[ExI] wet dreams, was openness on the internet.

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Jeff Davis wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> 
> > What may sound like totalitarian from your side, is rather innocent in my
> > eyes. At least right now (even thou, yes, I am a bit baffled by it).
> 
> We have our regular lives as regular people, where we wake, work, eat,
> sleep, and enjoy the company of our lesser and greater friends.  These
> activities compose the larger part of our lives, and to the extent
> that we focus on these personal matters while dodging involvement in-
> and averting our eyes from the wars of the elites, we can enjoy our
> lives and remain largely free from the injury and suffering caused by
> sovereign ambition.

I can see your point. On the other hand, if I was you, I would appreciate 
ability to express my thoughts in public without fear of being prosecuted. 
On the yet another hand, delving deeper, things can show themselves a bit 
more complicated. For example, censorship is not needed at all if one can 
ensure that only limited subset of thoughts will appear in people's minds. 
I can see a slight hint about such tendency, and not just in US. However, 
I'm undecided to what extent tendency is buried inside our psyche 
(thinking requires energy and time, and we tend to preserve energy and 
save time).

BTW, even being treated as object of some (monetary) value has positive 
sides. Nobody in his sane mind is going to waste money. When it comes to 
intrusive marketing, I think mental training will become one of a 
successful life's requirements. They want to push your hidden buttons, 
so we need to get more conscious about it. In a long run, this should do 
a lot of good to many millions of people. I think that consciousness is a 
great thing (hint: cattle doesn't seem to have much of it, just impulses).

> Your name and email suggests a connection with Poland, Europe, Eastern
> Europe, and the corresponding social/political experience.  On that
> account, I'm inclined to credit you with a more mature worldview than
> that of the typical Hollywood-ized, consumer-ized, patriot-ized, and
> in general, intellectually down-sized American.

Well, I am far from calling myself mature or more mature. I have had the 
questionable luck to watch fall of communism (and all changes that 
followed) while being very young adult. If travels educate, I had quite a 
few of them without moving anywhere at all :-). It certainly tought me 
something about how far things can go if there are people willing to push 
those things hard enough. I have learned, for example, about police 
informers planted (wed) into families of people considered "uncertain". 
Or, believe it or not, at one point in postwar Poland, almost whole 
anticommunist guerilla was probably directed by secret police agents. Why 
- well, if you control something, you can have it however you please.

Compared to this, yes indeed, Hollywood view of the world is rather bleak. 
Also, I am a bit nerved every time I read that US edition of some book 
has been cut short or altered "for the good of US readers". This sounds so 
pitiful. And so ungrateful towards authors, who besides being typing 
drones could also have something to say about how and what they see.

Obviously, this calls for a question, what is so good in being ignorant of 
author's original vision (assuming that some of us read to learn). This 
is why every thinking person should learn at least one foreign language - 
not to "make money and contacts" but to learn a world from another 
perspective.

Of course, one can also point that the whole culture thing is not about 
learning the world. It is about making a dream about the world. If this is 
the case, then obviously some people (i predict majority of us) will 
slowly but inevitably sink into their dream. Because, I think, homo 
sapiens is a beast that wants to live in a dream.

Observing US from far away I think I can see how a lot of Americans 
happily dream(t). Too bad.

It's also a little uneasy to see this. It asks for question if I dream 
too.

I guess one day the other branch of h. sapiens will simply take off, base 
their actions on reality (and possibly create another culture around crave 
for a truth and personal abilities to make things happen). Perhaps the 
difference will lie in genetics. Or maybe they will have better 
upbringing. I guess in the past the upbringing wasn't that bad - nowadays, 
there is tendency to "reduce a load on students", like they are worse than 
guys 100 years ago.

Upbringing! And education. Why it is so hard to do it right? Or at least 
better than now? Especially that I have some suspicions it was better and 
went downhill.

> But at your European remove, you may yourself fall victim to the
> "idylla" -- I suspect you meant "ideal" or "utopian" -- view of
> America.  You know, the Hollywood version:  "Give me your tired, your
> huddled masses...",  "liberty and justice for all"..., the City on the
> Hill,  "...from sea to shining sea", "...and they lived happily ever
> after", blah blah blah, etc.  That illusion is very pleasant indeed,
> but no matter how good it feels, don't embrace it to the extent that
> you abandon your connection with reality.

By "idylla" I meant, of course, "idyll". There is a lot of words in Polish 
coming from Latin and I somehow assumed that in English it would spell the 
same. I should have checked in a dictionary. :-).

But idylla is fine word on its own - like a mix of idyll and Godzilla.

I wanted to say, that people make up in their heads such idyllic visions 
of heavens on earth. AFAIK all those heavens have their other side, the 
one closer to hell. It is never to be seen from afar and it only becomes 
obvious that there is the other side once you melt yourself with its 
better half. Then you can feel the bad but you cannot unmelt and you are 
damned forever. At least, this I would be afraid of.

About my view of US - not really utopian anymore. That was good for a
teenager, but as I learned more I realised there was no place in a world 
that could qualify. On the other hand, US is still quite good for many 
people - I can see, that during last 10 years, about million per year 
obtained residency (so, they were making some money and payed their bills, 
maybe even taxes). Despite all economic wobbles.

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_immigration ]

But I don't have time to munge all the data. Therefore I cannot say if the 
biggest US problem is indeed the dreaming I tried to describe above. I am 
rather reluctant to care about elites, since they are made elites by 
people and they can be made something else by those very same people.

About this "give me your tired masses" - sure, they were needed to keep 
the pump going. Is it possible that US is/was a Ponzi scheme? Well, 
maybe... but not enough data again.

Overally, I feel my Polish/European remove gives me great perspective to 
see a world, at least in theory. Thanks to flows of history, I was able to 
have a look behind the courtain and was conscious enough to not let go. 
Future Poles would probably be as inane as anybody else, because of 
westernisation. If I suffer from illusions, I hope to dispose of them, 
preferably in not very distant future :-).

> America was wealthy, which like a new paint job, covered a multitude
> of sins.  Now the wealth is all but gone, and the ugly reality of the
> coarseness of American life is becoming ever more apparent.  Time to
> focus on the personal.

I think focusing on the personal is very much OK.

I am not sure how seriously you do consider a "Chinese option", but for a 
moment I myself would not choose it. The main reason for this, I would be 
afraid of personal security of mine and my relatives (in a long run). I 
don't have a billion bucks to buy me a place in right circles (like, say, 
if I was from elite and wanted to start a new life in more promising 
economy). There are folks who live in China, but I suspect their well 
being is thanks to combination of having desired professional skills, 
waving Western passport and paying their bills in dollars or euros. Remove 
one or two of those pillars and things can get worse for them. I mean, 
maybe many years from now some new gov in China will call masses to "cut a 
white weed" or something equally cruel. AFAIK, human life is a commodity 
there, and a rather cheap one.

Of course, I may be wrong. Time will show.

> Personally, I embrace technology as the vehicle that best embodies and
> promotes the "better angels" of human nature, those dedicated to
> progress, to building, to making things "better", to cooperating.
> 
> Please forgive me if I have offended you.

No, not at all. Even more, I hope you forgive me if I have offended you. I 
have this tendency to deliver my version of truth, sometimes writing 
faster than I think (a slow thinker, me) and it sure has some sharp edges 
which can hurt anybody standing along the way. Besides, it is possible 
that my Polish perspective makes me slightly angry when I see someone 
loosing their free will, even intentionally.

> Best, Jeff Davis

Thanks for explanations.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **