“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all."

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

According to Russian historian Roy Medvedev, around 200,000 people in the USSR were sent to a Gulag for telling a joke. When a system is threatened by jokes and jokes are taken too seriously, it is no sign of strength, but exactly the opposite – a clear indication of weakness. Even if you have the power to send people to a Gulag. Following the visit of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras to the Zagreb Subversive Festival in May 2013, only two months prior to the accession of Croatia to the European Union, it seems that jokes are to be taken more seriously now than ever.

Žižek

First, the Greek media reported that Hollywood director Oliver Stone, also attending the festival, openly supported Tsipras, saying without hesitation he hoped Tsipras would become the next Greek prime minister, because he represents “hope for Greece, and could bring a big change not only for Greece and Europe, but perhaps for the world”. Then, during the same conversation on Greek National Television, Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek added that he also believes in Tsipras, but “as a Platonist”, because “if philosophers are not kings, then at least they have to control kings”. Žižek concluded that he supported Tsipras, but only under the condition of becoming his “secret advisor”.

This was, of course, a joke. But it was another of his jokes that provoked a harsh reaction from the Greek establishment. During a public debate with Tsipras at the festival, “the most dangerous philosopher in the west” said that in his “vision of the democratic future, all the people who do not support SYRIZA would get a first class one-way ticket to a Gulag”. The Greek media immediately drummed up a furore, prompting Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras to describe Žižek’s comment as “horrible and disgusting”, bearing in mind that thousands of Greeks were killed in Gulags. And Tsipras was accused of laughing at the joke.

But what exactly did Žižek say in Zagreb? To avoid any further misunderstandings, it is worth quoting the whole passage:
The fight that SYRIZA is fighting is the fight for the very soul of Europe. And I am here without any shame [an] Eurocentrist. OK, it’s nice for politically correct reasons to blame Europe for everything, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, but my God, Europe did give – and let’s be proud of that – something wonderful to humanity: the idea of radical egalitarianism, of radical democracy, feminism, etc. This is at the core of European identity, and that is what is at stake today. So as Alexis said about who is the danger – today’s defenders of Europe, Brussels’ technocrats or anti-immigrant nationalists, they are the threat to what is worth fighting for in [the] European legacy. SYRIZA is not a Greek phenomenon, SYRIZA is something that is one of the few signs of hope for the entire Europe… And the test for the people, when you ask them what they think about Europe is to simply ask them what they think about SYRIZA. If they don’t support SYRIZA, then in my vision of the democratic future all these people will get a first class one-way ticket to a Gulag.
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However meticulous and ingenious the attempt of the kakistocrats to create a society of yea-saying acolytes is, as of now, in the Post-Fukuyamaist world, I'm pretty confident that they will never succeed in their attempts to institutionalize the youth for the youth of the 21st isn't a pet animal that could be domesticated or bestialized at will. My generation, a generation that was, is and will be condemned to give up its youth is adamantly antithetical to power - any inconsiderate attempt to centralize and confiscate the free will of my young generation, fails incessantly as it has been failing for aeons.

Per se, my quick-tempered yet questioning generation has been subject to extreme prejudice from school curricula to ways of spending their leisure time to their choice of political narratives to their religious preference, and very recently their sexual orientation. But that didn't stop them from pursuing their rebel existential quests. They rebel, therefore they are. They rebel in search of a better world to live in, a world without sado-masochistic gerontocrats. They rebel because they've been denied the recognition they deserve, the recognition that they are young on account and they are literally treated as and made into the beasts of burden, on the other. They are the ones to do, what anthropologists such as David Graeber label 3D (Dirty, Dull, & Dangerous) jobs, from organized theft to assassinations, from terrorist plots to carnage-laden coups. They sweep the floor so that the old boys could walk on the spotless red carpet somewhere in the corner of the globe as a sign of false public gesture.

So I say, rise and rise again till lambs become lions, till wolves make peace with lions, till lions become much more intelligent instead of abysmal brutes with viscera only for the somatic. And by this, I mean keep on resuscitating the spirit of youth (the sort of spirit we are constantly despised for by the de-youthed, the age bracket with relentless power, either to create or to destroy or to maintain the addictive predicament that runs by the name, status quo. Plus, it is obvious that we, as a hypercreative generation, are incline towards a cosmopolitan thought than tribalist genocides that everyone is familiar with from history.

If claiming a basic life condition of living as a human being, as a species that deserves to be treated as a valuable asset instead a what Guy Standing calls the precariat class, is a claim that gets my generation to be treated as "guilty as charged", so be it.


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In our permissive times, a new form of the unsayable is more and more acquiring a central role: it is not only that certain things are prohibited to say – the prohibition itself is prohibited: we are not allowed to say openly what is prohibited.

Already in Stalinism, it was not only prohibited to criticise Stalin and the party publicly, it was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly. If someone were to shout back at a critic of Stalin, “Are you crazy? Don’t you know that we are not allowed to do this?” he would have disappeared into the Gulag even faster than the open critic of Stalin. Unexpectedly, the same holds for the relations of domination in our permissive post-patriarchal societies: a modern boss is tolerant, he behaves like a colleague of ours, sharing dirty jokes, inviting us for a drink, openly displaying his weaknesses, admitting that he is “merely human like us”. He is deeply offended if we remind him that he is our boss – however, it is this very rejection of explicit authority that guarantees his de facto power.

This is why the first gesture of liberation is to force the master to act as one: our only defence is to reject his “warm human” approach and to insist that he should treat us with cold distance. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.



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A genuine political solution to Ethiopian problems could emanate from genuine efforts to narrow the generational schism that is plaguing the country: That Generation vs. This Generation, The 60s vs, Generation Z, Old School vs. Post-Millenials, The Old vs. The Youth (Often treated with contempt by the old elites). In the same accord, it is high time that the concerned parties (not particularly, Political Parties) should roll their sleeves and go on a comprehensive, considerate of the zeitgeist political quest that could at least, lay the ground for a common understanding of the generational interests. It is also time to recognize that the left brain couldn't naturally and possibly work without the right. 

It is a matter of survival; to wake out of our delusional trances and self-induced insomnia and cut to the chases. In fine, it is necessary to keep an eye on the clock and the time-keeper. Or else we will go on artificially separated, as if we have never known each other. In John J Welsh's words:

The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either.

But the crux of the matter is, no matter how much we try to ignore and diffuse the real enemy of progress - class differences based on artificially engineered and authoritatively constructed assumptions - there is no way we could effectively get it of the shelf. It lurks in the shadows of our collective subconscious. Seeing and Hearing No Evil about it couldn't get it rid of the beast once and for all. It is just a sublime game of hide and seek we are trying to play, a sort of sciamachy. 

So, I say let us be vigilant about the dangers of naivety-based generational schisms and the fake attempts to address them by fighting "Wag the Dog" style wars in our generational fantasies.

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A Courtesy of Atlanta Fringe


The next professors of the world will be open source-based ones. Their professorship, either as a title or a profession, emanates out of their status updates on social networks, video parodies on YouTube, Politically Correct Selfies on Instagram, ersatz critic blogs, number of likes and comments on their posts, followership of their hashtags, subscriptions to their vlogs and podcasts. And they are the "leaders" of the future of this world. Among the neologisms coined to call their WWW 2.0 titles include:


Professor Facebook

Professor YouTube

Professor Twitter

Professor Instagram

Professor Blog

.

.

.

Professor of Emeritus of Old School (The well-read, provocative, unrepenting and unrecanting critic)

‪#‎GenSchismEthiopia‬

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"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
 - Frederick Nietzsche

Being Young In Africa‬ is to dwell in a perilous condition of life. Being young is being the whipping kid. You are constantly despised for being, for demanding change, for moving too fast, for preserving your uniqueness... Youth is what African ruling elites want to amputate, once and for all. Refusing to be stupid as the rest could get you banished, ostracized, denigrated, exiled, demented, jailed and the need arises out of unclear political interests, you could be disposed of very easily.

Per se, being young is the same as being someone's hand to touch the fire the elites don't want to risk trying. In fine, being young is being disposable; for as Machiavelli said, "The end justifies the means"no matter how ignorant and viciously ill-organized the "power" struggles could be, to utilize the youth once and to get rid off it on other occasions has been the customary practice so far.

The "elites" strive to make a use and throw generation that hears and sees no evil, while putting aside the needs and aspirations of the juvenile majority. They want us to bury our nay-saying heads in the sand. To use a an expression from the movie "Oz: the Great and Powerful" our only rights are to "keep up, show up and shut up."
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The present moment has been challenged to expand in spite of its limited capacity. Minute by minute, smartphone notifications from Facebook, Twitter, emails and other social media outlets, have imposed an entitled demand on what the present moment can offer. Unless we are traveling at the speed of light, time dilation is not an option. Although, there are situations when our brains slow down time to allow careful encoding of what is going on, such as during a car accident. Fortunately, life is not a series of car accidents, which means that a minute could only fuel sixty seconds worth of living. 

We know from neuroscience that attention is a limited capacity, and multitasking does not mean an equal distribution of attentional resources to simultaneous tasks. What actually happens is attention shifts back and forth among these tasks. As attentional resources become scarce during the streaming overloaded present moment, the contents of these moments are improperly packaged into memory quanta. Furthermore, richness of these memories become compromised, misfiled, or never encoded, amounting to a sketchy past- lacking vivid memories. 

Thus, engaging in so many different tasks at the same time, contributes to poor encoding of memories. Some of us have tried to push this to the extreme by artificially dilating the moment: living on speed either by taking stimulants such as energy drinks, meth and/or cocaine. However, a much more common practice is decreasing sleep hours. The problem is, we cannot actually surrender the moment to our demands. Chronically sleep-deprived people live shorter. As though the moment is sticking its tongue out, and restating that there are a dedicated number of wakeful hours, should we indulge in using them, life span becomes truncated. 

Many modern factors contribute to the sketchy past problem: we have made a global factory out of the world, where urban planning intentionally replicates building blocks of cities. Seriously, my neighbors and I have the same fridge, kitchen cabinets and counters! For memories to be encoded vividly and with longevity, the contexts in which they happen should differ. But, this cookie cutter approach, makes it difficult to encode specific details and separate memories. 

Technology has also contributed to standardizing our lives by increasingly obviating hard copy books, newspapers and magazines. Many read on their kindle, iPad, or other tablets. As mentioned above, memories are easier to encode when distinguished from one another. All these tools provide identical contexts, within which memories are superimposed. These highly overlapping details, make the task of later recall more challenging. So, when reading a book on a tablet, every page has the same context, scrolling down or up the same white screen. I remember an experience from a book, because of the way my tears have textured one of its pages, or perhaps because of the coffee stains, the iPad cannot compete with that!

I wonder who will tell this present when it becomes past? Will future grandparents have a paucity of stories that start with "I remember when I was your age... ?"


This article was originally posted on 10 April 2015 on Huffington Post in the The Blog Column by Dr. Marwa Azab. Dr. Azab.

Marwa Azab, Ph.D.
Marwa Azab, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of psychology and human development at California State University, Long Beach. She studied psychology for many years and completed a masters in counseling from Toronto, Canada and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from University of California, Irvine, where she taught in the biology department. She has given four TEDx talks, including “The Logical Vs. The Reflexive Brain: Only One Wins” (link is external) & "Highly Sensitive? Should you change?" (link is external)
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If You seek to probe the true nature of a friend, do not inquire (after him), but approach him (yourself). (Then) deal with him alone, until You are no longer uncertain about his condition. After a time, dispute with him. Test his heart in dialogue. If what he has seen (of himself) escapes him, if he does a thing that irritates You, be yet friendly with him or be silent, but do not turn away your face. Restrain yourself and open dialogue. Do not answer with an act of hostility. Neither counter him, nor humiliate him. His time does not fail to come ... (for) one does not escape what is fated.


From The Maxims of Good Discourse by Vizier Ptahhotep VIth Dynasty - late Old Kingdom - ca.2200 BCE
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Courtesy of Arcadian Life

“What do you think of the human race?” asks a friend who has just graduated in sociology.

“I think it’s strange – so alike and yet so different! We are capable of working together, of building the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of Europe and the temples of Peru. We can compose unforgettable music, work in hospitals, create new computer programs.

“But at some moment all this loses its meaning, and we feel alone, as if we were part of another world, different from the one we have helped to build.”

“At times, when others need our help, we grow desperate because this prevents us from enjoying life. At other times, when nobody needs us, we feel useless.

“But that’s the way we are. We are complex human beings. Why despair?”

“We are what we think. All that we are comes from our thoughts. Through thought we construct and destroy the world. Thought follows us like a cart follows the pair of oxen. We are what we think. Your imagination can cause you more harm than your worst enemy. But once you control your thoughts, no one can help you as much as they can – not even your father or mother.”
Originally posted on 20 October on Paulo Coelho Blog
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Courtesy: Nuzzel.com

One of the mottoes I advocate those in this age of instant life without "instant wisdom" is: Say Not To Conditioning through modern education and efficiency-based bureaucratic system that strives for national intellectual blindness!"

I am  a nay-sayer to whatever is nonsensically collective and statistically, a majority without common elements of solidarity, among other things. I could be an Ethiopian - by birth or politico-legal citizenship at least. But that doesn't mean I am to be "evaporated" as everybody else out there. Some people may have been trained to forget and forget awful manipulations of their intellectual existence. But I am no such a creature of sorts. As I said before, I am an adamant nay-sayer. I am no a man of apology of all sorts. Some may even try to forget an "unpleasant" memory they have had in their desperation to escape limbo, which I cannot. My juvenescent contemporaries may have been conditioned to believe in borrowed concepts. I on the other hand have taken years of initiatives to get  myself rid off moral debts to be paid to an invisible army of creditors.

In this game of ill-bred, Frankensteinian metamorphoses of individuals into an exulantic condition, I chose neither to lead nor to follow the flock. I would rather prefer a "spontaneous etiquette" towards the vast immensity of realities of the universe I now dwell in.

I didn't go to school for school's sake, just to be schoolish. Despite the choice made by my family to make me attend schools in the many years I have been to these places what I have learned above all is the art of evading the eternal recurrence of monotonous rites of passage. I have mastered, I dare say, the art of refusing the Realm of Disgust, the realm of modern education based mass control and brainwashing leading the graduates of those institutions of manipulation in to nodus tollens, a late " the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to them anymore."

Hence, I would like to emphasize over and over again, the fact that modern education though accepted as an emancipatory carnival with an anthology of Western-Intellectualism based comforting myths is as subtly harmful as the evils mankind has experienced before. That is to say the consequences of producing a controlled and conditioned by academic ventriloquists of our borrowed scholasticism are nothing less than the consequences of colonialism.

Last but not, even though this system has created a system of similarities without reasoning I don't put myself in that position of believing in my identical similarity to the rest. I am, once again, a nay-sayer to such a sado-masochistic  culture of concluding the equality and fraternity of the human race in the name of progress, modernity, civilization and the like.

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