Émigré
“The best day after a bad emperor is the first”
Tacitus
“Discipline is remembering what you want.”
David Campbell
Stalin's Boots - in Memento Park (Szoborpark), near Budapest - Photo: Ines Zgonc
These days I’ve found the privilege of re-reading the Conrad’s masterpiece for the third time, (and for the first time in English) and -unlike my teenage years that I was more interested in following the intense drama and romance in the book – this time -being older- I found fundamental similarities between psychology of Russians in imperial times with Iranians in these days. ( I also noted striking similarities between Iranians and Russians in the famous U.S foreign policy correspondence called “the long telegram” which some historians believe that its the document that defines the cold war, but that’s another story.)
I would like to quote a line from Conrad here, which I found very interesting specially in the light of the events of these days:
“The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse.”By the way, I don’t agree with Conrad about the innocence, purity and devotion of the people who begin movements; history showed us most of them were opportunists. Instead, I think, the noble, humane and devoted was Conrad himself.
For me it’s not only easy to appreciate the intelligence in Carl Jung’s accurate description of Adolf Hitler, but also it sends strong shivers down my spine every time I read it.
“Hitler seemed like the ‘double’ of a real person, as if Hitler the man might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in order not to disturb the mechanism … You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there … It is not an individual; it is an entire nation.”
I’m not trying to downplay, deny or ignore the role and responsibility of the people who commit atrocities. But I can agree with Jung’s description of the tyrant, being a medium and a distilled essence of collective ignorance, hate and greed of its followers. An ordinary criminal does wrong things to satisfy his own desires, a tyrant satisfies himself by becoming a medium of all wrong desires of a cult who chose him as their symbol and guide. So what he does is more destructive than a lone criminal, because not only he has political power to do so, but also, can tap into the infinite source of destructive creativity produced by his cult. It’s a vicious circle that intensifies its own effect. The make a deal with their followers and supporters to be possessed by their desires.
I’ve seen this horrible emptiness in the face of many living tyrants. There is some truth in their boasting of being invincible and eternal; If they got killed, until the cause (ignorance, poverty, prejudice, feeling of cultural inferiority and etc.) are in place, soon there will be another person who will take their place. They are the symptom of social disease, not the cause of it. However, once manifested, they contribute to and intensify the cause. (i.e. They enhance the hate, poverty, ignorance and the feeling of the cultural inferiority)
To me, they look like a horrible form of a Jaquet-Droz automata, restlessly and involuntarily writing the pages of history, with blood.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — January 10, 2012 — “Faced with inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced today that it has moved the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight.”
I guess we need the same thing for war probability calculations in the Middle East. However, in our case a countdown chronograph will be a better choice.
“It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”
George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947)
I was reading about second world war when I came across this quote from Freeman Dyson about Nazi military V-2 rockets and the damage they done well, to Nazi military:
“… those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun. We knew that each V-2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament.”*Apparently, the endless obsession of the Nazis with creation of super weapons blinded them to the realities of the war they were about to lose. When one studies the ambitions of Hitler, Albert Speer and their likes, they will see no lack of imagination, however, apparently their imagination and idealism went horribly wrong and created one of the greatest tragedies of human history. Imagination is not only the tool of creative class or scientists, it plays a big role in politics, specially in states that are run under the rule of a small political elite; If, according to Bismarck, “Politics is the art of the possible, then imagination is the criterion that defines the borders of the possibility.
Freeman Dyson - Photo: Wikipedia
I believe there are two types of imagination, I call the first the constructive imagination, which, use creative thinking and taps into humanity’s vast cultural tradition to imagine new possibilities, and create new useful solutions. The other type of imagination I call pipe dream; dreaming of an ambiguous utopia, which built on sentimental ideologies, naiveté and wishful thinking.
These pipe dreams can lead states to think that there is a silver bullet strategy that can save them from their internal and external foes, all at once. Most of the time, the silver bullet reincarnates in form of a weapon with massive destructive power; Nazi Germany tried it with it’s flying bombs,siegfried line, ballistic missiles, submarines and bombers. USSR tried it with “Tsar bomba,” ballistic missiles, and other types of WMD, North Korea with it’s nuclear arsenal, Iraq with their project Babylon (note the “local” taste in branding of most of these toys), and the list goes on. Most of the states mentioned exhausted their resources in the Faustian quest to acquire the deadly capacity they dreamt of. However, at the end they ended up with economic, political and moral bankruptcy; their fetish not only didn’t helped them survive, it accelerated their downfall. Now, these states are either disintegrated, contained, besieged, ruined, or currently under new management. There is a lesson here: you can’t build and empire by relying only on military industry.
Nations die when they run out of imagination, albeit the constructive type of it. Resources can be bought, workforce can be employed, textbook history can be rewritten to suit the preferences of the ruling class, however, constructive ideas have to be generated in-house and their makers should be nurtured by freedom. No nation can think in place of another one. You can’t import ideas from southeast Asia.
The lesson of history for me is, tyrannical regimes, thanks to the reliance on pipe dream ideologies, sometimes ran out of resources, wise people, and ideas faster than exhaustion in any war and without need of any intervention from outside.
You just have to wave at their cheerleaders as they march toward self obliteration, and smile.
Footnote:* Dyson, Freeman (1979). Disturbing the Universe. Harper & Row. p. 108. ISBN 9780465016778.
Being a designer, I’m always conscious of inspirations taken from nature that made their influence into production of artificial creations; a society is like a body, with a set of systems each designed to perform a certain task, just like the human body. We have hearts and livers and bones in our bodies, just like we have departments for energy, environment and infrastructure maintaining our societies. Now my question is, in this comparison, where is the place of money?
Is it possible to draw analogies between money and blood? Or maybe it’s more similar to our central nervous system?
Saint Homobonus, the patron saint of business people, tailors, shoemakers, and clothworkers, as well as of Cremona, Italy.
Money stands for many things and have various functions. It’s a medium of exchange. It’s also a unit of account – this gets tricky because it’s not pegged to any perpetual physical metric; we can’t say for example, one dollar is the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. Even, it’s not possible to maintain a stable relationship with a commodity for a long time. Also, money is a store of value, like gold and silver or stocks. The “value” itself is an evasive idea; there are theories trying to define value, some based on the premise that price of goods and services is not a function of subjective judgment, and others relate the economic worthiness of goods and services to supply and demand.
So, can we draw analogies between money and blood? Blood is a medium of exchange. We can call it a unit of account too, and it’s surely a store of value. Most of the body organs use blood as a medium of exchange, but this exchange is in it’s most abstract form – biologists should pardon my naïveté – can be viewed as a reciprocal process; if blood is money, then we have positive money and negative money. Cells receive positive money and return the used, negative money. The negative money returns to system and somehow restored to it’s positive state. It’s very difficult to keep drawing comparisons from this point on.
Money seems to have no equivalent in nature. It’s the only thing that we made without mimicking something we saw on earth. It’s a strange phenomena. It’s not a tool every monkey can make, it’s more sophisticated than love. (Which can be understood with MRI machines and biochemistry.) Thinkers underestimated the money. They labeled it dirty and immoral. They tried to ignore it, living in their romantic utopias.But money was a reality that turned their Utopias into hell.
Maybe nature has something to tell us here. Maybe our medium of exchange, our unit of account and our store of value, which is remained almost technically intact during the ages (Except for moving from commodity money, to representative money and finally to angst-ridden fiat money), is a rough and incapable financial instrument for addressing the complexities of our world. Maybe someone should look at the body, or the planet ecosystem, and just like the first human who drew inspirations from birds wings to create a flying objects, looks at the complexities of our world and create a more efficient instrument to replace it.
…And no, I’m not thinking about it the Karl Marx way.
For a moment, imagine that sovereign states were large corporations. Now imagine, suddenly, one of the world largest corporations (let’s name it A) claims that caught an agent from a semi bankrupt company with poor reputation (Let’s name it B) in their headquarters, while he was trying to throwing a big cake, (not a yellow one) to the face of a visiting CFO of another company (C corporation).
Well, obviously, both An and C companies, become really upset for different reasons. A will be angry of the infiltration into it’s headquarters. C will be angry because one of it’s high ranking officers were in danger. In the meantime B, which-according to An and some of it’s business partners - has a poor reputation of dealing with it’s own staff as well as costumers, denies everything.
Now let’s take a look at how two three corporations rank
A:
- Gross profit per shareholder: $14.12 Trillion
- Number of personnel in legal department for settling “disputes”: 1,477,896
- Annual spending on maintaining legal department: $549.1 billion
B:
- Gross profit per shareholder: $331.01 Billion
- Number of personnel in legal department: 545,000
- Annual spending on maintaining legal department:$9.174 billion
Now let’s anticipate the steps that A will take:
- Public condemnation of the act
- Asking it’s legal department to prepare a plan in case the have to fight in the court
- Using it’s vast influence, ask its business partners not to supply any product to B corporation and, refrain from buying any goods from it, providing technical, financing assistance or trading it’s shares.
- Use it’s influence on fuel stations not to provide B corp fuel for it’s cargo and staff cars.
And B… :
- Denies it’s involvement in cake incident.
- Does nothing else.
Which company will finally prevail?
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, Source : Wikipedia
It’s very difficult to find a computer related technology that keeps its usability and popularity for more than a decade; most of the products that were using “killer technologies” of the 90’s are now either considered obsolete or completely replaced with newer items. Many programming languages came and went away, and operating systems which supposed to “revolutionize” the industry now are long faded into history: Amiga OS, BeOS, OS/2 and NetWare, once promising platforms, some even with great market share, are now either discontinued or are now rebranded into niche or “hobby” projects.
In this competitive field, it’s a surprise to find a man that had a fundamental role in creation of an operating system (UNIX) and a programming language (C) which both are arguably, the most popular pieces of code in their respective categories of all time, and not only the modern incarnations of both are still based on the original concepts which it’s creators designed, but also, they are growing quickly in newest sectors of the industry, outpacing the technologies that came about 20 years after them.
Perhaps managers of Microsoft corporation in their heydays of mid 90’s and after they defeated IBM OS/2, NetWare, Mac OS and expensive UNIX players and became the sovereigns of PC industry, never anticipated that they will lose ground to UNIX like operating systems in servers, mobile and PDA platforms and later completely miss the tablet market no matter how much they invested on R&D on this platform.
I remember once I read an article in Byte magazine around 1988 (Byte unfortunately ceased publication on the same year), about late Steve Jobs’ introduction of the wonderful NeXT computer. I remember Mr.Jobs told something similar to the following to the reporters:
“I believe this with every bone of my body: UNIX will be the prime operating system of every major company in the 1990s.”Well, apparently, A genius like Mr.Jobs, made a mistake by overestimating the other players’ insight; except his own product (NEXTSTEP, which later incarnated to Mac OS X and iOS) and Mr.Trovalds’ creation (Linux) almost no other major player realized the importance of UNIX and incorporated it in it’s product line until the introduction of Android in 2005. (Even desktop Linux, never gained popularity, mostly because of lack of a coherent, fundamental application suite.) Of course, I’m not taking the companies which simply rushed to rebranding Linux to “embrace openness” and mostly later failed into this equation.
Now, after 42 years, UNIX is stronger than ever; iOS and Mac OS X are the favorites among creative class as well as the new mobile generation, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are catering to HPC and enterprise market, QNX is shining on embedded market and recently incorporated to RIM’s blackberry ecosystem, and last but not least, Linux is reaching it’s popularity beyond it’s traditional bastions of networking, servers and hackers into embedded market, mobile OS’s like Android and Bada.
On the other hand, C and it’s object oriented incarnations are the basis of most of information technology ecosystem; from servers to desktops, from web applications to tiny scripting languages and bytecode running on virtual machines, the impact of C is beyond perception.
All this empire of software architecture is indebted to the efforts of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, whom the later unfortunately passed away on October 12, 2011.
There has been always criticism one complexity and difficulty of both C and UNIX. However one must consider that C and UNIX both provide a strong and simple architecture which other technologies can be built on them, and that must be one of the main factors of their success, among with their unlimited capacity for portability.
In an “Anti Foreword” to “The UNIX haters handbook”, a semi-humorous book criticizing and ridiculing UNIX which in some point made comparison between UNIX and prison cells, he wrote:
“Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.”I’m just a person too much fascinated by computers. In today’s standards, I’m hardly even considered computer literate, however, I never forget the first time I was stunned by the stability, simplicity and power of UNIX, and the first time I read the book “The C Programming Language” aka “the Bible”. Thank you Mr.Ritchie, you will be greatly missed.
Kasra Yousefi
