"Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy. As it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives....This new electronic environment itself constitutes an inner trip, collectively, without benefit of drugs. The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment."
- Marshall McLuhan
STRAUBING, Germany (AP) — A German artist is posing 1,250 garden gnomes with their arms outstretched in the stiff-armed Hitler salute in an installation that he calls a protest of lingering fascist tendencies in German society. Artist Ottmar Hoerl posed the gnomes in the historic central marketplace of Straubing, a town in southeastern Germany, on Wednesday. The exhibit called “dance with the devil” is to run through Oct. 19.
Most of gnomes are black plastic, but about 20 are painted shiny gold.
Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany but a court ruled earlier this year that Hoerl’s gnomes were clearly satire and thus allowed.
Hoerl says: “the fascist idea, the striving to manipulate people or dictate to people … is latently dangerous and remains present in our society.”
“Pirates didn’t kill the music industry. It’s the bands. The bands drank the kool-aid. That if they did what their handlers told them to, it would work. Sell out, don’t say anything that isn’t nice, take the corporate money, do the TV show, make that endorsement, you’re a brand, you’re a corporation, look to Jack Welch for instruction. Utter bullshit. If this was the case, how come Leonard Cohen, a seventysomething guy who can barely sing, owns the biggest tour of the year? Because he’s AN ARTIST! Who’s FLAWED! Didn’t he go to the mountaintop looking for enlightenment when Bono was trying to save the world? Didn’t he spend years out of the spotlight? Last I checked his music isn’t on “Grey’s Anatomy”, he isn’t hawking the latest evanescent product. No, people see Leonard Cohen as an artist and they’re drawn to him.”
“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.”
Everything important in your life, the correct decisions, the perfect work, the life-changing realizations, they all come when you are alone. Being antisocial provides you with the time for these. 1. Genius is antisocial This does not mean that by being antisocial you automatically adopt the status of genius, but it does mean that if you, by some slim chance are, in fact, a genius, you will have no patience for average and below-average humanity. You will see it as annoying and distracting like a high-schooler being forced to endure a day in pre-school. You will seek to isolate yourself and work. Again, the choice to isolate yourself and work does not necessarily indicate genius, just a slightly higher possibility of it. Very slightly. Writing, painting, working on complex math problems, all solitary work for the most part. Genius needs room to concentrate. 2. Less drama Which is not to say no drama. If you are human and you live around humans you will have drama. It does not matter if you mind your own business and keep to yourself, trust me, the cunts and assholes will find you. Being genuinely antisocial ensures that you will run into this less, which is not to say, never. Be ready for it, but going under the radar means that you probably won’t have to dig more than one shallow grave per decade.
3. You gain insight You cannot ever be rid of people entirely. I know this, I have tried. Hell, even Howard Hughes, the modern prophet of anti-socialism still had to deal with his lawyers. People, however, will be reduced to bite-sized chunks. You will be able to analyze them as you take your breaks from analyzing more important things. Spend enough time thinking about enough data and you come to some pretty interesting conclusions. The fact is that most people reveal far more than is immediately obvious in the course of a casual conversation, you just have to put it under a microscope, which means it needs isolated, and you need private time look at it.
4. Relationships require effort Usually of the non-rewarding kind. Relationships with chicks involve doing things that serve no practical purpose whatsoever, as gestures. Chicks love gestures. You take this much effort it means that you love me this much. The idea that there is no correlation between love and effort for a man never occurs to them. I think this all started with that old Percy Sledge song “When a Man Loves a Woman” in which the singer tells all the things men will do for women they love. It was BS made to sell records. Effort is what men put out when there is a tangible reward at the end of the job. Like sex. The gestures are all about sex, not to show affection. Those flowers are not merely because I know you like flowers and I want to make you happy, they are because I know you like flowers and I want to fuck you. 5. Conversation-padding A 2-hour conversation usually only consists of about 10-20 minutes of actual worthwhile information sharing. The rest is padded out with small-talk, awkward pauses while somebody thinks of something to say, and boring droning that blends into the background for the listener. Long conversations usually only happen when both people are stuck in one place together and want the satisfaction of “having shared” at the end of their sentence, meaning that they want a conversation for the sake of having one, not because it actually makes sense to communicate. This results in a lot of your life being wasted talking to people and needless stress as you share meaningless nonsense. 6. Low expectations Nobody expects you to be the life of the party, nobody comes knocking on your door at 3am looking for a shoulder to cry on. This means you don’t get invited to tedious functions and you get to avoid the truly thankless job of being a free therapist to your friends and acquaintances. Being antisocial means that people see you as a closed door, one that they might as well pretend is not there. This might sound like a bad thing, but it is not. We have been taught that happiness depends on being social, but there is no happiness, just the pretense of it. Why waste time looking for something that does not exist?
7. You get balls What it is is that you don’t care what people think of you. It may bug you that some piece of trash out there has the balls to insult you (different from taking offense at the insult itself), but then you know they are a piece of trash and you get over it. Being insulted by someone you have no respect for is very different from being insulted by somebody who matters, who you at some point thought highly of. I will give you an example: your neighbor’s chihuahua barks at you from his owner’s front porch, does it offend you that this dog does not like you, or are you just irritated by the bark and annoyed that it does not know how small and contemptible it is? For the antisocial person everybody but a very select few (with whom you have limited contact) are chihuahuas. Fuck ‘em. 8. You don’t miss out on a whole lot Most people have little to offer aside from the psychological comfort of being around another human being. They are not fun or interesting to anybody, least of all for the people who settle for them. In all but a few instances you could lose a relationship and feel very little, but even when you do, it’s pretty much always survivable. You lose that comfort from being around a particular person, but that’s more about adjusting to change than anything else. The point is that people are not all that important, not all that interesting, not all that fun, not all that essential. You would be making a better use of your time doing a crossword puzzle or learning a few words in a foreign language than hanging out with them.
9. Comforting self-deception If you are just an antisocial moron, then it’s probably a good idea to isolate yourself so that you can tell yourself that you are, in fact a genius and that nobody recognizes what you are because they are all so stupid. Self-aggrandizing delusion needs isolation in order to reach it’s full annoying potential. It’s annoying to everybody else, but rewards the bearer with a tremendous sense of martyrdom which, in many cases, is the only reason they have to not commit suicide. 10. It helps you deal with loneliness The most sociable, chatty, clingy, blowhards out there, the ones who try to spend as little time alone as possible, for them being alone is the same thing as being lonely. For the antisocial loneliness is very different from the sensation of being alone, they are two distinctly separate feelings. The anti-social can feel loneliness, but it’s rare. You treasure the moments with no distractions, no background movement, no responsibilities beyond what you have in front of you. That is largely, I suspect, a learned reaction to being alone a lot, but it’s good since everybody has to be alone at some point and it’s best to see it as a gift rather than a burden.
Your father. Your mother. Your brothers and sisters. Aunts and Uncles, Cousins and Grandparents. Your best friend. Your worst enemy. That mean guy in your english class. Your boss. That teacher you hate. The stranger that stops what they’re doing to help you out. The crazy old homeless guy on the sidewalk. Your children. Your significant other. Me. You.
ALL of us have one fundamental thing in common, quite possibly the most important thing to remember when dealing with any other person: we are all ONLY HUMAN. We are all helpless pawns/products of the environment we develop in. And our tendencies, our personalities are hardwired into us by the combination of our parents’ biological histories.
Our only worthy contribution to this world we live in, is the effort we put forth to improve ourselves throughout our lives despite what is hardwired into us biologically, and despite our surroundings.
So be a little more empathetic. Sometimes people make honest mistakes, or sometimes they just aren’t aware of their own wrong-doing. Sometimes they JUST DON’T GET IT.
It’s when their actions are premeditated that you have to worry. When they do hurtful things knowingly, and intentionally. It’s when they’re completely aware of the damage their actions will do, and they either don’t care, or even hope for messy results.
Otherwise the rest, sadly, are oblivious to their blunders. When it comes down to it, we’re all just trying to make ourselves happy. Sometimes to achieve that, we knock eachother out of the way… What most people don’t realize, is that if we followed our intuition more often, our paths would be more harmonious.
But all these distractions from ourselves (the media, materialism, celebrity lifestyle, glorified names and symbols) block us, and take our attention away from that path. So what do we do?
Not enough people take the time to reflect on themselves. Maybe they’re afraid of what they’ll find: imperfection. But the trick is to love those little dings and dents in your soul. They’re there for a reason, and the best part? We all have ‘em. :)
German Artist Poses 1,250 Nazi Garden Gnomes
Oakland Tribune (AP) Online
STRAUBING, Germany (AP) — A German artist is posing 1,250 garden gnomes with their arms outstretched in the stiff-armed Hitler salute in an installation that he calls a protest of lingering fascist tendencies in German society. Artist Ottmar Hoerl posed the gnomes in the historic central marketplace of Straubing, a town in southeastern Germany, on Wednesday. The exhibit called “dance with the devil” is to run through Oct. 19.
Most of gnomes are black plastic, but about 20 are painted shiny gold.
Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany but a court ruled earlier this year that Hoerl’s gnomes were clearly satire and thus allowed.
Hoerl says: “the fascist idea, the striving to manipulate people or dictate to people … is latently dangerous and remains present in our society.”