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.