Cursed and Doomed.

It's as though I am in a pressure cooker, and the pressure just keeps building up, more and more, relentlessly. I cannot handle it, but there is nothing I can do. 

I am left to the ebb and flow of society, left to be judged by them. left to have my fate decided by unknown faces and silent voices. 

My place in this world has been robbed from me, put into the hands of these anonymous figures who decide how good I am.

Perhaps this is how life is like for the mediocre. 

You are left painfully aware of your weaknesses and failings, yet remain in that awkward position to feel "lucky" that you aren't those left behind. You are left doomed to never shine and never fail. 

The winners leave you behind in a trail of dust, sending you coughing and flailing. But you can't give up, because you are still running ahead of those who have fallen. You are cursed to keep trying - and failing.

It is possibly the worst kind of life possible.

finding niceness on the Internet is like finding gold on the floor.

Why can't we have tame, mannered arguments online without succumbing to calling other people's views bullshit, sophistry and such?

The veil of protection from physical interactions through the Internet also manifests a certain kind of rudeness. One's views are always deemed to be right in any argument. There can be no settling for middle ground. Boy, it's almost like the US elections. The other person may be confused or wrong, but there is no reason you should immediately denounce their views as bullshit or sophistry.

That's why I hate arguing online. People almost never get your point, and you almost never get theirs. There's a sort of chronic misunderstanding once talk on the internet goes beyond basic propositions. And what's left is a gap between the two arguers. What an annoyance.

Sheesh.

Ikiru / The Looming Bureaucracy

The film Ikiru by Kurosawa Akira is undoubtedly one of the best films I have ever watched that touched upon the themes of death, meaning and the encroachment of the bureaucracy on the human condition. I strongly recommend this film to anyone even slightly interested in existentialist themes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The Protagonist, Watanabe Kanji, is a faceless minor bureaucrat in the Public Affairs division of the local government. He has spent the past 30 years working the same job, but as the narrator puts it:

"He is just wasting his time without really living his life. In other words, he's not really alive at all."

His family consists of him, his son and his daughter-in-law. The son and his wife does not really seem to value Kanji at all. They talk about using his pension and savings to buy a house for their own enjoyment. They say that "if he refuses to give us the money we'll just move out anyway!" The absolute value of Kanji as an end-in-itself, a human worth treating equally, is eroded; what is left is a commoditized Kanji, one that only has relative value because he is valuable as a means. A means for the son to satisfy his own desires and ends. Kanji's life was spent locked in the bureaucracy; even when his son was having an operation, he couldn't be with him until the end because "he had some things to do", again showing the trappings of work and bureaucracy. This notion of utilitarian commoditization within the bureaucracy will come back later in the story as well.

Upon his realization that he was afflicted with cancer, he immediately realizes, unlike poor Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella, that death was unto him like a spectre. He withdraws 50000 yen (a substantial amount in post-war Japan, I presume) with an intent to spend it, an act of reaffirmation of his life. Yet it hits him that he has absolutely no idea how to spend it, since his whole life was spent mired in work. He meets a writer in the bar who tells him (and later shows as well) that pleasures and indulgences are the only ways to tear himself away from the suffocation of work. Here the themes of life and meaning surface again. How should we live our lives? This question was not answered by pleasures in Kanji's view.

He meets a subordinate from his department outside who was looking for him to sign her resignation letter. She struck him immediately; she represents to him everything that he is not. Happiness, fulfilment and like he says later on: "You are just so full... of life." He desires to live truly like he sees her to be doing, and he finds out she quit the bureaucracy to work at a toy factory. "Making toys makes me feel like I am playing with all the children of Japan."

He then realizes that he had been doing it wrong: it was too late to change his own life, but perhaps he could still change the lives of others. He then remembered a project that the Womens' Committee had tried to propose but was truncated in the perverse loop within the bureaucracy. Public Affairs says it is the Engineering Department's Job, who says it's the Parks department's job and so on.

He tries his best to advocate for the project, and finally the project is done: A toxic cesspit was cleared to make way for a childrens' playground. He dies contented in the playground when internal hemorrhaging kills him.

Now it seems like a happy ending now, but the last part was acted out at his funeral, and his death tale told through the mouthpieces of the various co-workers in the bureaucracy. In the face of his family and relatives, the Mayor concludes in a cynical tone that Kanji's role in the park project was minimal, that it was all due to the auspice of himself and the Park / Engineering Department. The yes-men nod in agreement. What else can they say? They begin to fight over who's to bear credit for the park, forgetting or deceiving themselves that Kanji had little to no influence in the playground even though he was the one who fought through the bureaucratic inefficiency. Indeed, one man even proclaims, proudly, that "Kanji was from the start a Public Affairs man. How DARE he try to build a park. He's ignoring the bureaucratic demarcations!"

Yet, for all their self-righteousness, they were unable to look the women in their eyes when the Womens' Committee members cried at his funeral. I felt utmost pity for this man. For everyone has misunderstood him. His aim was not to fulfill some self-pleasing goal, but rather for the good of the act itself. He found the one thing in life that was not thrown upon him by a meaningless body and instinctively sought to act it out, his curtain-closer in life.Yet his achievement was buried, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy's need for self-affirmation. To make itself feel useful. But to think along that line will be to defeat the purpose, isn't it. Regardless of its ends, his act was self-justified.

In the face of his act, such bickering seem meaningless, pointless. Indeed, in the face of death itself such acts will bear no meaning. His act will shine on its own, one that bears absolute value. Those who only see relative value in his act are misguided, fooled by the illusion that bureaucracy can direct them to any meaning at all.

They embody cowardice. They refuse to break away from the bureaucracy because that's all they have ever known. Perhaps they too need to face death to see the temporality of their lives. So that they may truly live.

The Catch-22 of our Army.

To complain about the chain of command about your superiors, you need to go through the chain of command. sheer, god-damn genius.

thoughts / problems.

there are so many problems in this world, the more I think about it. And the fact that I am forced to view this perfect disaster from the eye of the storm just makes me feel so fucking useless.

Some problems are so deeply entrenched, people no longer see them as a problem. Lacking historical insights, people continue to worship these fetishes, as though nothing has changed for the past millennium. They worship their wealth, their material goods, as though that is all that is good for them. They act in blind pursuit of Progress, but not once did they stop to ask: Progress for whose sake? We end up chasing Progress for Progress's sake, at the cost of the people. Who benefits? No one asks. They merely chase the goal as told. Told by who? Not parents, not friends, but the oppressive weight of the society.

Some problems are so big, people refuse to act. People wait for some illusory Other to act on their behalf, and blame anyone but themselves when crisis strikes. Their own foolishness send them to the maws of bankruptcy and social collapse but they find themselves the victims. The need to blame rests the burden not onto themselves but to everyone else. I am not at fault. They are.

But the real problems, the problems that I care about, are those at the intersection between Humanities and Science. Science can explain everything natural, but what happens when we find out that we too are natural? Can science explain us away in terms of molecules? Can science explain away our politics and society? Knowing what Science can and cannot do is the first step towards advancing the current state of knowledge, where scientism, not Science, has begun to blur the line. Through subterfuge, ideologies mix in with facts, and the populace consumes. There is much concept clarification to be done, if only everyone adhered to such maxims.

But I guess we can start solving problems one at a time. One small step at a time.

For now, to solve the problem of sleep.

omnom / being Singaporean

I spent the last night queuing overnight for Carl's Junior's offer: first 50 people gets 1 year worth of Carl's Junior, and I got it! OMNOMNOMNOM.

Now the more interesting phenomena is what goes on in these queues. As a first-timer I had thought it'll be as easy as waltzing in early and waiting for food to be placed in your hands. But as it were, the whole event is an exercise in being Singaporean.

There were rational voices, who advocated a system of registering names (we were forced to wait outside because of management miscommunications) on a list, so we can have a "legitimate" first 50.

There were also people who didn't know of it and went directly to the store to wait, forming the "alternate" queue. When security guards told them to move, they adamantly refused. Now, I understand how you feel when you realized you queued for nothing, but this fear of losing is really amusing. Then there were further cases when the legitimate and alternate queue ultimately met, and a few angsty guys just shouted unintelligible scoldings on us, as though we were at fault for being there first.

Now, these are just a minority, but as the emptiest vessels made the most noise, you can expect a general air of disdain for the whole event after a while.

Also, the return of the stereotypical Angsty Angry Old Woman. Yes. I assure you, it's not as rare as it seems.

All in all, an exercise in Singaporean-ness for those who did act that way, and an utter let-down for the more respectable members of society who just want to get on with their free food and life.

back. / thoughts of being, in summary

I am back from taming the beast called Emotion, and am now ready once more to step forward!

my philosophical/pseudo-philosophical thoughts will all be dumped at http://pseudo-philosophicus.blogspot.sg/ from now on.

this will be where I dump less relevant, irrelevant or angsty stuff.

oh golly, it's late. why not talk about existentialism.

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There are so many people out there who claims to be unable to do what they want, because someone said this, someone said that. Then when they die they tell people they regretted not doing as they wished.

But the power of choice lies in you. Financial constraints are arguably the only real constraint on what you can or cannot do, and even that is rather arbitrary. When you do as others tell you to, are you really respecting them and deferring your opinions? Or are you simply afraid to do as you want because it will be "against the norms"?

As long as it's not anything immoral (i mean it in a philosophical sense, not what stupid social norms and law-fearing imparts on us), why not?

Think about all this in the context that there will be no afterlife. There will be no miracles beyond this life. All that is, is this life. Will you throw it away and live your life in Sartrean bad faith? Live in the shadows of what others tell you to?

People fear the loss of absolute meaning, the teleological meaning by which they can claim to come to be. But are we really just fearing that freedom from absolute teleology instead? That there is no one to tell us what to do with our lives? With no meaning conferred upon us, it means that we are free to forge our own meanings in this absurd world.

Ultimately the choice lies within you. If you so desire to shrug it off and say "well, I had no choice!", then it's your choice. But when you regret before your death, what are you truly regretting? That you didn't have the chance to do something, or that you had the chance and you chose not to do it?