsions in the status quo. the oxymoronic nature of the structures that hold our global "modern democracies" nowadays, creates situations of all kinds at all levels, that result in more or less revealing experiences in more and more individuals every time. anyone smart enough to follow the "bread crumbles" will coincide eventually in the same intellectual and emotional place. those not so smart will be guided by the contagion of that emotional response to end up getting to the same conclussion. we need to loose excess weight or we won't fly anymore.

that weight might correspond to those in power now, but mostly to those values that built and sustain their empires. that's why, after all, there might be a suitable solution for all this mess, even for those who designed it, probably not even on purpose. these are those days when change is needed, people must keep open eyes and minds to come up with ideas and then be listened to. times of exchange, learning and renewal, when values must take shape and take over before it's too late and even more blood is uselessly spilled.

war was never peace. orwell was actually warning us from that absurd idea. war profit has a conceptual weight attached that those who hold it won't be able to shake easily. all wars, wether literal or not, display abundancy of misery in human, economic, cultural, social and technological stages. every argument defending war can be easily disproved by the simple study of history. not even a deep one, just a glance to some war related facts would be necessary. technology advences faster, economies learn to stabilize and make themselves sustainable, civilizations evolve more solidly. all wars stimulate only destruction, driven by an unnoble and primitive desire for power, which can be conceptually reduced to... a simple addiction. down here, where the workers are, we suffer everyday the unnecesary effects of class war. the same that has been denied since the end of cold war, but has existed since the very beginnings of civilization. the same that has the lower classes in the mud and the higher classes ininsufferable golden cages, now specially fortified in weapons and luxury.

luxury is a mirage. actually, it's a classic swindle. the "value added", which makes a product or a service display a practical waste of resources under the weakest possible argument: "because somebody says so". who says so, anyway? luxury is in practice, a social tool: it sucks resources upwards. say, for instance, a manager from a manufacturing company develops a taste for sports cars. in order to improve his collection, this manager decides to make a larger cut from the company, maybe saving a little, say, by firing a couple of employees while substaining production. said manager cashes in huge amounts of money to some "motor companies", owned by trust funds we lose track of, for example, in switzerland. the more than generous profit margins from those luxury products are swung upwards by these managers every day, towards organizations that have as sacred rule the continuous exponential growth of their profits. good job, kids! luxury as a covert kind of mass robbery! good joob indeed...

sharing is good, both in time and resources. that so-called new age concept called "substainability" is, as a matter of fact, quite an old one. one of the biggest lies of modern capitalism is that profits must grow every term. a static growth rate is a warrant for long lasting business models that can also be fair from all parts. when one gear of the mechanism doesn't abuse by taking too much of the synergies generated by the whole apparatus, the process is smoothened and everything works better. simple old school common sense, that's all. greed is much more than a biblical sin, but also a tool to prevent and destroy balance. without balance, societies can't find the desired stability and wealth that makes them evolve, improve, advance. concentration of wealth decreases the chances for creative minds to develop new ideas that would provide the much needed continuous improvements that any civilization requires. thus, we witness the isolation of the demeaning elite, fortified against their peasants. all immobile and deprived of the means to rescue a culture that goes backwards and sees no future perspective. a lock-down, a recess not measurable in cyphers, but very easily perceivable. respectful cooperation leads to better results than hostile exploitation.

economy with real assets is the best way for actual growth, and those assets are products and services, thus societies need to protect both work and their workers. the global algorithmic macro-economy has been proven wrong enough already, and the self-regulation of markets one of history's biggest frauds. basing entire economic systems on hot air balloons due to explode is the typical irresponsible behavior encouraged in the nineteen-eighties, that took us to a series of crisis of increasing gravity. deregulated volatile markets drain societies from their real energy sources, the propelling material for evolution, not just as an economy, but as a whole. management is not human ownership, it is, instead, just another job, with its appeals, and, most importantly, its responsibilities, increasing with size. no matter how high the level, management is work, never mastership. if you punish a system's base, it's obviously due to fall, and oversized fragile systems like global economies are indeed glass giants, bound to break in millions of useless pieces. it is time to transform, not just structures, but also behaviors and conceptions.

so, for everybody's sake, let's just stop this absurd state of denial. it's well embedded in our minds, but if we watch ourselves and correct all these and some more mistakes, maybe we could see some improvement in our lives, if we can measure up for the challenge.