My thoughts

Day 3090, let go.

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Is it possible to ever let go? To untie yourself from yourself. To not think the way you always do. Turn a switch and change, even if only for a second or two.  

Of course not. Every reaction has an action before it; change in your life does not happen in a vacuum and can not be commanded. It is impossible not to be yourself, and even if you take a leap, you will most certainly land on the other side as yourself again. 

If you want to change, you could change your surroundings. Meeting new people is often an excellent way to confirm your choices or to get infected by new ones. And when you’re stuck in one place, alone, then read a book, one you wouldn’t usually choose, one recommended by someone you respect or who rubs you the wrong way.

Changing your mind takes work. When you are 16, you do it every week; when you are old, maybe just the second before you die. And if it is not your age that holds you from changing or changing too much, it might be your family, friends, the person sleeping next to you, or the country you live in. 

But just moving to another country or divorcing is not the cure that brings you change. The things around you might change, but do they change enough? Do you fall in love again with that person you imagined you had met before? Do you wake up next to the same person because you see all of them like that? A thing. 

Change is difficult, even if you want it. Not many people want to put in the effort, and we expect change to happen by demanding it from others or through shortcuts we want to believe. They say that we are formed for a large part in our early years. When you are three, change is happening all the time, and it just happened. You get moved around, presented with food you don’t know, and wear clothes you have never seen before. All this change was forced upon you and hopefully done with love, making you feel good. Now, you have to do it all alone, and you don’t know how and stick with what you know. Longing for someone who tells you, but most of the time, that is you; the choice is often between what you already know all too well.  

It is like the free will problem. If we had it, we could all just change our minds and change. We are all stuck in a particular past and body, and these two determine for the most who we are. Making unexpected friends or reading a new book might notch you off, off your trajectory, but knowing that you encounter something new is the big challenge. You have to learn to recognize what is new, and the best way to do that is to keep it close and not at a distance.





Day 3064, do I open the door.

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I don’t think that we have a free will. I believe it is essential that we act like we have one, and our nature and evolution have made it so that we all have the illusion that we have free will. There are many arguments against this idea, and as many in favor, I just ask you to look around and in yourself. If you look at us as a collection of inherited traits, the parts in you that come from your mother, father, and the rest of the family before them.  That’s the “mechanical” part of you, including the brain, that will do most of the work once you start living. During this living, you will be exposed to your culture and the values and morals of your surroundings. You can have a wide range of influences, but you will never be influenced by everything. You will be unique but, at the same time, a unique representation of your experiences. Your experiences will make you react to what the world will throw at you. You feel that you have decided to vote left or right, but your past, the clothes you wear, and the friends you have have already decided your path, your choice. Your choices are your surroundings reflecting in you and who you are without conscious interference.  

All the arguments going around inside you for why you choose the way you do are no explanations for why you consciously choose but for why you seem to have chosen.  Think about what you do when you lift your arm. You only see it move, but many decisions are made hidden from you. All the muscles and different signals have to start moving without your conscious awareness. You think you move your arm, but at most, you have given it an order. The thoughts you have and the words you speak are more or less like that. You only become aware of what you think after your brain has done a lot of unconscious processing. You might order your brain to think but it does most of the work for you, without you. 

We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
 Anthony Burges

 

Day 3056, Waltz.

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Is it bad to be hopeful? While standings frozen and looking to the other side on a screen*. 

I have written before that American politics is more important to me than the politics of any other country. I always say: if America farts, we all have to smell the stink. That said, politics over there is not left enough for my taste, but I am still happy that the wannabe Führer will have a hard time and the centrists are hopefully winning, that is at least a tiny step in the right direction.

*We had a band in the Netherlands, Het Goede Doel, that made a song about Belgie. One of the lyrics is about America: And when it comes to America, that country doesn’t really exist. I’ve been on a plane there, but maybe we landed in the Truman Show, and who knows, maybe all we see about America is what we see on the screens. It’s there to scare us. One thing I know for sure, it is definitely a show they perform for us. 

Day 3055, The Fear of Freedom.

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There are many factors why there seems to be a resurgence of fascist-like sentiments. By fascism, I mean the tendency of large groups of people to walk behind a “strong” leader, like rats that follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Reading about colonialism and capitalism has something to do with it, but one of the better books to read is Escape from Freedom, also known as The Fear of Freedom, by Erich Fromm. In short, the book talks about the problems we humans have with freedom, or maybe better said, what we do to fill that void we feel when answers are absent.

The book was written in 1941, but as the following text shows, it could be written for our time where in America, half the population follows their dear leader blindly, but also in the Netherlands, where I come from where the word fascist might be a little bit to strong but following blindly of the leader not.

If we want to fight Fascism, we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as the ritual of an Indian rain dance. In addition to the problem of the economic and social conditions which have given rise to Fascism, there is a human problem which needs to be understood. 

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally – that is, for himself – which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

You can read the book here: https://pescanik.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/erich-fromm-the-fear-of-freedom-escape-from-freedom.pdf

The following is a translation from the back cover of my Dutch copy of the book:

When man finally freed himself from the rule of the absolute state the medieval church, his ambition for freedom seemed to be realized slowly but surely. However, it soon became clear that, freed from the shackles of the old society, he felt lonely and powerless and was only too willing to exchange his freedom for the secure dependence of some authority.

‘The fear of freedom’ provides a clear analysis of the frightening phenomenon that man cannot cope with his hard-won freedom and on the one hand flees into the blind worship of a leader or an all-powerful state, and on the other hand sacrifices his individuality by allowing himself to be smoothed out in cliché and ready-made forms according to the demands of public opinion. “This interesting book gives much food for thought. It aims to bridge the gap between economics and psychology and shows how a theory that only deals with the way in which one earns one’s bread or a theory that only considers the essence of man will never suffice. In his short but pertinent consideration of the escape into the so-called average personality, anyone who studies the American situation will find important insights.’ (Prof. Dr. Margaret Mead)

‘The tendency to relax the inhibiting effect of the super-ego*, whereby a stream of sentiment and fantasy is released, seems to be a phase in democratic development that recurs again and again. Periods of expansion and contraction alternate: a sudden outburst of previously repressed emotions heralds an era of expansion, until a feeling of fear arises in the Self, ‘the fear of freedom’ that is so excellently described by Fromm.’  (Prof. Dr. Karl Mannheim)

‘Fromm is perfectly within his rights to apply psychoanalytic theory to sociological problems, as he does here. He has done us a service by drawing our attention to the social and spiritual shift that accompanied the Reformation, and his description of the psychology of Nazism is very useful.’ (Prof. Dr. Karl Menninger)

* The superego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly as absorbed from parents, but also other authority figures, and the general cultural ethos. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_superego)

 

Day 3053, our large house.

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I try to understand what colonialism and imperialism have done to the world. These days, it’s mostly understood as something bad, and politicians condemn it in many polished speeches, speeches that are carefully checked by a room full of lawyers, afraid as they are that their words can be misunderstood as an admittance of guild. The problem is that in the 16th and 17th centuries, the intentions might have been good, trading with the locals on whatever strange coast you found them, but the many differences in customs made it often easy for the Europeans to take advantage and slowly take over their society. The result is, hundreds of years later, that we have taken away the chance of these societies to find their own way into the future. 

I thought about this when I heard a story yesterday from someone who heard that same story from his grandfather. It goes about their forefather’s village somewhere in Indonesia, around the time that the first Dutch merchant/war ships arrived. The people on that Island were Muslims, and it was customary to give land to visitors if they wanted to stay, so they gave some land to the Dutch, and they gave more and more… He also describes that there were already vast commercial contacts with Japan, China, India, and the Arabic world. These contacts existed already for hundreds of years, and there were no monopolies; there was, more or less, free trade. This all changed in the next centuries, and part of the Dutch golden age was possible because the Dutch divided and conquered huge parts of Indonesia, and most of the trade was monopolized by the Dutch. 

There are many reasons why there are poor and wealthy countries, and the literature about it goes from left to right with no consensus in the middle. The former colonies were not as technically advanced as the European countries, but their moral systems might have been more mature because of longer, uninterrupted growth. We will never know how these former colonies would have developed if the Europeans hadn’t interfered. There was violence in ancient times and through the ages till now. The Indonesian archipelago was littered with small kingdoms that also fought with each other and tried to steal each other’s land, but we have to remember that we think with Western minds, and for centuries, we have learned, we have been told, that the people who don’t live as we do are barbarians and are less than us. We cannot trust our forefather’s stories, we also have to learn the stories from the people that already lived there. It will take a lot of effort to shake off these prejudices and see ancient and unknown civilizations with the same eyes as we do our own, not good or bad but full of people who, for more than 40000 years, already knew what was good and bad, and they often knew that better than we know that now. 

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe

I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world
Soekarno

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Day 3052, Divide.

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I bought a book about Indonesia this summer. It was written in 1942, when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony, though Holland was occupied by the Germans, the irony. I am interested in the history of colonization, especially in the former Dutch colonies. There are many books written about that period, but I liked this one because it was written at a time when people still openly thought it was a good idea to colonise other countries. So far, the book is interesting, but that’s mainly because of how the writer writes about how people traveled to the East over the centuries in the first few pages. After that, he brushes over a lot of wars and conquering. To fact-check, I ended up looking at several discussions on YouTube about Dutch history, and I learned a lot. I won’t border you with the details; they are 2-hour-long roundtable discussions in Dutch, easy to find if you are interested. It’s not that I didn’t know these things, but the details fill in many interesting gaps. 

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Vladimir Lenin

Day 3028, climbing higher.

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Reading about cults again. I think we all believe in our little world, but why you would surrender yourself to the world that another person paints for you is a mystery to me. Sadly, you also see this in politics, where many people follow the one with the smile they like the most. I think this proves, more or less, that life is not easy to navigate without a guide, some rules you learned while growing up, or a pointing hand while you were searching your way.

I’ve learned somewhere, on my travels, not to trust myself or others but to trust that if you set one foot, the other will follow without you thinking about it and contemplating why. Thinking as a means to get somewhere in life is fruitless; it is, at most, a fun exercise. You can learn a lot from critical thinkers and hope their wisdom will turn into the right “automatic” choices.  It is like learning to play an instrument; after many years of training, you know how to play without knowing exactly how to play; your fingers do the things they have to do without you guiding them all the way.

So think about all the different choices you can make in life, but don’t make them or let them be made for you; just trust that you will react the right way when a choice has to be made. This might be written as advice, but it is not; it’s just my way.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man. Jiddu Krishnamurti

I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don’t believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas. George Carlin

Take a chance on faith – not religion, but faith. Not hope, but faith. I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire. Faith leaps over it. Jim Carrey

Day 3007, disapointed mess.

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There is this atheist, Sam Harris, I have quoted him before in some of my blogs regarding free will. He has some smart things to say about that. I knew little about him before that, mainly as an outspoken atheist, but I regard him as a smart man, and he is, at least, academically. This week, I came across an interview with him where he talked about Israel and Palestine, and he said some strange things. I did some more digging, and to me, he talks like a former colonizer in the way he disregards the Palestinians and how he thinks that everybody who is a Muslim is more or less a terrorist. 

I don’t like his views on that conflict but I also started to doubt myself. How is it possible that he is so smart about free will and well-thought-out but also, deep in his heart, a racist? I am not going to tell how I got to this conclusion, there is enough on the internet of and about him, and you can come to your own conclusions.

Continue reading →

Day 2987, DOS.

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Ever since the invention of computers, we have started to compare how we function with that new invention using analogies.

The brain is the hardware with short and long-term memory, and the processor speed determines how fast we can calculate.  You can have all kinds of critiques of this comparison, but that’s nitpicking. Simplifying difficult concepts makes it easier to spread the word, so to speak.

I made this short intro because I read in an old post of mine about the idea that we have to reboot our fleshy internal computer. The idea is that our brain has hardly evolved in the last 100,000 years or so. The way we think, feel, love, solve problems, and go through our daily ups and downs is still the same as the people who lived in makeshift shelters and were hunting for their food. Our brain has evolved over millions of years and still changes, but our modern society exists only in the smallest fraction and at the end of that long timescale. We feel all modern and clever with our fancy phones, but in 100,000 years, they will look back at us like we look at an ape that got hold of a phone in a zoo.

If you use the analogy of computers, then we are a late seventies computer running DOS. It can do most of the things we do now; the difference is that it was made for smaller packages, meaning less input and less demand for results. People look, on average, at hundreds of small videos and posts on social media each day, but studies show that we only “compute” a fraction of what we see. The rest clogs up the computer and prevents valuable processing time from doing other tasks. Now we see a hundred pictures and remember two; in the seventies, we could only download two pictures in the same time, and the excitement after a long wait made you remember both of them for sure. I made these numbers up, but I am 51, and when I was 16, we had no cable TV or computer and only two TV channels to watch. I know for sure that I have more input of information now than when I was younger. The internet can satisfy most of our (knowledge) needs, back then I had to wait till I could go to the library in the hope of finding what I wanted to know.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet, but if I could snap my fingers, I would change all the phones into nineties Nokias, and the internet was only Wikipedia, text-based homepages of institutions, and ad-free YouTube.

 Human societies are complex, and we all feel the need to simplify our lives and understand the world around us. The attraction of leaders who speak understandable “truths” that are easy to digest is still strong, even though our history shows that easy truths almost always end up in misery. The truth is complex, and the solutions to the problems in our society are also difficult. Simplifying helps, as  I stated in the beginning, but only in the first school day at school.

In my old post, I wrote, “Our mind needs a reboot and an upgrade to version 2.0, and throw in some better memory and dust it off.” Of course, I have no clue how you could upgrade us, but maybe it is a good thing to realize that we all are not up to speed for the time we live in.

Day 2986, Goku.

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What do I think? What do we do when we think? The thinking I am talking about here are your deepest thoughts, the unthinkable thoughts. Not in the sense that they are immoral or need to be kept away from the outside world, there are just no words to express them. What’s going on in your mind when you feel and have these deep thoughts, the thoughts you can’t hear because there are no words attached, yet. What’s going on inside us has more to do with an abstract painting or music that moves around in your mind. It’s like a rhythmless rhythm that dictates you the words you know from your past and are in your language. The rhythm looks strange, and we try to interpret it, but we are forced to call the parts anger, jealousy, fear, regret, or sadness, all the things that stop us in our tracks of a deeper investigation and understanding. These descriptions of what you seem to feel come and go and mold for you the answer you most need, want. But if you don’t want them, you will be speechless, but your feelings will still be, just that.

Continue reading →

Day 2985, change.

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History rushes forward, and we like to point at the boulders that seem to cause the most turbulence. We call these disturbers Martin Luther, Albert Einstein, Stalin, or any other famous person from history who left a mark big enough that most of us still know them. These big boulders cause turbulence, but the riverbed, all the little stones, cause the real diversion by being swept up by rushing water and the turbulence, thus changing the direction of what flows forward.  A great boulder lying in a dry lake will move nothing, let alone disturb history, and a river without strong currents and disturbing boulders will flow forever with little change. 

Day 2981, butterfly.

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I am an idealist, and as such, I have no place in this time and world. In a political sense, this means that in my ideal world, everybody understands themselves and thus, the world, and in such a way that it is clear for everybody where to go and who can walk in front. I don’t claim to know what all fits in my ideal world, but I do know that many people in the past had an ideal and tried to force the world to follow that ideal. I think, for example, of the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago in Cambodia. Pol Pot had an idea of how people could live together. He studied in France and probably had some lofty ideas and ideals but never realized that the lessons from history are that you cannot force a society in a certain direction. He persuaded his fellow believers to kill millions of people in the name of progress, an idealistic world. 

The list of dictators that moved whole societies into destruction is long, and even our democracies breed ideas and ideals that come with destruction; look at the waste we make and the hatred many people have for each other. People are, for the most part, good, but as soon as they become part of a statistic, they show another color, and in modern democracies statistics rule.  

So, I am a revolutionary who doesn’t believe in revolutions. Someone told me once that if you want to catch a butterfly, you can run around and try to grab it, or you can look for the best place to sit, hold your hand up, and wait. The goal is not to catch a butterfly but to be there when it lands and enjoy the place where you sit in the meantime.  

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe – well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ‘who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,’ but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”
H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old

Day 2978, 5852 days ago.

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smile

Come inside! And when you do, the first thing you see is a big smile. Big smiles often hide something, and most of the time, it’s something damaged turned into a peaceful look down, with a smile, on all those smalltime problems surrounding the smiler. So you see a smile when you come inside and closer. Also, here, it’s hiding something you can only see when you come really close or if you stay exposed for a longer time.

The smile is a good tool; it protects the surroundings from all the darkness and lowness you feel for them and the words you want use to tell them this; the smile can prevent you from talking, just smile, don’t talk is a motto you will find inside of me and a lot of smilers

There are many different smiles, the one I talk about is almost always there as if it’s grown into your face, as if time and sorrow worked together and carved it out, molded your face into a permanent state of happiness.

Time and sorrow need a tool to carve and ease the pain. Anger is the tool that cuts and eats away your life and flesh and is a great carver for permanently marking a body and, thus, a mind. Grace in mind and body is the anodyne that comes along to ease the pain and brings balance to the life behind the smile.

This gloomy, shiny smiley stench coming from this carved-in face, penetrating my brain, has a soothing effect on my daily life. It calms me down and sands away all the rough edges of this overactive brain that, even I believe, sometimes belongs to a sleepy doofus.

Smiling through life when you have eyes on you. When you are alone, the world is blind, and you just…are…Your face is…just a face without expression because what is an expression without eyes to reflect on?

The smile of a liar.