Category Archives: society

About snobbery in art, and a spiritual message of “Twilight”

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The most revealing, accurate and scathing criticism of modern art is something I read in Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a strange land”, where the author, through one of his characters, says that the main reason why modern art is worthless is that it doesn’t communicate, that it amounts to pointless exercise in navel gazing by pompous pricks. You see, art is supposed to be a form of communication, where the artist communicates his ideas, emotions and other aspects of his psyche with the audience, and this is possible only if they share a common language, in this case of visual symbols, meanings and hints. Where modern art got it wrong is when every artist started making up his own visual language, and the critics applauded because they wanted to have their ego stimulated by being part of the “in” crowd, the ones who “get it”, while it is often the case that they don’t get it because there’s nothing to get, because the emperor is indeed naked. The modern art tries to imply that it is an encoded message that requires possession of the “decryption key” in order to figure it out, but if the “secret key” isn’t shared with the audience, if the audience is required to guess it, in reality there will be no difference between an encrypted message and random noise.

So, if a modern artist has indeed created a piece of art with a secret encoded message, all the while providing no clues for its decoding, he is a pompous ass.

Alternatively, it’s all bullshit without any value whatsoever.

Let me illustrate the difference between bullshit in modern art, and modern art with a message:

This is random bullshit without any value whatsoever, created by Jackson Pollock

This is a message about the state of modern society by Banksy

See the difference? Banksy uses commonly intelligible symbols, like words, sentences and figures. If you’re reasonably intelligent, you’ll have no problem understanding what he wanted to say. With Pollock, you can’t understand what he wanted to say, because it’s just random blotches of paint on a canvas. What it does show is that the author got lost in his own bullshit and no longer knows what he’s trying to do. Basically, he’s just getting drunk and going crazy.

Banksy’s art has a strong message, and this message is conveyed in the manner intelligible to his intended audience. The only thing that’s missing in his art, is pompous pretense and snobbery.

What I actually find funny is that I can often find a more profound message in works that are massively popular and are not commonly seen as art, than in works that are presented as art. The stuff that’s presented as art is usually just stupid and crazy; the message, if it even exists, is trivial and shows only the shallow and superficial nature of the author.

Stuff that’s widely popular in the general population, on the other hand, is usually popular because it has a strong message, something that strongly resonates with the audience. I’ll use the “Twilight” series of books as an example, because it’s an excellent example of a work that’s commonly frowned upon by the artistic “elite”.

On the surface, it’s a “young adult” book series about teenagers and vampires and werewolves and it’s as shallow as a piece of paper. But on the surface, “David” is just a piece of marble. Let’s see what’s packaged inside the superficial content. First you have the concept of self-control as the way of overcoming one’s lower animal nature and attaining higher forms of existence that are not possible if you immediately go for the quick gratification of senses. If you’re a vampire and you simply follow your thirst for human blood, you end up killing your future wife and your life is permanently altered for the worse. Furthermore, it’s a test of resolve: Edward, the male protagonist, wasn’t given a common level of temptation to overcome, he was given an almost impossible level of temptation, and at the most sensitive, vital spot, in some form of incredible cruelty of destiny, because that is what is needed to crush his arrogance. He knows that if he eats her, he will betray his father Carlisle, who is some sort of a vampire saint and his perfect role model of restraint, love, wisdom and intelligence. Later, as he actually falls in love with the girl, his instinctive bloodlust still threatens like Damocles’ sword, and now it’s no longer about possibly killing an innocent stranger, it’s about possibly killing the love of your life, and the temptation is still so bad it’s always a close call, and he needs to acquire a supernatural degree of self-control in order to be harmless enough not to destroy his life by accident. And this is not all. Unbeknownst to him and his family, the Volturi, a super-powerful ruling family of vampires, are set on their path at some unknown point in the future, where they will attempt to acquire some of them for their guard, while destroying the others. Bella, the super-tasty human girl, is the only possible defense, with her supernatural mental shielding ability, but nobody knows that. As far as everybody knows, she’s merely a human with incredibly bad luck, which forces Edward and his family to constantly get into trouble by trying to protect her, and if they do everything right, not only saving her life, but being the kind of people she would love enough to exceed all normal limits of her shield and instinctively expand it to protect them against supernatural attacks, only then do they have a chance of surviving. It’s very obviously hinted that destiny played a hand in things, and it’s not a destiny that just happens, it’s a destiny that demands that you make a choice, a choice that would prove you worthy in the eyes of God… or not. If you are worthy, not only will you get the instrument of your salvation, you will also gain fulfillment in your life, and by the virtue of your choice you actually become worthy. If not… the mechanism of your destruction had already been set in motion and it will reach you with the inevitability of sunrise, and you will have killed your only defense. And the thing is, you don’t know it. You don’t know how important the test is, you don’t know that absolutely everything is at stake. And there is more, of course: the implied hints that Carlisle is looking for a sign from God that he’s doing the right thing, because as much as he tries to be a good person, he can’t ever be sure of how his actions will be received by God – is he a doomed, soulless monster whose attempts are in vain, or is he merely a different child of God, who will be judged on his choices and efforts like everyone else. He doesn’t know whether his choice to make other vampires is a grave error or an act of kindness; however, now the fate has placed a person in his path, who can and will save him and his family if, and only if all these conditions are fulfilled: if they protect her with their lives, if she gets to love them beyond reason, and if she is turned into a vampire. If any of those conditions aren’t met, they all die. So, turning her into a vampire is God’s test to see if they are worthy, and, implicitly, it’s approval of their worthiness for salvation, proof that they are important enough and precious enough to be saved by such an elaborate setup, but only if they choose to be the kind of people that deserve salvation. So, Bella isn’t just a teenage girl his son falls in love with. She’s not just a remarkable person with special gifts. She’s a sacrament from God, a visible sign of invisible grace of God, but she’s also a dire warning about the supreme importance of restraint, free will and choice.

And it’s all there, if you put your snobbery aside and actually read into it. I didn’t invent this interpretation, it’s implicit in the works, and some parts are actually explicitly stated. It’s not encoded, it’s there for everybody to see, but people need to put their arrogance aside and have faith that there’s something worth seeing, and this, apparently, is the test on which almost everybody fails, because they are too arrogant about their sophistication in art and literature to look for deeper meanings in teenage romance books about schoolgirls and vampires. But a hint about that is also given in the books: if you see Bella only as a tasty snack, it all ends there, and for you she’s nothing more. However, it’s a fail.

And this might as well be the reason why “Twilight” is so massively popular – it’s a subliminal message that God has something wonderful in store for us, if we are restrained, subtle, patient and prove to be worthy.

Why generalizations are good

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Yes, I generalize. Yes, I overwhelmingly rely on statistics instead of individual accounts. And now I’m going to explain why you should, too.

I am extremely sensitive to sample bias, because I tend to surround myself with extremely atypical individuals. This is not uncommon; if you study physics, all your friends can probably do calculus in their heads, and very soon you start believing that it’s something everybody can do, or that it is much more common than it actually is. The problem is magnified by the echo-chambers of the Internet, because similar people tend to form interest groups that exclude the outside world and are in fact rather hostile to opinions that are uncommon in their group. After a while, their perception of reality is so severely skewed by their personal sample bias, that what they think is going on in the world has very little in common with the actual world.

You can call it the Marie Antoinette syndrome, if you like; I’m referring to the anecdote where she was told about the riots on the streets and she asked about the cause, and when she was told that the people have no bread, she allegedly responded along the lines of “Stupid mob, they should eat cake instead”. That’s what I’m talking about when I refer to sample bias. When you’re surrounded only by rich people you can’t really understand that the poor people don’t have the option to choose between this or that food, because they can afford only the cheapest kind, and if it isn’t available, they will starve. You have only what one would call the first world problems (“the line at Starbucks was too long so I didn’t have coffee this morning”).

I’m not saying that applying personal preference to our personal choice of company is a bad thing. The whole point is to find people who are more like us, so that we can function at our peak potential, which would be impossible if we were surrounded by people who have interests and abilities so different from our own that there’s no significant intersection. It’s a good thing. What I’m saying is, it isn’t healthy to use our personal experience, formed by an extremely skewed sample of the general population, in order to form opinions about the state of society in general.

This is why I rely on statistics. If someone did a meticulous scientific analysis of some social group, using large unbiased samples, I am going to rely on his findings much more than I’m going to rely on my limited experience with members of that group, because if you’re in heaven, you will tend to think that everybody is a saint, and if you’re in hell, you’ll tend to think that everybody is a demon. What you need is a wider picture, which tells you how many people in total there are, of which how many are in hell and how many are in heaven, and of those in each group, you will want a breakdown by certain characteristics in order to see a pattern. Essentially, what you need to do is remove yourself from the picture and acquire sufficient distance, in order to gain perspective.

But this wider perspective doesn’t influence the way I treat individual people. I can have generalized opinions about a certain group of people based on statistics, but that individual you are dealing with can be normal for that group, or extremely atypical. It’s like trying to form opinions about me based on general statistical facts about Croats. Not the best idea. On an individual level, you need to treat people like individuals, and do your best to perceive the actual person you’re dealing with. However, this individual approach is actually dangerous when you’re dealing with large populations, and if you don’t resort to statistics you will be unable to form useful opinions. What you need are generalizations – you need to know what an expected median sample of a population is, and for an individual, you need to know where he is placed on the histogram of his population group. If you’re talking to a +3 sigma individual, you know how many of those you can realistically expect to find where he came from. If you’re in Jet Propulsion Laboratory you need to be aware that each individual there is probably extremely atypical for any population, to the point where he’s more alien than human; the average person there has a PhD and Mensa level IQ. If you’re in the army, everyone you encounter is most likely representative of the general population and it would be unlikely for you to encounter an atypical individual.

If you’re an atypical individual, it is exceedingly difficult for you to find others like you in a general population, and the best thing about the Internet is that it enables you to find others like you much more easily, allowing you to skip the arduous task of checking out uninteresting individuals with very low odds of finding what you’re looking for. However, this opens you to extreme sample bias, because the ease with which you can meet other atypical individuals can blind you to the placement of your interest group on the population histogram. Essentially, you tend to think that everybody is like you and that your group represents what people normally are, and that actually has an unknown probability of being true.

Why Socrates was an idiot

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Socrates supposedly used a triple-sieve technique to filter out signal from noise in his life. If something was true, good and useful, then it got a pass. If not, he wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s see how we would have fared if the most important things in history were subjected to his filter.

Someone breaks off a sharp sliver of rock and figures out you can cut stuff with it. But is it true? I don’t know. It just is. Is it good? I don’t know, it just is, ethical criteria don’t apply. Is it useful? Yes, but it’s also possibly dangerous because you can cut yourself with it or kill people. Fail.

Someone accidentally drills a hole in wood too forcefully and produces a fire. Wow, fire! But is it true? Well, it just is. Is it good? I don’t know, I guess you can either cook a meal with it or burn your house down, so it depends. Is it useful? Yeah, it’s useful. It’s also possibly harmful, so sorry, fail.

Someone invented the wheel and made a cart that can transport goods more efficiently to bigger distances. But is it true? Sort of. Is it good? How can we tell what will come of it eventually? Maybe people will use it to make chariots of war and kill people. Is it useful? Well, we don’t know, we haven’t tried it out yet. Fail.

And that’s why the Greeks poisoned the motherfucker, because if people used his kind of philosophy to decide about things, they’d still be eating bananas on trees. Maybe people then intuitively understood the peril of asking too many questions.

In order to make any kind of progress, you need to work exactly with things that haven’t yet been proven true, good or useful. You must be ready to test ideas that sound crazy, like the one that the Earth isn’t flat and that the Sun doesn’t actually move in the sky from east to west every day, but that the Earth actually revolves around its axis, or that men could possibly fly faster than the birds or dive deeper than the fish. You need to work with things that are morally ambivalent and can be used for both good or ill, because good or ill is not in things but in the mind of the user. You need to be ready to do useless things because you never know what you could stumble into. You might find mold spoiling samples in your Petri dish, you might throw plates around the cafeteria and see how they fall and discover quantum electrodynamics and win Nobel prize. You can’t know what you’ll end up with just based on what it sounds to your pompous quasi-intellectual arrogance.

You need to give things a chance to show themselves, to tell you what they are. You can’t just silence everything based on what you think you know about truth, goodness and usefulness. Socrates was a pompous ass who didn’t even realize how incredibly harmful and wrong his “philosophy” was. If cavemen questioned things the way he deemed appropriate, they would no longer be living in caves, they’d go back to living on trees. Fortunately, they tested things by practical application and experiment and not skepticism, and so here we are.

Why we have a Muslim problem

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Our “multicultural” problem consists of two main elements.

The first element is that people in the West basically started to believe their own bullshit about how all civilizations and cultures are the same and the differences amount to clothing, cuisine, art and customs. For this reason, they think it’s a bad thing to discriminate between cultures and civilizations and this created the biggest part of the problem, where you are unable to do anything about evil because you’re not allowed to even recognize it properly, let alone do something about it.

The second element is that inferior civilizations live in a very dangerous illusion. They believe we are weak.

It’s a rather new development. The Ottoman empire in the Ataturk’s times was the most advanced Islamic state of the time, and it could never believe itself to be the equal of Europe, let alone its superior. All the weapons and technology they had in WW1 were given to them by the Germans. Outdated German shit was ten times better than the best stuff the Turks could do. Ataturk therefore concluded that the only way forward for them was to reject Islam and embrace the tenets of the Western civilization, because that’s the only way. That’s where progress is, where technology is, where reality is. Islam is where outdated useless bullshit is.

But something strange happened in the meantime. Colonialism was abolished and the Islamic tribes were allowed to profit from oil, and they became incredibly rich. Because it became unpopular in the West to simply enslave inferior people and take their resources, we instead traded with them and they got our money and could buy the technological artifacts our modern scientific civilization could produce. Because they became incredibly wealthy from all the money we allowed them to receive in our newly-found post-colonial kindness, they started to think of themselves as better than us, because on average they were wealthier than us. Since they were never forced to compete with us on equal terms, and we simply gave them stuff because they happened to live in places where we found oil, they were able to keep their inferior, idiotic beliefs that nobody in the West could have and be able to contribute something of value in the world of science and technology. Being able to keep their stupid shit, and having too much money for their own good, they started evaluating the world from the perspective of their stupid medieval bullshit. They think we are weak because we give them free money instead of simply enslaving them and taking everything we want (which we could do with trivial ease if we just stopped putting artificial restraints on our own actions). They think we are weak because we Western men treat women as our equals. They think we are weak because they are stupid enough to confuse our choice to be kind with inability to be strong and cruel. Worst of all, they believe in outward manifestations of strength, and they think that lack thereof means weakness.

So let me teach Muslims an important lesson here.

We can kill you all if we choose to. There’s absolutely nothing you could to about it, we are that much stronger. We have so much nuclear weapons, we could turn all places in the world, where Muslims are the majority, into glass parking lots, and simply pick up all the Muslims who live among us, put them in concentration camps and kill them. It would take us less than a year if we actually decided to do it. Don’t ever think we can’t do it, because we in the West invented genocide, we invented wars where tens of millions of people died, we invented chemical weapons, we invented nuclear weapons, and if you all lived on Mars, we could nuke you even there, because we know how to do it and we have the technology to do it. The reason why we are kind and tolerant and polite, and why we allow you pieces of shit to fuck with us, is because we are actually scared of our own power. We are so powerful we could kill every living thing on this planet ten times over, and if we don’t restrain ourselves artificially, there is absolutely nothing else that could restrain us. We are afraid we could do terrible evils if we don’t control ourselves, and so we do, to a fault. We saw the evils of the two world wars in which we used modern technology to kill as many people as we could, and after we nuked two Japanese cities at the end of the last war, we got genuinely scared. We knew it went too far. Hitler used science and technology to commit genocide. Americans used science and technology to evaporate entire cities full of people. We were aghast with horror at our power to do evil unless we restrain ourselves, and so we did. We decided to stop enslaving you and to allow you to have your own states. We decided to allow you to profit from mineral resources found on your lands. Whatever you have, you have because we decided to allow it.

So I would recommend that you stop right here and think carefully about what you are about to do next. To help you think, I will show pictures that you will recognize as our weakness.

In this picture, you can see how we allow women to work in our important factories and wear uniforms like men. Oh, how much weaker must we be than your “mighty” mujahideen? True, if we waged war with swords and arrows, but this is Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This is where we produced fissile materials for Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Let’s see another picture:

See how weak those guys look? None of them carries a gun, or a sword. They look mild and non-aggressive. They’re not warriors, like you are. They just write formulas on paper. About how to split U-235 and kill you all without ever even having to see you.

Take a look at this fellow:

He was a gentle, kind person, not like your Islamic warriors. He made modern agriculture possible by inventing the Haber-Bosch method of producing artificial fertilizers. He also invented the modern chemical weapons that were used in the first world war.

Our scantly dressed girls walking around without having to be afraid of being raped aren’t a sign of our weakness. They are a sign of our strength. The fact that we don’t need to be armed, that we don’t have to accompany our women everywhere for their safety, is a sign of confidence that we can destroy any possible threat with unimaginable ease. You were able to temporarily test our limits simply because it never crossed our minds that anyone would be crazy enough to even try, because we are so incredibly powerful. The problem is, even most of us forgot why we can do what we do and why we are not afraid of anyone, because we protected everyone from our horrible power so long ago, that we stopped even thinking about having it, and being able to use it. Most of us would be horrified at the thought of simply exterminating you like vermin with nuclear weapons, not because our cute little girls dressed in something revealing and very comfortable couldn’t press buttons that would turn all of your “mighty warriors of Islam” into blast-shadows and rotting flesh, but because we think it would be cruel and inhumane. The reason why we hate even thinking about it is the same as the reason why we don’t eat babies. It’s not because we couldn’t, but because we don’t want to be turned into baby-eating monsters. We restrain ourselves in our horrible capacity to wield death, because we don’t want to make those choices and be those persons.

Killing all Muslims would be as easy for us as killing a half-buried helpless woman by throwing stones is for your “mighty” mujahideen. It’s not for the lack of our power that you are allowed to fuck with us. It’s exactly because of our horrible, immense power, that scares us senseless, because we could so easily become the worst imaginable monsters if we just decided to do so. We decide, we press buttons, you all die, and we then have to live with ourselves and think about what it says about us. It’s that last part that restrains us. However, if you fuck with us enough, our self-restraint might slip.

On multiculturalism

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I was thinking how fighting the “Islamic state” might not be the best idea.

IS is a manifestation of a problem. This problem is called Islam. There are people who actually believe that life should be organized according to the principles of this, I wouldn’t really call it religion, but more of a political philosophy. So, they believe that the ideal state would be the Islamic caliphate, like that of the first four caliphs, from Abu Bakr to Fitna, the Muslim civil war which created a sunni/shia schism. This concept is called Salafism, a movement of going back to the roots of Islam and the lifestyle of Muhammad and his immediate successors.

So, they want to live like that – behead the apostates and the infidels, enslave people, treat women like cattle, basically they want to live like savages and do evil.

This, of course, is not compatible with the way we in the West want to live, and we therefore dislike them, leaving us with only three options. We can exile them from the West into some middle-eastern shithole where they can practice Islam as it was intended to be practiced, and they can make their own Islamic society there to compete with ours.

The second option is to have a military conflict with them, which will inevitably end as a very messy, bloody thing that might actually destroy our civilization.

The third option is to pretend that all is fine, that all people, cultures and civilizations are equal, and wait for them to finish killing and raping us until we are all either dead or Muslims.

What I propose is to let them have their Islamic civilization. I am not opposed to that. If God separated one part of all creation to be the dwelling place of Satan, demons and sinners who reject Him and the way He made things, we can separate one part of this world to be the dwelling place of Muslims. However, I think it is dangerous to allow them to obtain artifacts of sophisticated, non-Islamic civilizations, such as the Internet, the smartphones and computers, and especially the modern weapons. They can have whatever artifacts Muhammad and his immediate followers could produce, because those are Islamic. I think they would agree with that. They can have swords, camels, dates and goats. They can’t have artifacts of science and technology because they don’t believe in that Western nonsense anyway, and since they don’t believe in the theory according to which those things work, why would they believe that those things work?

Furthermore, since Muslims are traditionally a danger to others because they are used to financing themselves by robbery and enslavement of others, strong military defenses should be placed on the border, and if they start fucking with us, we should kill them.

Other than that, we should simply isolate them there and leave them to their Islam, until they are ready to admit that it was a bad idea and renounce it completely.

This is why globalization is a bad idea, because it forces different cultures and civilizations to live together in one entity under one set of rules before they are ready. It is much better to let people organize themselves in smaller units and let those units compete, to see whose ideas and principles are better, and people should change their civilization-forming principles only when they are ready and willing to do so, and until then, they should be kept strictly apart to avoid conflicts. Tourism and trade should be encouraged, but immigration should be allowed only for those people who are willing to renounce their own culture and civilization and accept the one they are migrating into. If you want to get away from the mess your civilization made, you should check that mess at the door and not bring it in with you. Until you are ready to do so, stay the fuck out.

Multiculturalism is not necessarily a bad idea, as long as the cultures are separated and they have to compete for supremacy. When you start forcing members of different cultures and civilizations to function together, you necessarily introduce intellectual and moral relativism that is immensely harmful, and the alternative is a bloody conflict. If you keep the cultures and civilizations separated, at least you can see which one is superior. If you try to blend them together, the inferior ones will try to claim superiority and the rest will have to either tolerate them for the sake of avoiding conflict, or you’ll have a civil war like the one in Bosnia.