Cosmos Café: Democracy.Earth White Paper [2/13]

I think I’m understanding your questions. We have a generation “short” and “not short”, Like it and not like it, the world in which everything is decided by a thumb movement. The important thing is that we can pretend to be intelligent by judging quickly and living in an apparent democracy because we can judge. Deciding quickly became synonymous with judging. Deciding everything by plebiscite became synonymous with voting. I think the Black Mirror series of Netflix has sometimes dealt with this issue.

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@johnnydavis54 The Korean German philosopher in his main works makes a diagnosis of the contemporaneity saying that we are a sick society. We have symptoms coming from a high positivity and the “neoliberal market” where the man happens to be fruit of the excess of positivity, of performance, of exercises and competition. This is making society sick. No wonder the evil of the twentieth century is anxiety and depression. In contemporary society in all places a competition syndrome is acquired. At work, at leisure, or in mental rigging. This leads to a high positivity that creates a vortex and is internalized in man by altering its functioning. Therefore, the man in this environment is giving way through fatigue, of the excess of performance culminating in a high positivity. For him, we are in the era of “positivity infarctions” caused by stress, which results in the proliferation of things like Hyperactivity Disorder (TDAH), Borderline Personality Disorder (TPL) and Burnout Syndrome (SB). It is these evils that determine the pathological landscape of the early twenty-first century, against which no immunization is possible. Thus, the immunization society, in which the metaphors were warriors, that is, the defense of the organism in the face of foreign and foreign enemies, remained behind in the twentieth century (I personally disagree in that point). It would even be interesting, he thinks, to reintroduce some negativity into our society. We would have to rebuild rest, not as passivity, but as a capacity to get out of the dumb scheme of active life in the molds of computerized life, to a resumption of the capacity for contemplation, the demand for true philosophy. Byung also says that machines and computers are stupid, just because they do not know and cannot stop. They cannot stop an action they continue incessantly. Paradoxically, in a way, they were meant to have an end - an interruption: the so-called programmed obsolescence.
Exhaustion is not only about the positivization of a “neoliberal” society focused on performance, but also on a sameness that is done without alterity, but effectively as the equals, since the other does not exist anymore. Man is no longer distinguished. He is different, but a different one that is the same. A diversity different, but equal, from those many who are comparable. The man here is getting tired of himself.

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Our contemporary society is the lightness, the relief and the anti-gravitational movement that takes us up. In it, here is a figure I have dealt with before: that of the masters and coaches - the Coach and Personal Trainer. Gurus who command what to do, what to read, what to research, what to eat, what to train. For Sloterdijk culture is a system of dressage and in it goes the man. It is also useful to us when we see ourselves in Debord’s “society of spectacle” as a world whose content is the practice, the exercise, the conduct of asceticism stripped of any religious background, we begin to accept the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk and that he is right in saying that where we look for the man we will only find acrobats. Only those who train, that is, all of us, are human. The man is the one who practices his practice to do better what he has already done. It is not a matter of noticing a certain performative character of human life, but of noticing performance as any content that fills us as human (physical, material, mental and spiritual) with creations of immune-immune systems.
“Nobody has time for an entire generation anymore,” says Sloterdijk in an interview. We will live without interruption. A society of non-interruption. It would take a “stop in time” or the famous epoché of Husserl. Noninterruption requires a form whatever it may be in the form of performance. It all depends on a deep work which, as Sloterdijk says, is the substitution of Hannah Arendt’s contemplative (Cartesian subject-object) life for Hannah Arendt’s active life, but all of it subjected to the real life, the performative life.
Husserl wants to capture the structure of the world’s natural point of view - in its phenomenology. So, either the “phenomenological reduction” or the suspension of beliefs, which in Greek is epoché (sectioning a moment, an epoch, and holding it suspended). It is a matter of putting the whole experience in brackets and describing it by suspending assumptions and assumptions about that experience. It would be like a sort of procedure to get the thing itself. She wants what appears. And it does everything to clear the pre-appearances.
It would be like peeling an onion, removing its layers of impregnation whether it be cultural, semantic or otherwise. For example: a tree. You already see that thing, the tree with the language. It is already “contaminated” with culture because the word tree already brings several ramifications out of the thing and its first appearance. We also have the tree as science presents us. Botany (stem, leaf, roots and etc.) or something in the scope of Ecology. It is these barks that bind that must be cleaned of the object. To seek the “pure phenomenon” even if you cannot. If you try then, pick up the tree like an almost tree - its appear like tree. Sloterdijk works this in the book “Apparent death in thought” just by making a suspension of picking up a period, time or theme and freezing it there to philosophize yes. It was the modern creation of philosophical practice, a vision of the Academy that was the forerunner of this posture that always wanted to create a place of culture, but far from the practice of other places also involved with the most elaborate culture and the discussion about knowledge, such as forums, museums , arenas, parliaments and editorials Epoché, or the “catch an era” or the “put in parentheses” an occurrence, or “circumscribe a period” in order to raise it out of judgment and conclusions; this was a way of doing theory by theory without concern for conclusions or purposes other than the very purpose of continuing to investigate continuously. It would almost take something to a non-place.
I believe your questions may be very interesting, and I believe Sartre would be well regarded in the book Between Four Walls and The Nausea. In the first book one of the characters speaks that they are in hell and that they would be doomed to life without interruption because that would be a punishment and a sacrifice. Hence: “the hell is the others”. The character gradually realized that he had no eyelids and could not blink, because life would be fated without interruption. Blinking and closing the eyes would create an interruption in the permanent where the world disappears even for a short time. It would be a relief even if for a few seconds it disappears and reappears. In the second book we have a hero sitting in the park in front of a tree. He sees its enormous root and realizes that there is a clump of existence, a menacing bulge of existence, which may be black, pasty, knotty, melted, monstrous, slimy, smelly. The “crisis of consciousness” is the breaking of any epoché, for it shows the being of the tree seen as that which erupts in its excess, in its maximum contingency. All that the root shows are aspects of its facade, its attributes, and the root does not allow itself to be captured by its essence. It just exists. It’s there. In its existence the root breaks with the “phenomenological reduction,” since it is seen from various angles and names and impressions without being defined by any separately or by their whole, and then causes the “crisis of consciousness.” The consciousness that is always referential tries to grasp. Contingency causes nausea. It is the fear that each of us does not really have any reason to exist. The being of the tree shows itself. And the Being of the Self shows itself as without reason or justification. The word existence, then, appears as not evoking any abstract category that can explain it, as would be the case in the epoché, and thus existence opens to nothingness. The hero of Sartre tries to explain the root by its size or function or color, but soon discovers that speaking of these attributes is not properly speaking of the root, but of things that do not exist. Note then that essence is a simple idea that hides existence. The feeling of nausea is the product of colors, tastes, smells that, in short, are not real. In addition, nausea becomes explicit when he notes that essence is what people attribute to things exactly to supply a reason for existence. There is no reason for existence, which exists only as an accident. Existence is a gift. At that time, the hero then understands what bothers him, which is nausea. It is the meaning of their existence. You realize how much people do not confront their very existence, but they tend to shy away from it. No one faces your nothingness.

In a further view of pragmatism, I fear that seeing it does not aim at particular results. He has no dogmas or doctrines, save his method. Pragmatism came exactly with this proposal: let’s stop thinking that the world must be made of a substance. It can be accepted as a variable set of relations. Pragmatism is during the most diverse theories as a hallway of a hotel. The hallway has several doors that are bedrooms. In one of them there may be someone writing a book on atheism, the other one may be praying for faith and strength, another may be investigating the human genome, another may be writing about metaphysics. All these rooms open onto the corridor and everyone must necessarily pass the corridor if they wish to have a practical way of getting in and out of their respective rooms. If we take Pragmatism and see that it does not mean how the world should be or talk about metaphysics, but rather to have a practical consequence in the world of putting an end to questions. For example, if I tell my mother I have a headache and she gives me a pill. I take the pill without question, without hesitation and I believe I will be well. Because I believe the remedy will heal me and because I trust my mother would not give me another remedy by mistake. That would be dealing with every day and mundane situations that can generate a kind of solidarity. Or even when the mother says that “everything will be fine” when I am a baby. I feel comforted, less suspicious and less fearful, though there is no guarantee that this promise will be fulfilled. It’s a way for us to stay in the world and have some “control” over contingencies. Belief would be almost something ontological. Would “truth” work as a placebo? No, the truth works. Cannot you experience it? The word truth is important. Really important. If you say, “this will heal me, heal others” and get in return, “it’s true”, do you feel falsely stimulated? Or if you go on a diet hoping that in the future you will be healthier and that diseases can pass you by without harming you. You really can believe it. It is uninhibited, even if the contingencies hit you in the future.

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I will have to read this guy. From your summary of his views he sounds interesting. I am out of touch with the techno craze myself. I sense that there will be no quick fixes brought about by computers. But I would say it is not the computers that are stupid but the people who think the computers are smart that are stupid.

You mention that you disagree with him on one point. Is there anything else about that one point of disagreement?

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I like this metaphor of the Grand Hotel of Pragmatism. Very well said. I recall that James said most people have a belief in the beliefs that other people believe in. That is what faith is. Faith is like a tattered security blanket that the child drags around the hotel lobby, the teddy bear he hugs to his chest and when he grows up he gets a laptop to put in his brief case and hurry from meeting to meeting in the Grand Hotel which is located at the edge of a mountain. I imagine the hotel has a spectacular view and that it is near a big precipice. Earthquakes are frequent. We can feel an occasional rumble.

Yes…I think I get the picture…many relationships can emerge…when the guests start talking to the staff.

A metaphor happens when you can draw a picture of it. I sense a picture arising and can also feel there are relationships between the different rooms, and that there are different rooms with different kinds of wall paper and different voices coming from each room, many conversations happening all at once. There is also a bar downstairs and an auditorium for conferences. I am starting to like this Grand Hotel.

Thanks, Eduardo, for the Grand Tour of the thinkers that you are thinking about and that you bring them to our symposium. I sense that you really are motivated to develop the many themes that you are working with and hope you will continue to share your insights and develop the metaphors for our collaborative mind . May the force be with you!

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We have much to learn from you. It is now required that you frequently post at least 100 lines :wink: Someone here will benefit from your words, whether an incomplete passionate flurry of ideas or an in depth study.

Sociedade do Cansaço or The Burnout Society (and your critical analysis of Han’s work) articulates ideas expressed here in other discussions. I am working with these ideas (changing the way we see work/retirement to promote healthy, slow exercise of the mind and body; the erasure of meaning via technological removal of the stories shared by families, generations, elders; allowing our mothers to give us the medicines of their generation rather than seeking techno-cure-alls; etc.) and would love to see you and others continue to explore.

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Here is an essay which I think makes a good case the kind of networks that we’re working on through such projects as Democracy.Earth and Cosmos not only should but could win out in the end.

While decentralized projects start out half-baked, ultimately we can offer greater incentives to developers (or creatives) and end users, who over time come to see the benefits of openness, transparency, and collective control as the closed-system dynamics of centralized platforms become more problematic.

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Separating yourself and creating your own immune field is a rule in Sloterdijk. The present world problem is not to create a great human society without walls. What we are looking for today is the maintenance of our work of “cell reproduction” at all levels, a mechanism of self-transport, as the bubbles soon see globes, so that our immune spheres have their membranes according to a system of gates that can maintain the level of immunization, without it becoming a complete barrier, a type of cage or a closed chamber. A bubble can not be certain to be rigid. It can not be a chamber in a kind of enclosure. At the beginning of Spheres I, Sloterdijk mentions a boy who is blowing bubbles. That’s it, two spheres that are one for a brief period. The air coming out of the boy’s mouth and the bubble share the same space functioning as a transport of animation. Astronauts travel to the International Space Station in capsules. All capsule and station design are made by sluice systems and hatches. The capsule and the Station are now one air-conditioned environment. This allows the crew to move. It all depends on how we build them and how the flow is. I think Byung Chu Han means that immunization does not fit today as something of the notion of antibodies, of elimination. I believe that for Sloterdijk immunization is in fact a regime of consideration of the other, but in no way what is to be expelled and eliminated.

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I came across this interesting critique of what the author calls liberal democracy. This is a broader argument that the bitcoin stuff, but I wasn’t sure if a new thread was called for. I don’t agree with all the points presented, and I feel that if the assumptions made are indeed correct, then we were in those days incredibly naive.