Dear reader,
Especially during our times it is comfortable to say that one should remain hopeful about a bright future, and remain optimistic. This is often also the attitude organisations and politicians brainwash their people with, stay positive, remain calm and hope for the best! This is dangerous I would say. However, this facade of a ‘constant improvement culture’ philosophy of positive thinking for mental health is something I do not promote on this website. Always having to remain positive is a sweet lie to sell to oneself and others, and one I often catch myself with as well, since who can really climb out of their iron cage, look past their ivory towers and expand upon their habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) without showing some negativity? The habitus explained from a general systems theory perspective can be described as follows;
My thesis so far; ‘A social field of power by which the contextual nature you are born into nor are conditioned to work in from a sociotechnical perspective can be called your habitus; your field of operation, a structure in which you make informed decisions.’
Sometimes it is key to just be depressed as hell when one feels like that, and just go with that vibe for a while and gravitate towards and draw out the brightest versions of themselves. Just being with negative emotions, especially during a lock down or world war, of which the horizon is consistently stretched out without a clear endpoint, can be very unsettling on ones mental makeup or sol to deal with every day. Therefore, I like to embrace the attitude I saw and experienced in Mexico. Since it seemed there is more political unrest without the advanced well fare system that exists in The Netherlands while keeping the social fabric alive. Therefore, the people rely more on each other and on building close net local network communities by which they can not only go through a new day, but maybe even enjoy it while having an eye out for each other.
Doesn’t that sound like a paradise, oh what is wise? Or do we wanna play some dice? Wishful thinking, good faith and sticking ones hand in the sand, might not bring us those promised lands? So what do you intuit, feel, think and act above these matters? What about those ladders? Bringing us to downfall, placed against the wrong wall?
This mindset is one that can be learned from I think, rather than having ‘hope’ that the government, god or any other ‘deus ex machina’ plot twister will fix things in the narrative of the human story. The weight of the collective challenge should be felt I guess in the sense that there are some stressing challenges to be dealt with. Challenges, of which some of them, I have been aiming to describe for the past 7 years when I launched this website in ZhengZhou in mainland China while shaking the hands of the local hero Mr. Sun and looking a person like that deeply in the eyes was definitely thrilling. It is not without saying that a handshake could be just a few shakes away from those in false power. Due to the build up of what could be paralleled to the ongoing theme of a new cold war turning more proxy and hot by the day, I thought it could maybe someday become in use to find ways to mediate the apparent differences between the so named West and East divisions, black, and yellow. Funny side fact on my daily bike trips is that I saw a small bird with black and yellow colours? How rare, since it used to be more common to smash them apart, causing a greater calamity in the making? I visited this place during my internship abroad China and spent like three weeks in this area in which the entrepreneur seeking advice was probably the largest influence and philanthropist around that area probably, mr. Sun, following truthfully in Mao’s footsteps using philanthropy ultimately with a hidden agenda. However, this time period was also the period I started this blog. So I have interesting memories from that time to experience rural and city Chinese culture. Honestly mind bobbling to feel a place like that. A culture which has to be felt, lived and perhaps understood if diplomatic ties are wished to be strengthened I think. Could not be more relevant revisiting this post in 2022 if I may say! Obviously many so called experts or journalists have not even been to China and if they go, they surely did not went the way I did or that the only other Westerner that was in town xd. Waking up doing routinised morning drills for the great leader is not something I bend towards, or one must be a great actor. However, as the saying goes, how the root is bend so the tree will grow. Being born in such areas must be troublesome, however, is something that had to be loved. I could have stayed, working my way up in the most ambitious construction company I have ever seen, have an insider life, skate and parkour in ghost towns in your free time besides working 14+ hours clockwork is all just family life, taking some hits for the team. Besides the obvious culture shock one can get and have to deal with it, seeing it from a xenoanthropologist perspective, could this truly be a way perhaps of bridging seemingly opposing worldviews into a collaborative future rather then throwing those last sticks? By the sheer experience of exchange students that travel for the sake of travel? This is why you got to learn how to love certain things in life, cause along the way you might end up in a place which is so horrific for an outsider, that it only makes sense to become an insider and learn from one another to even begin a dialogue. It is, therefore, extremely hard if not impossible to escape ones habitus, so it is to be an individual traveller among a collective as it is to be a collective among those strange individuals. For them buzzy bees;
The virtue of being a cliffhanger – The concept within a concept (keesbergsol.nl)
Hope in that sense can not be valid if reality does not turn out to be what was hoped for. Like being cut off from carbon fuels, testing people’s will to choose a bright future or not, show us what you got kinda thing? Therefore, there is a key difference between -faith and +verification of ones spiritual ideal world(MT). With using these ‘opposing’ life scenarios of which faith is in this sense useless and verification is not. When one can validate certain life experiences by the physical practical uses of ‘photographing’ the inner and outer web of reality itself. This is how one can ultimately create a whole ‘castle’ of stored memories about pretty much anything that can be experienced if one is aware and fully present every moment. Even if the memories are just a subjective truth or experience of reality. Therefore, there exist subjective truths and absolute objective truths that can be applied more universally among different kinds of disciplines at once while subjective truths only go as far as the one experiencing them holds unto it. For example, someone who dies and really believes in a hell might experience their own made up version of this hell(MT) The key then is to be able to try to grasp or understand the way others see, feel and completely experience their inner as well as outer realities, and anything which is in between as well then off course following the concept of life, neutrality and death. Which makes geometrically speaking more sense as well that anything which is described in mythology for example is marked by trickster figures who stand in between those two ‘opposing’ forces in the sense that everyday we experience a little bit of both extremes. The number three also makes sense when traditionally speaking a child is born, the child is then the neutral force in between the man and woman giving birth to that child. So that could be a good example that in between life and death, there is a certain stage to be experienced which can be called neutrality due to neither feeling alive nor dead, hence the silhouette with a heart maybe balances out the more analytical approach I try to convey in this current article –> The silhouette with a heart – The concept within a concept (keesbergsol.nl)
So rather then sticking with false hope and faith, why not change things around by trying to seek and understand what makes others estranged from ones mental model of looking at once own world. To come to such a mutual mental understanding can be one of the keys in finding harmony within diversity. So by making interesting work with the above philosophical differences between what is prescribed and how different certain realities can be, then perhaps opposing parties could come to an arrangement to begin with. See the octagons;
When an individual or group is guided by the force of faith, then the socioeconomic system will probably collapse due to the malfunction within the overarching hierarchy of systems that make up the belief systems of societies. This could be called in system theory 1. ‘downward causation or religious manipulation opposed to influencing’ rather then 2. ‘bottom up causation or grassroots passive-aggressive uprising or pure rebellion’ (the different possible scenarios by which there exist societal expressions of these different forces can be categorised multi-fold of which example 1. and 2. is just limited. Why this is the way it is, is, I think, in the sense that the supra-systems are ‘higher’ in the hierarchical chain of command by which the socioeconomic systems can be just as corrupt as the police officer can be during martial law. This can be seen as more of a mental ‘mind-screw’ by which individuals and groups can be manipulated on a highly karmic level (MT) as opposed to a milder type of karma like disrupting the flow of time in missing an appointment or whatever, the other party would then probably feel inclined to dish you at the next appointment or let you wait a little longer then usual (MT). So the cause of the negative externalities is then mostly a challenge within the consciousness of the people and how that collective state of mind is crafting the physical realities we daily life and navigate in. Thereby saying shortly that what we might lack of today is not a shortage of energy or food as so far yet, but mostly a fractured and depleted inner state which is reflected through the state of the planet. Therefore, the current geopolitical conflicts only sets in motion the bigger challenge humanity as a whole has to face in eventually finding the right relationship with the planet and ultimately cosmos at large. This dials back into older posts about first finding the right relationship with oneself, before setting out to the we and all, and beyond. So either, as a collective, we use these pivotal moments to reinvent and emerge or we fall in the same boring narratives of the rise and fall of human civilisations in human history, only remaining to be a stamp of time on a rock in space.
Within that lays the power for a bright future as well. Cause it means that what we do on a daily base matters, the combined actions of all agents is what makes it great or fall. So herein I want to close this article for now, since I want to link this perhaps to some ‘activity theory’ which I have to revisit first.
‘That the arrow of ‘doom’ might be pulled into a trajectory of a bright future for all’ – Bashar
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Cheers,
Kees
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