Hunting by Proxy

I have often wondered why we work. Having to work for a living may make us fell part of Civilization, a part of the world. It may make us feel like we’re Contributing to Society but all it does is make us animals in the end. We’re all just animals.

Dreams when i was 18 imagined myself at 25 wearing Prada suits, working in London, climbing the corporate ladder. I’d roll with catwalk models in BMWs and be a young prodigy set to become CEO at 30.

Looking back at me when i was 18, and comparing him to me now. The only difference is that i think differently. people don’t look at what they can do for the world, they only look at what the world can do for them.

In economics, the Invisible Hand does just this. It takes self interest and makes something that is for the collective good; like business. Businesses start out of self interest but through providing access to cheaper goods and services, they make lives better. If a system works properly then self interest helps the collective whole, at least, it doesn’t hinder it.

That is the way of nature anyway, the lion hunts to feed, the deer dies to preserve enough grassland for the rest of the herd. Are freemarkets natural systems then?  I guess they are as close to natural as we can get, barring certain abominations like banks. But are human systems ever completely natural?

This train of thought takes me to thoughts of political systems and the Sri Lankan one in particular. Democracy is meant to be a market system. Where demand dictates supply. But its inefficiencies make it the worst market system imaginable, and not only because there is such a time lag between matching the needs of the people  with governments or because the accuracy of matching needs depends so much on the intelligence and morals of the people elected, its a system where companies control consumers; an enforced monopoly of sorts. Politically, we are barely into the Mercantilist era.

 I suppose in Sri Lanka democracy and governance is not looked upon as a market system at all. Maybe thats a problem. But thats an interesting train of thought to follow up on, maybe later.

Back to a company. Which is a money making machine, working in one makes you a cog in the machine, in a sense. I am however a bit tired of being that cog for now, and need to experience something more hands on. Working here has made me feel a little hazy. There is like a mist that has settled over my mind that refuses to dissipate.

Voting for Nobody

I didn’t vote at the last elections. And no, i didn’t meet with an accident, i just couldn’t be arsed. I didnt vote and i feel good. And this post is a little late, but meh.

Voting is a method of approving the system. By going out and voting, you are basically saying that you endorse what’s going on. The government wants you to vote precisely for that reason.

So take a *cough* hypothetical situation; you live in a country where the constitution is a farce, the politicians are corrupt and the leader so authoritarian that ‘democracy’ can only manifest itself in an acid enduced hallucinatory trance.

In a place and time like this, lets assume that it didn’t matter if you vote for the opposition, because integrity is an arcane concept to all of them. They’d simply switch sides when they got into parliament and sell their ‘principles’ for a few million. So your vote means nothing in the end. Your vote won’t swing things your way because your ‘way’ is not represented – hypotherically speaking of course.

So then what do you do? Endorse whats going on by going out there and casting your vote blindly? Spoiling your vote and destroying your chances of spoiling the election? not voting?

Or taking to the streets and fighting? Or staying home and watching Burn Notice?.

Same Same, But Different

Lincoln, by Dali.

In our confused drive to believe in ‘equality’ we have confused equality with similarity. In our efforts to treat everyone and everything as equals, we have tried to make things easy by ignoring the differences and focussing on the similarities, to the exclusion of those differences almost completely.

We are not homogenous. we are a mix of several rich and diverse things. Black people, brown people, women, men,  Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, Christians, fair people, dark people, rich people, poor people, selfish people, rude people, beggars, executives etc. At times these differences really don’t mean anything, but at times they do.

Secularism is a nice concept. It requires people to focus on commonalities when working together, and requires them to keep their differences to themselves. But people interact on all sorts of levels. And beliefs are not just limited to organized religion. And politics are the manifestation of our worldviews, which are based on our beliefs. Then secularism becomes a very porous border no?

So we’re not all the same. But we’re not all that different either. We’re on that dynamic gray line that shifts between white and black on a constant basis. Individual humans are capable of identifying with this, and acting on it. We have no problem of accepting the fact that everyone we meet needs to be treated subtly differently, and we do so everyday. The problem happens when we get together.

Humans collectively are far less intelligent that humans alone. When we’re together, the instinct is to generalize. Societies make decisions based on generalizations, as opposed to individual humans. This is of course probably because the impacts of these decisions affect society as a whole as opposed to indivuduals. But in doing so, society has created a world that is still too rigid for individualism to survive beyond a set non-criminal boundary.

In making these collective decisions there is far too much left unsaid. The need is to keep things simple. And this is understood. There is no way of conveying, amalgamating and transmitting all the collective nuances of mind a group of people will possess all at the same time. Our skills of communication still restricts a vast portion of our thoughts, perceptions and ideas to the realm of the inexplicable.

So we know that the world is colored grey but we have no choice but to look at it in terms of black and white. We work together and we are forced to alter our perception of reality in order to try to make a system that does the best things possible for the most amount of people it can.

That is a sad consequence of being human. Can technology help? Cos evolution didn’t. We’ve always been the same throughout history; the winners still write it.