28⟡342 • Pouya Kary's Archive

2024-12-15

1403/09/25

Orchestral music is for the ones with the most intense amounts of internalized emotions.

When you talk about what you have just read, others say “ awesome” and go about talking about what is a completely different thing they read, and you should read that too, ignoring you all and completely. I hate that.

Optimism-Pessimism Knot

Robert Iger states in his book The Ride of a Lifetime that among his pillars of leadership stands "Optimism." As he says, "Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists." I believe he is right. Although I find the book a bit of a woke profile-making exercise, it is true. In fact, this is nothing new. However, living in optimistic ways is not always good for the soul, as it has never been good for the Earth. Cooperation and Optimism are the heart of Capitalism. You never find a pessimist CEO or a doubtful shareholder; they all are always optimists. After all, it is their optimism that fuels the efforts in the first place.

Nevertheless, there exists another side to the coin. This capitalism is not good in itself. A good account of all the evil that is in the fashion of being practiced by the economy can be found in the book Creating an Ecological Society by Fred Magdoff & Chris Williams, and I cannot deny any of it. My count of books and views like these is numerous.

These bring me to this conclusion that the world is full of problems. Much of them being existential even. Global warming, freedom and democracy at stake, technology as Postman called it, evil corporations taking all over the place with their limitless changing of society as (again) Postman had once foreseen. There must be things done to prevent the world from falling apart as uncontrolled forces are unleashed. But thinking about problems is thinking with pessimistic glasses on.

My point begins in here:

Looking at this, most people go to the right and wrong assumptions. All things must have a right or wrong state. And there must be a solution. I find this fascinating. It seems to me such an observation is derived from divinity, that the world was made with a plan and therefore all things must have been thought of. This style of thinking is even present within the non-believers, residing from the past. But then for what reason should all things be solvable? I think of it as the halting problem. Maybe capitalism cannot be fixed, just because evolutionary-wise optimists survive and the pessimists die in isolation. For that matter, maybe we get extinct since capitalism is something to be stopped.

The last of ecological stages of species development is the "Resource Depletion and Collapse", when there is nothing in front of a species, it cannot help itself but to deplete resources and die. Bacteria do something called "Ecological Suicide" where they populate so much that the amount of waste they produce makes the whole ecological system toxic, leading to their imminent extinction. Capitalistic optimism definitely ends in here, and then pessimistic approaches ends in lonely philosophers. I look to a solution for the system and both ways seems to be leading to a Knot.

This thought is not yet fully digested. and thus, ends not in here

Quotes & Excerpts

The basic strategy for coping with information overload is myth.

MARSHAL MCLUHAN

✧ The Medium And the Message

50 years ago, people could be sure of who they were that way. Today, that no longer serves as human identity. For example, among our own children today, they refuse to accept jobs as a form of identity or a mark of significance. They want roles, instead. The job was a highly classified, specialized activity. Today, the role is returning.

A man, say a top executive, doesn't have a job. He has 50 jobs, 60 jobs. That's a role. A mother doesn't have a job. She has 60 jobs. That's a role. In the electric age, all forms of human activity become associated, closely interwoven again. Fragmentation, specialism disappears with circuitry. Roles return. Roles equal depth, equal involvement, equal commitment, equal dedication.

MARSHAL MCLUHAN

✧ The Medium And the Message

Computer displays are low-resolution devices, working at extremely thin data densities, 1/1o to 1/1ooo of a map or book page. This reflects the essential dilemma of a computer display: at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer. Yet all communication between the two must pass through the low- resolution, narrow-band video display terminal, which chokes off fast, precise, and complex communication.

EDWARD R. TUFTE

✧ Envisioning Information

Take off the date line from any newspaper and you'll have a Surrealist poem.

MARSHAL MCLUHAN

✧ The Medium And the Message

In an electric society, where everybody affects everybody at the same moment, it is impossible any longer to say, "He done it." It's just as realistic to say, "I did it." Again, at instant speeds of involvement of people in people, not only is there no possibility of assigning guilt, or the things that people formerly had legalistically assigned guilt, there's also the difficulty of even knowing who we are.

MARSHAL MCLUHAN

✧ The Medium And the Message

In my opinion this is an example of hidden ground behind the motorcar. Why do Americans go outside to be alone, unlike other people? That is a pretty tough question, but as far as I've been able to determine it relates to the fact that 200 years ago or more, our people came to this continent to fight nature, to tame the wilderness, and to subdue the elements.

This typically led them out of doors to a kind of aggressive action against the environment. The environment was the enemy. It had to be subdued, tamed. This developed a habit of going outside aggressively and extrovertedly to fight.

MARSHAL MCLUHAN

✧ The Medium And the Message

Day's Context

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