São Paolo

Yesterday I revisited the documentary by Morgan Spurlock called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Having already seen the movie, I had spoken to my girlfriend a couple of times about it, and she suggested we would see it together.

The movie itself is by no means a masterpiece. It deals with its message in a similar way as his previous movie Supersize Me, in that it slightly mocks the viewer with his obvious points all along. And even though I label myself an experienced observer especially when it comes to the central issue of the movie, product placement, I did notice a few extra items on my journey through his tale.

One particular issue did stick with me though. About half way through the movie Morgan introduces us to the legal ban in São Paolo on all outdoor advertisements. The returning reader will note that I have mentioned this before.

According to this article São Paolo is the 4th largest metropolis in the world and since 2007 when Mayor Kassab outlawed "visual pollution" the city has been free of billboards, posters and cab-commercials. This is very interesting to me, because it employs a fresh perspective on what pollution should cover as a term. Apparently pollution is not only toxic biproducts of other products. Pollution can then be understood in a broader sense as anything that is physically or mentally harmful towards any recipient. So if advertisement in São Paolo could be derived as harmful towards the recipients, take a look at this image of Times Square and tell me what your immediate impression is.

It might just be about time we ask ourselves just where we stand in the debate on heredity and environment. Do we believe the notion that we are from birth determined to make self-sufficient decisions or do we believe that the environment greatly influences our lives? While I am sure most readers already have a stand point in that debate, primatologist Robert Sopalski has some interesting insights on what comprises a human being.

What the movie, the city and the research seems to show is that human beings are very susceptible to marketing ploys. Indeed it is the only explanation why such an industry exists. The counter-argument always seems to be something about free will and anti-determinism, which makes perfect sense from a controversial stand point. But it should be quite obvious that Times Square would look a lot different if everyone were capable of making independant decisions in particular when it comes to patterns in consumption. It could be viewed as the greatest social experiement ever made ©.

And in its own way São Paolo is contributing to this debate by taking the stand point that a city with less visual clutter is a city with less clutter. Furthermore it is mentioned in an interview with a store clerk in the movie that they have noticed a rise in product quality in the stores, simply because referrals are now the primal force of marketing.
If that is not a hard hitting argument for less advertising I do not know what could be.

Groceries

With New Year's Eve drawing close everyone is starting to reflect on what changes they desire to see in 2012. It probably comes as no surprise that I would like to see quite a few. But I will not be listing all of these today. Instead I will share a few thoughts on how I personally intend to greet this new and blank page in the book of me.

Today I went for some grochery shopping, and I did this with the intention to try and see whether it was possible on my budget to purchase only organic. To my amazement I actually ended up with a shopping bag that costed me about one and a half as much as I normally spend on food for a couple of days, and this was even with a few extra items I would not normally need.

Now the prices where I live are normally a lot higher for organic products, but given that I have a physical condition that requires me to be more healthy in my diet, I did pick up an interest to learn about cooking and food in general. This was a while back, and it probably started before I was diagnosed, but it is quite evident now that I have changed my view on eating.

On my normal budget I never knew I could afford to buy organic and healthy food in the maner I exhibited today. I am not a vegan or vegetarian, but I do not eat a lot of meat and I should stay away from milk in any shape or form, and the meat certainly is the expensive part of any diet in the area where I live.

So this was more or less just a cheerful post about how I tried something different to see if I could make 2012 a year with an improving diet for myself, and the first step proved to be succesful. And now I will be off to the kitchen to make myself a wholesome meal.

I hope you have equally important prospects for this new year. The revolution in you is the most important one.

Act

While I do spend a lot of my time complaining about corrupt organs within society, I do also try and recognise the fall out that I so fiercely despise as a symptom.

As a very brief note before I head on holiday for a few days I want to leave you with an Einstein quote.

Motivation

So today I thought I would take some time to write a piece on motivation. A subject I have had to deal with in many various facets of my life. Because what is motivation? Motivation is the drive that makes you productive. It generates the energy and the want to do a certain thing. It is the fuel for your machinery and it is evidently needed throughout the globe to make this and all other races viable for survival. We quite simply rely on constant motivation in some form to keep us going.

Evolutionarily males are hard-wired to try and be accomplished so they would attract the better females and secure healthier offspring. Now I do not know what presumptions you enter into this debate with, but if it comes as a surprise for you that this has residual presence in the society of today, then I am afraid you may be in for more surprises as you progress through this post.

Since man has lived in scarcity for most of our time as a species, it is quite understandable that our brains have evolved into working in a way where we associate resource acquisition with success and thriving. It might be far fetched to say that most of us today look for economic success in a partner, and I assume it would seem derogatory to say that women especially would do this. So what am I saying?
I could be saying that women biologically were driven to look for these things in a partner, but underline the point that no one has to be a slave to any biological drive. We can starve ourselves to death if we put our minds to it, so certainly we are capable of not adhering to all tenants of our human drives.
So perhaps our biology is a bit too conservative and maybe even outdated? It would certainly seem this way, as people are trying to break out of these bonds and claim freedom from any societal influence on their preferences. People do not like being told what they look for, they want to establish that for themselves. At least in our culture.

What we are interested in is to maintain our own motivation. Especially in the consumer culture where we are constantly under attacks from fizzy drinks, junk food, noisy entertainment and informational overload. Our physical blood sugar and our attention levels are jumping up and down all day, and this tires out the brain and body and causes us to lose motivation towards generic drives. It makes people lazy and perhaps it explains why online dating is such a growing phenomenon today. Even the most basic need for physical interaction with the opposite sex has to be sated from the calm and comfortable position of your own chair.

But this is just a symptom. The real enemy is the lack of motivation. The massive increases in anxiety and depression in most if not all of the western countries over the past 50 years, could be explained by the fact that we are the first few generations that have no goals. There is nothing to fight for. Only to shop for. And only having things to shop for leaves the human body and mind in an unhealthy state where we begin to perform a sort of social apoptosis. Depression takes hold of a person when he or she feels useless and unmotivated. A psychiatrist would probably disagree with this and explain it chemically, but there is no denying that the younger generations today are the less motivated generations and they are also the more anxious ones. The correlation could be unrelated, but I doubt it. Multitasking at the level we ask people to do it today quite simply should not lead to anything good. We have not been underachieving as a species so far, so why do we need to go so much faster now? Have you ever tried hyper-motivating an animal? They go crazy and start running around in circles not knowing what to chase, do or act upon. This is more or less the constant state for a normal western person today. Everywhere marketers are trying to get to you, and your solace is broken by the fact that you own a television that will allow the continuing of the mind-invasion you offer to your insurgents. All in the name of getting the carousel to run a little bit faster to allow for a little more growth.

It would seem then that this culture did wish for a greater knowledge of and capacity for empathy this year. We require the managing institutions of this world, the media and the law makers, to start paying attention to the fact that we have to slow down or we drown in our gluttonous intake of rapid social expansion. You will note that it also becomes increasingly difficult to scout a system or construct, social or otherwise, for errors if you constantly add more and more parts and modules. So we never know if sub prime and interest free loans undermine our economical strengths, or if artificial sweeteners act as carcinogenics, or if it destroys a generation to have Kanye West as a role model, before it is too late and the damage has been done by this free flow of seemingly innovative additions to our partly determined, partly ever-adaptive life styles. And the industries do this with a double standard, defending to the best of their lawyers' capability their corporate rights to avoid telling the consumers which products are genetically modified and which are not. Because they do not want to scare the consumers from buying their products, before it is 100% scientific that consumers, formerly known as people, dig their own graves with them. And if you ask me you can disregard the last part of the prior sentence actually.

The intrinsic motivation for all of us beyond water, food and a roof, is that we want to be socially relevant, as we have discussed prior. When it comes to what we get the most out of it is certainly a widening of what is socially capable. If you look at this study showing which nation is the happiest in the world, you will notice that resource acquisition is far from relevant to such happiness.

Luckily we have pills for postponing the solution of this social decline a generation or two.

Something just for you

Well you and anyone else who ends up reading this post...

I thought I would take a detour, in the light of Christmas, and give you readers a little present. A poster that I found on the web not long ago, and I think it is very relevant to the times we are in, this holiday that is upon us and the new year inching its way closer to the doorstep.

Show your compassion and send some thoughts towards the people in need.

Gamefication

Not too long ago I saw a video on gamification. Unfortunately I cannot find it anymore, and I would normally have linked to it by now when the reference is this clear. However, I did notice that about a gazillion results came up when I searched for the term, so I'm sure you can look it up if you do not know what it means.

If you want a quick catch up as to what it means and how the more positive perspectives on this idea reinforces their perspectives with arguments, look no further than this guy's presentation:



If you draw anything from this presentation please disregard his ideas on what to draw. You should be weary of this concept. Especially looking at the industry attempting to constantly trying to impress kids and force their parents to buy a product. If you look at this specific part of a documentary about corporations, you should get the bigger picture on why you want to question what industries educate your children.


My idea on how to make gamification useful is to introduce it into the basic learning of children. Much like these business vultures would want to, but ethically of course. How so? Well first of all it should be scientific, meaning the games developer should pick a topic they find interesting to develop a game world on, and then they should confer with the experts on that field.




An interesting way on how to make biology classes more compelling could be to make a game that puts the player into the role of becoming a white blood cell and fighting off infections to the host. These infections could then mutate and evolve, to make room for differing levels of difficulty. In addition the game could easily be transformed into a multiplayer game so a class of students would learn how the system of their bodies work together to keep them as healthy as possible.
Tie this in with specific levels in the game making it harder to work as a white blood cell due to fatigue, because the host body is eating too much fast food or drinking too many soft drinks filled with additives, and you got yourself one educative game.


I have no idea how to market this idea though, and I am quite sure that one way is to remove the aspect of combatting fast food, embracing the idea that the heart of the host body could wear a tag for a fast food chain the kids normally love. Many games will be doing similar things to get on the market in the future. Refer back to my prior post on advertising. 
The competition will be fierce and the corporations want to be a part of it, both so new games do not embrace the ideas I have mentioned that could potentially educate their consumers of their harmful ways, but of course also in order to be a part of sponsoring the games inside the games.


Finally I will simply say this. What the speaker at TEDx is right about specifically is that this trend towards gamification will not go away. It will not only be used on children, it will be utilised on adults as well, to make them compliant ressourceful workers with rising productivity due to the old carrot on a stick routine.


I will leave you with this lecture theorising why that will not work.

New World Order

A friend of mine linked to this Forbes article that talks about how only a handful of corporations own a gigantic sum of the total money sequencing going on in and around the world.

In truth, I don't know how I should feel about this issue. It might be devastating because it enables the obscure thought that they can push and pull society in any direction they so choose, but then again, maybe they can't. As we have seen with the recent uprising in Occupy movements, it is becoming quite clear that even if there ever was a mastermind trying to plot out the worlds economy (the worlds fate), one such person or group cannot fully control the subjects that inhabit the economy. At least not entirely.

Sensationalistic titles aside, I do not believe that there is some huge conspiracy to push the world in a singular direction, and as stated above even if there was, it would hold less than the power needed to do so in any case.


It does empower communities to realise the power of group pressure. Even the establishment with all their millitary and police are subjects to the effects of group pressure. If the public wants something, it is simply a matter of determination and numbers to make it happen. Through elections, through riots or through revolution.


Does that mean that we can simply lay back and expect the future to deliver onto us the sweet redemption from anything we find remotely nasty in society? 
No it most certainly does not. Because a society is made up of its inhabitants and you are one of these. Since all human beings are socially dependant upon relating to each other, it becomes in your own interest to regard it as your job to take part in the process of bettering society.

You are a cell in a body. You have your duty as the red blood cell to feed and fuel the system, but you also have your duty as the white blood cell to find and root out negative influences on your host body. And every time you decide against your job as either of these cells, you leave that amount of extra work for all the ones that do.


Now as a patient diagnosed with a chronic disease that could have been caused by my own immune system, it becomes a reasonably acceptable metaphor for why it is in your own interest to part take in the movement towards changes in society, for otherwise your opinion could go unheard. The social immune system consisting of the people attempting to make their voices heard can overreact and cause a counter-productive outcome.

As we saw in the Bolsjevik revolution, where only a fraction of society seized control over the dissatisfaction of the public, and used this to stear away from the good of the many in order to realise the goals of the few.

In other words, change is coming. Make sure you get on that bus and help out, because if you do not, you have silently consented towards whatever the outcome will be.

War

The atrocities of war are getting to a point now where it is about time the western world dawns upon the fact that this "war on terror" has to stop.

You might as well call it a war for terror, seeing what the outcome is. The establishment is attempting to loot and pillage poorer nations rich on oil. If this was ever a humanitarian project, why would you fly right over Sierra Leone and Somalia to get to Iraq and Afghanistan (and to make Iran start sweating in the middle).

Released this monday is a letter by a member of the US Army, who has witnessed first hand the ugly face of war. You can read the relatively short but important letter here as well as watch the documentary made about this soldier just below the transcript.


I could draw this back to prior points made about how public opinion is shaped through advertising and similar tools of manipulation, but I believe you should be quite capable of making that connection yourself.
For something has certainly shifted, since we are now generally capable of shutting this information out, even though it has been a reoccuring element in the independant press ever since the war began, when we would sit no longer than 60 years ago and scoff at the nazis and their doings. If you regard that as a stretch of a comparison, please return here after you have read the short letter I have linked to above. When you carve a hand-cuffed mans skin off his face, you must descend into the same category as we used to reserve for the nazis. Where else would we put such inhumane people?


If you know the story of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you will recall that one of them is named War. And war is indeed a corner stone in the international degeneration of society, if not in the end of the world. Loosely interpreted you might say its a part of the end of the world as we know it.


Please take part in spreading the grim message that is reality. There are others trying their best to make you think about pop star shows and soda drinks instead, so your help is needed.

Advertising

Yet again I find myself sitting in a train, waiting for it to slowly start grinding the gears, telling me through loud noises of metal at work that I am changing my position towards my destination. I did have a few beers celebrating the end of the semester today. The final project has been handed in, and now there is nothing left to do but read up to the exam and enjoy Christmas with my family.

Normally I am not one for traditions, but I do see the merit in handing out smiles to the people that love me, by masking the repulsion I occasionally feel for this holiday that allows the western world to consume more calories in a day than most African children do in a week, if not a month.

Will the rest of this post be a vile spewing of acidic commentary on the festival of hearts? No. It will not. I left that part in this post instead of deleting it, because I do feel there is some merit to trying to reflect opposition towards a highly cherished ideal. Perhaps that is a general driving mechanic for a lot of the things I write.

Yesterday I spoke shortly of the curse of advertisement that has been brought to normalisation through repetition. Grinding those gears apparently turned the creatures formerly known as humans into these biomechanical beings capable of withstanding this constant noise in our environment. Of these beings only few even stop to consider how harmful this presence of mercantile manipulation affect the offspring of this self-consuming generation of pop star commentary wannabes.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil they actually banned outdoor advertisement. They now inhabit a city with a more cleansed self-image. A city that is closer to being as pure as a modern city can be, from the grips of globalised capitalism. At least visually.

Trust me when I say that these corporations have psychologists working on they can effectively break down your resistance toward their brand, and they care not what they destroy inside or outside of you in this process. That is irrelevant to their share holders and it does not figure on the statistics of their next general assembly slides of the quarterly stock improvements.

Advertisement is not there to inform you. It is not there to educate you. It is there to lure you into connecting a certain brand with a certain reward mechanism for you personally. To do this, they must first obstruct your sense of reality to make you slightly more eager to listen to the rest of their message, even if you already have another element associated with this sense of reward.

You might argue that people make up their own minds about what they wish to purchase and that I am therefore attributing way too much power to this industry of advertising. Considering the studies done on conformity and social pressures, I dare say that you would be wrong though. Ask yourself why more than half the people you know own an Apple product, and why half of those people probably own more than one. You would be kidding yourself if your guess was that its because Apple makes the best products. Obviously that is not the case. Even professional advertising agents have admitted that the logical assumption that a company spending money on advertising does so at the expense of higher prices or lower quality products, and/or to over-shadow a competitor.

So why do we continue to accept living in this litter box of self-promotion, done by conservative remnants of a past economy they consider the present. The time is now to start considering proper alternatives to this devouring beast of a society we chose to remain in out of fear of the unknown future scares us.

Gaming

Normally I do not read a lot of blogs myself. I tend to find the scope of most blogs a bit too narrow to keep me interested. However, a month ago I tried searching online for a release date of an upcoming game I was looking forward to. Although no specific date came up, my search did introduce me to an article talking about a rumour of one such release date. The article went on to describe the rumour, but what interested me was the link to the blog where the article had its roots.

Now I am a daily subscriber to the news posted on this blog, simply because the writer has a fascinating way of researching and commenting on the games industry. The author's views on production for greed resembles my own quite a lot, and recently a post was made about unethical game design. In this post the author went on to comment on how the industry manipulated consumers and tried to prepare them for the upcoming world of in-game marketing. Soon you will see billboards for soda in the background of your gaming environment.

This is all just to show a little bit about how the blog caught my eye. It has more of a social perspective to it than just commenting on these products we enjoy as players, which is obviously why it appeals to me.

Now to the point. This morning the blog was updated with a post about how the author was hoping for the Stop Online Piracy Act bill to be passed. I will leave you to read up on SOPA and the points made on the blog about this bill.

It may just be sarcasm, but even if it is it shows how negligent the entertainment industry is towards its own consumers. The grand argument is that if everyone were to pirate every produced piece of entertainment available, no entertainers would make a living doing what they do and we would cease to be able to live in this wonderful amusement park we see around us today. We are bombarded with amusement every hour of every day. Some of it we are responsible for seeking out ourselves, some of it we are deliberately forced to endure, for instance while riding the train, as I am now, where billboard after billboard is passing us by telling us that our lives would improve immensely if we were to put money in the pocket of some socially degenerative industry.

How would you feel if your country was trying to enact a bill, giving the industry a red button they can push whenever they feel your favourite sites on the internet might be linking directly to copy righted material?

I hope you would feel like this guy.

Identity

Once again I find myself at a loss for words. At the moment the clock is half past 4 and I am sitting at my university, across the table from my group members working on our paper for one of our courses. It has to be done by monday, and this is the last attempt to get something written down while we are in a relaxed mood. The weekend will be reserved for the desperate last-minute-writings, and we all know that those are probably not going to be as good as the rest of the paper. A slight bonus might be that they are more in thread, because they have been written close to each other, as opposed to the rest of the paper that has been spread out of the past month.

So to bring this into a more social perspective. I suppose you could say that this resembles the general attitude towards life. There is work and then there is life. Prior to the boom of the 50s it was more of a situation where work was life. The social residue from this is that people still largely identify with their professional position. What are the consequences of this? One such consequence could be that people are rooted too much to stay adaptable. If you root your identity in an industry you become dependant on it and not only financially. In this current state of rising global unrest, it is probably not preferable to be reliant on a certain attribute of a system that could very well be overturned soon.

For what is one without an identity? One could be many things, but the awareness that is part of the identity is quite relevant for a human being. The identity is, among other things, the ability to filter what is relevant for you personally and what is not. You would simply be bombarded with too many micro-informative elements if you had to relate to everything going on around you all the time.

As an example we all know how a mathematician can sometimes notice patterns in every day life that the rest of us simply do not see, and would probably never notice. A salesman would probably try and work out the value of every offer he is considering. And perhaps a dentist would notice the strenght of a set of teeth when everyone else just notices the general value of the smile.

And because of this personal filter it is quite obvious that we get absorbed into our professional lives and, through our identity, become what we do.

Evolution does, however, teach us that only the adaptive species survive. Just as how we will soon have to deal with peak oil and the massive consequences the lack of fuel and plastic will have on our consuming culture, on a more individual level the adaptive people within the greater society of people will probably have a greater sustainability.

You might even label it survival of the fittest.

Lottery

Yesterday I went and did something stupid. Yes, something stupid. Because it is not an intelligent act to buy a lottery ticket. It is to submit to the lower parts of the brain tempting me with the financial freedom I would like to enjoy, when I fail to consider the consequences.

The pot was 123 million Danish kroner. By the exchange rate of today that is equal to almost 16.5 million euros. So it would have been quite a win to pocket that money. If you are anywhere close to normal in this society you would probably think that such a huge influx of monetary gain would only yield positive changes to your life. But have you considered that you might not the be the same person as you were before you turned ridiculously rich overnight?

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton said in a letter addressed to a bishop in 1887:

    ”Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Now in the society of today, where we have done away with nobility mostly, power is no longer only what you are born into. It is also what you accumulate of capacity for economic redistribution. Put more simply, it is now the money in your wallet that buys the power you have to influence society. Politicians take supporting charity to push forward their campaigns, and this runs through all of society. With more money comes the power to purchase more correctly produced goods from a social perspective. Sometimes this would amount to fair trade products. It also comes with the power to purchase more the incorrectly produced goods, such as clothes, shoes and electrical appliances made from child labour or underpaid labour.

So this is where the quote comes in handy. For how can we determine whether we personally would be a driving force towards more socially responsible demand in the market or the contrary? Perhaps there is no real way to know before you are truly there. Before you truly master the quantity of purchasing power that allows you to succesfully alter your way of life at least for a significant period of time.

I believe I spent at least half an hour collectively thinking about what I would do with such a sum of money had I won. And I cannot say for sure if all the positive things I initially figured I would do with the money would outweigh the negative things I came up with.

In a way I am happy that I did not win. Simply because I am happy with being the person I am right now, and while I do not have the economic freedom to choose to purchase only the responsibly produced goods, I am at a point right know where I know I would if I did not change my life over night. I like who I am, and I think such a large sum of power to change, would be hard to keep away from changing me.

Inspired by an epic read

Not epic in the sense that the word is frequently used today, but in then former sense. The one that told you that a story was about to unveil itself to you, and it slowly reeled you in with promises of the subtle stimuli for your more intellectual wants, without becoming too enforcing.

Such a story did I stumble upon today, and I really must share it with you, even though I cannot take credit for its well written gifts to the readers.

The shopping mall experience.

Focus

This piece will be about focus. As I described in an earlier post, I have been finding it difficult to keep concentrated when it comes to my work at the university. There seems to be too many distractions. Now it is perfectly normal to not take a step back and ask whether or not I am just plain lazy. Perhaps that might be the sole case. But perhaps other things might be a factor as well. I will try to interpret and relate this situation to a broader social perspective.

You see in the current consumer culture, host bodies of the consumer choke points (the vast majority of companies) go out of their way to ensure that their products occupy your daily life for as long periods as possible. The big ones try to optimise the amount of time per day you spend thinking about their products, because association is everything in a culture based on impulsive shopping and decision making.

In a former post I mentioned how the most important revolution that needs to occur is the one within your mind. That is because of this endless stream of impressions you are receiving from these sources that try their best to get your attention and as much of it as possible. It is because your identity is shaped to be contingent upon these stimuli you have learned to associate with your well-being. Be it having a soda with your meal, an ice cream on a hot summer day, saving up for that car you think would look cool or feel great. All of these things have made their entry into your world view at one point or another. They are not novel ideas or wants. A lot of them are carefully manufactured and shaped to make you behave in a certain way.

Think about this: The smartest people working in advertising are the ones that achieve not only you as a consumer, but you as a branded consumer. Suddenly you are sporting a product with a gigantic logo in the side, and you are providing a non-stop commercial for the company that owns the product brand. Additionally you are providing this service free of charge. Simply because it has been flooded into the media, the anti-social culture shaper of the west, that it is preferable for things to be this way.

Why?

Entertain this thought for a while. Ponder why it is preferable for a company to have consumers feeling that doing their job of marketing for them should earn you no reduction in the product price, no monthly salary for your work, and it certainly should be associated with no deliberate lowering of your personal integrity at all.

The answer should be simply. It turns you into a money-maker for the company even after you have done your final purchase with them. For you are now showing all your peers that this product is pre-approved by you. This enters into the debate yet another concept: Pre-approval. This is very important, because socially our culture forces us into a social hierarchy, and as such, the people that are below you are thought to be impressed by you and your actions. Your actions include your purchases, and you show off your purchases by using them in your everyday life.

You may recall a couple of years back when the hot topic was Neil Strauss, the author of the book The Game. In this book Neil theorised that women are like clock work and the discipline of picking up women should therefore be a trainable one. Now to my understanding his theories are by no means scientific, but they do have one very valuable point that I would like to emphasize to prove my own theory of consumption patterns.

Much like when trying to attract the right partner, we exhibit a lot of the same patterns when trying to make the right purchase or show off the correct social attitude. This is why pre-approval is everything today. There are so many things to buy and so many potential partners to chase, that we rely on some sort of highly integrable way of gauging whether a product or partner is right for us.

An associate of Neil Strauss said that an effective way to create attraction about your own person as a male is to team up with a female friend, or even better with two female friends, when going out, and then walking through the place you end up arm in arm with these women. Obviously it has to look as though you are simply pre-approved, not taken, by these women. It forms the illusion that you are independent of everyone else in that place, because you are already sorted out with what you need. You become an object of attraction because you exhibit the act of being attractive. It is a self-perpetuating circle.

So this is why the people that you look up to have the power over pre-approval for you. This is why James Bond sells cars. This is why Sarah Michelle Gellar sells shoes. This is why Santa Claus sells Coca Cola.

Now the interesting part is that this is perfectly honest business for most companies. It is respectable and people enjoy being a part of it. Consumer culture has now assumed such a stand-point in the west that we are what we buy. Because it displays who we are trying to associate with that is higher than ourselves in the social hierarchy.

Hence the revolution that needs to occur first is the one within your mind. You need to be liberated of what the hierarchy is being skewed to sell to you. You need to be able to make your own decisions about what to relate to and be relevant to.

Start out with shutting off your television.

Poetry

I could not possibly claim to be a poet for revolution if all I did was shover you with my ramblings in verbal form. So as a fun thing I thought I could do today, I'm going to introduce you to a singer and song writer I recently have taken quite a liking to. Granted you will experience him as quite on the toes in some areas, if you get into him, and you might also label him as more of a social revolutionary than an anarchistic revolutionary. These two terms do go hand in hand on a lot of subjects, and I would define myself in no way as a regular libertarian that simply seeks to reduce governmental control. I do believe that big business is a chokehold, and given less regulation, they would only choke us all faster. So if I had to pick sides, I suppose you could say that I am more of a red than a blue anarchist.

And because I have already taken up your time describing uninteresting terminology, I will without further ado introduce you to Mr. David Rovics with his song: ”I'm a better anarchist than you”, because irony is such a sweet dish when served in this fashion.

Globalisation

This is just a quick appetizer for you that I came across today. I learned of this guy John Perkins watching a documentary a while back. Quite an interesting character. So much in fact that I bought his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

According to Mr. Perkins it has been the policy of the intelligence services in the USA to keep out of political overthrows and general power shifts around the globe. This has not stopped them from interacting with these elements from behind the curtain though, because it simply meant that this service was ”privatised” instead. Indeed, companies arose after the succesful overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, because the CIA had to keep their hands clean in the event of an agent getting caught.

Whether or not you buy his story, you should be able to appreciate the honesty of how guerilla fighters could emerge in developing countries. Enjoy.

Revolution

What is a revolution?

I will leave you to look it up, if you feel the need for a cookie cutting dictionary interpretation and structural analysis of the word. In my mind the word simply means fundamental change. While a reform is diplomatic and compromising, a revolution should be neither.

What is a revolution good for?

Simply put, an infinite amount of achievements. A fundamental change, either from interior or exterior workings, often is brought about with the expectation of bringing about a more fruitful direction. Such is also true of a reform, but the result of a revolution is more often than not quite a lot more radical in its new direction than a reform would be. To be diplomatic certainly has its uses on a more social level, but if you look at nature you will notice that diplomacy is just about nowhere to be found. Not just globally, but universally, it is true that any element exposed to a force greater than its tolerance will yield. Ask any person you know that actually read their physics book.

A revolution then would be superior as a solution to a crisis, if the optimal change in direction needed for the host element is radically different from the current one.

Why would I propose revolution on multiple levels of society?

Because I believe that a vast amount of elements within society, which I will most likely be covering in greater detail in later posts, has to change within the near future, for our species to retain a reasonable chance of cultural survival. In the event of a complete societal breakdown, for instance if the economic crisis worsens and sends the super powers to their knees and the ensuing panic within the western world tears the economic boundaries asunder, our cultures might not make it into the history books. And more importantly our health care systems, educational systems etc. all need to keep running, even through massive societal change for obvious reasons.

It should be clear now that my view on the future of this current culture is quite bleak. But honestly, why would you even spend more than the time it takes to load up a YouTube video of Rihanna on this blog, if you had a problem with a revolutionary approach to social evolution. Quite simply I am of the impression that this culture will be surpassed soon. Therefore I am only interested in making the transition to whatever comes next as smooth as possible.

The social immune system of the world is hard at work right now. Just like a cancer grows within the body without the host noticing it before it is too late, we have not yet reached global awareness of the fact that our current ways is no longer sustainable. If the goal is to achieve the highest standard of living possible for as many as possible, then this system is rapidly being outgrown by the rising demands for actual resolve.

Where do I propose the revolutions start off?

Jiddu Krishnamurti said that a radical revolution of the mind needs to occur, and I agree whole-heartedly. You need to take back what is yours, because I can promise that you have been robbed. Just as everyone else has. By advertising, by politicians, by your parents, by your peers, by your diet, by your habits, by your likes, by your dislikes. Every one of those elements and an almost endless list of others within your life has been acting and reacting to shape you as an integrated cogwheel in the machinery of society. Modern psychology claims that you are the product of your surroundings, and if it is true that you have any type of free will in that equation, then you are in turn able to interact with and change your surroundings to knowingly or unknowingly reconfigure your own programming and thereby change your behaviour. That is as much free will as you can get, assuming the discipline of scientific psychology to be a resourceful one, and for evolution to be anywhere close to truth, it is all you need.

I already have a future post planned that will comment in greater detail on how evolution and biology plays a big role in my view on humanity.

How do I plan on convincing 7 billion people?

Well, some are ahead and some are behind me in this train of thought. What I am aiming for personally right now is to be able to shut down the parts of my personality that keeps me addicted to unsustainable practices. Such as eating junk food and being socially self-centred. In essence I am trying to practise what I preach, and this is harder than first assumed. Believing that the world needed to change was unfortunately not enough to spin my life around and become a social beacon of hope.

Currently I do have an interesting task going on actually. I started at a university earlier this year, and I do find it difficult to muster the patience and concentration needed to do my work properly instead of just playing games and day dreaming about the new society.

At this point I do not know what my next post will be about, but I'm very excited to find out. Stay tuned.

Introduction

So this will be the first post on my not as first blog. While the other's never got properly off their feet, I do have hopes for this place.

What to expect from this project? A bit of everything really. Without being anywhere near an expert on blogs, I would venture the guess that most people start out with saying that their blog will just be for thoughts and ideas. Initially mine should be no different. But I often find myself catching on a writer's fire when I start jotting down ideas, so this might lead somewhere interesting.

So without further delay I'll just dive right into the thoughts of tonight.

Why this name for a blog? Well, after lunch, dinner and coffee for the 10.000^th time with the family it became apparent to me that this could be delayed no further. Am I simply rebelling against my biological roots and their attempt at forced inheritance? Perhaps. But then again I would expect most people around my fitting age of 24 to be about the same place in their life.

Poetry for Revolution was the product of about 15 minutes of rising frustration over all the good ideas for things I wanted to write down for you, but lost track of because I was stuck in the proces of chosing a name for my blog. The title perhaps reflects this even more so, as I simply picked my regular internet nick and put 's blog at the end of it. In my defense I would say that my imagination sure has been working today. Perhaps that is why it took an ill placed, but hopefully minor, vacation when I needed it for this simple task.

Okay I promise: No further rambling from now on. Poetry for Revolution is going to contain my views on local and global life. I will attempt to verbalise perspectives that seem wide to me, and I will be doing this to hone my communicative skills, as well as to get a more clear view of what my personal evolution looks like.

Perhaps this blog will be more for me than it will be for you, but we will see where it goes. My heart certainly is full of hope that this will serve as a proper outlet for my frustrations with the world that we inhabit. Trying to keep it constructive is certainly something I will be aiming for, but I shall guarantee no such thing.

My next post will detail the initial analysis of why I believe in a need for revolution on many different levels of societies.