Thursday, November 1, 2007

Cause and Effect

This is one of the reasons man is so smart and so stupid. This supposed "law" allowed us to make some of the most astonishing discoveries of human history. It also generated some of the most astonishing misunderstandings about ourselves ever made. Cause and effect doesn't even work in a simple way inside a laboratory. Applied to human matters, is just the most misleading concept conceivable. It asks you, given some determined "state of things", to find the culprit, the one and only responsible for what the case is. But this is not a crime scene. There's no evil spirit causing all our troubles. Reality is so complex that all you can see are clouds of causes, circumstances and conditions, phenomena and next, clouds of effects, changed circumstances and conditions.

Revolutions

The first thing we must do is change our very idea of Revolution. Instead of changing changing the people in power, we must change the power and attitude in people. People today feel powerless and that is just not true. In every age, people have been able to fight for their goals and many changes were made. But one still views revolutions in terms of changing the people and keeping the attitudes and practices. Today, this is just not possible anymore. We witnessed to many revolutions and we saw all of them lie back on its predecessors errors and faults. We want something different. We want a world where it is possible to dream but also to make those dreams come true. We want a world where we can keep our humanity. Where we're able to be more than specialized ants, digging away at our "expertise mound", working ourselves senseless while serving today's "growing imperative". We aim for a world, for a mankind where one can be human and live by human laws instead of dissolving at the orders of non-entities like the Market. The Market is real and it feeds our stomachs and our whims but we mustn't forget the rules are our own and we can change them in order to live better lives. In many cases just to live lives.