Outburst
This is an outburst I’ve written yesterday for my frustration from dealing with American bureaucracy and dealing with the problems of my city (hey, let’s talk about gun-shooting in Rio again!). A lot of outrage, a lot of desire to move, anger of my own, but I do believe in these very inaccurate untreated thoughts. And thinking about the collective issues always helps me to become lighter with my personal ones. Great exercise.
And then I deal with my personal ones too, by talking with my loved ones and not the world wide web. Then the craziest thing is to realise that by expressing myself better, I’m also feeling much better. Looking at problems in multiple perspectives, they don’t seem as insurmountable.
It's just life, you know?
Life does not need to be painful and hard for us to worth being loved.
Life is going to be difficult anyway, because life always has its own surprises and challenges, we don’t need to make ourselves miserable to prove anything.
Humans now have the ability to communicate all over the globe and that makes nowhere safe from international power relations. This leads to a massive movement of homogenisation, making some spaces holders of a huge power of impact over everywhere else.
Capitalism as we know it was given birth by protestants christians. They believed that humans are guilty, live in sin, and to get free from such sins one must make an enormous effort, to work a lot and get recognition for one’s work (aka money) to prove God that one is worth love.
It’s all about the individual and its relation with God, it’s each one seeking love for oneself.
This was relevant and fruitful in the context where it started (just think about medieval Europe and how harsh it was!) but now it is making us all sick. All of us who are dominated by the major economic and military power on earth today, the United States of America — a nation that never created its own real name, because it’s a very beautiful and mad federation of states with their own voice, though it was mostly dominated by protestants males and now it lives a ideology crisis. After all, Europe killed its God in the 18th century with the Enlightenment movement and the 'end of history' theory did not come through. We live a crisis of humanism, right? Some indigenous would say that humanism is not enough, life is not only for humans.
What does the USA want to become? What do the other countries have to say about that? Can we all listen more? We all have to dance together anyway, couldn’t we make our dance more joyful?
It’s not about me, it’s not about you, it’s not even only about humanity, it’s about co living in this planet and how could we have a loving impact on it instead of just messing with our house and feeling sorry for our own self destructive instincts while we seek new houses in the open space to colonize and live miserably, in eternal regret for turning our own mother Earth into such a mess. The Earth is a loving mother, but also a very harsh one, very violent, so many of us have died out of starvation, floods, so many dangers, and humanity seems to have reached adolescence since the Industrial Revolution and to be torturing its family for the inherited trauma. To show that we can. Because it’s easier to be ignorant and self centred than to be loving and forgiving. To accept the fact that life is hard even when we manage to get more power of action.
The people I’ve met in positions of power were also suffering, though due to different pains from the ones I’ve met in positions of extreme vulnerability. The people in positions of vulnerability also bite. The pains from the people with power were usually somehow connected to individualism, including the difficulty of opening oneself up to friends and admit that one suffers for whatever it is. The pains of people in vulnerability were either very physical (someone was murdered, I don’t have food, I’m sick) or connected to the acknowledgment of being conquered by another group and losing their identity and autonomy to become someone else's servant, or to the process of becoming individualistic too, it's contagious. The pains are very different but they are all real, comparing pains and denying someone’s right to be in pain, I highly doubt that helps much. And these positions, power and vulnerability, life makes it far more confusing and intricate than just two poles. The positions reverse. Having money does not necessarily comes with real power, power is a very wide concept. Yet, the inequality and comparison of pains is making everyone angry and anger can be good to make us move. The problem then is to know where do we want to move towards.
There are so many people throwing rocks now, how could we be building with the rocks?
As the world gets connected and power is concentrated, we are all competing for the same positions. We are all competitors in an unjust job and attention market. Yes, the straight white male, specially if white American wealthy protestant, has many advantages in the competition, but they are also a decadent power and just occupying their position and keeping the structure does not make the dance better for the majority of the population (though that can be an important step too, it's all a process, right?).
If compared to our ancestors, we are all living much better. There are 8 billion people in the planet because we managed to die less of child diseases, war and starvation. That unfortunately does not guarantee that we won’t face a major crisis in the future with who knows how many deaths. Can we avoid such scenario? I deeply believe that if we want to overcome our imminent crisis we need to learn how to collaborate better instead of competing. How can we stop being sick with self hatred, individualism, selfishness, anxiety?
What are everyone's powers and weakness?
There’s no group, no individual, that can save everyone else.
Let's share our knowledge, our solutions, with open source platforms. Let's build the tools and structures of a society we actually want to live in.
