Skip to content

War, What is it Good For?

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Ninth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

I’m a huge hippie pacifist. But with all due respect to those great Motown songwriters, Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Strong, the answer to the above question cannot possibly be “absolutely nothing.”  In every generation, in nations across the world, in human societies since the dawn of recorded time, people have gone to war. We must be getting something out of it. Our species –all evidence to the contrary –just isn’t that stupidly self-destructive to keep on pursuing warfare for no reason whatsoever.

There are multiple answers, but one of them is that war, as awful as it may be, is a highly successful Employment-Creation System, under the criteria we established in past weeks.

  1. It creates jobs:  In addition to the millions of people employed directly on the frontlines as soldiers, war employs many millions more in activities directly or indirectly related to war-efforts: in munitions factories, in agricultural production, and so forth and so on. At the conclusion of wars, new jobs are created in cleaning up and rebuilding after the destructiveness of the battles.
  2. It matches people up with jobs:  There’s a large range of specialty positions in most armies, so recruits can theoretically be matched with positions that suit particular skills, interests and talents, ranging from electronics to cooking, to strategic planning.  There’s also ample numbers of positions available for people who are particularly ambitious, or who have exceptional leadership qualities.  In addition, there are roles in armies for people who would have grave troubles fitting into civilian life –people with a strong desire to kill other human beings, for example.As far as how jobs get assigned, however, we’re back once again to the old Feudal pyramidal hierarchy.  In place of a king, the armed forces have a Commander-in-Chief, in places of Dukes and Barons, the armed forces have Generals and Majors, in place of the lower aristocracy, Sergeants, and in place of the peasants, privates.  Ultimately, the responsibility for creating the jobs goes back to the Commander-in-Chief, who decides what countries to invade, and so forth.  The details of carrying out those orders, where to build a base, where to attack, etcetera, are determined by the military hierarchy, and the orders are carried out somewhere close to the bottom of the pyramid.
  3. It makes jobs meaningful:  Armies tend to use “the carrot” during peacetime (“see the world!”  “get money for college!”  “gain valuable skills”) and “the stick” in more desperate times (enlist or go to jail, you coward!”) but beyond these more superficial motivators is something altogether deeper and more primal.  Summarized neatly by the U.S. Army’s longtime recruiting slogan “Be All That You Can Be,” War does indeed provide the challenges that push humanity to its highest heights, not only as individuals, but also collectively –at least in theory.For nations as well as at the level of each soldier, a major portion of the attraction of war is the concept of being tested to the absolute limits (and of course emerging victorious).  And in the big picture, war isn’t just about national interests and secure borders,  but about field-testing an entire ideology, an entire way of life and belief system.  That’s why nations meet on the field of battle –to find out “are we right, or are they right?”Islam vs. Christianity.  Capitalism vs. Communism.  Catholics vs. Protestants.  Fascism vs. Democracy.  Fight it out and may the best ideology win –and then spread.  That’s the unspoken promise of war.  After all, everyone loves a winner.  Why else would Germany and Japan have re-patterned their societies after the example of the United States after the conclusion of World War II?

NEXT WEEK:  The horrible downside of war.

Filed in The Economy, War, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged | Comments (1)

Back to the Future

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Eighth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

It may seem odd to look back at Feudalism, universally considered one of the most unpleasant and backwards economic systems ever invented, as the first stop on the quest to replace Consumerism.  However, in order to know where you’re going, you must first know where you’ve been. Consumerism’s ways of meeting the employment-creation criteria may seem like the most natural and obvious ways possible, but a lot of that comes from the fact that we are already immersed in a Consumerist system.  Feudalism actually meets the same criteria, but in a much more primal way.

  1. It creates jobs:  Unlike the “franchise” model of Consumerism, where everyone works together to create jobs, in Feudalism the ultimate responsibility for creating jobs falls on one person, the King.  The King sets the agenda for the overall big projects of the nation, typically invading other kingdoms, or building mighty works like castles or cathedrals or –if you have a extraordinarily enlightened King –kingdom infrastructure.
  2. It distributes jobs:  Feudalism’s model for job distribution is extremely simple, yet in its own way, elegant.  If you’re a Duke or equivalent aristocrat, you work directly for the King.  You send men for his armies, food for his table and his court, and money to pay for his projects.  Each of the Dukes is surrounded by a host of minor lords, who support the Duke in the same way the Duke supports the King.  And each of those minor lords has a small team of servants and larger assembly of slave-like peasants who work like dogs to keep him and his family in what passes for a lifestyle of local luxury (and to generate the thin margin of excess that gets passed upwards).
  3. It makes jobs meaningful:  It doesn’t seem like much of a booby prize for a modern observer, but even the work of a peasant in a Feudal system is ultimately the work of the nation as a whole.  Each person’s individual labor goes not only to support and sustain his or her own life, but also in support of all the King’s grand projects.  This is why a King who demands too much of his subjects is ultimately a more successful King than one who demands too little.

It may seem like so much ancient history, but actually Feudalism never completely went away.  A modern multinational corporation is nothing but a Feudal society dressed up in a nice shirt and tie.  The CEO is the King, the Vice Presidents are the Dukes, the middle managers are the minor aristocrats, the entry-level white collar workers are the servants, and the factory workers are the peasants.  Instead of invading other kingdoms, they take over markets.  However, unlike in Feudalism, there is at least some social mobility in corporate life.  It may be rare, but people do occasionally travel from somewhere near the bottom to somewhere near the top.

At any rate, the purpose of looking at Feudalism is not to posit it as an actual improvement over what we have now, but to see how very possible it is to meet the same employment-creation criteria in very different ways.

NEXT WEEK: War

Filed in Yes and Other Answers | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Downside to Consumerism

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Last week we looked at the upside of Consumerism, the ways in which it functions well as an employment-creation system.  This week we’ll look at the darker side of our trusty economic engine.  Seventh in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

The question of course, is this:  If Consumerism works so well, why are people out of work?  Who turned off the jobs spigot?  As it turns out when we take a closer look at how well Consumerism meets our criteria for a great employment-creation system, the picture isn’t nearly as rosy as we painted it last week.  Let’s take a look at the criteria again.

  1. It creates jobs:  An unlimited supply, right?  Not really.  Theoretically the kinds and quantities of consumer goods that can be produced (and thus the number of jobs producing those goods) are only limited by people’s imaginations.  But in reality, there’s an actual limit to how much people want to acquire.  Most people in the First World already have far more consumer goods than they need to live a comfortable –one might even say luxurious –life.  This leads to the problem we discussed in week three (“The Global Pyramid Scheme“) of markets drying up.There are a number of ways in which consumerism compensates for this effect, but they all have problems attached to them.  One way is by making cheaper, more disposable products that wear out faster (such as blenders that break on the third usage) –which is wasteful.  Another way is to stimulate people’s desires for new and different products –which involves making them unhappy with what they already have (as in the case of cell phones that are already out of date a month after being sold) .  A third way is to promote ostentatious excesses (such as the purchase of giant gas-guzzling automobiles).  In addition to making our lives unhappy and filled with cheap crap, these techniques also accelerate the depletion and pollution of the Earth’s natural resources.  Consumerism is a driving force behind impending shortages of such vital and irreplaceable resources such as clean water, oil, fish populations, trees, and unpolluted air, a trend pushing us in the direction of an ever-accelerating environmental disaster.One cutting edge “solution” to the problem is the invention of “virtual” consumer goods, simulated objects that are bought, sold, coveted and “gifted” on various websites and in various virtual reality environments around the internet, ranging from Facebook and MySpace to World of Warcraft and Second Life.  These objects don’t draw a lot of resources, they don’t take up any physical space, and people love them.  It’s a perfect solution, except for the fact that people are now spending huge portions of their lives in the pursuit of shiny objects that don’t, strictly speaking, even exist.  Plato would be horrified.
  2. It distributes jobs:  Apparently not as well as it once did, but that’s more of a symptom of jobs drying up than the cause.  A more serious concern is Consumerism’s poor prioritization of projects, since it elevates trivial industries (say, the marketing of soda pop) to positions of central importance, while letting projects vital to the future of humanity (such as preventing mass extinctions) languish.
  3. It makes jobs meaningful:  This is where we run into real problems.  As you recall, Consumerism makes jobs meaningful through the money you earn from working those jobs, and money is meaningful, not just for its raw purchasing power, but because it allows us to each measure our own self-worth against that of those around us.  But reducing everything to money has its downside as well.  It’s nearly always possible to increase your profit margins (at least in the short term) by doing some bad or immoral thing such as clear-cutting the forest primeval, farming out your labor to five-year-old workers in a Third World country, or putting sawdust in the chicken nuggets.

The upshot of all of this is that Consumerism is faltering.  People are no longer in tune with its devil-may-care, spendthrift ethos, and the loss of confidence in the Consumerist philosophy is having a very real effect on global markets.  Furthermore, the stopgap measures that gave Consumerism an extra century or so of viability have run their course.  Now like the snake eating it’s own tail, Consumerism has begun to consume itself –one reason, perhaps, for current pop-culture’s tendency to endlessly regurgitate and redigest it’s own recent past.

The problem, of course, is that Consumerism is what is keeping Capitalism afloat, and when it comes to Capitalism, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is nothing else.  Competing systems, such as Communism, have been much worse.  But is Consumerism the only possible employment-creation system that can rescue Capitalism, or are there other options?

NEXT WEEK – Feudalism

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Spend ’till you drop

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Sixth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

Let’s take a good hard look at our old friend Consumerism, the dominant Employment-Creation System (ECS) in the modern world.  In many ways it works quite well, and it fits all the criteria we outlined last week.

  1. It creates jobs:  Consumerism creates what has always seemed to be an unlimited supply of jobs, all revolving around the manufacture, marketing, sale and distribution of consumer goods –the famous fabulous prizes of Capitalism.  Blenders, cars, t-shirts, posters, paperweights, computers, microwaves, gold teeth, embroidered wall-hangings –the list goes on, and on, and on.
  2. It distributes jobs:  Consumerism distributes jobs via what might be called the “franchise” method.  Anyone can buy into Consumerism at any point in time –just create a product and put it on the market.  You’ve just manufactured your own job, and if you’re successful enough, you’ll create jobs for other people as well.
  3. It makes jobs meaningful:  This is where the true brilliance of Consumerism comes into play.  Many, perhaps most, of the jobs in a Consumerist system are not intrinsically meaningful.  With notable exceptions, consumer products aren’t saving lives or making the world a more beautiful place.  However, each and every job in the Consumerist framework has a quantitative value attached to it –that value being the amount of money you get for performing it.  The amount of money for a Consumerist job is related to the amount of money earned by selling the consumer products that generate the job.  The amount of money earned by selling the product is in turn based on the price of the object.  The crucial part of the whole thing, the part that makes it all work, is that the prices are quasi-objective.  No one person or government sets the prices, they are all assigned automatically by the actions of people buying and selling on the open market. In other words, we all set prices collectively, by establishing through buying and selling what we are willing to pay for things.The utility of this system of evaluation is that it gives us all a way to measure our own self-worth, i.e. in terms of dollars and cents.  In our society, under the Consumerist system, your status, your value as a person in society, is roughly equated with your purchasing power, your accumulated wealth.  The day you first get a job, you secure entry into a global system that allows you to compare yourself –quantitatively –to every other person in the system at any given time.

    This in turn provides the motivation that keeps people working.  True, for people at the very low end of the income scale (a vast number of people, largely invisible to the those above them), the primary motivation is survival, the need to purchase the essentials of life, food, shelter and clothing.  For everyone else, however, no matter how it may be disguised, the goal is status, the getting ahead in the system represented by accumulating more money and more goods.

NEXT WEEK – The Downside of Consumerism

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The Bright Side of Unemployment

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Fifth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

Don’t jump off any tall buildings yet.  Despite the abundant Direness, things are less bleak than they appear.  The problem may present as though we’ve run out of a scarce resource –namely jobs, particularly meaningful ones –but viewed from the proper perspective, it becomes clear that we are in fact suffering from an overabundance of a different resource –namely human labor.  And an overabundance is a better kind of problem to deal with than scarcity.

It may seem hard to believe that this could be a problem at all.  After all, the imagination is staggered by the sheer volume of worthy projects in need of more workers.  Desert reclamation, space travel, teaching in the inner city, bridge building, planting trees, the list goes on and on.  Yet the things that need done rarely seem to get matched up with the people who need things to do.

You can’t just throw the people and the projects into a jar and shake it up to see what settles out.  You need a system –a system with the following characteristics:

  1. It creates jobs:  Your Employment-Creation System (ECS) must have a deep (ideally endless) supply of projects that need to be completed.
  2. It distributes jobs: Your system needs a way to match people with projects.
  3. It makes jobs meaningful:  Most importantly, your system must provide a unified larger context for its workers that motivates them to complete their assigned tasks.

For those readers with an economics background, it may seem like there are some important things missing from this list:  Supply and demand, channels of distribution,  methods of production, and so forth and so on.  But what I’m describing here is not a economic system, but rather an Employment-Creation System.  For example, here in the United States, our economic system is Capitalism, but our employment-creation system is Consumerism.  Capitalism provides the overall system, but Consumerism generates the majority of the jobs.

NEXT WEEK:  A closer look at Consumerism.

Filed in Social Change, The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Dire Trend #3: Busywork?

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Fourth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

(Adapted from an essay originally presented on 4/4/05)

Most Americans are familiar with the phenomena of “busywork” –time-consuming tasks of dubious meaning and value, which much be completed according to precise but arbitrary parameters. Such tasks –generally consisting of pieces of paperwork to be laboriously filled out –compose a large portion of many people’s jobs (as trenchantly chronicled in the movie “Office Space” in which the main character’s entire career hinges around the use of one form versus another).

Few people realize, however, the extent to which busywork has come to dominate the American workplace, or have questioned the sinister implications of such a seemingly innocuous phenomenon.

The reason for the existence of busywork is as follows: In a money-based economy, wealth is relative. My spending power increases when the spending power of those around me decreases. However, there are some absolutes, and one of the most foundational absolutes is human labor. In order for anything to actually be produced, there must be human labor involved, and the value of human labor is physically bounded by the amount of productive work a person can do in a day.

What this means is that, in order for a people to become wealthier than the limits of their own labor, they need to me able to control, directly or indirectly, the labor of a large number of people. Direct control of other people’s labor, as in slavery, is ultimately inefficient, because one person can only exploit the labor of a limited number of people before facing the inevitability of a revolt. However, indirect control of labor solves this problem through the magic of hierarchy. If I control a small number of people –ten, for example –it takes relatively little force and coercion, particularly if I share the benefits of their labor with them.

A part interest in the labor of ten people is not enough to create immense wealth. If each of those ten people controls ten other people, however, and those people control ten other people, then I quickly reach a situation where I have a part interest in the labor of a thousand people (or, to extend it another level, ten-thousand). Now my wealth is greater than those of my laborers by several orders of magnitude.

One of the problems with this setup is that the vast majority of the actual productive labor that keeps the company running takes place at or near the bottom. There are other functions that take place higher up the hierarchy –skilled labor and technical work such as engineering and design for example –but the need for such labor is generally not extensive enough to fill the vast pyramids that compose mega-corporations.

This is where busywork enters the picture. The filling out of forms, shuffling of paper, and completion of meaningless tasks keeps people in the middle of the corporation busy, and thus prevents them from causing trouble. The busywork also structures the organization and keeps it from collapsing, by limiting opportunities for advancement and by placing barriers to productivity.

This last point demands some explanation. Why is productivity in the middle a bad thing? The answer is that the function of middle management is to maintain the organization and to keep the hierarchy from collapsing. Productivity is not the chief function of the middle. If people in the middle are too productive, it calls into question the need for the vast numbers of people in the middle. If I, as a mid-level employee complete tasks too efficiently and effectively, then why does the company need all the other workers at my level of the structure? It is only a useful fiction that my employment is maintained primarily for my productivity. Rather it is maintained for my utility as a channel through which wealth can flow upwards.

Thus, success in middle management is largely dependent on the ability to keep people busy, but not productive. In other words, the function of middle management is to create busywork. The more busywork that is available, the more the company can expand, and the larger the structure will be, thus creating a greater concentration of wealth at the top.

This explains a phenomena noticeable in many offices. One or two people may be the ones doing all of the actual productive work in the office, but they are surrounded by a vast number of other employees who are essentially supernumerary and parasitic. The employee who does the actual work, however, is less likely to be promoted or recognized than a co-worker who continually creates meaningless projects, and thus increases the workload on those around them.

Why is the hardworking employee disdained and the parasitic employee celebrated? The former endangers the employment of those around him or her by demonstrating their uselessness, but the latter ensures the continued employment of his or her coworkers by disguising their needlessness .

Unfortunately, this phenomena creates employment at the price of the death of creativity and human potential.  To restate the problem, our society is unable to generate a quantity of meaningful jobs sufficient for the working population, and so, in order to avoid mass unemployment, it must create jobs whose only real justification is their own existence.

NEXT WEEK:  The Bright Side of Unemployment

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged | Comments (0)

Dire Trend #2: The Global Pyramid Scheme

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Third in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

Dire Trend #2 – The Global Pyramid Scheme: This second trend is a little easier to miss than the first one.  Did you ever get a letter –or an email –promising you $625 in the mail? All you had to do was send five dollars to each of the four people’s names above you on a list, add your name to the bottom of the list, and send the letter on to five (soon to be former) friends. This is what is known as a pyramid scheme, and it sounds like a great deal. Basically, the people at the beginning of the scheme, the top of the pyramid, get paid by an ever increasing pool of people at the bottom of the pyramid. It really does work as advertised, at first, but the same law of mathematics that promises exponentially huge payouts dooms the scheme to an unhappy ending. After only a short amount of time, you run out of people to recruit at the bottom of the pyramid. The very large group of people who come in at the end of the pyramid scheme pay money that goes to the people above them on the pyramid, but they never get any payment back because there aren’t enough suckers left to recruit under them.

Pyramid schemes never completely die off because they seem so promising. Most people learn pretty quickly to avoid the most obvious chain-letter type schemes, but millions of dollars are routinely lost in more upscale Ponzi-type pyramids, such as the one run by the crooked financier Bernie Madoff.

As many shock waves as were set off by the collapse of Madoff’s pyramid, however, it was small potatoes compared to the biggest pyramid scheme of all –the one played by nations. It works like this: In order to become wealthy, a nation industrializes, which means it opens up factories and begins mass producing consumer goods. In order for this to work, however, a nation needs a constant supply of low-priced raw materials, and a market full of consumers ready to buy the finished products.

When what are now the “First World” countries industrialized, one of the ways in which we accomplished that task was by entering into an exploitative relationship with less fortunate countries around the world.  In that relationship we obtained raw materials from them at artificially low costs, and sold back finished products to them at inflated prices. This relationship still continues, but there is now also a second tier of industrialized countries –places like China and India –that are still subsidizing the luxurious First World lifestyle, but that are also entering into their own exploitative relationships with countries further behind on the pathway to industrialization.

Like the Madoff investment group, the payoffs are great for the top of the pyramid –so far–, but a collapse is inevitable. The number of people in the world is large but finite, and the resources of the Earth are vast but exhaustable. Now that countries as large as China and India have entered the game, the chances of there being enough new recruits further down the pyramid to keep the system running are becoming smaller and smaller.

NEXT WEEK: Dire Trend #3

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Dire Trend #1: Debt

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Second in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

Dire Trend #1 – Runaway Debt: I think everyone has pretty much noticed this one, and if not, it’s because we’re collectively putting our fingers in our ears and shouting “Na na na na!” at the top of our lungs. In a nutshell, our government has run out of money, and is paying for everything on borrowed funds –as have other governments all around the world. It’s the same as when you or I put the rent on a credit card to make up for having no money in the bank. That means more money is going out than is coming in, it leads to exorbitant interest fees that make it ever harder to catch up, and sooner or later you reach your credit limit and get cut off. If that happens to you or me, we declare bankruptcy and lose our homes. If it happens to a Third World country, you end up with riots and the rise of warlords. I don’t think anyone knows what happens if it happens to the world’s premier superpower, but it seems unlikely to be good.

NEXT WEEK: Dire Trend #2

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | | Comments (0)

I’m bright, talented, hardworking, well-educated and have good social skills. Why can’t I find a job? After I graduated from college I worked for about two years for a small company, but they went under over a year ago. Since then I’ve been pounding the pavement with no results. I couldn’t even land a retail job I’m overqualified for. What the [CENSORED] is going on?*

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Dear Jobless,

In the smaller picture, you may be doing something wrong –looking for the wrong kinds of opportunities, not projecting a professional image, showing up for your job interview with spinach in your teeth –something that can be fixed. It’s quite probable there are specific practical steps you can take that would lead you to finding and obtaining a job you would be very happy with, at a nice salary, with friendly, cheerful coworkers. That’s all possible in the smaller picture.

This is a philosophy column, however, and the big picture has less to do with your brightness, your talents, your work ethic, your education, or your ability to carry on a conversation and chew gum at the same time, and more to do with the impending –some would say ongoing –collapse of our society’s economic system.

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on television, but there are three current trends that require neither a Harvard degree nor a psychic sixth sense to read as warnings of dire consequences ahead. Understanding them might just be your last best chance at a brighter future.

NEXT WEEK: Dire Trend # 1

Filed in The Economy, Yes and Other Answers | Tagged | Comments (0)

Kitoba.Com Relaunch

Thursday, July 21, 2011

From this point moving forward, the goal of this blog is to provide cogent, practical answers to some of the biggest problems facing humanity, and to provide those in easily digested, bite-sized pieces.

Starting next week will be a new series of blog entries around the subject of how to fix the global economic crisis. We’ll also look at the question of how to put an end to war, how to save the environment, and how to fix education.

NOTE: You may notice that this site has a lengthy archive for a “new” blog. The archive includes selections from my previous websites, most notably my essays “Reconstructivist Art” and “Jedi Philosophy,” as well as the majority of the five year run of “Internet Philosopher: Ask Me a Philosophy Question.”

NEXT WEEK: Why You Can’t Find a Job

Filed in Philosophy, Social Change | | Comments (1)

Is this statement a tautology: “If there were no opportunities there would be no crimes” ?

Thursday, November 18, 2010

It depends on how strictly you want to define the word “tautology”.

A) FORMAL: If you wanted to evaluate it this statement as a formal tautology you would have to rewrite it as a formal statement first. In the form

“IF NOT a THEN NOT b”
(a=opportunities, b=crimes)
it is not a tautology, but in the form

“IF NOT a THEN NOT (a AND b)”
(a=opportunities, b=actions and opportunities + actions=crimes)

it is a tautology, because no possible assignment of a and b makes the statement as a whole false.

B) RHETORICAL
Although, taken literally, it seems to verge on a tautology in a rhetorical sense, you could reasonably argue that it functions rhetorically as a stand-in for the substantive claim “preventing opportunities is the best way to prevent crimes”.

Filed in Logic, Questions | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

who is the philosopher that said a real philosopher are the ones that question?

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

You are probably thinking of Socrates. To be exact, he said that the wiser man is the one who knows he knows nothing rather than the person who thinks he knows something (but does not). However, the underlying idea is the same. Socrates is also famous for developing a method of practicing philosophy that consists only of questions without answers (the Socratic Method).

Filed in Philosophers, Questions | Tagged | Comments (0)

What does Sartre mean by “Existence precedes essence?” What is essence and existence? What makes him conclude this? What further effect does this have on meaning, value, and freedom?

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Essence in this case refers to the ancient philosophical idea (most closely associated with Plato) that all things have a predefined, ideal set of characteristics. For instance, the Essence of a chair is that it has four legs, a back, and people sit on it.

However, not everything matches its Essence. You might have a chair with three legs, or a broken back, or that no one sits on. The actual details of a particular chair make up its Existence.

The idea that Existence precedes Essence is that –for human beings –there is no predefined pattern that we must fit into. We live our lives, and that in turn defines what we truly are, not any idealized set of characteristics. This idea is the heart of Sartre’s version of Existentialism.

The implications are that we must create our own meaning, place our own value on our acts, and that our individual freedom is absolute and unbounded.

As a side note, Sartre, although an atheist, gave what I consider to be one of the best ever descriptions of God, as the “Union of Existence and Essence”, meaning that God is the full existential realization of every perfect, ideal or essential attribute of God. Sartre, of course, described that as an impossibility, but it is also a good description of what a believer believes God to be.

Filed in Questions | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

HI THERE..when we say time doesnt have any meaning in the life after death so we are living here and there now!how can it be possible?what happened to our soul in that case?and whataya think about the events we see from future?there are some connection between our soul in here and other life?

Monday, September 20, 2010

I can’t give any definitive answer to this question, but I can offer you a portrait of a situation that might be analogous. Picture yourself as a character in a book. Time only has meaning for you, the character, during the narrative of the story, which represents your life on earth. However, outside of the book you, the character also exist in the mind of the author. You were in the mind or the author before the book was written, while it was being written, and after it was finished. And although you experience your life as a series of chronological events, that perspective is only valid from within the story –from outside of the story, your life exists as a timeless whole, although it can only be experienced chronologically.

Filed in Questions | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Reconstructivist Art: American Born Chinese

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese as an example of Reconstructivist Art.

American Born Chinese centers around what at first seem like three very different narratives.  The first is a superhero-themed retelling of a beloved classic tale from Chinese mythology, the story of the kung-fu practicing Monkey King.  The second is a realistic, contemporary story about a young Asian American boy, and his struggles to fit in at an almost wholly white school.  The third and final narrative is a sitcom about a white boy named Danny, and the mischief caused in his life by the yearly visits of his cousin “Chin-Kee”, a walking conglomeration of every possible offensive stereotype about Asians.  What makes the work a tour de force, however, is the way Yang swiftly, unexpectedly and yet credibly brings together the three narratives at the end, revealing them to be linked not merely thematically but also as facets of a single unifed storyline.

  1. Nod to Artifice:  Although the cartoon format is highly contrived to begin with, Yang further heightens the sense of artifice with the framing device for his third narrative, which is presented as an American sitcom, complete with an intrusive laugh track.
  2. Iconic and Transcontexual Elements:  The most notable examples of this are the Monkey King, an icon of traditional Chinese myth transposed to a number of alien settings throughout the book, and his counterpart Chin-Kee, a montrous being uniting a host of iconically offensive elements.  Other, less prominent icons include the herbalist’s wife, who represents the archetypal figure of the wise but sinister old woman, and a wide variety of pop culture references and icons, including Transformer toys, a high school named after a racially insensitive cartoonist, a reference to American Idol non-singer William Hung, and a cartoon representation of a popular You Tube video featuring two young Asian lip-synchers.
  3. Classic Structure:  Although Yang’s triple narrative structure is nothing if not innovative and unique, the three narratives considered separately all have familiar structures –the first story is patterned after the classic myth it borrows from, the second has elements of a teenage romantic comedy, and the last is a parody of a typical sitcom episode.  In addition, the larger story arc can be considered as having a traditional three act structure, with the caveat that all three acts are presented simultaneously.
  4. Moments of Genuine Emotion and Significance:  Stripped of its trappings, the heart of “ABC” is a starkly honest story that will be both familiar and relatable to anyone who has ever sacrificed some portion of his or her identity in order to fit in –which is to say, everyone.
Filed in Comics and Graphic Novels, Identity, Literature, Popular Culture, Reconstructivist Art | | Comments (1)