pictures

Day 2986, Goku.

Daily picture, My thoughts

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.

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Day 2981, butterfly.

Daily picture, My thoughts

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 2966, attached.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Quotes

When I started my journey into the world of what there is to know about us humans, I liked to go to one of the many second-hand bookstores in the town close to where I was living. For little money, you could buy a few books, and often I read the introduction and then decided if it was worth my time. One of these books was written By Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist with some provoking thoughts. The titles of some of his books speak for themselves: The Fear of Freedom, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics and The art of loving . From this last book, you can find some quotes and links to the pages of the book at archive.org

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.” The Art of Loving

“But actually, people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.” The Art of Loving

“Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.” The Art of Loving