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Xanadu 2012: Your dreams miss you |
Category: Articles 1 comment 20 Jun 2007 @ 18:38 by Hanae @69.33.46.10 : Thought provoking pieceSometimes, people put things together and I am not always quite unambivalently sure what it is they are trying to say. But do they always do themselves? Does anyone? Ever? There is something in us, emotions, longings, feelings, pains, sorrow and also that unknown part of us which is greater than us or greater than the sum of the parts, who speaks in us (there is also that part which doesn't or can't or won't speak), and whatever reaches our conscious awareness, that part of ourselves we identify as the self - our conscious identity - is but a vague and often deformed echo of something much greater and much more complex. This is a truth that has become commonplace in this day and age but that we dutifully forget in the day-to-day humdrum of our "productive" lives. And maybe this is how it was meant to be. Or is it just an evolutionary quirk? Or both? There is a possible and obvious reference in the title of this piece to the famous Rozerem prescription drug ad featuring Honest Abe, a beaver and the simple phrase “your dreams miss you.” I recognize the top and bottom pictures on the post from Terry Gilliam's {link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)|Brazil}. And the rest of it looks just like snapshots taken from various kind of advertising. At a first level, the message is clear. The character on the top right picture is "hooked" literally so. Also, there is a certain hypnotic quality to the whole piece, which is reflective of our age - an era of unequaled hyper-marketing and mass manipulation. The second obvious and closest level to this, of course, is the question about "our dreams": are they really ours, or are they programmed in us - "are" we become programmed, is a common place question of our times. Marketers and advertiser do not so much "create" people's dreams (not really, they don't) as "exploit" and "manipulate" (for $) what is already there, the Drive for life for - just read the catch words and/or the pictures - "escape," "energy," "open spaces," "exploration," "discovery," "speed," "freedom." But is it what the product really delivers? Sometimes it does but most of the time the ad is just a lure. Ethical questions do appear when the manipulation reach proportions of global consequences such as "pairing" (in the behaviorist sense of the term) people's need for "escape" with "owning a SUV or a Hummer," or pushing prescription drugs as a substitute for states of being which people cannot experience because of physical or emotional dysfunctions due largely to an unbalanced or toxic life-style, which instead of being addressed at the source is covered up by masking the symptoms - symptoms which should be so many warning signs of things that need to be addressed individually, or at large in our societies, and which are basically "repressed" (in the Freudian sense) with the consequences that come with that. Some people get their fix by snorting Cocaine other use Ephedra. But the collage also has other levels to it, Man is essentially a creature dancing to the sound of a music he/she cannot hear. The marketers and advertisers do tap into its power (like the Pied Piper of Hamelin) - but understand it, they do not. The music speaks through musicians and other artists, poets, painters, etc. Philosophers try to put a name to it. Scientists try to explain its language. The music is all. It often ill-treats the human vehicles through which it manifests and oftentimes human will do unthinkable things at its service, or devote - even sacrifice - their life to it. At another level, there is also the reading of that particular turn life has taken at this point in time. There has been a leap from what was mostly genetic evolution (one way of storing and propagating "information"), to cross-generational learning though symbolic communication, with oral language first, and then writing, to what we ultimately know now with the world wide web. Augmented intelligence is next. As, a matter of fact - though many people do not realize it - it is already here accessible to all - you use it every time you access the web. Next levels of augmented intelligence will follow. Artificial Intelligence too is around the corner: another leap in evolution. A common fallacy consists in opposing Life to Man's civilization, or also Life to Artificial Intelligence (as in Nature versus Artifice) but there are no "artifices" (and that includes the use of performance-enhancing or consciousness expanding drugs) we all are children of Life. We are life. And so is this civilization. This is by no means to be interpreted as a guarantee of its success. It is only a path. It could turn into a dead end. Or not. That is going to be entirely up to the evolution of Life's current path. And, as it appears, this means essentially up to mankind, for now. Here is hoping it is a happy path. May it be a wise one. 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19 Jun 2007 @ 18:44, by Unknown
