To become a stomach or the head of this civilization while the question remains “to be or not to be”
Becoming of a stomach with strong wonderlust — universal language of food as we age and reflect the machine of this world — youth are racing for money = success to join the orders of the stomach — vision of the prehistoric people who draw Altamira cave — UBI as an apparatus that might be a physical solution to a psychological problem — how many Mozarts, Leonardo da Vincis and Adam Smithes did we lose, and will lose while we keep moving in one spot
Who wants to be a stomach? The answer is, so many, almost everyone, because it is the most static the most comfortable space in the body, it is the machine that works many hours per day, sometimes during the night because the lifestyle and technology allows us to choose what is a day and what is a night, according to the individual needs/personality. Stomach is the most vivid in terms of the wonderlust also, so many items come in for processing, the collection of the surface experiences happen just here. The most instagramable moments are the ones captured from and for the stomach and so the machine goes on and on waiting for better combination of stimulus, the exchange of traditional cooking styles from different parts of the world, a cuisine as a fetish of our modern life.
Not too long ago I was sitting at the table, with friends, everyone coming from different parts of the world, and I almost had a panic attack, I quickly zoomed out of the situation, into the bird perspective! I realized and kept watching, in the middle of the curry, chilies, vegetables, spices, Eastern specialties, Western specialties, insects,….. the subject of the discussion was almost constantly and repeatedly the food.
This scenario repeated so many times, the food, the universal language, something that binds us and something that used to divide us in the past, now that it is there, in sufficient amounts for the whole planet to just survive on, was somehow the most dominant topic of almost all gatherings.
I rationalized, is this the indication that we have all gone middle ages, even though almost none has reached that age, or is it a premature aging due to 20st century lifestyle of life, inability to carve out the essence of creativity and then I stopped, I reversed back to the premature aging part. What if this repeatedly appearing subject is the indication, a reflection of where the civilization is, the point of management, the trends, the striving, the invisible hand.
The invisible hand of management? To be or not to be? This subject is very far from discussing food, or even our carnal relationship with the planet even though that was my first art installation relating to the ecology of the planet and how we consume it slowly but surely, however this post (reflection of my artworks) is about the way we have become, somehow in the whirlwind of distractions and multicolored entertainments. We became settled and conditioned by the stomach. I see so many young people wasting their minds in order to become stomachs, they use all of their creative energy into “how to make a living”, “how to be a youtuber”, “how to crack the success chord with the fashionista industry”, “how to succeed in almost everything with persuasion”, the list and iteration of things is infinite. The magical road to the financial independence and a free life was never so accessible in the history of the human kind, thanks to internet. The most remote of the places on this planet, we have internet that gives the option of learning, cracking, hacking, faking until making and eventually making. We read success stories all the times, there are many platforms that actually carve their niche just by interviewing the success stories of those who analyzed the market, entered it smartly and made a financial success, now temporarily living a dream, setting the example, and so on and so forth into the circle of inevitability.
Everything would be fine with this if only it was the head that was benefiting and not the stomach in this race for survival. Stomach wants to experience, digest, repurpose but is it capable of anything more, can it truly transcend, is this a trajectory a primordial human, when drawing the Cave of Altamira some 36000 years ago, envisioned? At the time when stomach indeed meant to survive or not survive, more so at that time it also meant to eat or be eaten. Still upon observing those drawings, experts wonder was it truly about a stomach, but rather, maybe it was a projection of the mind, an image of abundance, an image of abstraction eventually a wonder with life? We will never know, but it is interesting to observe: Sadly we have exact same phenomenon, and fears happening today but packaged differently. Why do we employ so much and stimulate the development of the vascular system to feed the stomach when we could be directing that same energy into the head especially now when most of the efforts of economical contributions are slowly (not so slowly) but surely going into the hands of robots and scripts.
This reminds of an animal kingdom, I often wonder why is it that I let the algorithm of YouTube to push so many suggestions from the animal kingdom, do I have a secret recently developing fascination with plants and animals or do I start seeing something human in them. I think that while a child in me naturally likes animals, diversity of life, a non child in me sees the desperation of the world that lives in stasis, afraid, lacking knowledge, most importantly lacking thirst for knowledge and I think how do we overcome this condition of a human kind and the UBI comes to mind as a technical solution, the only apparatus that could technically shift the humanity out of the materialistic obsessions/statuses/manipulation, but then we are still left with the problem of the head. How to get more people to learn and find passions once there is more time. How to employ the empty hands so that they don’t become destructive? Why is it that it is not happening naturally, a child, a freshness of youth wants to learn, is thirsty for new things, eventually is trained to dislike those new things through traditional schooling systems, I wonder why?
The only reasonable answer I can think of is the invisible hand, the stability, putting the machine into the motion so that it doesn’t go anywhere, it is much easier to manage a machine, when it is not moving, when it doesn’t care about the higher forms of existence other than to eat or be eater, to hack or be hacked, to condition and blackmail the way to the top. What happens at the top, one wonders? Exactly the same as it happens at the bottom (an illusion of symmetry), it is the entertaining life lead within or around the stomach. Ancient Rome comes to mind, Panem et Circenses (bread and games), a famous phrase, to give bread and games, entertain the masses sufficiently with the Colosseums and the population is firmly set in it’s way, stasis achieved. It is maybe not a coincidence that currently many of the main TV/internet shows and movies actually are placed in the ancient times, to evoke this genetically remembered times and approve of.
How do we have the civilization that is focused more on the head, will it be too much if everyone suddenly populate the space of the head? Will we let our robots to manage the rest of the body, provide for the head or will we coexist along side the robots in different parts of the body? Surely these are the questions, just like art criticism, answerable only by those who have access to the time machine, but my inclination is to have a one final look at the past and the times when Adam Smith a fonder of modern economy, wrote his magnum opus, regulating with thoughts and at the time a very chaotic understanding of the system, giving the impulse to the world from the head, but at the same time forgetting the fundamentals, like so many afterwards, when he wrote the Magnum opus, he lived in a full comfort not having to think about the stomach, the same applies to almost everyone in the cause of history who actually moved this civilization one step further through art, science,…inventions. My question is, how many Mozarts, Leonardo da Vincis and Adam Smithes did we lose, and will lose while we keep moving in one spot and thinking about us vs them?
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Originally published at ideasrex.com
