Alex Torpey - the local revolution

Watch this space.

"There is no such thing as the "status quo" in society or in government. Things can get worse, or they can get better. And your government needs you if it's going to get better."

About the Russian fascination with the West which might soon, finally, start to wane.

...«Господи, да какие же мы русские? — мелькало у меня подчас в голове в эту минуту, всё в том же вагоне. — Действительно ли мы русские в самом-то деле? Почему Европа имеет на нас, кто бы мы ни были, такое сильное, волшебное, призывное впечатление? То есть я не про тех русских теперь говорю, которые там остались, ну вот про тех простых русских, которым имя пятьдесят миллионов, которых мы, сто тысяч человек, до сих пор пресерьезно за никого считаем...” ФМ Достоевский

...“Lord, what kind of Russians are we?”flashed through my mind from time to time while I was on the train. Äre we in fact really Russians?”Why does Europe create such a powerful, magical, alluring impression on us, no matter who we might be? That is, I am not speaking now of those Russians who have remained in  Russia, those simple Russians whose name is fifty million, whom we hundred thousand to this day seriously regard as nobodies..."
FM Dostoevsky

Being a visitor

Visitors are like deaf mutes. The emphasis goes on what's visible to the eye on one hand, and on the other those impreceptible details the intuition picks up that locals are probably oblivious to. The middle frequencies are largely shut out.

Melancholia - film

It's painful to watch but interesting to think about. He creates a terrifying dystopia where no-one is really connected to each other any more, nobody properly understands each other and everybody's trapped in their own little world. 

The setting is the party after a wedding. The parents of the bride hate each other, the groom seems to have no friends or relatives, the bride has difficult relationships with both parents, the father is completely narcissistic, the mother is authoritarian and hates all conventions and disrupts the party, there seem to be many acquaintances around but no friends, her boss is her husband's best man and gives a speech where he does not mention him but announces her promotion, he has a minion trailing around her through the evening in case she comes out with an advertising tagline, her brother in law keeps reminding her about how much money he spent on the wedding and how many holes there are in the golf course, she promises to keep forever a photo her husband gives her but forgets a few minutes later, clearly showing they have not established a proper relationship... and so on. 
People converge but they never establish a bond that's sufficiently strong to be mutually nourishing, only to just about be mutually supportive at a given mutually advantegeous juncture, which is an entirely different thing. The two sisters try to mend their bond and create an intimacy in the second half of the film, but it's too little too late.

A very nice metaphor for that is the sticks that support each other to create a teepee effect under which they hide at the end of the world. It's a pathetic haphazard structure under any circumstances and (although the protagonists themselves intend it to be symbolic) is completely useless to confront the oncoming cataclysm. This final scene, where they hold hands under the teepee very nicely underlines their vulnerability, and that everything at the end of the day is about no more or less than human relations and theirs are as inept as the three sticks leaning against each other.

So the heroine is depressed, her sister is half-depressed and everyone has got issues to different degrees. They live in this suffocating, bad taste universe of wealth, in a dreadful castle that is all varnished and the most unpoetic place you could imagine (despite the lovely setting), where everything is perfectly manicured and there's no compromise with nature and where they are separated by the status their wealth gives them from any cut and thrust of life there may be out there. 

So in these kind of conditions, no wonder the end of the world will come along soon, even if it seems at times to be a false alarm. It works well as a social satire showing the dynamics that engender spiritual destruction. I'm not sure what else it could be about apart from that.

St. Pete

I always reserve the harshest words for those I'm close to. This is the best way I can think of to excuse my mainly critical words when writing about St Pete. If you've already detected from the last sentence that I could be inclined to slipping into a city-as-person metaphor, you won't be disappointed.


St Pete is so damn big and spread out, it goes on and on, with far too many empty buildings in it's centre so that its heart beats very slowly, almost inaudibly. In fact there is no centre. In Moscow, everyone knows where the centre is, and everything radiates from there. In St Pete, in the place where the centre should be, there's just water.


This absence of a centre makes people even more aware of where the real one is: for such a big proud city, it's painfully out of reach 670km south. Hence the city's strange swampy lethargy is redoubled by this lack of focus.


There are certain people you can meet who are alluring in their ability to be sometimes very charming and at others terribly indifferent. You grapple to find their heart: some solid yet tender area which, if reached, might give you a measure of the person and something worth gripping on to. But with some people it's just like St Petersburg, as you get closer to where you hope to find the heart, you find instead a kind of dark watery current that pushes along silently and can't possibly be seized.

How do you uproot entrenched oligarchies?

View across eastern Libya

 © David Degner

The problem the crowds are trying to solve in the Middle East with their repeated demonstrations is alot greater than installing democracy through a system of fair elections. It's the far trickier business of peacefully uprooting a political and economic structure that serves the vested interests of a tiny minority of people. If it were  a plant, the dictator is just its flowery head. It can be lopped off, though soon another very similar flower will bloom after a short spell as a demure bud. Having to dig around and uproot the whole thing, leaving a big messy hole in the ground is a completely different matter.

To extend this handy horitcultural metaphor, democracy even in developed counties seems to be not that much more than a process where through some clever grafting, you get a pleasing seasonal variation in the colour of the flower, while the plant itself largely remains the same. If they do find in the Middle East a way to remove the entire plant peacefully, fill the hole, and level out the terrain for a real fresh start then it would certainly be a great example for the entire world. I can think of few places where achieving this periodically without bloodshed would not be a good thing. It's a pity democracy as it is practiced currently cannot solve this issue, though maybe some kind of democratic process could. I wonder what that process might look like.

Discomfort with photos

I've had to cultivate a detachment from photos and other "things" in general to stop me from going crazy.

Only reality is worth investing emotion into.

"Never let anything 'artistic' stand in your way" has sort of become a motto for me, stolen from Bruce Chatwin (who got it from Noel Coward).

Some photos are far more engaging than others, but in the end each seems to offer just a quick emotional hit that rapidly fades.

Meanwhile, irrespective of its aritstic qualities, each one is asking for far more trust than it should be getting.

What bothers me is photography's uneasy, unsettled relationship with reality, how photographers often pose as witnesses when they're really manipulators - both on the field and in how they present things afterwards.

There would be a much more guarded response to images were this element of manipulation not all too easily ignored, because it interferes with the enjoyment of an image.

Meanwhile a photo still carries a segment (or burden) of objective truth that is unnerving and makes photography unlike any other art.

The photo's silence, moreover, gives the image a deceptively stern, grave quality, as if it offered a clear view "beyond the noise".

Each picture sucks you in, makes demands on your emotions. A little vacuum that can leave you drained if you're not careful.

Published pictures have so much authority that they seem to have the final word on the way something should be viewed.. (I think that's what many photographers secretly love about photographs  -  the authority of the published image.)

Once published, images can seem like the assertion of an unassailable objective wholeness.

Writing is made of components, words, and can be broken down or rewired. Pictures, meanwhile, cannot be - they supposedly just convey the captive instant. "Don't shoot the messenger!" each one squeaks when confronted.
.

If Sharia law were imposed tomorrow and all images were banned, would a wonderful freedom from a degrading tyranny of archetypes and stereotypes not emerge?

To my mind anything of any importance that exists is outside the realms of the visible. The visible is only (and not always to the same degree) a manifestation or effect of what is important and invisible.

Photography helps place far too much emphasis on the visible symptoms, as if they functioned in lockstep with the invisible causes, which is rarely the case.

When, as a culture, photography makes us become fixated with the symptoms as if they were an accurate evocation of the causes and we start to think that what has no visible symptom has less importance than what does, we reach a point where we no longer understand the world so well.

Nice observations from Nicolas Bouvier

Le monde est constamment poliphonique, alors que nous en avons, par carence ou par paresse, qu'une lecture monodique. il y a des moments... ou tout d'un coup on percoit toutes ces harmoniques. C'est a dire qu'on entend toutes les voix de la partition au lieu d'en entendre qu'une, comme a l'accoutumee, parce qu'on vit dans un temps lineaire, qu'on a un passe, un avenir, on fait des projets, ce qui distrait de l'instant present

... le haiku est, philosophiquement, l'oppose et l'antidote du projet....

Au Japon et en Asie jaune, les gens ne surveillent pas leur visage comme nous le faisons chez nous. Peut etre a cause du bouddhisme, ils n'attachent pas tellement d'importance a leur personne. De telle sorte que lorsque vous les photogrqphiez ils vous donnent leur existence, leur "instant d'existence" avec beaucoup de candeur et sans du tout prejuger de son contenu. Tandis qu'en occident, le visage est l'enseigne, le menu ou la carte du restaurant. C'est a dire qu'on concentre dans la tete jusqu'a la congestionner, tout un projet social. La personne, le citoyen,le seducteur ou la sedctrice, l'ariste maudit ou pathtique que l'on souhaiterait etre. Le visage est a la fois le cahier des pretentions et des reclamations, et la concentration de ce projet cree un cesure dans le corps, qu'on laisse muet silencieux, dont on ne s'occupe pas, qu'on laisse aller n'importe comment. Le personnage est davantage d'un jet.... Si vous voulez il y a une meilleure repartition de l'etre, telle que la camera peut le fixer.

What has value and what doesn't

Fascinating film about how MW took on the whole Economics establishment and showed that by excluding from calculation all the unpaid work done, mainly by women, the picture one gets of a nation's economy is entirely distorted.

The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life by Charles Derber

" Many people see nothing egoistic about everyday conversation. We're nice and civilized people, after all, and we revel in shooting linguistically charged sound waves at each other. Some of us never stop talking, we love it so much. Certainly we're just making innocent and polite chatter? For example, one person in a group mentions their new puppy, everyone swoons, and another person responds "when my dog was a puppy I had the worst time keeping him out of the basement." Yet another person responds, "we'd like to get a puppy but our condo association doesn't allow them." The initial speaker then says "we named him 'Fred'" and someone else adds "I've always wanted a dog named Boethius, but my husband doesn't like that name." Was that exchange just a smattering of idle small talk? A mere chewing of the air? On the surface, yes, but the whiplash revelations of "The Pursuit of Attention" add a shocking dimension to what most of us consider quotidian jibber jabber. "


As summed up by an Amazon reviewer.

I find those kind of conversations absolutely infuriating, unless they're with a 10 year old.


http://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Attention-Power-Everyday-Life/dp/0195135490/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Dixit Abraham Lincoln

    

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Two solutions to one problem

Compared to what?

Lets imagine you have, say, a 4 x 8 grid and if you fill in all the boxes in the grid you have genuine participatory democracy where every adult plays an active and continuous role in deciding what happens within their country on a local, regional and national level. 

I would say that most ordinary democracies would be able to fill in a couple of those squares at best, with the rest empty. People generally vote perhaps once every four years. This is the extent of their participation in democracy. 

The rest of the time they complain about the state of their country and their leader - a much vaunted benefit of not living in a country where the number of boxes filled is a fraction of a single one.

When looking at democracy in the world it is common to look at the amount of democracy in undemocratic countries as a proportion of the amount of democracy in democratic countries so that from that perspective it becomes impossible for the democratic country not to seem ideal!

If you however place the level of democracy that exists in a democratic country and that in an undemocratic country against a backdrop of genuine participatory democracy, you start to get a completely different picture: the numbers in the two types of country are far far closer to each other than they are to the total possible number. The emphasis shifts from the difference between them to the fact that both fall very short. 

This reframing may seem simple but is important because had it been the standard way of seeing things, it could have denied the impetus for some of the horrors of the past decade.

Very imperfect democracies become almost ideal democracies in the absence of a 3rd scale - which is terrible for the evolution of democracy.

We all need to start thinking much more about that 3rd scale. 

Contrast with Holland

I heard the exact same anecdote twice from two different people. Thought I was having a deja-vu earlier.

You can't just drop into someone's house, you need to be invited. Also they might give you a cup of tea or maybe nothing, but they'll never feed you. In Russia they'll empty out the contents of the fridge and lay it all out infront of you.

Is it just habits or can wealth have a bizarre de-civilising effect?

Alexandra had a friend who came round and brought her own salad, ate half of it and then wrapped it up and left.

People in the street look bland compared to Russia where each person's character is much better defined. What is important is that they work well and make a good living. Any internal development is seen as being of marginal importance.

Men and women

Any person spending time in Russia will not fail to notice the curious fact that the country is in fact largely run by women.

There seems to be an imbalance between the sexes. Men are spoilt, very free, often weak-willed and live within a world created by women. This is not about individual personalities, it is not about some women having a powerful character that crushes the man (that's something different), it is simply that the female will collectively is stronger and envelops totally. Like the mother figure that contains all the remaining ones, including the father, in the Russian doll depicted above.

The special complicity one seems to find amongst women has the smooth coherence of a woven rug and covers most of the country. Male bonds, meanwhile are a more rag-tag affair, whose power is compromised from the outset by the very thing that helps cement it - massive booze consumption.

It may have always been a bit like that. It's hard to really say. De Custine in the 1830s mentions that women could be relied on to deal with money matters with the utmost probity, while less was to be expected from men. From what I can make out WW2 exacerbated a preexisting tendency. When men came home from the war they were exhausted, traumatised and greatly reduced in numbers. Women during that time had been working hard and conscientiously, developing ttheir collaborative approach to life in the absence of men, and when the men came back from the front, women spoilt them rotten, indulging their every whim. Thus it became something of a habit amongst men that was passed on to subsequent generations.

I think also Communism had  had a belittling effect on males as individuals, made their personal efforts seem pitiful,  while for women Communism was perhaps a more positive environment as it protected and met basic needs. Under the stewardship of consumerism the sisterhood has received something of a mauling. There has been nothing like "compete" and "compare" to shred its subtle bonds. The machinery of turning people into consumers is only beginning to gather pace.

Doomsayers, historians and foreign observers seem to miss in their dismal analysis of Russia the marked contrast between the public and the personal spheres, where one sphere has a tendency to be a world of men and the other a world of women. People looking at Russia from the outside, and thus seeing predominantly the public sphere, cast a disparaging eye on the world of men: conniving, chaotic, doggedly inventive, lazy and, despite being interspersed with flashes of incredible courage or brilliance - often useless.

But the mistake is to see one side and mistake it for the whole. In the world of women there is an entirely different atmosphere: it is imbued with a strong sense of responsibility. Go into any space that is controlled by women, be it a room in an office, a home or a public space, and there is a heightened feeling of calm, order and serenity the likes of which you rarely see in other countries. There is not only a sense of safety and reassurance but a sense of collective intelligence, of know-how and complicity. The public sphere may seem brutal and bordering on inhuman, but the woman's sphere underpins all this. The severe and jarring outside world is one people step out into, it is not the world in which children are raised, in which old people end their days and men stumble back into at night. The West in fact mostly lacks this cushioned layer beneath the surface.

That Russia is a place of extremes is abundantly illustrated by this dichotomy. If one were to add the often negative aspects of external life to the more positive aspects of the private sphere, I wonder if the sum would be much lesser than the same sum made in countries more accommodating to the statistician.

I wonder how the bleak view of Russian history would be adjusted if we gave more weight and emphasis to the woman's side of life. But the poles are likely to narrow: commercialism is not only likely to break up the power of women by making them more competitive and self-centred but men will become more outwardly slick and less erratic by trying to live up to western conventions and also be reined in by what really formats the behaviour of Westerners - the discipline required to pay for credit card bills, mortgages etc.

A French guy once said to me something to the effect that Russian womanhood was like a skilfully made rug from which men fired themselves off like little rockets, tracing different arcs in the sky, sometimes sumptuous, but often with the feeble trajectory of a firecracker - a brief erratic fizzle, forced down by the imperturbable laws of gravity that each tries in vain to defy. Perhaps this ill-considered audacity is aided by the certainty of a soft landing.

Image issues

I get infuriated by people who dismiss Islam and am often amazed by how distorted views about Islamic culture and religion persist. Sometimes I ponder on the possible causes...

Maybe it has something to do with this:

Our mind works with images far more than we care to admit, especially when it comes to things that are distant from our ordinary lives. Islamic cultures don't really produce much images or imagery. Most of the images or imagery concerning the Muslim world are created by us. We tell their visual story almost entirely. In a way they are mute while our screaming and jeering can be heard across the world.

Moral map of the Middle East

Adjust your compass. If you think the captions make it hard to work out which place lies beneath it, you're right.

Evolution

To understand where we're headed, its a waste of time looking at economics, news, history and architecture and the deeds of important people.

The only ones that have the real understanding of what makes society tick are the Marketing, PR, Advertising peeps. But their power lies in not divesting this knowledge and their contempt for the fools that unwittingly do their bidding is tempered only by their astounding ability to deceive themselves.

Journalists and economists, the ones who formulate the "consensus reality" - offer little in the way of help. The first are in the pocket of the lot above and the economist is lost outside the realms of the measurable.

Here's a perfect example of how Economics is so backward, hamstrung by the ideological framework of the Standard Model:

in 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton and Amos Tversky of Stanford published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," a breakthrough paper on how people handle uncertain rewards and risks. In the ensuing decades, it became one of the most widely cited papers in economics. The authors argued that the ways in which alternatives are framed - not simply their relative value - heavily influence the decisions people make. This was a seminal paper in behavioral economics; its rigorous equations pierced a core assumption of the standard model-that the actual value of alternatives was all that mattered, not the mode of their presentation ("framing").

To me this illustrates how painfully slow and backwards Economic thinking is and how shifting its crude paradigms takes an eternity. Discoveries made long ago in other spheres become revelations to economists, once encased in the pseudo-scientific language and methodologies familiar to them.

Meanwhile, if you pick up Edward Bernays' Propaganda - a little tome first published in 1928 - that lays out the basic strategies of PR in a clear and concise fashion, you will see how very little has changed over the last hundred years in the West. Despite all the developments in fashions and appliances - it has been business as usual with little but an ever-evolving narrative masking a stagnancy, perhaps even a regression in people's consciousness.

The concept of evolution is very misleading. Most people seem to take it for granted that we are naturally evolving in the right direction. Possibly this is true on a scale of 100s of thousands of years. But certainly within the last 2000 years one should be very weary of seeing any evolution in mankind. All that has evolved is man's dependency on various systems. On the whole, as a being increasingly dependent on huge indifferent hierarchies, he is not necessarily evolving in the right direction. Furthermore, division of labour, one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model, has created millions of "fachidioten": people who can only look beyond the little corner of the vast, terrible hierarchy known as the 'free market' quite timidly (since their consciousness is so tied to it) and who only have in common with other men what is handed down to them by the peeps mentioned towards the beginning of this piece.

Economism

Economism is a moral and social posture "which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth".

It's incredibly pervasive. As the evening winds down, to show how clever they are, someone will invariably flare their nostrils, put on a solemn face and start going all macro. Within a few minutes the whole table is infected, carping on about national debt, budget cuts and currency fluctuation. Hopefully one day it will be recognised as a mental illness and there'll be a 10 step programme to wean people off it.

"Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored of its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer."

Albert Jay Nock

I'd say that sums it up perfectly and the "despairingly consenting" bit is upon us now! It is hardly suprising that economism creates such a world since in essence, it systematically elevates the nastiest most ruthless people possible, those cunning enough to know how to observe the letter of the law whilst having total disdain for the spirit of it. It forces us all to develop that most horrible side of ourselves unless we`re already taking protection under the umbrella of others who individually or collectively fit that description. 

Missing ingredients

The missing ingredients are often acknowledged.

Dijon

Stockholm

Basel

Geneva

Nizhny Novgorod