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Apathetic Politics

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote." ~George Jean Nathan

My only disagreement with George here would be to exchange the word "government" (which for myself refers to society as a whole) with the phrase "the Powers That Be" (PTB - the Golden Rule says "those with the gold, make the rules"). The highest level of victory is to convince your adversary that their cause is inevitable and defeat assured. I believe two of the most destructive forces in society are political apathy (or a nihilistic sense of powerlessness) and impatience (or a need for instant gratification). These two forces feed off and reinforce each other, turning most of society into passive sheep that do naught but bitch and moan (only to their fellow sheep) with little or no willingness to do anything about what is bothering them.

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
- Bertrand de Jouvenel

I have always been both politically aware and active and I have met, and am friends with, a number of politicians. I believe (I know, actually) them to be good people who are following what they believe to be a higher calling. It is an extremely challenging, draining, and for the most part, thankless job. It is definitely not easy. Plato sarcastically explained it well when he said "One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors". I believe this to be not a "truth" but a widely held and accepted "opinion" to the point where most actually believe it to be a fact.

I have yet to come across any (prejudicial and judgemental) generalizations about any group of people that was actually all that truthful or very accurate, other than in the reflection of widely held misconceptions.

H.L. Mencken said it best. "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard."

Taking an active role in our own lives, in the society we live, can be more work than most people are willing to do (for whatever reason you wish to blame). Complaining is generally easier, but it's not much different from masturbation (or procrastination): it might make you feel better while you're doing it, but eventually you realize that all you did was screw yourself!

"Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there."
-- Frank Zappa

Learning to Fly

Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
  The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live closer to the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution has flowed past by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
  And the there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
  And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap...
  And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
  And then the eagle lets go.
  And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death.  Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
  But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
  One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/

http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/smallgods.html
http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/small-gods.html
BBC radio play - http://youtu.be/NCgv2aeFiKw

Culture Is Extraordinary

The highly controversial Woodwards project

The Pantages Theatre, being demolished for Condos

“I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Twice a week I get the opportunity to travel by transit from the Downtown Eastside (DTES) to the main campus of the University of British Columbia. It is an interesting journey, from one extraordinary neighbourhood to another, while traversing the ordinary. While I do believe Vancouver to be an amazing and unique city, it is mostly full of so-called ‘ordinary’ people living ordinary lives, living in ordinary neighbourhoods (where every single house costs over a million dollars!).

There are however, a few neighbourhoods which are not-so-ordinary. The DTES is one of them. UBC would be another. At UBC, this extraodinariness is fully embraced and promoted - across the globe! In the DTES, the flavor of the extraordinariness is not so loudly heralded. Both neighbourhoods are seeing considerable amounts of money being spent on renewal with various constructions sites visible throughout the community. At UBC this is driven by the need to maintain this extraordinary flavor, to ensure their place on the world stage as a place of innovation and discovery, as a place where culture is defined, discovered and disseminated. In the DTES these expenditures seem to many to be driven by the need to transform, comodify, and suppress this flavor. It seems to be a little known facet of the eastside that what makes it such a great community is that is has an authentic (or real) culture all it’s own (which is why it is so easy to sell condos down here, plus the ‘undesirables’ keep property values a little more reasonable). It’s not just the down-and-out junkie that finds the DTES a comfortable place to live.

Many ordinary people find themselves drawn to these neighbourhoods, and by living there, become EXTRAORDINARY. Someone who is a student (or faculty member) at UBC is no ordinary Vancouverite, British Columbian or Canadian. They are a member of one of the most prestigious, hardest to get into, schools in Canada (the world even). Most such people are quite proud of this fact, and are rarely shy or ashamed to wear various symbols announcing to the world their status as extraordinary. Their friends and family are usually just as proud and more than willing to tell all who will listen about their extraordinary friend or family member who lives on the cultural edge. Those who live in the DTES are also extraordinary, whether they ended up there by choice as a homeowner, or as a result of poverty and addiction. Those who end up here by choice are generally more proud of their status. By choosing to live here, they are able to proclaim that they are less conformist, more independent and more willing to strike out on their own. They are more alive to culture, and generally get to be a bigger part in defining it. Those who end up here out of necessity, are rarely held in much esteem or regard, and are often shunned and ostricized. And yet they are important to our society and culture. Without them, the DTES wouldn’t really exist, it would just be part of the downtown, and Gastown and Chinatown would have been modernized and gentrified long ago. The Eastside, I would argue, has more living culture than any other neighbourhood (although the same could be said about the Drive, but I consider the Drive part of East Van). The culture here, is born here, not imported. It is not critiqued and analysed to death here. It is created and performed here. The analyzing and critiquing is done elsewhere, by others.

The trip from the DTES to UBC, is a trip from the extraordinary, through the ordinary, into the extraordinary!
Ordinary:
1. of no special quality or interest; commonplace;unexceptional: One novel is brilliant, the other is decidedly ordinary; an ordinary person.
2. plain or undistinguished: ordinary clothes.
3. somewhat inferior or below average; mediocre.
4. customary; usual; normal: We plan to do the ordinary things this weekend.

Extraordinary:
1. beyond what is usual, ordinary, regular, or established: extraordinary costs.
2. exceptional in character, amount, extent, degree, etc.; noteworthy; remarkable: extraordinary speed; an extraordinary man.

Can Philosophy Cure Emotions

Can philosophy cure emotions? This is one very loaded question, and one for which philosophy exists in the first place. For many people (myself included), it is this exact question, or at the least, this type of question, that got them interested in philosophy in the first place. Many, many articles, essays and books have been devoted to this question. Careers and lives have even been spent in pursuit of the elusive answer to this question. The simple answer would: yes it’s possible. But what fun is that answer? I will instead dig into it a little bit and see what bones I can dig up, and see where the evidence leads me. If I am going to make a (brief) attempt at this question, the first thing that I must do is to define the question itself - which, for myself at least, is what philosophy is all about.

I am going to settle with a couple of easy, and fairly accepted, definitions of the word philosophy. Just defining what philosophy is has occupied many books and lifetimes, but for the most part this definition works fine for most people (and most dictionaries):

philosophy: the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.

I myself am a little more preferential toward the following definition, since for me it needs to be practical, or else what good is it?

philosophy: a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs.

Taken together then, we must do the first part (rational investigation), to end up with the the second part (a system of principles). Philosophy is not something we can be given, but something we learn and build for ourselves. But that is for another essay....

And what can this practical system of principles do for us? They can provide us with a:

cure: a means of correcting or relieving anything that is troublesome or detrimental.

What is it they can correct?

emotion: an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.

Emotions are generally associated with agitation, and are often referred to as a “reaction” to something. They are commonly believed to be “triggered” by some external event. Emotions are something we “feel” internally, with our (mostly) conscious awareness - as opposed to something we feel with our external senses, such as texture or temperature. It is the uncomfortable emotions we are talking about here. Nobody is interested in a “cure” for joy or love.

Taken all together then, the question could be expanded to say:

Is it possible to come up with a practical system of life principles that allow us to correct or alleviate the uncomfortable and stressful internal feelings and reactions that arise throughout our day-to-day existence, often out of the blue and without rhyme or reason?

Taking a look at the self-help (and related topics) in any library or book store and it becomes immediately apparent that this is indeed an important issue for most people. Reading any religious text further confirms this. Our internal pain and suffering hurts so much more than anything that happens to our body. A man who comes up with a workable solution to dealing with this can have calenders reset to his birth!

Using the first definition of philosophy, I cannot see how there is any way to deal with this without philosophy. Only through rational investigation of myself, my feelings, my thoughts and my actions - and most importantly my beliefs - will I have any real hope of self-directed growth and improvement. Otherwise it is all just random if I don’t play an active role in my own direction. This is the purpose of philosophy. The philosophers and other “lovers of knowledge” are still arguing over just what emotions are and how they work, so it is a complicated problem. I myself have yet to be convinced that emotions can be entirely tamed, but my own reactions to them can be softened, and the havoc they cause me can be mitigated. I would love to get to the point of one day waking up in the morning, and choosing for myself which emotions I will feel that day. In the mean time I just need to stay rational, and remember that my emotions are something that happen to me, but they are not ME. I may feel angry, but I am not anger. I am not sadness. I am not joy. I am just a person experiencing emotions. A human being emotional.

Through philosophy, through rational investigation of myself, I can come to the realization that emotions are something over which I have almost no control. I cannot banish them to some forgotten dimension, or unused corner of my mind. My only real hope is to acknowledge them and learn to deal with them. I cannot ever run away or hide from them. They are an intrinsic part of who and what I am. The Stoics taught that to avoid all the suffering we need only maintain a constant state of indifference and keep ourselves free of passion. Which to me sounds allot like what the Buddha preached about being free of desire. For most of us though, especially in this current time, this holds neither appeal nor practical application. How does one maintain indifference while holding your newborn child? Or at your own wedding? Or at a loved-one’s funeral? I’ve always thought the roller-coaster to be funner than the merry-go-round. The up’s and downs may be a bit scary, sometimes uncomfortable, but always funner!

I will get through it and live to see another day, and feel more feelings, if only I can stay calm, try to not get to hung up on myself, and just try to enjoy life by maintaining a philosophical perspective on things.

philosophical: rationally or sensibly calm, patient, or composed.