Thoughts from an internetcafe

So, its finally happening. I'm doing what I've waited desperatly for for several weeks; I'm travelling with my family! Beside from the fact that it is amazing, it has also almost made me be in favor of dictatorship. We are 6 people travelling together, my parents, my two brothers, my cousin and me. Only 6 people. It shouldn't be so hard should it? Well, it is. Everything takes time. Deciding where to eat takes time, deciding what to see takes time, deciding weather or not to go back to the hotel to take a sweater takes time. Basically, efficiency levels are quite low at the moment. I hate to bring up MUWCI when I'm in such a realm of freedom sitting in an internet cafe in Varanasi( though writing these blogs) but this is exactly what is going on in MUWCI. Our efficiancy levels to get anything done is almost equal to zero just because everyone wants their saying and their personal wishes to come forth. So when I'm in the hotel arguing with my brothers weather to eat chinese or indian, I get deja vu's back to countless student meetings where noone is willing to compromise.

In the case of my family I would suggest dictatorship( with me as the despot of course) but as in MUWCI, the personal ego is too big in everyone to let someone else decide what is best for them. Which I guess can be reasonable since I myself don't trust someone else to know exactly what is best for me at all times either. In society today most people are too much aware of their rights and focused on individuality to let someone else take complete controle over their lives.

The actual problem of efficency is not created when people refuse to be dictated by some one, allmighty character but when this personal ego comes in the way even of choosing representatives to prsent their views in a collective gathering or to an authority. This system, it seems, is plausible to make function in most developed countries, where representatives are chosen by the people in some way or the other. So why cannot this function in MUWCI or in my family for example?

I think this cannot only be explained through huge egoes. According to Mill, though talking about a dictatorship, the less power the people feel they have over their own destinies, the less they care about taking part in desicion-making regarding their own life. I think this notion can clearly be shown in smaller and larger groups of people like let's say MUWCI vs the US, to create a proper contrast. While in the previous US selection only 56,8% voted( despite the huge focus on the election in both media and around the country) in MUWCI, everyone wants to say their opinion on weather to vote or not or weather we should have a student council.

My conclusion is that we in MUWCI are not just a bunch of big-headed people( slightly maybe) but that due to the massive influence we know we have over how things will be conducted on campus, everyone wants to take part because they actually have a saying about what's going to happen( like in other smaller groups like families, small communities etc) compared to again the US or other democracies where people might feel that their vote counts for so little that the effort of getting engaging is not worth it....

Limbo

Another topic which is brought up in 1984, perhaps more in the book than in the movie, is language. Does language shape who you are, and does the limitations of language limit your thoughts? Obviously in the book it is taken to the extreme with a language created to shape a certain way of thinking, but you can also see this in real life, maybe especially here in MUWCI where a lot of us comes from a different language background than English while here we speak it everyday.
Personally, Im currently in a state of limbo. I realized it all too well when I tried to write my World Lit in Norwegian and when my family came to visit me. I dont speak my own language anymore. Ïm searching for the words, maybe finding them in English but not in Norwegian. And, at the same time, my English is not good enough for me to adapt it as a first language. Basically, Im screwed.
But the combination of this state of limbo and living in India, getting to know concepts that does not exist in my language, has also made me realize that I can actually think without words. When youre at home and everyone around you speak your mothertongue, using only familiar expressions, it is harder to be aware of this area where langauge does not play a role, simply because your sourroundings are so familiar and you dont need to expand your notion of conceptions. Your language is adapted to your suroundings.
Exactly because I have this gap of missing words and expressions somewhere between Norwegian and English, Ive realized that even if I dont have the means of explaining it and expressing it orally to other people, be it my friends here in MUWCI or my family, I can formulate thoughts in my head that are abstract and not connected to any language. Obviously it is quite frustrating, because most of your thoughts and ideas you want to communicate them to other people, but it does weaken Orwells idea of that simply by creating a new language, one can shape how people think. Just as I have concepts that I cannot express in any language, even if a completely new language was taught to a child, he or she would still have conceptions and ideas that are outside the range of this language. Of course, the idea of that a society can be controlled by means of language is not that far-fetched, because even if one can formulate ideas, the words are not there and thereby not the communication between people either. And without being able to communicate these ideas, action is difficult and the idea of a government controlling a people in that way is not at all impossible...

Selfinflicted censorship

Since we are watching 1984 in class, I thought it would be appropriate to adress the issue of censorship. Not censorship related to government but to the media and its influence on the information we are provided with.
We like to believe in these liberal time that censorship is something that existed in the past and perhaps in dictatorships like North Korea or communist China. Of course you have the theories of Noam Chomsky saying that media is in fact still censored, but that is not what I would like to adress. I would like to talk about another type of censorship that is more subtle but still influencal as to what information we receive through the media.
The type of censorship Im talking about is happening through the choice and viewpoint of different information related to events reported by media. A good example of what Im talking about can be shown through an article in one of the biggest newspapers in Norway where a political youth organization has decided to sue the Norwegian press association for bad coverage of the climate conference happening in Denmark. The accusation is tsating that Norwegian newspapers only wrote articles concerning the violence and arrest of 200 protestors, not mentioning the 100.000 peaceful protestants that filled the streets of Copenhagen to get their voices heard.
This is only one example of how coverage of an event can be completely focused on a minor detail. And why is this? Because the minor details contain the x-factor that is supposed to and do in fact sell newspapers or attain viewers. It seems as if catastrophe is what we want to hear about, so catastrophe they give us. It makes me wonder if Nietzche was right when claiming that humans find pleasure in other peoples suffering, because it seems as if the greatest entertainmentfactor is people being imprisoned, killed, beaten up etc. And this need for death and destruction leads to what can be called self-inflicted censorship or filtering, that leads us to, in a case like the climate conference in Copenhagen, get the details of how many people were arrested for what violent actions, rather thn what is actually going on and what can have an actual influence on our lives, more than just entertainment...

Balls of cotton

In class we read the article by JS Mill arguing that tyranny leads to passivity because the people don't have a saying in their own lives while Hobbes argues that democracy might lead to passivity due to the idea that your vote doesn't count and that you're not able to make a difference anyways. We can discuss weather passivity is good or bad but at least for a society to progress within the areas of economics and technology it is a necassary factor for people to be active, interested and innovative. In this post I would like to look at how wealth creates passivity and how it affects my country Norway...
Norway is a country rich on oil. After World War 2 we were poor as church mice and had to start everything from scratch. The hard work we had to put in to rebuild our country made us united as a people right untill the mid 1970's when we discovered oil in the North Sea. From that point on, we are to be considered a wealthy nation with the opportunity to create a complex welfaresystem for the Norwegian people. Up untill this point, everything seems fine and dandy. One would think that with so many resources one would be able to build a Utopia of happy-go-lucky people without any problems. Wrong.
The development of our welfaresystem, which other countries drool at, has created a bunch of lazy, passive, uninterested people without any care for their own future( exuse me the lack of patriotism). How? By offering every kind of social assistance in every aspect of our lives, the government has(unintentionally) wrapped every single Norwegian into a ball of cotton so no matter how hard you smash us against the wall, we wont notice anything.
Neglect to wake up for work, get fired and try to find another job so you wont have to sleep on the street. Wrong. If you loose your job, the government will pay you money unntill you can find another job and even get you a job if you're too lazy to find it yourself. You feel sick and you stay at home for a day or two to get better and get back to work. Wrong. Since the government will pay you the same salary from not working if you declare yourself sick, you can get payed for up untill one year without doing anything. In a Utopian society no-one would take advantage of these arrangements and it would all work out fine, but since we're not living in the land of ponies, rainbowes and pink candyfloss fairies, the Norwegian people rip the government off for what it's worth.
One would think that when given such an enormous resource, one would use it to develop other resources that can be utilized when the oil is over, but due to the constant padding by the government we are like kids that will never learn to swim because the floating devices are not taken off. We will never have the need to put any effort into progress because we are in such a comfortable place, buried deep inside our balls of cotton...

Silence

A nice conversation dies down, people looking away, trying to think of something to say but fail. Silence. The most awkward thing one can encounter in Muwci as well as most other social settings. Somehow not having anything to say has become the greatest fear of all, because what are you if you have nothing to say? Boring. A word even worse than silence. Especially here in this place were you're expected to be Superman, Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci at once. Being one of those people who don't say interesting, smart and original things every hour of the day is even worse than failing your IB, it means that you're boring.
This extreme fear of silence has lead to two things. One, the awkward turtle, where to make things less awkward when the conversation has reached its natural end, one moves ones hands to imitate a turtle in the hope that the gesture will create a conversation-starter( this rarely works and tend to create an even more awkward mood, even in settings where the silence was not awkward). The second, and much more effective, result of the SilenceMonster is bullshit. The sweet salvation we reach for when there is nothing left to say or when the need to show that we are in fact the offspring of Superman becomes too strong. The skill of bullshitting is the most valued skill of all and if you master it well you might even achieve the Nobel Peace Prize just from talking.
Personally, I've gotten a lot better at bullshitting since I came to Muwci but I'm still an amateur, constantly finding myself in situations where I don't have anything to say or where I don't have an opinion, to relate this to democracy. You might shoot me, but I'm not capable of having an opinion of absolutely everything and on certain issues I just don't care. And in those cases, when there is voting involved, why on earth should I screw up the result with my "uneducated" vote when I don't care about the outcome? It would be rather unfair to those actually caring about the result and voting out of actual conviction. Unfortunatly I think we do tend to vote and speak even when we don't have an opinion or anything to say( I can only speak for myself of course). But if we are so active and always have something to say, when do we find the time to think?....

20 grams of chicken and a piece of lettuce

Vietnamese Special Chicken Filet Salad for 200 rupies at a restaurant in Delhi. I felt very exited untill my dish of 20 grams of chicken and a piece of lettuce were set before me by a smiling and slightly condecending vaitor. Is this it, I asked? A nod shattered my hopes that this was some kind of appetizer. I wondered how on earth they could charge 200 rupies for something I had to wear my glasses to be able to see and reached the conclusion that yet another restaurant had become "Sophisticated". Many people have suggested that in the future, the time we now live in will be called the Data Age, but I think the Age of Sophistication would be a better term. After people reach a certain point of satisfying basic needs, the need for something more, something luxurious, something "sophisticated" takes over - a way to stand out of the crowd. It is a constant battle both on a materialistic and an intellectual level to show off your "sophistication" by wearing brand clothes, driving fancy cars or spending hours reading Nietszche, Marx and Tolstoj to be able to talk about at the next dinner party. This phenomena, one would think, could only appear in upper class society but as things are, the strive for "sophistication" is present in almost all parts of society where the basic needs are already covered. A lower middle class woman might not be able to afford a Prada handbag so she buys a fake one to appear "sophisticated".

The actual meaning of sophisticated is "one who pursues wisdom", but today I would say it represents quite the opposite. It is quite funny how after having the priviledge of satisfying our basic needs like for example eating we have gone back to starving for the cause of "sophistication".If to be sophisticated I have to pay per fancy word in the name of the dish rather than the actual food, I prefer being a barbarian having a proper meal at McDonalds.

A herd of Sheep

Norway is a monarchy. We have a history as a Christian country, our traditions and culture is largely based in Christianity, something which is also stated in our constitution. Our king, a nice guy but completly powerless and only functioning as a symbol, is also Christian. Despite all this we do have complete freedom of religion in a society growing more and more sekulare. Sounds all nice and open-minded right?

The only thing is that in Norway, despite the idea of full freedom of religion etc, our state religion and the traditions we have built our society on are being discriminated.
This is portrayed quite accuratly by a statement our king made a couple of days ago that he thinks Norway should have a Christian king. His phrasing might not have been too good, but fact is that this tiny, insignificant personal statement created a huge fuss among the growing sekulare movement in Norway, accusing the king for discrimination and favoring of his own religion etc. But why on earth should one not favour ones own religion? That`s the whole point of religion isn`t it, that you believe in something over something else. One cannot be a Muslim and say "but of course, Buddha is also equal to Allah, I don`t want to discriminate". It seems in sekulare circles that there is this growing fear of religious brainwash, because the moment someone mentiones Mohammed, Jesus, Ganesh, Jehova or anything related to religion, they are pin-pointed as preachers, discriminators and manipulators. But where has the belief in human beings gone? These people must have very little faith in our ability to think citically, or think at all, on issues presented to us. As if humans are helpless, all-consuming creatures that will turn to Islam as soon as someone whispers Allah, or Christianity when a completly powerless person as the king mentiones that he believes the king in a Christian country should be Christian.
The funny thing about this is that the king got complete support from the other religious communities in Norway, like the Jewish and the Islamic, who stated that it is a completly reasonable statement, while the sekulare community went bananas with accusations of no tolerance, discrimination etc. I think that the witch-hunt for religion in countries where the population is becoming more and more sekulare is a danger much greater than if someone were to say that they prefer one religion over another. To their information, we are not a herd of sheeps waiting to be brainwashed by whoever decides to share their oppinions, religious or not. In that case we would all be atheists, wouldn`t we, since that`s where the largest amount of propaganda comes from...

"Hell is - other people"

After being sentenced to burn in hell with Rosie and Alex in Sartre`s extistentialist play "No Exit" I`ve been thinking about this main idea of the play that humans create hell for each other so in that way we don`t need torture or burning flames to suffer. I think, as showed in the play that the worst torture we experience as human beings is the need for affirmation and reassurance from other people. The constant need for different sorts of approval can drive people crazy. In the play this is portrayed through all the characters where Gracin seeks affirmation to the fact that he`s not a coward, Estelle seeks the approval of Garcin to confirm her beauty and Inez tries to seduce Estelle to concinve herself that she`s capable of making her love women and despise men as she does.
This notion is present everywhere in society, the need for other people to approve of us and the torture it can be when they don`t. This need can manifest itself in many ways, like in MUWCI, where the need for approval is not for the oppinion you present, but the fact that you have an oppinion. I think we are scared to death in this place not to have an oppinion on something while in "the real world" you might hide your oppinion in fear of it not being approved. Of course you have radicals and extremists that seem not to care about approval of others, but they always have someone to support them in their cause even if it`s an insignificant minority.
Even in religion, where your main goal is supposed to be Gods approval, many people still seek out for the approval of their fellow men rather than God. In practicing religion they might seek more towards the approval of the religious community rather than the laws of God.
In the end we are completly dependant of other people for their approval and affirmation, so then to spend eternity in one room with two other people who doesn`t give you any affirmation would be the ultimate torture...

What`s my potential?

Sorry for posting this so long after our discussion on this. Wrote it in word and forgot it existed

“A look at the real world, demonstrates that some men are smarter than others” - John Cobbs(from Chomsky`s article)
After reading Chomsky`s article on equality and especially equality of endowment, I started thinking about something I previously took for granted; the fact that you have the potential to do almost whatever you want(excluding physical inabilities of course) as long as the want is strong enough and certain environmental conditions are present . Chomsky`s article raised the question; Are we all given certain conditions at birth that we cannot run away from, that determines where we go in life?
Obviously we have environmental factors that largely determines what opporutinties we are given - me being in a UWC is a result of opportunities given to me like education and access to information about the movement. But though it is hard, there are so many cases where people have gone completly against their external conditions and turned their lives around. I guess what I`m wondering is weather these people already have something innate that makes them capable of turning their situation around that other people don`t have. Are we all given a certain and different amount of potential that we can use as we wish, someone wasting it and someone taking advantage of it? Here in MUWCI, I can`t help of feeling that there is, if not a clear divide but rather a vague notion, a separation between people who have a lot of potential and those who have less potential and therefore have to work harder to achieve what they want. Of course there are differences in intellegence, education etc, but even in identical twins, sharing the same genes and environment seem to turn out very differently potential-wise.
It scares me, and I refuse to believe (for my own benefit) the idea that no matter how hard we work, we can only reach to a certain point that our potential allows us to. I guess we can never know weather it is like that or not but even if all you can do is maximizing your given potential, the belief of a limit to your potential, I feel would demotivate one even to maximize the potential given.

Vamos a la playa

I wanted to response to the "bikiniissue" brought up on college meeting. Not that this in itself is an issue of huge concern to me, it doesnt really make a difference. What I want to discuss is the underlying assumtions brought up by it. First of all, the point Jana made about this being our home. I have to agree with her, considering the fact that we spend two years of our lives here most of us call this home. I know that people have strong oppinions about this, and I don`t wish to step on anyones toes but doesn`t the notion of "home" contain some amount of freedom which you cannot excersice elsewhere? Regarding the RKHS, the guards and everyone else working on campus, I think we have to keep in mind that this is their job. We are not asking to bring our own culture down to the villages and walk around in bikinies in their houses. Quite the opposite, when going down to THEIR homes, we adapt to their culture by dressing culturally sensitive and learn to live with their custums which at least in my country is seen as offensive like burping, spitting, beating of kids in schools etc. I think that in a job, you`re bound to adapt to certain situations where you don`t feel completly comfortable, situations that you don`t experince at home because home is your sphere of freedom to continue your custums and habits. And MUWCI is our home. Though, I do see issue with this argument and I think that the way of looking at is is much influenced by how we define MUWCI. Because fact is that we have chosen to live in India which is in a larger context, the home of people working on campus. But if we talk about MUWCI as "the bubble" so many people refer to then it`s maybe more justified as our home. Can we take the freedom to refer to MUWCI as an independant bubble or a mini-world separate from our environment here in India?

Miss Universe

This is more likely the 27th time I`m sitting down, determined to write my first entrance on this blog. After looking at a blank screen now for 20 minutes, I started thinking about why its so damn hard to write these 300 words( other than the fact that its a beautiful day and I would love to go to the pool). Im realizing that I actually have a lot of stuff I would like to write, but everytime I start typing, I reach the conclusion that it is too much of a clichè, too idealistic or too romantizising. They`re all things I would have written about a year ago when coming to MUWCI for the first time, but after spending a year here the notion of idealism is just another clichè along with peace on earth and complaining about the caf food. I used to have so many romantic ideas of the world before coming here, but slowly my illusions of what is possible to achieve grew more distant and I realize I`ve become one of those people who rolles their eyes during college meetings when someone wants to discuss cultural sensitivity or enviromental issues. Not that I don`t care, Im just lacking my previously naive view that I could change the world( yet another MUWCI-clichè).
Its quite sad to see the illusions you had about yourself and the world disperse in the heat of the Indian countryside. We come here to be educated and enlightened and to "make a difference", but what can you do if you don`t actually believe in the change you`re suppose to make? Sometimes I wish I could go back to my more naive state of mind when I actually believed in all the clichèes about the envionment, world peace and so on and when I could write about it without feeling Im quoting an extract from the speech of a Miss Universe contestant...