To solve large scale problems, we must first deal with personal relations. In the ideal world everyone would just be what they are and get accepted that way. No one suppressing anyone, just living their lives to the full in Anarchy Utopia.
Surprise: That's not how the world is. Our beloved ancestors, the apes, are still in our nature. We are territorial animals going for the best possible position in the hierarkies, we are part of. Unfortunately it does not work well for our survival, as we have become so powerful, that we can exterminate ourselves with weapons and a general abuse of the worlds ressources. So, in our struggle for high quality survival our unsurpassed intelligence must grant us yet another great leap forward by the use of our maybe most powerful asset of all:
Communication skills! Well..you may not be impressed with this conclusion as we're more than ever communicating the hell out of eachother, and still... a lot of conflict in the world in form of war and different sorts of oppression. What is new, then? Well, a still relatively new media for communication is the basically very anarchistic Internet, with a potential for honest and direct communication from almost any one person to any other in the world. Good forces can meet and form virtual communities totally independent of any form of status in the "real" world. And I write "real", because actually the virtual world is real, too! We can move things from here. We can be personal, we can conflict with eachother in ways to cause more understanding than harm and thus spawn experience to use right out there IRL in the nucleus of relations, love, meeting of the sexes.Sex in the broadest definition possible can take us far against a more harmonic world. Let us go for the Art of Living; homo Sapiens Part II:
Art! And by art I mean sublime communication not slave to any system of thought, not to any religion, ideology or form of therapy.
Well, at this point I will shut up and leave some room for comments. So:
What is your opinion about all this?
Hi Michael
SvarSletI think we're pretty much on the same page in many respects. Only I'm not sure I can vouch for the definitions of your key terms. And if we can't agree on what we (whoever that might be) are trying to accomplish, how will anything be accomplished except from certain configurations of zeros and ones on various hard drives scattered across the world?
Sex.
You write that sex is "all that tries to unite male and female". Why commit to such a narrow scope? Why not describe it as something that tries to unite people regardless of their biological sex? Still the definition seems to wide because of the word "something". Duct tape is an excellent remedy for trying to unite people, so are groupthink and party games. None of which can be described as sex in any meaningful way. I might be a bit too nit-picky here, but I'm just trying to arrive at a definition of something, I think will push the ocean uphill and get us anywhere nearer homo sapiens part II. THIS we can agree on: The world is very far from the best place for human beings to exist - thanks to human beings. We owe it to ourselves and each other to create better possibilities for living together in whichever ways each of us see fit. With all the problems this might entail.
So,let me try to make my point in another way. In ordinary use of the word, sex is an activity, best engaged in with your clothes of, which brings the body (and in rarer cases the minds) of people closer together. Which is nice and so on, sure, but how will it contribute to a better world? Empathy, respect for other people, a wish to make the world a better place and other fine things just doesn't seem like the average long term result of sex, does it? Can this be changed? How?
Anarchy.
You describe anarchy as a state of affairs, where "no one should rule anyone". That's all well and good: I would love to live in a society where people accepted other people like they were and didn't interfere with their lives in a negative way. Later you undermine this with an argument on how human nature affects our possibilities to achieve a society anywhere near this. I disagree. I think human nature is relatively straightforward: We will bang anybody on the head with a club, if s/he tries to interfere with the fulfillment of our urge to eat, sleep, fuck and so on - if communication won't solve the conflict. Most of us learn not to bang people on the head out of fear of getting punished. We ask if we can have a piece of the pie, grumble if we can't, find another pie to eat and come back with a club only if no other pies are available. In other words: I don't think the building of nuclear warheads and the craving for bigger tv-sets is caused by a fact of nature. We live in an unjust etc. etc. society not only because of unscrupulous politicians, cynic manufacturers of warheads and marketeers from the Biggest-tv-set-in-world-history corporation, but because of a world filled with people putting up with the state of the world at large. Some have no choice, they're to busy starving to death or beating other people on the head. But most of them have no problems to speak of on a fundamental level. They have the opportunity not to go with the flow, to refuse buying unnecessary junk made in sweat shops, to stand up in the face of violence, to make the world a better place in some way. Some of them do, most don't. Why not? How can this be changed? And would it help move the world towards becoming an arena of the creation of life unchained if it did?
Art.
I think the mission of art in the project of creating a better world is to show people that almost anything is possible and that the current configuration of the world isn't a fact of nature. But what is art really? I have no idea. Seriously.
What's next?
art does it exist? it cannot be proved, i dont even believe it can be seen in the real world.
SvarSletyet i feel it metaphysicly.
madoc
Good question, madoc, "Does Art exist?". And I very much like your ".. I feel it metaphysically".
SletWell, to answer your question: I recon everything we try to contain in words exists. Thus "Art" exists, in varying definitions you can check out. More correlating than the opposite, I believe.
As I see and put it, "Art" is a word for humans expressing something sublime - in a way that do not obey any rules but its own. It's a much needed source for truthfulness. And it's a form of communication,that establishes, confirms and even celebrates human relations, humanity. It's a kiss of the divine, at touch of armaggeddon and everything inbetween.
And I don't think I - we? - could live without it :-)
What do you think?