43. The enemy is confusion

Elistism v populism

Elites fear the mass, what's "popular", they need to keep distinguishing themselves as the "true owners" -not even seekers- of beauty, truth, excellence, critique, peace, high quality, culture, consciousness, the light that guides the rest through darkness or whatever. If it's popular, it's  kitsch, ugly, fake, cheap, low quality, delusional, subversive, dark, dangerous, etc.

In this polarisation, democratic forces (and post-modernity) present a challenge to the elites (economical, cultural, political) and their hierarchical structure. It tries to open up some doors and demonstrate that there is a popular consciousness too able to generate art, wisdom, capable of exercising power and in many cases demand a pen to fill in the gaps that History written by elites leave.

The Beatles in a way were an example of this: being deeply popular but able to create the foundations of how music will evolve in the future. Charly García, an argentinian musician, dares to suggest that in musical terms if we were contemporary to what now are called classical musicians, Chopin, with his melodies, would be the equivalent of a pop idol in terms of their appeal, and Beethoven would be a heavy metal rocker, and even imagine that The Beatles will enter in the pantheon of "classical music" of the future. He suggests classical music is the way it is because it hadn't received yet any African influence that brought rhythm to music. This is not meant to not recognise the mastery the classical composers had, but rather to challenge the view that 'high quality' music is something like the art of the dead, petrified, beyond reach.

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa published a book "La sociedad del espectáculo" (something like 'The show business' society) in defence of elites. He claims that in the past there was a clear distinction of what culture was and somehow asks 'how come everyone think they have culture?'
He claims that in fighting the monopolisation of culture within elite circles, they got a pyrrhic victory, where the cost of this victory undermined the notion of culture itself.

But even from his defence of elites and some good points he raises, he acknowledges that petrification of elites and monopolisation of culture was a problem and he warns against certain 'temptations' that corrupt their purpose, particularly when following a free market logic:

-In trying to massify a message, there is always a temptation of changing the original message for something more palatable and easy to convey. or package it in a way that actually affects its meaning, generating confusion.

-In trying to defend hierarchies and elites and their function, there is always the temptation of petrification, closing ranks and attempt to concentrate more power and halt time and progress, generating confusion too regarding which are the open ways and opportunities to become part of any elite.

Vargas Llosa speaks about the power of critique, and what's offered by the "the distance" elites keep. But who can criticise elites? One of the most significant situations, illustrating the lack of critique in elite circles was the moment the Queen (in the position her own distance gives her) asked academics at the London School of Economics why no one saw the credit crunch coming in 2008. The Telegraph reports about the reply the Queen received a few days later:

The letter ends: "In summary, your majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole."
The letter talks of the "psychology of denial" that gripped the financial and political world and says "financial wizards" convinced themselves they had found ways to spread risk throughout the financial markets - a great example of "wishful thinking combined with hubris".

Vargas Llosa speaks about elites that are formed by people with "vocation, effort and talent" and criticises elites "by essence". But cultural elites tend to overlook how structurally close they remain to economic and political elites. They look at football with disdain and rarely reflect about how greater inequality and lower social mobility make cultural elites more structurally static, hereditary and far less truly meritocratic than football sporting elites, for example.

Of course, not all popular music will have the significance that the Beatles' music had and not all football players can be Maradona. But both the Beatles or Maradona are examples of excellence emerging from popular places, challenging this notion that excellence seeking has some sort of exclusive proprietary process.

All the anti-establishment movements, standing as far away of the elites as the elites do from them, are trying to articulate a critique. But they also fall into the same temptation of bringing an idea into our physical reality in a false body, in taking the short cut of conveying a complex subject as "the mobility economical mandate of free trade agreements" and "immigration in a context of austerity", in xenophobic terms. Let's bear in mind that people complaining about immigrants are the most reluctant to emigrate, they chose to stay and vote instead. Let's remember too that people and capital move in opposite directions (one follows higher wages, the other lower).

The enemy is confusion and its main weapon is confuse us regarding who the enemy is: pointing out to some visible agent and keep its own invisibility.

Not surprisingly this confusion comes with memes and illustrations, as images are read, decoded and stored in unconscious ways and can be more ambiguous than words.

Elitism and populism are constantly blaming each other of lying without recognising in the other their capacity to generate truth.

The product is the hero: the lie in the truth and the truth in the lie

Market logic always plays within the boundaries of the existing power structures and already accepted codes of acceptance/rejection. It only introduces products and slogans as new intermediaries.

As an example, naming Wonder Woman, a sexist, polarised, american-dominance symbol, as the ambassador of women's empowerment, the UN played exactly to the tune we dance today. It only promotes further Wonder Woman as a product. Brexit was a product sold to "take back control" and Donald Trump might just as well represent the same product for the empowerment of 'hard working white Americans'. Products, playing these symbolic hero roles, promise grandiose and somehow magic solutions to beat the antiheroes, something or someone chosen to carry all negativity and be sacrificed.

These products/heroes falsely embody a solution to a need that is not being addressed/satisfied, the antiproducts/antiheroes embody the threat/the problem that remains invisible and unnamed. Both the need and the problem are probably genuine but not their embodiment. Political discussions can easily fall in the trap of unmasking the lie, without recognising the truth or in trying to recognise the truth, it may appear to be endorsing the "product". No clearer example of this, was Donald Trump twitting about Michael Moore's documentary as if it was an endorsement.

The complexity of this election cycle is that Hillary Clinton does not have enough "distance" with economical elites to be considered such a clear alternative for those with anti-establishment sentiments. In this sense, she does not appear to many as "recognising the truth" they want to hear recognised, and therefore not being a agent of the change needed.

Renowned economist Ann Pettifor writes in "Brexit and its consequences" about the failure of economic elites in leading the UK away from Brexit, and analyses the ambivalence of the Brexit vote. Citing Polanyi and The Great Transformation, she speaks about how the Brexit vote was both somehow truthful and misguided:

Karl Polanyi predicted in The Great Transformation that no sooner will today’s utopians have institutionalized their ideal of a global economy, apparently detached from political, social, and cultural relations, than powerful counter-movements—from the right no less than the left—would be mobilized (Polanyi, 2001). The Brexit vote was, to my mind, just one manifestation of the expected resistance to market fundamentalism.
By doing so, they confirmed Polanyi’s firm prediction that
the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society … . Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way.

Brexit has endangered British society in yet another way, but the vote was, I contend, a form of social self-protection from self-regulating markets in money, trade, and labour.

The tedious task

Separating the truth from everything else is a tedious, laborious task often described as finding a needle in a haystack. And it is a process that involves conversation and talking to people who don't agree with us. Truth is found in groups. The Other helps us see different perspectives. However, in the attempt to liberate the individual to express its own truth, we severed connections with groups, somehow suggesting that any group would become a mass which is ultimately deindividualising. Protecting our beliefs, "out truth" from critique meant we cannot recognise the truth that the other might have found. I read a comment today in Facebook that ironically said "to be happy I decided to read nothing but what I say".
Interestingly in this video actor Michael Sheen says:

"Our culture is a conversation. A conversation we have with each other. And it is about voices and stories coming from all over. Opinions that do clash. There has to be a healthy way to have different opinions without each of us becoming offensive and abusive and "you-are-the-worst-shitty-scam for not agreeing with what I think". That's unhealthy. A healthy argument is the one where there are different opinions, different voices and are able to be aired and you are affected by. You telling me that you disagree with me, actually changes me in some way. That's important. If we lose that we are having a one side conversation that goes round and round in circles and everyone misses out, everyone loses because of it."

Culture and politics is where this conversation happens, so when this conversation stops, when there are more silos and filter bubbles, democracy crumbles and violence takes the place of the ordering principle. But there is another danger: Millennials, being the generation with the highest ever level of education and the most affected by the filter bubble, read in the analysis of the Brexit vote that it was the fault of "uneducated" people or the old generation and then some of them quickly jumped to the conclusion that they should not be allowed to vote, probably not realising that they would be denying the vote to many members of their own families, or that it was a discussion that happened a century ago, or even that many of them (particularly women) are able to vote today because some of people (many uneducated) fought for this right. The same conclusions will be drawn should Donald Trump win today. This Bloomberg article denounce how Millennials are being turned off by democracy. I personally find these conclusions scary and I feel like almost begging: whatever happens in today's election, more politics, more conversation is needed, not less.

Andrea

39. Violence won't have the final word

Solving problems through political means can be frustrating. Discussions, technicalities, irreconcilable ideological differences that no logic can bridge, and time: it takes a long time. And even then, sometimes one idea must win (or is forced to win) over the other. Decision making, in many cases, can't follow logic and reason. There can be petrified beliefs, we simply don't know enough or in both scenarios there are pros and cons. Then the decision comes by weighing in priorities: we have to think which principle is the most important to us as we fully immerse ourselves into the emotional realm. But here is where we are utterly unprepared. The emotional world can be explosive if we are educated with the repression hammer as the only tool.

Somehow, both the Brexit debate, with the assassination of Jo Cox, and the Orlando massacre have something in common. Violence tried to get the final word between two seemingly irreconcilable positions: accepting or not accepting homosexuality (own or others'), in or out of the European union; these two positions could also be described as a world where a an idealised (toxic) masculinity rules (even through violence) or a world where there is free expression of sexuality, empowerment of women, where the "weak" aren't so weak or invisible or discarded nor they are the sacrificial lambs who will wash away our own weaknesses; a world stuck and under control or a world that is more fluid, dynamic, multi-polar and uncertain.

This week we were left shocked with these two cases in front of the brutality, the destructive power and the lives wasted... in front of the sheer uselessness of an explosion of a violent emotion to resolve "the" underlying conflict.

Nowadays we are going through a multilevel crisis: economical, social, environmental, communicational, political, judicial, educational, cultural, religious... a crisis in truth seeking at a global level.

Even though we live in a complex world, full of greys, we are being told all the time it is all black and white.

In the era of information, we can't say anymore we did not know. Therefore the fracture between narrative and truth is clearer than ever, particularly since the Iraq invasion. Facts are dismissed, distorted, invented. We only need to read two different newspapers to see it. Speeches are rustic and shallow. They avoid entering into any sophisticated area, simply because depth will no longer sustain this polarised view, this basic structure that tried to organise all of our lives. We read the news and do not know what to believe anymore. And then, when narrative does not work, violence comes to impose itself over social discontent.

In this sense, I am interested in the use of the word corruption, not only as a crime where someone is paid to be disloyal to their duties and favour a particular interest, a term that has been mainly used to describe the actions of the state or what's done by women. I mean corruption in a broader sense, as disloyalty to the original purpose, which requires a sort of "absence". Corrupted journalism as the one that -even if we all accept it can never be fully objective- it does not address its own underlying commercial problem and starts to follow easy sales or transform itself into a new sort of entertainment. Corrupted politics, that in order to ensure power (or personal economical gain) deviates from addressing social needs. Corrupted science, that in order to get published dismisses unwanted results, neglects entire areas of investigation and turns a blind eye to its own ideological bias. Corrupted religion, that in order to sustain the superiority of a group charges the rest with all the sins. Corrupted education, that stops trying to be an emancipating path and trap students into debt slavery, class labels and indoctrination. Corrupted agriculture that tries to control the sexuality of the land. Corrupted nutrition, that makes us dependent and fat. Corrupted law and justice, that makes corruption legal and protest and whistle-blowers illegal. Corrupted technology, that instead of being an enabler of inter-connectedness, is used to control us.  Ultimately our corrupted self: the disloyalty to ourselves, to our internal truths that even if they can be emancipating, we rather not find, so we might prefer to be absent, and not "occupy" certain spaces.

Slowly and silently we are being dragged into new cold black-and-white wars opposing US and China (in Africa and in the South China sea), Iran and Saudi Arabia, Nato and Russia, TTIP/TTP "aligned countries" and Brics, oligarchies and workers, Genetically Modified foods (lead by Monsanto) and organic (with its seeds in the EU and recently Russia), democracy and technocratic neoliberalism, secular and non secular governments, petrol dependent economies and climate change, speculative use of land and housing shortage, finance and real economy, rent and wages, etc, etc. We could expect violence trying to have a final word here too, with these "quick wars", drones, "carpet bomb" solutions and "the new right" that are being sold in a world that seems impassive in front of a permanent state of war and fear, and seems more at ease with fascism than with a moderate left challenging some of the workings of the modern world. 
However, at this point we must know already that no amount of bombs or arms or police state will solve the underlying conflicts.

We need to start putting words to emotion as a way of taking ownership and funnelling the emotional power towards a constructive purpose instead of an explosive non-purpose. Putting words to our mouth to participate in a dialogue that triggers action. Words to name and put light to spaces we decide to occupy and transform. Attention versus distraction. A world full of greys that does not simply balance itself out. We need to reclaim politics, internally and externally.

Andrea

27. Sight and insight

I always joke about the super power I'd like to have: "being able to roll my eyes 360 degrees" (As in being-able-to-perform-an-epic-eye-roll in front of someone talking non-sense). Definitely. It was a joke until I thought that I might actually have another, more interesting and less cynic, reason of why I'd like this super-power: it'd be the power to look in, to see clearly something inside that changes how you see the outside. The power of insight. 

Insight is this moment of recognition of an internal truth that changes how we see and interpret reality. It is something that had previously been hidden, but which we recognise when it emerges. The journey of how we find insights -and thus discover these inner truths- is not easy. Most of the times, we try to do it through observation (sight), sometimes in constructing (or attracting) outside something that we "feel" inside, to then observe it (sight again) -as in the Infinity sand sculpture by Carl Jara-.

Infinity (sand sculpture) - Carl Jara

In this sculpture the true insightful moment would be when one of these men turns around and, instead observing only a smaller version of themselves, they see what's behind. Bringing forward what's back, making conscious what's unconscious, elevating his awareness of reality.

In Marketing and Advertising insights are used either to create propositions or to make an existing one more appealing by making them "resonate" with the public. By "resonate" here I mean that the public recognise it as a "truth" and therefore identifies with it, albeit unconsciously. To give an example of what insight is, Top Gear is a good case. It is a BBC program described to be about cars and driving. However, the insight behind the success of the program is that it is about male camaraderie with a car theme. There are many programs that speak about cars, with experts and maybe even more accurate reviews. What had made Top Gear appealing is that it is about three "friends playing with cars", the cars and the information about cars is important but not central. This is the difference between what you see and what you don't see, but is. Sight and insight. If you are the producer and have this insight, the way you'll put the program together will be completely different to one that only focuses in the cars themselves: you would allow episodes when the presenters build their own cars, and cheat each other in phoney races. Its insight is what makes it unique. Its insight informs what's the creative coherent space to play with.

The following advertising plays with the concept of "Golden shadow", with the insight that sometimes prejudices don't allow us to recognise potential.

Insight is only found through a trained used of our intuition, a skill in which we are all almost analphabets. It is about submerging ourselves in the world of ideas, of symbols and concepts that sometimes are incongruent and ambiguous, and making connections to then articulate a simple idea, a truth (or for the artist to create art).

But why is this important? It is important because we are all looking for our own inner truths. We are all exploring the geography of our identity, with its ever changing landscape and its moving borders, trying to understand what's in and what's out, what is ours and what's "foreign", ultimately trying to answer the question: who am I? 
There are three quotes attributed to Michelangelo about sculpture that have to do with this process (I hope that at least one of them is real!).

 

We are both the sculptor and the block of stone. We know that inside the block of stone that is ourselves, there is something that simply is. Finding these insights, as Grayson Perry puts it "these truths we didn't know we knew", is powerful because it is liberating. We chip away that piece of marble that wasn't us, and we feel lighter.

National Portrait Gallery: Grayson Perry's Who are you? Introduction

Of course, we are not only eyes that roll between sight and insight, deep in contemplation, observing and reflecting. So what happens when we get out of the our inner cave, step outside the church or the museum? We have to create. Play a new game. Make something new. Make new decisions. Express ourselves from this new found centre.

This is so important that funerals are increasingly more personalised and popular songs started to replace the old hymns.  "My way" was the first hit to top the funeral charts. So even though we are not all great innovators, breakthrough thinkers, artist or rebels, being able to claim we did things -big or small- "our" way seems to be a worthy badge of honour.  

As an opposite example, we can hear Johnny Cash singing Hurt:

If I could start again 

A million miles away

I would keep myself

I would find a way

And yet, as long as we are here, we can always try to find our way.

Andrea

PS: You have to love the British that now moved on to Monty Pynthon's "Always look at the bright side of life" and songs like Queen's "Who wants to live forever" for their funerals.