9/11, and Human Animal's Love for Excitement

By Xah Lee. Date: 2011-09-11

So, over there at social policy activist Lauren Weinstein's post about politicians and the media abusing 9/11 to manipulate populace or whatnot. Here's excerpts:

With the media deeply engaged in an orgy of wall-to-wall 9/11 coverage today, one might imagine that the 10 year anniversary of another attack on the U.S. -- the attack on Pearl Harbor -- would have generated similar press reactions. Or is the media exploitation of such anniversaries a relatively new phenomenon?

I spent some time looking over newspaper archives from December 7, 1951 to try find out. The contrast with today's media was striking. …

In fact, you had to go to page 10 to find any mention -- a brief editorial -- regarding the anniversary, noting with confidence that there would never again be a similar attack on a well-prepared United States: …

Full post and comments at: How Did the Press “Commemorate” the 10 Year Anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor? 2011-09-11 By Lauren Weinstein. At ~~https://plus.google.com/114753028665775786510/posts/AnLppyDzCis~~

I have the idea of a solution to the ills of modern society, that's in me for a while. Here it is.

tend to agree with +Lauren Weinstein on this one. Am in general against any activism or emotional stimulation. Instead, resources should be spend on general education.

the problem with the good old education line of thinking is that nobody cares for such boring “solution”. The human animals want new things, chantable phrases, actions, especially when some big news incident just happened. I thought of this problem, and a fantasy solution i thought is to fight these idiotic human nature or greasy politicians with the same, lies, or marketing, social psychology, suave, whatever one'd call them.

so, in this fantasy scenario, when some major disaster happened (e.g. Katrina), or 9/11, instead of politician jump to action with cries of retribution, slogans such as “united we standard”, blood donation, and so on, the politician of my school should equally respond to the public with EXTREME agitation and reaction, but instead of some reaction such as warmongering, he would enact things that are seemingly completely irrelevant, such as for the next year, all books sold in US on shakespeare, poetry, books on paintings of classic masters, will be FREE, paid by government. Or, the government will henceforth pay 10 thousand dollars to each and every teachers across US that are teaching subjects of humanities (or, to all teachers, period.). Or, the government will immediately start projects that build free internet in all major cities, wholly paid by government.

in this scenario, the essence is that no extra dollar or attention should be paid to whatever disaster or incident of current. Instead, such heart-wrenching incident will be used to spur and channel the populace's emotion to the immediate funding of spreading knowledge, in particular, “useless” knowledge such as arts and letters.

also, any non-profit organization should be axed, such as Red Cross or some help Africa fuck. Instead, help should be in the form of immediate, concrete, human touch, from you, that can be felt by another human animal directly and physically. For example, if you are the bleeding heart type, then, when 9/11 happened, instead of donating say $10 bucks to red cross with the complex channel of credit card and so on of modern society that you hardly know how exactly money works or what complex route it actually go thru and how the fund are spent by the board of directors shit… Instead, immediately, walk out of your house to the street, and hand a $10 dollar bill to that neighbor kid you knew is poor. Tell him, you love him, and advice him to spend the money well, and leave it at that.

The $10 that went to Red Cross, is love of yourself, your ego. The $10 that went to the neighbor kid, is love of humanity.

why such line of thinking? Roughly, these disasters, wars, never ends. It happens thru-out history, today, and not likely to end anytime soon. Human animal's been like that, despite so-felt love and humanity and such. (aww, how sad is 9/11, let's have a group-hug) Even at individual level, look at the nym war going on here. A rather insignificant issue, but the proponents spend inordinate amount of time, going into great lengths fighting about it, likening Google to Nazi, and so on, so that they can WIN, they can feel they are USEFUL. This is a small scale of things. In bigger scale in the complex society, we have Iraq War, Congo War, and all other wars around the globe. So, in my view, which is a view of Bertrand Russell, that a good life require 2 things: love and knowledge. Nothing else. I think war, and much problem of society will decrease, if say every US citizen have at least knowledge equivalent to a college degree in humanities, but more to the point, that each of us college educated, should have knowledge equivalent of at least 3 degrees, 2 in humanities. The humanities knowledge is there to cater love. (btw, institutionalized education with its bureaucracy and knowledge certification (aka “Degree”) should be de-emphasized, but rather, a life-long learning system in society, preferably instigated by culture.)

because, you see, that the way society are is largely due to the way we are. The USA is the way it is today, all its political ills or whatnot, because each and every one of us, made it so. You, you did it. If each and everyone of us, all can drivel poetry or painting or esoteric ancient history, and assuming we have cultivated a society and culture such that we love these things just as today many of us love to have a say about politics from small (nym wars) to large (american left vs right), chances are, USA might be more rich and prosperous. (though, possibly might not be as powerful, not having so much nuclear weapons, and china might tell us what to do. That might be the Achilles' heel of my theory. lol)