Reading 'life is elsewhere' by Kundera; a poet's story through a revolution ( and vice versa. Kundera's oeuvre is as if the story of his disillusionment with the czech revolution)
In the progression of the young Poet towards manhood, he rejects his earlier muse and strongly subscribes to the narrow view of socialism to his own art's detriment. In his rejection, he is abandoning his richness of divergent views and narrowing his thoughts through the constricting prism of socialism.
This act of believing in something passionately, made me think of the nature of a revolution.
I wonder, wouldn't any revolution be essentially oppressive? A revolution is centered around an anti status-quo point of view regarding something. For a revolution to be effective, it has to have a strong large base of people believing in it. and unfortunately, the nature of believing is in the narrowness of the thought, in rejecting the many strands and holding on to singularity of a thought, to be bathed in the glorious promise of a singular thought, to hope in a 'final solution'.
But that very essentiality creates the condition of intolerance towards divergent views, towards the minority. Its a game of gathering 'enough' ayes. a game of majority building. with globalisation, the scope of the majority is global. This in turn necessitates flattening of differences.
Is this the world we really want? Large revolutions, large scale changes and narrow views with homogenous beliefs? or would you rather have this little planet to hold many different worlds, small scale beliefs and hence richer and divergent views.
Caliphates and christian crusades bathed the world red in their quest for domination of their belief. The blind juggernauts razed much richer cultures in its path.
Now consumerism is razing any other thoughts from our minds. The nature
of consumerist world is to turn our eye inwards, rejecting the outside
world by drowning us with self-centered thoughts of consumption. (if you spend so much of ur mindspace on questions of which restaurant to go to, which shampoo to buy and so on, when can u really be involved in thoughts of mountains, of rivers, of nothingness and of everything-ness. that mind needs to be vacant too at times, u know? its cathartic)
Through the consistent razing of thoughts, i wonder what we will be left with soon? Histories, stories, cultures razed. all we will have is a soda bottle. nothing else. is that what we want for our children? we are eating richer food now and sitting on more comfortable cushions, but we are feeding our souls much much filthier and sparse beauty.
perhaps it means to create some sort of walls around us. It would be a better world if the walls are confident walls of self-sustained cultures rather than them being reactionary fundamentalist walls.
For the former to come about, we need to start appreciating differences, to start seeing the world beyond our shampoos and to not expect 'service' when you step out of your home.
