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Once again, TPN’s fearless VP of Stuff, Ewan Spence, has caught the big white bird from his home in Edinburgh to Austin Texas for South By Southwest. Catch his shows from there starting today on TPN’s Tech Conference Show.
I know I haven’t put up a G’Day World episode for a couple of weeks – had a few things fall through – but I did a new episode of The Biography Show today which I think some of you might enjoy. Check it out here.
Now – as a capitalist (surprised I’m still one of those?), I think that’s fair enough. Nobody should be able to force a business owner to accept money for a product they don’t think is a good fit for their business.
The key point for us to understand though is that this is another form of censorship and propaganda. This is how BIG MEDIA works in harmony with BIG CORPORATE and BIG GOVERNMENT to make sure you only get certain messages broadcast to you day in and day out.
So don’t tell me we have “free media” in the West. What we see on TV is very closely controlled by a small group of wealthy individuals and what they allow you to watch is only what they decide is in THEIR best interests, not yours.
From Adbusters:
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I was talking with some people tonight about humility. Most people probably wouldn’t consider me a humble person. It depends, however, on your definition of humility.
As with most things religion touches, I think it has screwed up our idea of humility. The typical conception of someone who is humble is someone who is self-deprecating, self-effacing, deferential – humiliated before GOD.
1: not proud or haughty : not arrogant or assertive
2: reflecting, expressing, or offered in a spirit of deference or submission
3 a: ranking low in a hierarchy or scale : insignificant, unpretentious b: not costly or luxurious
But I prefer to think of the word based on its etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin humilis meaning low, humble, from humus earth; akin to Greek chthÅn earth, chamai on the ground.
This is also possibly the root of the word “human“.
You know how much it must irk me to quote from the Christian mythology book but I’ll take poetry where I find it:
Genesis 2:7 And Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul.
Genesis 3:19 In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.
Where am I going with all this?
I explained to some friends tonight that our bodies are made, as the book says, from dirt – which is just a poetic way of saying that the sperm and ovum which came together to create your body were formed out of the nutrients eaten by your parents which came from the ground. Plants literally eat the minerals out of the ground, the animals eat the planets, and the human animals eat both, thereby eating the “dirt” second-hand. This “dirt” – or as I prefer to call it, these “chemicals” – are what you are. Your entire body is made up of chemicals from the ground. We’re made up mostly of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen (the last three which were all formed in the explosions of stars, which is why Joni Mitchell sang “we’re all stardust”), with some salts and trace elements.
(photo by idan x)
Your brain is also made up of this “dirt”, this humus, and as regular readers know, it is my suggestion that every thought you’ve ever had in your life was 100% the result of a simple electro-chemical event in your brain. Dirt can think! Free will is an illusion. We aren’t in control of chemistry. We’re just along for the ride.
If you accept that this is all you are – that every action you’ve ever done and every thought you’ve ever had was the result of a simple electro-chemical event in the brain – then you realize you are just dirt. That everyone else is just dirt. Just chemical reactions. Hitler. Gandhi. Buddha. Not Jesus, because we know he was probably a fictional character. Napoleon. Jack The Ripper. George Bush. Saddam Hussein. All just dirt. Everything they ever did in their lives, everything you’ll ever do in your life, is governed by the laws of chemistry and physics which all sprung from the Big Bang, 14-point-something billion years ago.
Even that thought you’re having right now – “Reilly is so full of shit, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about” – that, too, is 100% based on the laws of chemistry. “You”, the dirt, had no “control” over it. It’s just chemistry. Don’t feel guilty about it – it’s just chemistry. You have no control over the laws of chemistry (unless, of course, you are a student of Professor Charles Xavier, in which case I grant you special compensation and you can leave class early).
So – that’s my definition of HUMILITY – knowing that you are just humus, just dirt. That everything you do in your life (or don’t do as the case may be) is 100% the result of chemical reactions which started with the Big Bang all that time ago. You can’t take credit for it. You weren’t even there. In fact, most of the atoms making up your body didn’t even exist. They came later.
If I’m right – and if you don’t think I am, come prepared in the comments section below with rational arguments – then you can neither justify feeling guilty or proud or angry or love. Can you love dirt? Can you be angry with dirt? Should dirt feel guilty for being dirt? Should it feel proud for being dirt?
Do you think perhaps this is what the writer/s of the Talmud or Genesis were trying to convey when they spoke of people being made out of animated clay or of the earth? Were they trying to explain that we are all just chemistry? And that TRUE humility comes from that knowledge?
The person who says “I’m not just a chemical reaction – I have FREE WILL! I am in control of my actions!”: is what they meant by a person with pride?
Instead, I quote Popeye: “I yam what I yam”. The dirt that made me is configured in a particular way, thanks to the laws of chemistry, and it is going to do what it has to do. “I” (whatever “I” am) is just along for the ride.
I watched an average 2007 film SHOOTER tonight on DVD. Marky Mark’s always pretty good, playing that tough guy with a heart of gold character. Some interesting stuff about life as a sniper in the film (apparently all true according to the doco and Wikipedia, but I’ve got a mate based in the Middle East who knows this stuff who I’ll ask). Anyway, onto my point.
The top bad guy in this film is Senator Charles F. Meachum played fairly by-the-cards by Ned Beatty (who to me will always be “Otis” from the bad SUPERMAN movies of the 70s and 80s). in the film he’s a Senator who’s got a black ops organization running around doing his private bidding, killing villagers in Ethiopia to make way for an oil pipeline, assassinating an Ethiopian Archbishop who is about to reveal the truth when he’s about to receive an award from the US President, etc. The Meachum character has one great line though. When he’s facing off with Marky Mark’s good guy sniper character in the false climax of the film (there’s another climax coming a few minutes later…. I’ve got so many lines I could make here but I’m holding back… for the second climax… get it?? It looked like I wasn’t going to make a cheesy line but then I did… damn I impress even myself sometimes with my sneakiness), he (the bad Senator in case you’ve forgotten where we were) delivers this line to Marky Mark’s character “Swagger”:
Senator Charles F. Meachum: You got any plans after this? You have a rather unique skill set. I’d be interested in offering you a job.
Bob Lee Swagger: Work? For you?
Senator Charles F. Meachum: It’s not really as bad as it seems. It’s all gonna be done in any case. You might as well be on the side that gets you well paid for your efforts.
Nick Memphis: And what side are you on?
Senator Charles F. Meachum: There are no sides. There’s no Sunnis and Shiites. There’s no Democrats and Republicans. There’s only HAVES and HAVE-NOTS.
That’s certainly my perspective on the system of party politics we have in the West. We’re given the illusion of choice. Democrats or Republicans. Labor or Liberal. Conservatives or Labor. Channel Nine or Channel Seven. The Age or The Herald Sun.
There was a time when, if you were poor, you knew who to hate. You hated the King, the Queen, the Duke, the Baron, the Bishop. You knew the name of the rich guy who oppressed you, who owned you, the land you worked, who told you what to do and when to do it and beat you when it wasn’t done properly (or sent the guys to beat you).
Today those names are usually disguised by a ‘brand’. Whether it’s the brand of your political party or the brand of the media company who pimps them, you usually know the names of the brands but the average joe in the street doesn’t know the name of the person BEHIND the brand. And I’m not talking about just the CEO of the company – he (or she but usually still a man these days) is just the front guy. The CEO isn’t the person who really pulls the strings – that would be the major investors, the Board of Directors, the puppet masters, who hire and fire the CEO. And it isn’t the Prime Minister or President – again, just front men. And usually, these days, BLAND front men. Look at the guys who end up in these jobs – if you met them at a party, and you didn’t know who they were, how long before you made some lame excuse about having to relieve the babysitter to get the hell away from them? John Howard? Please. I’ve met lime jellies more interesting. Kevin Rudd? Come on. Nancy boy who, I bet, blushed all the time when he was taken to the infamous strip club in the US. George W Bush? A jock with a rich daddy who probably still puts fart cushions under the asses of his cabinet for a laugh.
The real power is smart enough usually (but not always) to hide behind a construct of front people, to maintain plausible deniability, like the mafia bosses distancing themselves from the guy selling heroin in the streets to the trail doesn’t lead back to them when the heat comes down.
We are given the illusion of choice though so we feel like we are free. The Land Of The Free and The Home Of The Brave. More like The Land Of The Duped And The Home Of The Sheep.
I started thinking about this today when someone criticized Cuba for not having a “free press”. Really, like the US, UK or Australia has a “free press”? We have a press that is owned either by a handful of rich white guys or is operated by the Government which is also, as it turns out, run by a handful of rich white guys who are good friends with the other rich white guys. You don’t think these guys all have the same interests? If you were an old rich white guy, what would your main priorities be? Helping the poor? Forgiving third world debt? Creating an international criminal court? No, your main priority would be staying rich. And if any of those other things contributed to your main priority, then all well and good. And if they don’t? Then they aren’t really going to get much play.
I’m reading a book on the Soviet Revolution at the moment, actually written by one of the guys involved in it, Raphael Abramovitch. He was a Menshevik, the minority party of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (the Bolsheviks, run by Lenin, were the majority party of the RSDLP). The idea behind the Soviet Revolution (a soviet was a worker’s local council, like a labour union) was that the power of government needed to be taken out of the hands of the rich (the minority) and given to the poor, the workers (the majority).
Which gets me back to the illusion of freedom. We have been taught in the West to believe we have choice, we have freedom, we get to vote our leaders in and out. Every four years we get to decide which rich white guy and his friends get to run things. And the rich white guys who own the media tell us over and over again in their newspapers and their televisions and their radios how lucky we’ve got it.
We’re free.
We’re happy.
We’re the good guys.
Aren’t we?
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Anyway, this post was prompted by one of his blogs posts this morning (see below) about the Thunderbirds and I was thinking about how shows like that (and, of course, Star Trek), considered camp and silly even at the time by many, inspired a generation. And I was thinking – what are today’s shows which are likely to inspire the next generation of adults to push the boundaries of science, art and business? What shows on TV today are building a vision for a better future, one we can aspire to, strive for, work towards? Most of the shows I love today (or have loved recently), the futuristic shows, are dystopian. BSG, Firefly (RIP)… ummm… hard to think of any others right now. While they each have some cool toys and technologies, I don’t think either of them contain aspirational messages. I do, however, get a lot of aspirational futures from the books I read. Charles Stross, William Gibson, Vernor Vinge – all write about near-term futures which get me bloody excited. But not TV.
Got any suggestions?
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Rushing around this morning, driving my kids to piano practice. In a hurry, so the ubiquitous iPod wasn’t jacked into the car stereo. Instead I turned on the radio for the five minute trip to piano.
After a minute, Hunter (age 7) asks me from the back seat “Hey Dad – where’s your iPod?” I explain it’s in my bag, I haven’t bothered to plug it in.
“But where’s the music coming from?” he asks.
“The radio,” I explain.
“Is that like TV?” asks his brother Taylor (also age 7).
I look at their faces in the rearview mirror and realize they have no idea what radio is. They have never heard me listen to radio. They are amazed that music is playing without the iPod plugged in.
If you have any shares in Austereo – welcome to your future marketplace. It doesn’t even know you exist.
