Yet There Is Method In It

I am quoting one of my favourite paragraphs from Notes from Underground. The narrator’s point of view, which he calls “underground”, is extreme philosophical scepticism. This has undermined all justification or motivation, so he doubts the value of his own actions. At the same time, he feels himself superior to normal “men of action” and consequently, he has the expectation of achieving something profound. But his scepticism makes this achievement impossible to define, let alone attain. The narrator also tries to state why “underground” is superior, by argument to the consequences. This is a classic argument when defending the “truth” of a belief but is technically a logical fallacy. Just try to search for “what does atheism have to offer” and “what does Christianity” have to offer, on the Internet. Of course, the narrator can’t sustain his argument from his sceptical point of view. He is caught forever between seeking for “truth” and of questioning if “truth” has any value. Anyway, over to Dostoyevsky:

The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground! Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!

BTW, you can get the audiobook on librivox.

AC1

This is a great parody of all those moralists who assume the right to improve mankind:

This is a difficult time in our nation’s history. There is a rift—a deep, enduring wound—among the people of this once-great land, and while I’m not sure it will be healed in my lifetime, I do not think all hope is lost. I believe change is possible, but the road will be long and difficult. The truth is, this nation can never be united as long as it is home to people other than myself. The Onion

I am deep into reading Waldon. It’s good so far.

AC1

I recently had an infuriating conversation which revealed staggering selective intellectual blindness. I am reminded of the quote:

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, [...] But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [the concord of things through discord] and all the marvellous uncertainty and ambiguity of existence, and not to question, not to tremble with desire and delight in questioning, not even to hate the questioner–perhaps even to make merry over him to the extent of weariness–that is what I regard as contemptible[...] The Gay Science, Aph 2.

I am glad to get that off my chest.

AC1

To celebrate this blog’s 3 year(!) anniversary, here is a word cloud of my articles. The general idea is the cloud shows the commonly occurring words in a text. You can see my favourite themes and topics as the proportionally larger words.

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Reminds me of:

For a typical healthy person being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how [my own] long period of sickness appears to me now…it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement. Nietzche

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves

I was just thinking about the proportionality of beefing up airport security. With 15.1 million passengers per year flying through the major UK airports, and say it takes 10 minutes to queue and clear security, that amounts to 287 person-years of waiting (per year). Now assuming the average person has 43 years remaining to live (life expectancy 82 years, average age 39 years). So security in UK airports uses enough time to consume the time of 7 peoples remaining life spans (on average, per year).

Anti Citizen One

Update: Recent analysis of airport security on The Register is very relevant and interesting:

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.
[...]
Terrorism simply isn’t a visible factor in your chances of dying while flying, or indeed while doing anything else: it is insignificant, a problem that has been almost totally eliminated for Western citizens since its not-very-serious heyday in the 1970s and 80s, and you shouldn’t worry about it. It would make absolutely no noticeable difference to your or my chances of violent death/injury if terrorism was eradicated overnight. Lewis Page

I have decided to attempt a series of articles on existentialism in film. There are few ways this movement can manifest itself in film, some are more obvious than others. It seems easier to group them by the way the existential issues are handled and in what manner the characters are aware of it. This is a necessarily incomplete list. The first group I will address are films with an existential theme.

Films Themes Raise Existential Questions

Taxi Driver being influenced by Dostoevsky (particularly Notes from Underground), its psychological examination of character is hardly surprising. Travis is a lonely person and throughout the film tries to overcome his lack of purpose in life and nihilism. The film ends violently and he enjoys being a hero for a day, but it is implied that he still is slipping back into insanity and nihilism. This is perhaps an example of a “failed” existential film.

A Scanner Darkly is the story of an undercover police officer Bob Arctor aka Fred. Due to drug use, he is becoming increasingly confused at his situation and his identities begin to disassociate. He also is a pawn in the larger picture of a “war on drugs”. His quest for self knowledge is a losing battle as his personality and grip on reality are destroyed. The only ray of hope of personal choice is in the ending scenes – but the cost Bob as paid is very high. (“A present for my friends…”)

Fight Club covers a great deal of ground and is better known for anti-consumerism and anarchism. For the unnamed protagonist (informally called “Jack” by commentators), he starts in a similar place as Travis of Taxi Driver – lonely, suffering insomnia, lack of meaning, etc. He fills this void for a time with being a “tourist” at support groups, “Fight Club” itself and its spin off movement “Project Mayham”. All these are collectively trying to deal with changes or loss in personal identity in a group setting. In the last scenes, he takes responsibility for his actions but at the same time repudiates them. The ending is left open ended but hints that he can experience healthy personal relationships (finally).

Apocalypse Now is a monument to moral relativism. Willard is a troubled covert operations soldier. This superiors tell him about Kurtz – a former model soldier who has being using “unsound methods”, which euphemistically refers to his going completely “insane”, having a private army that worship him as a god and practising human sacrifice. Willard’s orders are to “terminate” Kurtz’s command. On his way up the river, he sees the insanity of the Vietnam war. It is hinted that Kurtz actually is still effective as a soldier and is a fierce critic of the conventional American war effort. The question is who is insane: Willard, Kurtz, the generals running the war, or all of the above? When Willard meets Kurtz, he sees Kurtz is a haunted individual who is questioning his own identity. And the end of the movie, Willard is so isolated from conventional moral standard, he is faced with his own existential question of what to do next…

Other notable films: Magnolia, Ghost World, Eyes Wide Shut, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the book explicitely deals with existentialism, the film less so), His Dark Materials, The Machinist, American Beauty, Adaptation

The British inquiry into the Iraq war has already been informative. I look forward to further developments. For some reason, my listening to the band Rage Against the Machine has increased in response. Questioning of authority and consequences of obeying authority are major themes. For example, they question if we should be follow the current political course when it is unsustainable and self destructive?

I am the Nina, The Pinta, The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agent of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire (RATM)

In other news, I finished re-reading Lord of the Rings. It is very interesting after the reader changes to perceive things in a new way on returning to a book. “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.” There are many times when the protagonists pity other characters (most often, Gollum). It might be interesting to study if any of the pitied characters actually recover from their pitiable state…

In related news, I have finished the translator’s preface of Of Grammatology. This took significant effort! I will perhaps blog my thoughts one day…

Anti Citizen One

Human rights lawyers reviewed computer games with a war setting.

The group chose games, rather than films, because of their interactivity.

“Thus,” said the report, “the line between the virtual and real experience becomes blurred and the game becomes a simulation of real life situations on the battlefield.” BBC

This key assumption, that actions in games are morally equivalent to actions outside the game is laughably untrue. We don’t see people getting post traumatic stress disorder from computer games. Playing games is nothing like being in a war. Other studies show that gamers are not desensitised to actual war violence (stated later in the article). Therefore, the choices are not the same as those posed outside games. Games are more or less works of fiction and the choices posed to the player are almost forced outcome moral choices, since the player is not acting as “himself”, but as the character created by the game’s script writer.

I was recently hearing about the Australian Prime Minister apologising for the treatment of child migrants. This apology was presumably done on behalf of the institution that he represents i.e. the state. But the state does not feel “regret” since it is merely a concept. Even if the people comprising “the state” feel the actions were wrong, it is the individuals themselves that are responsible, not the state itself – which cannot act or think independently! Unless the individuals themselves were responsible, guilt does not even apply. Although it may cheer the victims of injustice, I am concerned that if we shunt the responsibility (and “guilt”) for wrong actions onto institutions, it diminishes the personal responsibility that each individual bears and transfers in onto a mere concept. In the extreme case, it may lead to the bystander effect, were everyone does nothing to correct injustice because it is “the state’s” responsibility. So I distrust all institutional apologies and think of them as political tools.

In agreement with our favourite existential thinkers, a new study has linked suffering with religiosity:

Gray and Wegner created a state-by-state “suffering index” and found a positive correlation between a state’s relative misery (compared to the rest of the country) and its population’s belief in God. Sciam

That’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Anti Citizen One