Tag: existentialism

Normal Is Another World

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It was just recently the one year anniversary of the massacre of three Mormon women and six of their children in Mexico. Their cars ambushed in the hills near their home at La Mora close to the US border. Caught up in local Cartel violence; the exact reasons and culprits are still unknown. They will likely never get real answers. It was a brutal event which understandably brought international attention and shock and just for a second it opened up a community to the eyes of the world.

With over seven billion people on earth there are over seven billion different ways of being raised to understand life and the world around. Mormons can be ridiculed for it, but they offer an example of another way of life. With my experience of growing up, understanding how people like these Mormons live their lives is not always easy. To begin with we view them through the narrow prism of our own conditioning and view their actions as if they thought as we do. But why would they, having grown up in a Mormon community in the north of Mexico, their experience in the large part is beyond my comprehension. Saying that having Anglo-European origins, they likely won’t be as far removed as we might first think.

I look at the women and struggle to understand how they could be happy with a husband who also has other wives. The young women growing up and ultimately being prepared for a life of baby making. The two women discussed in the BBC article have over one hundred children and grandchildren in total. That is simply remarkable. Or at least it’s remarkable for someone who comes from a country which will likely start to experience falling birth rates in the near future. The understanding of these women also comes from the experience of women with a very different attitude to sharing their men.

This isn’t to say all cultures are right in all their own ways and we need to respect people in their cultural sensitivities. If a culture is abusive of someone within it, then that is still wrong. It’s being able to identify the grey areas between what is abuse and what is simply misinterpretation because of your own cultural understanding of the world. There are plenty of examples throughout history which suggest we have at times got it very wrong. I look at the huge group of children in the pictures and think what a lovely childhood they must have growing up together, it’s just a shame it’s tinged with God and all that that entails. Many run away from Mormonism or don’t continue it’s practises, but someone growing up in that world will likely have a different perspective of God’s influence and all their brothers and sisters. Normal is always normal in our own eyes.

We can be critical too of people to don’t reject these worlds they grew up in. Unable to understand why they don’t walk away from what seems so obvious. With such sentiment all we do is miss the irony that we are unable to walk away from the more detrimental and destructive aspects of our own societies and ways of life. There are many and we vary in levels of obliviousness towards them. I can imagine a Mormon from this rural community finding all sorts of faults with the behaviour of the average city dwelling northern European.

This all simply comes from imagining growing up not as me but as a kid in this community. What a completely different understanding of the world, or of home they must have. Then imagine someone from Asia or Africa, or even southern Europe. It’s just important to remember sometimes that what we think isn’t necessarily the only way of thinking. How we experience a moment is not the only way of experiencing it. Normal is not always normal in others eyes after all.

The Barrier Of Conditions

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“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”

It’s always nice to start with some Camus. These French (-Algerian) intellectuals really knew how to get people thinking and living. So thinking we must do. What conditions have we attached to our own happiness then. A momentary chance for some introspective thought perhaps. If we are honest with ourselves we will see the conditions we either try to live by or aspire to. If we are willing to take that further we may just accept an imbalance between the desire to achieve an idea over allowing happiness to happen. How much of this then is influenced by our habitual responses to moments and life. The conditions we set on life are nothing but ideas and learned responses to moments. We are fixed. If we create these conditions, or we have these conditions created for us and we accept them as such, and either refuse or are unable to view any other version of happiness, we likely set ourselves up for failure.

If there is anything this year has taught it’s that being fixed and not being able to look beyond our narrow ideas of future and desire will only lead to our own suffering. I doubt there are many people out there currently who have managed to live the exact version of 2020 as they had foreseen and hoped for when the first of January ding donged into existence. Most people are either working from home, still furloughed, back in their workplace or redundant. Had anyone here not been able to accept this change then they would suffer. Their previous conditions of happiness would be impossible to achieve. Habits have had to change.

This can only be a good thing. One benefit of immigration as people come from different cultures they view the one they’re entering with a fresh perspective. Those who live within their own culture are more likely to view their world as normal and in that case how it should be, this is just the way it is both good and bad. People see what is missing because they bring part of what is normal for them with them. They see a hole with fresh eyes, fill it and changed the habitual structure of society. The populace embrace this but fear it too.

Will what we are experiencing do similar. The circumstances and events are different, it is unlikely to be about people entering a society as our miserable little island appears more closed off than ever before, but there will be tangible changes which may only become evident in a few years. What is the point of principles if they’re so limiting as to restrict any possibility of happiness. We are living in what appears to be increasingly evolving conditions and how we deal with that will determine how we move forward as a society and individually. Habitual flexibility and happiness may just turn out to be one and the same after all.

BR#5 – Frankenstein

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From time to time as adults we throw a little classic in to our reading. The kind of story that spawned others and has passed the test of time. The kind you could have studied at school. That last one in a way makes it sound unappealing considering we don’t always look back on the book we studied at school fondly. Frankenstein though isn’t one of them, it’s one of the ones you wish you had studied at school. It has so many of those moments you could see yourself analysing in a class, it has layers. It is also very simple and obvious. A main uncomplicated but unbelievable story. Take it at face value and that’s it.

The writing feels like it could be updated although it shouldn’t ever happen. When things are translated they are also updated in language and in a subtle way style. A book written in English will forever be ageing. I would love to know how Tolstoy sounds to a Russian than he is in the latest translation I read. In that sense I can tell it was written in the early nineteenth century. While that’s not a problem it will be one day.

Shelley approaches all sorts of ideas and concepts throughout the book. They are too numerous to go into detail in just five hundred words but she discusses justice, the role of god, she approaches ideas of personhood and what is is to be a person, our understanding of ethics, even existentialism but this was long before it had become an ism. This is an entire philosophy course for a year covered. There are many essays written on it. I imagine it’s a common understanding too that there is the potential schizophrenia angle which relates in a way to ideas of duality in the book. They need each other, the monster never tries to hurt him and when he dies the monster goes off to die too. Did Frankenstein give a part of himself in the creation of the monster. In a way the monster shows more of what we call humanity than Viktor Frankenstein who in the end becomes a monster himself in a sad way. In a contemporary sense we could think of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The monster has not only an ability to learn but has self-consciousness, the ultimate stage of creating free thinking robots. I could go on and on.

Quite interestingly the book has nearly as interesting a back story. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the revolutionary thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Shelley. In the ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816 when they were visiting the exiled and infamous poet and writer amongst many things, Lord Byron in Switzerland, the weather forced them to stay indoors and Byron came up with the idea they all wrote horror stories. In a dream over the next few nights the story of Frankenstein and his monster came to Mary Shelley.

Along with all this and not to be forgotten it’s actually quite a good story. You don’t just read it to learn and look smart, you read it to enjoy. I assume they teach it in schools still and if they don’t can’t think why. It’s so full of everything it would be a waste. I ended it really feeling happy that I had just read a good book. We all should, we may just learn a little eloquence and humanity from a monster.

An Existential Nature

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First surmountable challenge…my laptop isn’t working. It is fixable which is why it’s also surmountable but in the meantime this is being written using a phone. Expect lots of error and a lack of flow, it’s good to get the excuses in early. The question then is whether that is the kind of person I am, someone who’s a waster full of excuses or someone who never let’s an obstacle prevent him reaching his goal. There may be more but these are two ways of looking at this, presupposed narrative will play an enormous part of which one you think I am. What kind of character you think I have will have potentially already been decided before you’ve even finished reading the sentence. What though is it that leads us to seeing events through whichever prism we have been programmed to look through. Are we who we are because of previous events, similar things which we experienced in the past and played out a particular way, our subconscious now presupposes every event similar will play out the same way. Alternatively is how we view this something innate within us, dare I saw, where we born that way. Importantly too, ‘we have been programmed’ already implies an assumption of sorts and it would be worth mentioning how that sentence was toyed with before being settled upon.

John Paul Sartre may not be seen as the father of existentialism but it isn’t too far fetched to refer to him as it’s most famous and important proponent. He believed existence precedes essence, simply put we create our own character through our experiences and our actions, and are not born this way. To put it crudely would be to hurtle into the frame of nature versus nurture. What happened in my life then that led me to feel the need to qualify what I was about to say with an excuse on the off chance that what was to come would in some ways not be to the required standard. Have I failed too often in the past, do I lack confidence or self belief, have I learnt that over explaining everything is necessary, am I in some perverse way just too polite. On the other hand Scorpios don’t try anything unless they know they’re going to succeed, perhaps that was a way of preempting failure. The Chinese Ox just plods through and gets on with it, perhaps the laptop issue was nothing more than something to be plodded over. Really though who knows, ultimately which ever way you lean on this particular issue has most likely already been decided in your mind long before you started reading this.