Monday, October 14, 2013

Knowledge is a fractal, just-percolating path between nihilism and totalitarianism

This is a tale of finding complexity and coming to terms with the world, partially. Better said, coming to terms with a little role of ours in the world, and how hard playing that role will inevitably be.

I recall my early times in Berlin when my motto was 'everything is a lie'. Even now from time to time I can't help that sentence slipping out my tongue. I was coming from a media delusion, a politics delusion, and I was confronting a University-scale scam and (once again) delusion; so I used to get drunk with friends, howl at the full moon -- which in Berlin is a bare tree laden with snow amid a desert parking lot, and repeat all over again 'this is a lie, my self is a lie, the rotting lungs of the city are a lie'. And I would doze off on a freezing concrete street until that yellow vodka would carry me home. I once lived on a 13th floor and I have memories of flying in through the window. I had abandoned myself to a hopeless nihilism.

The other extreme is being blindly sure of a truth impossible to grasp and is the essence of fascism, I have no doubt. How totalitarian this sentence was!

My little revelation was that neither position is true. It might seem small, but all of a sudden loads of dilemmas appear clear to me:

  • (Wo)men is born neither evil nor good: it is a complex thing in between. 
  • Evil (or good) in (wo)men is neither born nor fostered: it is a complex thing in between. 
  • Media do neither lie nor tell the truth: it is a very complex thing in between. 
  • There is definitively some truth and use in politics, as obvious as it is that all politicians lie. We must wring them out and out as a wet cloth to extract some of that use to the world. 
  • Things are neither relative nor have they got an absolute existence of their own. Relativism is relative and difficult to size. Things exist just on a glimpse, always there and always about to vanish as if the world were quantum in nature. 
Summing up: things are complex, very complex!! And I largely recognize the defeat against this Nature in the younger, more frustrated drunkard playing chess with the shadows of the Berlin wall. A fawn hidden in the woods, its heart a nest for a dove flapping with fear. So easy to abandon ourselves to either nihilism or totalitarianism. But acknowledging that the world is complex paves a tiny, little way in front of us. The reality is complex and we must work hard to extract truth and knowledge, to make serve our work. Reality is not pointless, it is very difficult to grasp.