“And the Romans praised Janus, the God of peace and war, the God of all beginnings and all transitions”
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Thesis– Janus’ first face
“The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.”
Claude Levi-Strauss
I wrote the other day that “Art is humanity’s alibi”. Today I feel that art and letters, and also culture, are the murderers’ false alibi.
If we consider humanity as a unity and we put crimes on the scale, then how could culture offset abomination?
Artists delude themselves, they live their myth, believing that art is humanity’s conscience. The conscience of the most destructive species is blood stained. And not only with fellow human beings’ blood.
Over the last forty years we have extinguished 50% of wildlife. Why? Because we can.
Man is the only animal with developed self-awareness and grasp of historical continuity. This renders him capable of making choices and therefore absolutely guilty for his crimes, under no mitigating circumstances.
If someone should be judged for crimes against humanity and the planet, this is humanity in its entirety.
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Try to see humanity as if you’re not a part of it. Imagine that a more developed species (aliens, gods, beings from other dimensions) come in to judge us.
They retrace the whole human history and they find slaughters, wars, genocides, disasters. Do you really believe that we could justify ourselves by bringing up Van Gogh or Kavafis?
How many books, how many masterpieces, how many ninth symphonies neutralize a child’s starvation on a planet where some people pay nutritionists to “lose the weight they gained on their vacations”?
On the one side there is famine. On the other, obesity and the Atkins diet.
On the one side, for dogs there are cans with meat and vitamins and vaccines too, and on the other, scraps -at best- for people.
But the earth is spherical; there should be no “sides”.
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Alibi means that the accused was somewhere else at the time the crime was committed.
But we are here, all of us.
Nobody can justify themselves anymore by saying: “I didn’t know”.
If you don’t know (an insubstantial claim in this century of information) it is because you don’t want to know, you don’t want to listen, you have other fish to fry.
Artists may be living in their fantasy world but this is no proof of their innocence. We take the crime for granted and as long as we just see it happen, spineless and fatal, we’re partners in it.
We can’t count on judges’ mercy. We deserve none.
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The only innocents are children. Those we kill, rape, enslave, leave starving to death, or die of illnesses that shouldn’t exist anymore or terrifying diseases (they are terrifying when they come knocking at our door).
For as long as children are murdered at any place on our spherical planet, we are all responsible.
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I want to end this with a ray of hope, I really do.
What should I believe in, what should I hope for?
God or another higher power? Aliens or Artificial Intelligence, chaos’ clandestine plans? The evolution of the human species? Luck? Should I believe in love which always hopes and always endures? In what?
What could possibly head off the destructiveness of this monkey with the atom bomb?
I can find no answer; and I don’t want to comfort myself with fake alibis.
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Antithesis– Janus’ second face
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein
Until the Renaissance, the astronomers failed to solve the issue of the retrograde motion of the planets (Retrograde motion is the apparent motion of a planet in a direction opposite to that of other bodies within its system, as observed from a particular vantage point.)
They came up with complicated models of their motions, ridiculously complicated, but their mistake was located in the question.
The problem was the model itself they used, it was the “paradigm” they utilised.
That was because until 1543, people believed in the geocentric model. The earth stood motionless in the center and all the other celestial bodies were in orbit around it.
Until Copernicus (who drew inspiration from Aristarchus of Samos) made a “paradigm shift”; he merely changed the model and everything fell into place.
The heliocentric system shed light onto the apparent retrograde motion.
His book “De revolutionibus” which was printed in 1543 (Let us consider Gutenberg and the second revolution information) exerted such a catalytic influence, that the Latin term “revolutio”, aside from the meaning of a circular movement made by something fixed to a central point, also became a synonym of rebellion, of revolt.
With the contribution of Kepler, Galileo and Newton –a hundred years later- it became clear that nature favours simpler solutions.
Of course the old world didn’t take that change so lightly. It took Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake and Galileo’s renouncement of his blasphemous ideas in public. But, as it always happens, change finally prevailed.
Change is the only constant.
This paradigm shift signaled the passage from medieval times to Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
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There are many who believe that we are going through new medieval times. What confuses them is the apparent retrograde course of the evolution of the human species.
Humanity evolves as if dancing the Kalamatianos folkdance. Ten steps forward and two behind. Those two steps are not regression but part of the evolution. Those two steps will give the boost we need to reach a new plateau.
Humanity is ready for the next “paradigm shift” and every birth comes with labour. The old world is dying and the new is about to be born. That’s painful.
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The new model will not be devised by old people. It will be something so brand new, but also so simple, that in a thousand years our descendants will wonder, how come we didn’t think of it before the 21st century.
Doesn’t the model of the flat earth look ridiculous? Yet, before the Renaissance, it was the common belief.
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The new generation, the kids that were born in the midst of the digital revolution are the ones who will modify the model; because the planet of free information is more spherical than ever.
The one-dimensional political views, which are built on the axis “leftists-rightists, republicans-democrats, communists-anticommunists, fascists-antifascists, poor-moneyed”, will become obsolete through a New Synthesis.
The structure of the New Synthesis will not be pyramidal but spherical.
The sociology of the New Synthesis, the cybersociology, will be founded on ecology; and exaggerations don’t thrive on ecology.
Meden Agan is the motto of earth.
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The new model won’t be human centered, but geocentric.
Man will grasp that they are a part of the planet instead of its dominator.
The centerpiece of human centered economy is money – which has the innate “features” of uneven distribution and accumulation.
The geocentric economy of the resources will be based on free information, automation, respect to the Earth and the sensible distribution of commodities (not money).
The human thought, aided by quantum computers, will create new models, new theories and new physics, which for the time being strikes us as being metaphysical, that will take us to the stars.
Man was born on the earth, but will not die there.
Our future is to spread and settle on other planets.
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The question instantly posed is whether man will overcome their own contradictions to move on to this New Synthesis, before self-termination.
The answer to the enigma is invariably the same: The human.
Because that’s his very nature; to surpass his nature.
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Synthesis
«Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future
and time future contained in time past»
T.S.Elliot
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Through guilt and innocence,
through chance and necessity, through sensitivity and cruelty,
through poetry and destructiveness, through balance and extremity,
through rudeness and genteelness, through pure and filth
through arrogance and modesty, through gentleness and visciousness,
the simple and complexity, the conflict and companionship,
the underworldly and spirituality, the fantasy and reality,
the common and uniqueness, the desperation and bliss,
the blasphemous and holiness, felicitation and brutishness,
rises above, fragile, uncannily resilient,
humanity.
Man, capable of the worst and the best.
Man, the bridge between nothing and glorification.
Man, neither animal nor god, yet animal and divine.
Man, free to choose and captive of his own choices.
Man, irrational and rational, ancient and mortal.
Man, contradiction incarnated.
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Sanejoker’s Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/sanejoker/
Translated by Alexandros Mantas
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7qasikNVdTDZ1eUY0FzIHv
Edited by Jackie Pert
