i've got a secret for you: no truths

This was originally posted on Kwoon Talk, for posterity's sake I'm putting it up here as well. A movie came out in 2006 called "The Secret". It's a lazy piece of filmmaking that teaches further laziness. Here's why.

This purported 'secret', the 'Law of Attraction'
that has been kicking around for the past 30 years or so, is nothing
more than the quick-fix material culture packaged as spiritual
wisdom. For those of you who haven't watched the movie, the tenet is
that 'like attracts like'--if you think positive, good things will
happen to you. You want that promotion? Visualize it, believe it
will happen, and poof! There you are. The movie even claims it will
cure serious illness. The three steps are "ask, believe, receive".
In other words if you want something: wish for it, believe it will
happen, and then it will.

First off, if you have cancer, chemotherapy will do much more for it.
All the evidence around this 'law' is anecdotal, which means that even
if it were true, due to the positive self-selection effect this method
is on par with random chance. There is also some pseudo-scientific
mumbo jumbo about how it is based on quantum physics. This is so far
off base it makes my head hurt.

In addition, the movie puts forward that the law of attraction has
been suppressed by those in power (hence the movie title) , but there
have been 'secret teachers' throughout the ages who have achieved
success and in fact taught this. Some examples are Plato, Carl Jung,
Siddhartha Buddha, Issac Newton and Aristotle--who did not teach this
in any way, shape or form. They also take a Winston Churchill quote
out of context which makes him look like he supports such theories,
when in fact he's calling it nonsense. Oh, and apparently Beethoven--
an incredibly short tempered man who battled depression for most of
his life--was all about the positive thinking.

Like I said, I have no problem with positive thinking. But that is a
tool to help you go about achieving your goals. What this sort of
thinking does is tries to portray everything as so easy. In doing so
it places the blame of circumstance on the person. The 2 or so
billion people who don't get enough to eat every day? Why, they're
just not wishing hard enough! I also find it curious how the film is
so focused on material goods--probably due to the target demographic.
The numerous movers and shakers in history are mentioned for a very
specific reason, to take the blame of self off the person. I'm sure all Victor Hugo did was wish hard enough and believe that it would happen, then sat back and Les Miserables just popped out of nowhere. No thousands of hours of frustration and hard work. No doubt and confusion--it just went along easily with no troubles because he assumed it would. Ridiculous.

True positive thinking is extremely important, but doesn't ignore
reality. It also isn't lazy. You can believe all you want, but don't
put the work in and don't have the conviction of purpose, it won't
happen. Anything that promises a shortcut like this is a lie. Even
worse, it's a lie that people think they can get away with because
they assume those listening aren't going to bother trying something
significant. It takes the onus off the individual to actually do
something. No wonder I gave up the cello and now can't play like Yo-
Yo Ma, some person probably said to themselves, I didn't have this
secret. It had nothing to do with hard work or desire for excellence!

In life, sometimes you will be sad, other times happy. Nothing will
change that. Furthermore, if something is worth doing, it will be
hard and will take a long time. Along the way, at times, you will
have doubts and feel bad about yourself. Everyone does. But it's not
mindless, blissful ignorance of that reality that will see you
through. It is the knowledge that what you're doing is worth it and
the confidence that you can see it through. Assuming that blind hope
will make all your problems go away just sets you up for a bad fall.
Instead of believing that the cosmos will arrange everything so you
can just glide through life, believe in yourself and then prove it.

your pretty plastic skin, meant to look like porcelain, shines with the congealed grease of leftover dollars

So there has been a lot of talk about Dove's 'campaign for real beauty' and how laudable it is for taking a stand against portrayal of women in the media. I couldn't disagree more. I think that campaign is one of the worst things to happen to discussion of the female image in the past decade.

Portrayal of physical attributes (of both sexes) is a serious issue, especially with the rise of eating disorders. For instance, recent statistics suggest that France has upwards of 40,000 anorexics, most of them under 25. But encouraging people to be skinny is not the issue. If the standard of beauty was people who were overweight--like it is in some central African countries--then we would have teenage girls overeating to get towards that. Fashions in body types change almost every decade. Furthermore, people have individual tastes towards certain physical attributes. What I find attractive in a women will be markedly different from the next guy (or girl, if she's 10-20% of the population). While of course we should push for appreciation of the qualities that matter, physical attributes do exist, and outside of social constructions people will still have tastes--though they should be more divergent than we see now.

The real issue I have with advertisers is not they are encouraging a certain body type, it is that they are turning our bodies into products. It doesn't matter what body type they're pushing, it is simply the fact that they are constructing a standard which they can sell. We are being sold our bodies--being taught they are products, end results as opposed to constantly fluctuating processes. Own ownership of our own physical identity has been stolen.

So any beauty company is damaging because of that. Dove is even worse, the lowest of the low, because it doing more than the skinny models in magazines. Dove is not only making the body a product, but also politics. Critique of body identity, mostly pushed by feminist thinkers, has exploded in the past 30 or 40 years, and is reaching a fever pitch. So what does Dove do when this glimmer of independent thought begins to take shape, threating the very modes of thinking the company is based on? They peddle their stuff based on it! The people of Dove are not trying to redefine beauty, they're trying to get you to buy stuff by creating a false image that is palatable to your politics.

Here is a quick survey of the different types of products (usually 5-10 individual ones in each category) I found on the Dove website: day creams, night creams, cleaners, cleansing cloths, shower soaps, hand soaps, shower gels, facial masks, facial toners, body oils, hand oils, body lotions, facial lotions, hand lotions, and a shampoo for every conceivable type of hair. That sure looks like 'real beauty' to me. Empty wallets, too. If Dove really cared about redefining the standard of beauty to one more resembling reality it would have shut down by now.

Now, I'm not saying to not shower or get your hair cut. What I am saying is that to not think for a second that shopping at Dove does your part for the actual battle for physical identity. All it does is make that company money. Boycott these anti-aging wrinkle cream pushers--not just Dove, all of them. There are plenty of products out there that will make you smell nice and your skin soft without turning you into a patsy. Don't let yourself be lulled into a false sense of accomplishment while ignoring the real issue.

Anyone trying to sell you something is not on your side, simple as that. That includes products, religions, politics, and lifestyles. I'm not even on your side, I'm tying to make you come around to my way of thinking. It's even worse, though, when a company using a false image of social change to sell you things you don't need that contributes to the problem. Buying into Dove's lies only makes this problem worse.

As Desmond Tutu said, "I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights." Redefining the standard of beauty is not going to solve anything. We need to do away with the very notion that there is one beauty to move towards, and the first step is to make the people and companies who profit off of that fade away. Doing so will tear down a wall that has been put up by these people and one that has been standing far too long: the barrier between us and our bodies.

this one is probably too grave for an ironic title...too late!

So Sifu Edge has put forward an interesting question on Kwoon Talk about changing the world. You should go read the whole post, and if you don't know what Kwoon Talk is, I am shocked someone not from Silent River is reading this. How's life in the blogosphere? Is it irrelevant? It sure seems that way.

Basically, she sees a dilemma in how to live her life. Should she work to make the world a better place, or spend her time enjoying her life?

I'm going to be a real jerk and answer that question with an old story, one of my favourites. Those who have read Pirsig (which is many of you) will remember it. The famed zen master Joshu was walking along with a friend of his, who turned and asked "Can a dog attain Buddha-nature [enlightenment]?" Without breaking stride or even looking over, Joshu replied "Mu."

'Mu' is a Japanese term which roughly translates as 'neither yes nor no'. It means that the possible answers do not fit the question. That's exactly what I'm doing here. I'm muing. Mooo.

The way I see it, you work hard, do what you can, then go relax with your friends. People manage to combine work, school, hobbies, families, and friends--why should your outlook change that?

But at first glance it does appear to be a valid question. This is because there is another one implicit in this dilemma: can one really change the world? Or to put it another way: who's problems can be solved, mine or the world's?

It does seem like in order to go along that path, you can never really relax. You should always be thinking of the next issue, you should be too busy protesting to hang out. In all honesty, it can easily be a full time job. I spend a fair chunk of time just trying to stay on top of what's going on in the world, then I have to invest more time into trying to do something about it. That's the depressing part of all this. I could go out tomorrow and eradicate HIV, but there would still be a million other problems plaguing the world. There are so many horrible things occurring at this very second it seems like there is no point. Why bother trying to make a difference when you have all these things going on in your life?

I need to stress again that it doesn't have to hijack your existence. The outlook itself will do wonders, especially if you do your best to exemplify it. Yes, you will be inconvenienced, you will spend more money buying locally grown organic produce (that doesn't mean Planet Organic), no matter how much respect you treat those who disagree with you some will not give that back and that will depress you. All that has happened to me, and more. I spend a lot of my time thinking about problems and trying to help solve them. I belong to several organizations and donate time to some of them. But I still have a life, I still have friends and go on dates (well, not many of those--that's another issue though). Yes, I don't sit on the couch and watch tv or play video games all evening, but that's not something I miss. I do what I do because it's important and it does not come at a sacrifice to who I am.

We will not reach a utopia, ever. Simple as that. More than likely for a long time we will be in a society that necessitates a significant portion of the population to live badly. More than likely blind loyalty will still be masked as a virtue and many people will die for no good reason. Barack Obama, in his excellent speech on race relations, touched on this. He said he realized that one presidential term will not do away with racism, but it doesn't mean one shouldn't try. He said that his nation will never be perfect, but it can be perfected. That's true about the whole world. I know that I'm not able to tear down society and start all over again. I can push it in a good direction though--inch towards not a better future, but a better now.

The power of the individual is what matters, people getting together and deciding they've had enough have caused more drastic change than all the governments in history. We need to realize that we can make a difference, even just for one person. Need an example? Go to Free Rice, a simple vocabulary game that through sponsorship of advertisers donates rice to the UN world food program. Play that for 5 or 10 minutes and someone can eat for a day because of you. You are literally saving people from starving to death. There, that's change. Next time you discuss politics try and get to the heart of real issues, treat everyone with respect and genuinely present your views. Bit by bit a few people will start to care.

We don't need a few people ignoring their lives to sit and worry about the future, making grand statements about how things will be better. We need everyone to do at least a bit to make things better for everyone right now. Don't listen to people pointing at the sunset, listen to those pointing at the ground. Work towards now, helping those in need and challenging apathy. Make it part of your life and you won't have to give up anything for it. If you do that, keep the small victories in mind and help things inch along, more good than you can imagine will happen.

i'm chalking that last one up to april fool's

The 50's/50s issue keeps popping up in the course of my daily life. I keep going around in circles with it, all the while telling myself it actually couldn't matter any less. I in fact just deleted a long, extremely nerdy paragraph about the place syntax has in language. Writing it helped me decide that the possessive is a rhetorical device referencing the non-possessive 'occurrence' meaning, so while they're not completley equivalent, neither trumps the other.

That was the interesting version. Be glad I try to curb myself.

I actually want to talk about this article. That's right, Net Neutrality has come to Canada in a very bad way. Bell and Roger's (especially Bell) are now choke holding certain venues on the internet by controlling the transfer rates and access. This is partly due to Bell and Roger's having terrible infrastructure that can't handle the kind of exponentially increasing demands in terms of data transfer. Even with that in mind, since it's peer to peer transfer that is the issue, most notably Bittorrent, it looks mightily like these companies are just trying to muscle out competition. Bittorrent has many free (and legal) video downloads--CBC has even put a few television programs on it. This competes with Bell and Roger's video download programs, which you have to pay money for.

Net Neutrality is the idea that the user should have control over what they do on the internet and the provider should not be able to manipulate transfer rates or access. For more info go here. This is a ridiculously important issue, as the internet is the best tool for citizenship involvement in terms of activism, DIY, or just general information. That only works when it's completley open. There is a reason it's so heavily controlled in a place like China, where google and yahoo provide search records to the government. The internet is incredibly powerful, but not if someone with political or profit-minded interests is determining what or how we see on the internet.

Now, some of the more tech-savvy of you might object, saying that p2p (notice the hip lingo--that one was for you, tech-savvy people) is primarily a means for people to exchange pirated music or films. That's true, but it certainly doesn't have to be that way. There are many legitimate uses for p2p that are finding a greater audience. I don't pirate, myself. The way I see it, most of the bands I listen to have day jobs and are simply doing it for the love of the art. Me buying the album helps them go on tour or make rent. And to quote the immortal Henry Rollins:
"[The major labels] can't get it through their thick, greedy heads that they've been overcharging people for music for so many years and have been cranking out so many alarmingly mediocre, tepid records where the only song you want is the one you saw the video of that looks somewhat interesting--the rest of the album is eeegh--so why would you want to pay 22.50$ in a strip mall for a J.Lo record? That's crime!"

Of course when he actually said it, there was more swearing and shouting. Point is, if you are only listening to music you don't want to pay for, find something you would. Where can you find music like that? The internet! See how I'm bringing it full circle? That's real blogging. Yeah. Or luck, whatever.

Search around at all the podcasts and bands releasing some music for free. Seriously, google "independent [your favourite genre]". You will find free samples of music within five minutes.