Big Number Five for George

Alright, Sunday night, of course I planned on cranking out a few more blog posts before the weekend . . . I never could have guessed that I would put that off.

I want to give a lil shout out to Iris-I feel a kind of bad pushin your blog post back so it's not the final thing people remember from this class blog, it seemed like it was pretty heartfelt.

On top of that it would be pretty embarassing if this post didn't count towards my total word count. Actually, maybe it wouldn't really be that embarassing, it would just kind of suck. Oh well, I'm going to comment on Brave New World and 1984.

Brave New World was just hilarious and about as much commentary as there needs to be on Utopia in my opinion. Thinking that we can "design" a perfect world is just outrageous. The whole of Aldous Huxley's book was just completely making fun of their bokanovskified world. It just reminds me so much of the US these days, I can't really speak for the rest of the world. We think we are making so much progress and then I read this grade A stuff from Huxley and I definitely cracked up out loud quite a few times. He was pretty much spot on. The reservation seemed like the way people around here think of tribes or something. We just go visit to get a little taste of what their world is like, but after a week we just can't stand it any longer, so we hop back on a plane and fly back.

I didn't really like the Soma aspect of Brave New World, just because I can't really think of how exactly it relates to our world today. I guess you could argue that it is kind of like people just thinking it is their birthright to take anti-depressants for all of their terrible stress, anxiety, and depression caused by our daily lives. Then again, I guess even Frederick is pretty stressful. I just hate being around giant groups of people, definitely stresses me out. Or maybe Soma relates more to people drinking alcohol to try and "ease the pain." Going out to bars on weekends does seem like it is the highlight of a good amount of people's lives, so I guess this could be a modern day representation of Soma.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of modern day Soma is weed. You know, everyone just "chillin' out" with their "magic herb". The thing is, as "cool" as it is for a chill ass teacher to be a big pothead, I really just don't think an overwhelming amount of people smoke weed. Most people probably realize that it stopped being the hip thing to do after about the age of 14. I do wish weed would get legalized though, just so people wouldn't think it's cool anymore and maybe even less people would smoke.

Making my way back to the actual book, the ending ruled. When John just went out to live on his own in solitude I was like, "hell yeah, that's exactly how I've been wanting to live lately." Just growing your own food and not really having to worry about much else. But of course that didn't last long, everyone just couldn't leave the man on his own so he just had to get out of there the only way he knew how, by killing himself.

1984 was too corny for me, man. George Orwell just took his fake, unbelievable world way too seriously. The things that made me cringe the most were "The Book" and Winston's whole ordeal with O'Brien at the end of the book when O'Brien was trying to convince him that the though police control all memories or that the things he "knows" are wrong. In The Book it just seemed like Orwell was trying to make some profound insight into human nature and the way different countries interact, it all just seemed pretty lame to me. To be fair though, maybe he was making more of a worthy point that I didn't really catch; I will admit, I wasn't paying all that much attention during that part.

So then we had O'brien's whole controlling history speal...alright this book was miserable I'm just going to stop writing about it.

For my closing thoughts I'd like to offer an overall outline to my utopia:

-No guns, bombs, or any stuff like that. This stuff is all just terrible, we're pretty much screwed because it has already been invented and there's not much we can do now besides restrict them with laws enforced by people with more guns.

-No cars. Of course.

-As few laws as possible.

-Tons of awesome dirt running trails that last for hundreds of miles.

I thought this blog was a pretty sweet idea. Even though I didn't take advantage of it as much as I should, writing out your thoughts is a lot easier than trying to concisely express what you want to say in class.

Past the Finish Line

A little behind schedule here, but I would like to discuss my favorite points about the book Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This book brings a question to my mind: are we attempting to “progress” as a society in an attempt to reach a certain end? Or are we simply innovating for the sake of doing something different? The passage that brings these questions to mind is this:

“The years of pioneering lay far behind them. Theirs was a civilization in which the initial difficulties had long since been overcome. The untroubled peace, the unmeasured plenty, the steady health, the large good will and smooth management which ordered everything, left nothing to overcome. It was like a pleasant family in an old established, perfectly run country place.”

Terry had problems with the fact that a society could exist in these types of conditions.

“Life is a struggle, has to be . . . if there is no struggle, there is no life-that’s all.”

I feel like most people these days pretty much agree with Terry. Nobody seems to be satisfied with a steady life in which their needs are perfectly met. I think that this is a problem and will continue to cause turmoil throughout the world. The final product seems like it was about 20 years ago to me.

The only outlook many people have for the future is technology. Evidence for this in all of the utopian/dystopian films we have watched in class recently. The main features include genetically perfected children and Tom Cruise throwing around data in the air with his light up magic gloves. As far as I can tell, people won’t be satisfied until doctors are able to implant metal hearts in their chests and brains in their heads so that they can be immortal. But even then I’m sure people wouldn’t be satisfied.

Obviously I’m pretty anti-technology and I’m sure that’s getting real old, real quick for people who actually read my blogs. Some people probably even think that hating technology is corny and unoriginal. I’ll tell you what’s corny though: zooming around in a “smart” six foot long metal box on wheels, scrolling through all of your social websites on your touch screen iphone that has a cracked screen . . . oh wait! Don’t forget to listen to the digital voice coming out of your Garmin telling you where to turn next because you can’t read the 20 foot green signs that tell you where to go-thanks, but I’ll stick with my map. I can see it now, one day I’ll be driving down the highway and notice that there are no more road signs. They will all have been taken down overnight because there will be a GPS built into every single car!

Think about the major “innovations” and technological progressions that have taken place in the past decade. Two that immediately come to mind are Google and Facebook. First I’ll take a look at Google. Let’s see, pretty much anything that interests you can be accessed in about three seconds by just “googling” it! I cannot even begin to try and count the number of tests that I have done zero amount of reading for, paid no attention in class, “googled” everything the night before and got a solid B+ on. It doesn’t help me learn; in fact I retain pretty much nothing when I try to learn things this way. Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. Now that’s a dream come true.

Man, I get fired up just thinking about Facebook. Never in my life will I support something so utterly useless and devastating to the world that I live in. The people who sit on Facebook all day are the same ones who complain about inequality throughout our country. Maybe there is inequality because you support a man like Mark Zuckerberg who is worth 10 billion dollars and done nothing but “make us all connected.”

As much as I have tricked myself into thinking that I enjoy things like YouTube and Google, I’m sure that I would be better off without them. Nothing makes my brain feel more like mashed potatoes than staring at the front page of YouTube and not knowing what I want to search for.

Technology does some good things, but it isn’t our savior. We need to take steps to make the world a better place without becoming reliant, using technology to overcome bad choices/lifestyles. I’m sure that we will never consider ourselves finished in our “pioneering” quest.

Blog Post 3 - Catching up on word count

I ended up enjoying Thomas More’s Utopia much more than I thought I would. Whenever reading these different accounts/attempts/ideas about living a better life I tend to look past the laws and rules of the different societies. Whether someone deserves to get the tip of their ear cut off for stealing or their hand chopped off, I do not feel I have the right to make that decision, nor does anybody else. So instead of breaking down all of their dumb little laws and saying which ones I agree with, I just wrote down some of their ideas on life (provided by Hythloday), ideas which seem more like common sense to me, but are surprisingly overlooked by far too many people in the present day, and I’m sure back then as well.

Although I do not really agree that laws should exist for anybody to follow, if you are going to have laws, they need to be based on solid foundation, this foundation is society’s outlook on life. The laws are meant to serve a purpose and are the most superficial aspect of a community. If everybody lived their life by premises which these laws are created in order to serve, then the laws would not need to exist in the first place. Of course the premises or ideas about life are very subjective, which is my main reason why I think that people who do not see things the same way should not have to live their life restricted by laws which serve ideas they do not agree with. If a society thinks that something should be patched up by creating a law to “fix” those who would choose to do otherwise, it would be much more effective to get those people to change their way of thinking to prevent the temptation of doing “wrong” things in the first place. This thought is put forward on page 65, “A wise man would rather escape sickness altogether than have a good cure for it.” I’m sure that people know this would be the more appropriate thing to do, but they believe that changing the thinking of others is just not a feasible task, a statement with which I would probably agree with. Man’s lack of the ability to think critically is what is holding us back from achieving a more uniform base of thought, and therefore the need to patch things up with laws.

If we start our discussion of utopia at the most superficial, subjective layer, the laws, then we will wind up getting nowhere other than circles of disagreement. This is why I feel it is very necessary to start off at the basic meaning of life, one which we can try to formulate as an objective one, and work our way up. This way we will not get into confusing arguments which have no clear basis, everything will build upon itself. I think Thomas More did a relatively good job with this. My favorite quotes from Utopia that I think addressed the meaning of life are these:

P. 61“Your mind draws more joy from recalling the affection and good will of those whom you have benefitted than your body would have drawn pleasure from the things you gave up.”

 P. 61“And so they conclude . . . that all our actions and the virtues exercised within them look toward pleasure and happiness as their ultimate end.”

P. 64“Health is the greatest pleasure of all.”

“Health is the basis and foundation of all the pleasures.”

Ok, so I think health is a pretty objective way of looking at the world, I find that it is a pretty easy subject to discuss which shouldn’t bring about too much objection. Maybe we can all agree that without good health (death looming), everything else is just pretty pointless.

Focusing on health as one of our primary concerns seems to make the issue of women being allowed to fight in wars that shouldn’t exist anyway pretty insignificant. I just think that preventing heart disease and cancer in men and women is more important than who does the dishes and sweeps.

So these days with all of our new medical technology we’re always looking for that next big cure! So all we need to do is donate millions (billions? trillions?) of dollars to spur on that cancer research. If somebody writes a nice big check . . . what a saint! That person is just so kind!!! And all those football players wearing pink all over their jerseys . . . that is just some good stuff!! No doubt about it, that’s going to bring cancer to an end REAL quick. Oh yeah, “save the ta-ta’s!” I cannot even begin to explain how corny, lame, and embarrassing those bumper stickers are.

Sorry for that little rant. But instead of sitting on your computer and ordering a new bumper sticker, maybe people could go jog for a half hour. Or instead of donating money to cancer research, maybe people could buy healthier food and prevent cancer in the first place.

Whoever organizes all these breast cancer awareness events are not heroes at all. If they spent all that time explaining to people a little physics so that they could comprehend the biomechanics of the human body, and why an inch and a half thick pillow strapped to the bottom of our feet does nothing but inhibit our ability to run naturally and pain free-if the spent their time explaining the relationship of shoes to injury, injury to lack of exercise, and lack of exercise to cancer, THEN I’d give them a little more credit. But no, they just want to dress football players up in cute pink ribbons . . . unbelievable.

People are just so lost and scared. They are scared to believe that a billion dollar company like Nike or Adidas has not made one person a better athlete. They have not enabled one person to run injury free, but instead caused people to get knee replacements, hip replacements, and bunion surgery.

I just want to help people, and allow them to see that there are very small changes people could make that would drastically improve their lives. I understand that I could write twenty blog posts like this and I probably would have no noticeable impact on people’s life views, but that is OK-I’m not too worried about it.

One more thing about More’s Utopia, I enjoyed the quote “They are very fond of fools; they think it contemptible to insult them.” I just thought that that was hilarious. I also think that people should humble themselves every morning when they wake up, and remind themselves that they are no better than anyone else in any way that really matters.

The Rule of St. Benedict and Life

The lifestyle portrayed in "The Rule of St. Benedict" seems like it would be very fulfilling for those who choose to live that way. Many people would not want to live in this way, and I think that those living the Monastic life know that and are ok with that. I think that people differ in many ways concerning how much satisfaction they get out of their life. If others are pursuing a path in life which they feel gives them the most satisfaction and long term pleasure, and are not interfering with others who are trying to do the same, then I think that they are doing what is best for themselves, which is what truly matters in the end.

In class we went around the room and answered whether we agreed with doing things for either the benefit of the many, or the benefit of the one (or something along those lines). Me and Iris said for the benefit of the one, Erin said the benefit of the few, I believe, and everyone else said for the benefit of the many. When I say that I think things should be done for the benefit of the one, I do not mean that people should be selfish-rather, I observe, or think I observe, that the root cause of any decision or action one takes lies completely in self-interest. I have no problem with people putting others before themselves, and I think that I do this fairly often as well, I just think that no one actually sacrifices self fulfillment/happiness/satisfaction/utility or whatever you want to call it, on purpose, for others.

Granted, people do not always know how relatively satisfied they will be given two opposing decisions, but I think that we subconsciously make these calculations with every decision we make and choose the one that leaves us better off. People may think that they are self-sacrificing others, but I think that in every case they knew beforehand that they with feel more satisfied within themselves with their altruistic decision!

Although the Cenobite monks that are discussed in "The Rule of St. Benedict" seem to be living an unselfish lifestyle serving the Lord and living by his Rule, I think it is just another prime example of humans living solely for themselves. The end that all of them seek is to live gloriously through the Lord, and be viewed accordingly on judgement day. They want to "attain life everlasting" "in His kingdom."

What I enjoyed most about the lifestyle of these monks, was the lack of arrogance that seemed to exist in their lives. Although I think that in the end they are living for no one but themselves, the way in which they do this seems very admirable to me. They have something that they firmly believe in, work with everything they do in the name of this belief, and do not credit themselves for anything. They just expect a fair judgement in the end. One of my biggest problems with humanity is our arrogance. Everybody has so much confidence in themselves and thinks they deserve credit for useless things they did. We also think that morals only exist in humans because of our "rationality", if people are going to make up things like right and wrong, they should at least apply the same moral laws to all creatures, not just the ones whose brains developed "best" or with the highest capacity or however you want to phrase it. I myself have my own belief of how I view right and wrong, just like everybody else does. I also understand that the "rules" I use to aid my actions aren't overarching and that people can disagree with them.

I am basically just indifferent to however anyone wants to live their life. But when the ways that different people get fulfillment out of their lives conflict, I fully expect people to pursue what they think is the right thing to do.

Cars Are No Good

It is very difficult for me to begin to address the concept of Utopia in the first place. When I think about it, I just wind up in a never ending argument going back and forth about ways to approach the "problem" of improving the world. One side of me says that to make the world a better place, we have to consider for what purpose we are making the world a better place. If it is to give all humans better lives, than we have to think about whether we equally weigh all humans' opinions about what gives them better lives, whether anybody is wrong about what is a good life, and find ways to address the differences in the ways people want to live.

It all just really comes down to a philosophical discussion on the meaning of life, which has remained unresolved for a very long time. So when I get the question, "What is one thing that would make the world a better place?", I think to myself that I want everyone to live life the way they want so that they fulfill what they want to do with their life. And then I think that basically our world is already our attempt at Utopia and that it is perfect within all of it's "imperfections"- or maybe disagreements would be a better word.

So obviously everybody views it differently, which just seems to make the whole concept contradictory. But I guess to address it, I will assume that people misunderstand what will allow them to lead a better life, and that I can point them in the right direction.

My idea for a better world is to abandon vehicles of any kind. I believe that humans, similarly to any other animals, are meant to move without the assistance of a metal box on wheels.

For the record, I would like to say that I enjoy looking at and driving cool cars. I go through stretches in which I get really set on buying something like a Trans Am, but for the benefit of everyone I think it would be best if we did without them.

Back to cars being bad. The only purpose I see that they serve is for more things that make the world worse off. It all just comes down to cars facilitating our economy, which is based on us buying things that we don't actually need, which is done with MONEY, which many agree the world would be a better place without!

So now that we see the only things cars are used for are bad things, we can look at unintended consequences of their use.  Many people die from zooming around on our paved roads in metal boxes. Although I know it could be argued that death is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, I am assuming that while we are here we want to remain alive with healthy bodies. The other major consequence is people being very unhealthy from not having to move around the way we are meant to. I guess maybe being unhealthy doesn't seem like that terrible of a thing, but when I think about it, our bodies should be the one thing we want to protect above all else, so being unhealthy is basically the worst thing imaginable.

There are people who don't exercise, eat unhealthy, and drive around a lot, but are still skinny.  I just wanted to clarify that being skinny is not equivalent to health.

I basically see the purpose of life as enjoying my time while i'm alive. The only things I really want out of life are to be able to eat, maintain a comfortable body temperature, and be around the people that I enjoy. I have known nearly all of my good friends for over 10 years. I'm sure that is very different from people who go to college and have new friends in three weeks. I don't consider myself close to someone until I have known them for a considerable amount of time. This is why I find it ridiculous that people would want cars and planes to travel and spend time with their "friends" who live in places like Italy, Mongolia, and Ghana.

I do not think that cars improve our lives at all.