Tag: anti-system

Of men and machines: Is this an opportunity to reach a higher human potential?

September 28th, 2022
A.I Generated Concept Art For: “Human and A.I shaping the future together”

Time for random reflections folks, isn’t it exciting to be able to just stop one’s routines and pre-defined action sets and just sit down and think? Man, this is why I love writing, it’s like taking a shovel and starting digging treasures inside of your own mind and soul, maybe they’ve been ignored for years, maybe disguised in unpleasant containers, but they’re precious if you pay enough attention.

One of the big opportunities I’ve experienced in the last 3 years of self-exploration, is being able to observe my own beliefs and presuppositions from above as if participating from an external consciousness. It’s not easy, as humans our self-preservation and to a degree, our sanity demands a certain structure from us, a certain set of immutable or core beliefs that would provide a sense of identity but also a frame of reference for measuring the world around us and gather meaning from it. And so I’ve come to understand there are two extremes I want to avoid at a personal level:
- The dogmatism that incarcerates: I avoid dogmatic positions like the plague. One thing you can expect to increase in my content is a challenge to ideology and dogma, I consider myself a free spirit and I hate to observe the prisons people end up bearing in order to be accepted by a certain group or even to be able to accept themselves. That’s also why I don’t think many people will ultimately grasp me, I will reason against your beliefs but then another I will support a subset of them, on a case-by-case basis; a mind that’s interested in learning the truth needs to allow enough room to grow and admit to past and present severe misconceptions. As you age, maintaining this attitude requires a very intentional decision.
- The fluidity that renders you shapeless: Well that’s every bit as dangerous as the former; when everything’s true, nothing is. It’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to offend others by having solid positions on topics that cause controversy, it’s OK to change your mind if deep inside you know your adversary has won the argument. But absolute fluidity makes you very easy to deal with, deceive, and manipulate; it’s interesting, just as I can create propaganda tailored to the needs of a very dogmatic type of person with a set of well-known beliefs, I can also device means to confuse a person who’s absolutely fluid, and act in the direction I want one day, and in the opposite the next day, the person will never realize because they dread taking a confrontative position on pretty much anything.
“OK Josué, how’s this related to A. I and humans? Are you playing us or just doing very hard drugs?”

Answer: Neither, but have you seen how film directors can shoot a seemingly unnecessary scene for like two minutes straight just cause he feels like it? David Lynch, I’m talking to you!

Well, just the same, I sometimes feel I need to write something that seems unrelated but it connects directly to the topic, even if it’s not apparent.

Anti-System?

So I have been of the “anti-system” type for years and years; I didn’t see my dad much, but when I did I would always ask him about why things are the way they are, a 12-year-old talking about a system he deemed oppressive, unfair and rigged; was I wrong? Not entirely, no; a lot of that happens to be true and for some reason, it bothered me since a very early age.

I’m 35 about to turn 36 and I came to understand it will never be ideal, not even close. But there are degrees of non-ideal realities and the truth is, I wouldn’t trade myself for people who lived before our day and age; I consider myself blessed and yes, I know this doesn’t apply to all. If we were to destroy every foundation on top of which current power and economic structures rest if we were to pursue the dismembering of the evil empire piece by piece and with fierce wrath destroy the reign of injustice, how long would it take us to build something better and entirely different or even allow me to ask: could we?

These are complex questions, and idiotic ideologies will have deceitful easy answers for them, but if you consider these things carefully and honestly maybe you wouldn’t rush to set shit on fire just cause you feel it’s wrong.

I feel I’ve been a frustrated revolutionary for most of my life, but now I came to understand the value of reformation; in either case, we’ve seen both revolution and reformation happen in history with great results sometimes and dreadful results many times, but I believe in salvaging, fixing and building better things using the experience of past generations as a starting point.

I know, it’s not as exciting as destroying everything right? But have you ever seen or read about unstable regions trying to painfully define for years a struggle for power between two or more factions? Man, it’s a horrible window to look through and it will show you some of the worst of mankind; it’s never going to be perfect but it’s better if it’s relatively stable and there’s enough balance for opposing forces to introduce changes and balance.

“OK Josué, seriously: how the FUCK this related to A. I and humans?”

Answer: Because a new society is being shaped, and with it, it brings new challenges. But I would rather take a part in building it than opposing it blindly; by constructing during its early stages, and embracing change, I get an angle and perspective to help reform it later.

Back To The Future

A.I Generated Concept Art For: “Human and A.I shaping the future together” – II

Change is chaos to human psychology, it’s typically not naturally welcome, unless you’re in a horrible position, and such change promises an opportunity to turn the table around. But even so, many individuals will prefer the known evil to exploring the unknown.

And so we witness how robots are taking many jobs that used to be a human job for a fraction of the cost and double the efficiency, you see how an A.I algorithm can generate competent artwork and provide interesting interpretations of deep concepts, how expert systems can make better decisions in critical moments due to their lack of emotion, and how automation simply starts removing the repetitive tasks from our plates.

Information is at hand, education is more accessible than ever, and it is my belief that an individual living in a relatively free, democratic country can change their social and financial situation with much more easiness than in previous ages if they decide to listen to the market and acquire in-demand skills, learn to manage the money they start getting wisely and create something profitable with it: I can tell you this because it’s my own “rags to riches” story, where I’m nowhere near rich, but I live a life no generation in my family before would have dreamed of as far as opportunities and quality of living.

Now, everything in life comes at a price. I’ve paid a very expensive price in terms of time, in terms of pursuing my best potential in the things I care about the most. And such has been my conflict and paradox for many years: I love the opportunity technology has afforded me, but I want to write, I want to create music and art. So, I hated my life for a long time, not realizing that my problem was my linear vision of life and achievements and my own childish expectations that were simply impossible to fulfill because the world wasn’t as I pictured it.

Today, as I continue to build this blog, have much more flexibility in my time management at work, explore my own thoughts and talents, and build my next plans around what I want rather than what I need, I bless those years of bitter struggle.

But one obsession, one thing that the toughest years left me is this: can I help others escape their bitterness? More importantly: can I help others find their potential and get the confidence in themselves to use it? Because I can tell you step by step how I did it, but what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for all. Also, I look at my life and for the first time in my almost 36 years of existence, I feel I’m in the right place, doing the rights things, and can stop for a moment a feel grateful and satisfied; but maybe if you look at my life at this stage it’s far from enough according to your own standards. We’re all different.

But I feel that as the system we live in continues to automate the mundane, the ordinary, this provides for an opportunity which is: that humans can dedicate more to the abstract work of ideas than to the material work of surviving in nature. Could this answer my concern about giving humans the opportunity to explore their own genius at a deeper level? To have more sovereignty over the way they spend their time? To let the machines do the tedious and start competing to provide value based on their own creativity and thoughts? To become creators of new stories, realities, and solutions?

I know, that I’m not speaking about every person here; not everyone has the same motivation although I do believe that every human has the potential to create something. So in order for such a change to be inclusive, there’s really a lot of work involved, a lot of trial and error, a lot of system building, some of which has already begun, perhaps by people some us deem evil or greedy?

And this ties down to my whole story about the system, the reformation, and so on; can you think of building something with others, believing in an improvement, and raising the human potential to a new level? You’re building a system, and probably one that decades from the time you began building it will generate its own problems and will eventually be criticized and threatened by the anti-system people of that age, who happen to have valid points against what you created.

Are we doomed to run in circles continually?

Can we dispose of the rubbish we inherited but honor the hard work of those who laid the very foundations of the system we benefit from?

Food for thought, I guess.

“Food for thought” – Original A.I Concept Art
Fight Club in 3-D: The Mental Dimension – Part 1

June 19th, 2022
Yes, yes it is that time my friends, “ground-zero”! Time to fulfill the promise I made in “Welcome to Fight Club” and start my 3-layered analysis of this mind-blowing movie. I know, I know I’m overly excited, so what!

So today, I will present to you what’s probably the most obvious dimension of the movie and that is, the mental state of our friend “narrator” around which the whole movie gravitates. I feel it has to come first because it impacts and links to any other commentary on culture, or society and definitely shapes the nature of the relationships between the characters.

So if you’re a hardcore fan like me, you know saying “narrator” is just an unstable guy having an episode is a seriously simplistic understatement to the wealth and depth of the content presented to us in this story. But before you judge too hard someone who does, let me just say in their defense that the “narrator” himself defines it similarly at the end of the movie, as he attempts to explain the current situation to Marla: “You met me at a very strange time of my life…”

So what’s up with this whole “narrator” thing?

–“Sure, why don’t we start at the very core? It’s not like it’ll end the charm too soon, will it?” LOL.

There’s an artistic reason and a psychological reason, why not only me, but a lot of fans of the movie call Edward Norton’s character “narrator”; now I’m writing this to whoever’s interested this is not segmented for-fans-only, after all, Tyler is a “man of the common folk”, the “all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world” a bucket in which it seems most of us (fans ar not fans) fit equally, in his vision of things.

But, I’m getting carried away here, the more obvious reason is that the movie is narrated by the protagonist, who would occasionally address the audience directly and explain things that are happening; the other reason which I find very eccentric is that throughout the movie, this character is never actually named; moreover, there are very intentional moments in which providing the name is avoided as if Palahniuk is mocking us in our own faces, I already spoke about examples of this in the first article, but indulge me with another one I noticed recently: Narrator’s condo just burst in flames, he picks up the phone and calls Tyler, Tyler asks “who is this?” do you recall narrator’s answer?

“…we met on the airplane, we had the same suitcase? the clever guy…”

I love it, the story author’s genius allows such a transgression to conventions to carry on all throughout the story, and you don’t even care and perhaps didn’t notice it the first time. I’m mentioning Chuck Palahniuk even when I mentioned this posts will take the movie as their only foundation, because of two reasons:
1. It’s his mind that brought us this masterpiece
2. I came to understand while preparing these articles, that the movie respects a lot of the original lines as they appear in the book
Having made that meaningless clarification, I come back to the original point, besides the artistic eccentricity this entails, there’s a deeper sense to the narrator’s anonymity, it’s precisely the quality of being anonymous and seemingly devoid of an identity that triggers the whole chain of events. So keeping this guy unnamed is a perfect homage to his struggle.

“You wanna see pain?”

So what’s his struggle you ask? Well, I’m glad you ask, this is why I’m writing this entire piece, to answer that very question; in short, our beloved narrator is suffering from a severe philosophical void in his life, he’s nothing, no one, his life is meaningless and the whole world around him is soaked in the same banality, life doesn’t make any sense at all and he’s just too aware of it for his own benefit. But here’s the worst part of the curse: while he’s aware of the condition and suffering from it intensely, he’s powerless, there’s nothing he can do to change the condition of his own life, and don’t even think the world around him.

Now, this manifests in different, more visible symptoms we learn about throughout the movie, insomnia being the key problem in the opening act, yet obviously surrounded by a deep dark depression appropriate to his existential suffering.

“everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy…”, – is this a wink to the NIN song?

As it usually happens, he’s annoyed by the symptom and he’s not fully aware of the dimension of what’s going on inside his mind and soul (can’t really judge him, it’s so hard sometimes, isn’t it?), so he goes and sees the doctor about insomnia. And here’s where the title of this section gets his name, the doctor really reacts with the apathy and mockery ordinary people of our society usually reacts to mental and emotional suffering: “that’s nothing, you need to do some exercise and sleep better”; as narrator replies “I’m in pain”, the good doctor replies:

“”You wanna see pain? Swing by First Methodist Tuesday night. See guys with testicular cancer. That’s pain…”

As an omen of what’s being triggered here, we see the first “subliminal” apparition of Tyler behind the doctor in a glimpse of a second, right in this scene. Now the big turning point here is, where most people would have taken the doctor’s suggestion for what it was: a rhetorical mockery of his patient’s complaint, our narrator actually decides to go to the testicular cancer group. A fateful decision.

Losing All Hope Was Freedom

You think you’ve seen it all in movies until you find yourself watching a guy becoming addicted to support groups, how crazier does it get? – A lot more.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, let me ask you, dear reader, have you ever been in a real-life support group? Lucky you, who can answer without anyone else knowing, I can tell you that I have. Support groups can be a true blessing, and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending them to people who are struggling with addiction, disease, and other conditions; now, they do have their quirks of course, like anything, and such quirks make them a fertile ground for humor.

Now back to our character here, support groups aren’t necessarily anyone’s first choice for relief or socializing, they’re meant to help people undergoing very specific and tough situations. And so we can tell from the whole catalog Marla and the narrator start arguing about, negotiating which one each of them will keep.

Narrator: “What do you want?”
Marla: “I’ll take the parasites”
Narrator: “You can’t have both parasites, but why don’t you take the blood parasites?”

So how is it that our tormented friend is able to recover his ability to sleep and enter a place of “peace” while engaging in these activities? Well, he explains it to us rather philosophically: “losing all hope was freedom”.

I find it very concerning, and very telling of the deficiencies in our society to address mental health properly, that a person with a clear pathology needs to find shelter among people with unrelated terminal illnesses or irreversible conditions. His expanded explanation could be: “by surrounding myself with people coping with loss, people who are hopeless about their condition I also feel like I can let go of any need to find a meaning, a reason, a motivation, an expectation from life; I can imitate that state of hopelessness and thus, let go of my anxiety and find it easier to live”.

That’s a primary, very compelling reason for him to become addicted to support groups; and isn’t just a few steps away from suicide? Think about it, when the proximity of death, and the thought process to accept it seems preferable to the anguish of dealing with life, I’d say we’re talking about rather deep depression. Now, interestingly enough, he’s not hopeless regardless of how he’d like to think he is, if he was hopeless he wouldn’t be in such a conflict, he wouldn’t be seeking to feel free, alive, and listened-to among the people in support groups. So there’s also that tension and contradiction, which is very natural and which leads to the next stages of his crisis.

But then, when relief seemed to be at hand:

“Slide…”

Why? Why is Marla such a terrible presence in the support groups? It doesn’t have anything to do with being exposed, she’s also a tourist and doesn’t want to be exposed either; no, the problem is that she’s a mirror to him, she’s another desperate, sunk-in-darkness no one who’s constantly reminding him that he’s not really terminally ill, he’s not in acceptance of death, he’s a faker who’s borrowing from other’s the relief he can’t permanently find for his own condition. This sweet relief is now exposed as fake and temporary, doomed to fail.

In spite of the efforts to negotiate a way out, by getting rid of Marla and distributing attendance to support groups between each other, insomnia returns, and his small existential oasis is now invaded and ruined, by someone perhaps too similar to himself (which is something he would deny and despise, of course). There’s yet another subliminal omen of how Tyler’s appearance is close, right after confronting Marla for the first time (found this cool gif version of subliminal Tylers, the last one is the one I’m referring to here):

Tyler’s subliminal appearances are an amazing symbol of the disturbance in our narrator’s mind and how throughout the beginning of his crisis, an alter ego is taking shape.

A semi-conclusion

Honestly, it’s just that this post is getting way too long, and I will need to split it into parts. But I think this is a great moment to stop, because Tyler’s official introduction into the story is what’s next, and this is really the turning point; so thanks for reading me, and stay tuned for part 2 of “Fight Club in 3-D: The Mental Dimension”.