B. Barmanbek's Blog

“I am not a number, I am a free man!” shouts Number Six at the ever-watching cameras of his prison island, in the 1960s cult TV show The Prisoner.

Think about it. No matter what they say and no matter how much they assure us, we are simply a statistic to all public and private institutions around the world.

And the explosion of global communications in the Internet era makes it only worse. Now we have Big Data evaluating, calculating, cataloging, and storing our every single move.

It appears that this trend will only intensify and create an indirect pressure to shift our daily behavior in order to adapt and take advantage of this new environment. Consequently the system will adapt to reward such behavior.

We humans are not good with numbers so it is very likely that all these numbers about each of us will eventually converge into something simple: a single number, an index to represent the lifelong accumulated big data about every single one of us.

Yes, I’m talking about a Human Development Index.

I can hear its footsteps. Can you?

It’s about instincts and how they can guide us to personal happiness, no matter how much they deemed irrelevant by modern science and thinking.

It’s about struggling against all odds and our endless capacity to overwhelm the same.

It’s about a personal voyage in search of self-fulfillment and happiness, satisfying that endless urge to do and to make.

It’s about self-discovery and re-invention, and that endless journey to the depths of the soul.

It’s about an ever-existing mega-machine and its boundless appetite to devour human soul, spirit, and her right for just existence.

It’s about resistance to the control, manipulation, and indoctrination over one’s pursuit of happiness and self-determination.

It’s about you, and me, and everyone who is born with a dream to make.

It’s about searching and finding that one dream that would make us leave a unique footprint on this world.

What happened to your dream? Who stole it and how, then gave you a polished and politically correct version to consume, do you know? You don’t? Then, listen to my tale…

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...

It’s another day of drowning ourselves into the abyss of information before us, absorbing the sensory feed, processing, and what remains is virtually nil. Ready-to-process answers to standard questions are perpetually pushed towards us through the media bombardment around us. Our minds desperately try to process these and make useful sense of them, unable to avoid the relentless bombardment. Then they attempt in vain to make useful links to our real life dilemmas from this information. Any truly useful piece of information is lost among the junk or goes unnoticed due to the sheer volume. Then, we are left with nothing, another wasted minute, another wasted hour, another wasted day…

They have a cool term for this in computer programming: “Garbage in, garbage out”. This isn’t the way to make sense of our lives, I’m telling you. We are curious creatures by nature. When presented with a challenge, we are relentless. When we notice something truly interesting, we do everything we can to understand and figure it out. And most of us just waste away all that potential and energy with fun yet unrewarding daily musings. And how can anybody blame us? We have been told all our lives that it’s cool to be ordinary and average. Don’t even our superheroes aspire to be “normal”?

Then again, why should you care? If you’re sick and tired of that suffocating feeling from filling your life with copycat activities, emulated sensations, and that constant “busy” mode with your life sliced and diced into easily consumable portions, perhaps you should. Don’t know where to start? It all starts with being truly honest to yourself and challenging yourself by asking simple questions… until you start asking the right questions. Progress started with simple questions like “What are those blinking lights in the night sky?”, “Why do objects fall down?”, “How come do I have two hands and ten fingers?”, “When will I die?”, “Where does the world end?” Newton’s question led him to invent physics and Magellan’s to the ends of the earth. Neo’s question drove him to the source code and the soul of the Matrix, while Hamlet’s sent him to the depths of his own soul. Do you think it was less of a challenge to kill that first mammoth than to send a man on the moon?

No matter how big or small, it is the question that challenges, defines and drives us forward. The moment we ask the right question, the answer (no matter how complex, how difficult to reach, how impossible it seems, or how much soul probing it requires) becomes irrelevant. It becomes irrelevant because sooner or later we (or someone else) will eventually find the answer.

So, tell me… What is your question?

As creatures we are so quick to adapt and get used to the easy. I was at a zoo recently and just like everyone else there, I was trying to catch a glimpse of the animals’ natural behavior. Yet, they were all lazing around, predators and prey alike, their natural spark lost, waiting for that next handout. Are we that different than those animals? With our natural abilities to survive in the wild completely atrophied, are we really free or captives of the system we created?

The word freedom has so many different connotations throughout history, and yet most of the times we can only relate to the versions that we see on TV and in movies. For Spartacus, freedom meant breaking the bonds on his wrists – literally. For Susan B. Anthony, it was breaking the chains around the rights she had. For the Navajo, it was being under the sky where the Buffalo roamed. These examples we can watch on TV. How about the ones that never make it to our screens? How about what freedom means to you or to me?

Now this is a very tricky question. What is freedom for you? How do you know that you are free? Sure, the Amendments and UN Human Rights Charters grant you inalienable rights and those are supposed to guarantee your freedom. But does it end there? Then how come most of us feel trapped all the time? Trapped, with no room to maneuver, anyone? Or is your definition of freedom to be able roam around the country in your choice of motor vehicle, drinking as much as you want and sometimes even throwing up on the street, having sex with whomever you choose, shopping at whim, eating as you please – are these enough for you? It appears that, these are more than enough for the average American, making them feel like a bald eagle soaring in the skies.

One disturbing commonality of the freedoms pointed above: All of them involve consumption. We consume our vacations to tick off the places we’ve been. Same with our relationships. It goes without even saying for drinking, shopping, eating, etc. In today’s financial system, where our credit rating is more and more becoming the determining factor for us to go anywhere or to be anyone, we are made to believe, or taught, or perhaps have the natural assumption, that our sense of feeling happy and free is proportional to our ability to consume. It’s as if, our freedom to pursue happiness is somehow transformed into our freedom to consume.

Do you understand now what I mean by “Freedom is consumption”?

Just watch how they walk down busy streets of their metropolis, appearing all too busy, with gadgets on every limb—save one for that coffee. They are all so very busy, focused on the information coming from every direction and through every sensory organ, but are they really? They appear to focus on something, but it seems to me like their focus is on the very distraction itself.

This attention-seeking bombardment of information slowly entered our lives in the last century or so, with the popular access of all kinds of media, starting with newspapers, radio, TV, and of course, the internet. With cell phones and widespread wireless access, it simply exploded. We’re besieged by media from all sides, trying to grab a slice of our attention, filling our minutes, hours, days, and life. There are so many ways to meet people now, make friends, find people with common interests, find significant others, keeping in contact with friends and family, and all these apps and networks are out there to organize our time, days, work, friends, family, vacations, interests, anything and everything we would ever need, and more…

Now, I’m telling you to stop! Think! Is this really good for you? Yes, keeping in contact with people, meeting new people is a good thing, but how much is too much? Could this be a new form of gluttony, where we waste our precious time and life on just stuff? Is it anyone’s dream to be lost in an endless chatter, only to wake up one day to find, too late, that we’re out of time? It is a form of gluttony, as you are consuming more than you can digest and keep piling it up, building that thick layer of fat made of junk info around your mind, diminishing your ability to think? Think! You need room to think in your mind, free from distraction, so you can reflect, so you can absorb, so you can truly understand—forget about the world around you—but what’s going on with you. Do you know who you were yesterday or who you are today? Who do you see when you look into the mirror and deep inside your own eyes? Who will you see tomorrow? Who is the true you? What is it you truly want? Do you know? I’m not sure if I really do, but I try my damnedest to do so. Otherwise my life might just turn into that of one of those vampires or zombies in those popular movies, consumed by a raging thirst for junk, mind-numbing garbage, day and night.

Is it a curse where once we are exposed—or bitten if you prefer—there is no turning back and we are damned forever, or do we possess enough willpower to stop this and keep these new age wireless narcotics at a reasonable level?

Red pill, anyone?

We still keep watching the fallout from the recent financial collapse and its ramifications. It’s been more than 4 years, but the “how” is still a big question for the average folk on the street. It’s hard to fathom for a wage earner or a small business owner or an entrepreneur how these sophisticated financial derivatives work. We have no clue what those bankers did, and it honestly seems to me that only a very few of them are aware of what really goes on.

Perhaps we should long for those simpler days where the economy was a zero sum game, where the only way to grow was to steal at your neighbor’s expense—could it be a coincidence that every major religion forbids messing with neighbors? But not anymore. The Pandora’s box has opened and there has been no going back since the Industrial Revolution. Growth is a must for economies to survive. And nowadays how far we can stretch this growth seems to be in the hands of those ostracized inventors of such tools like those financial derivatives.

The sky is the limit with what you can do with a corporation. After all, they have human rights and don’t come with a biological clock that limits their life span. No wonder so many people prefer the long living of their corporation at any cost. Perhaps they are perceived like an offspring, some form of continuation of us as we move forward to other forms of being or oblivion. If a corporation can have human rights, why can’t it be the other way around? I feel that it’s only a matter of time for those financial inventors to come up with the idea of Ego Shares, every human a corporation.

Imagine the possibilities: There would be a human capital boom, public offerings would be all over the place where people would sell a part of their wealth and future incomes in order to raise capital. All economies around the world would be injected with a new serum of youth and the wave of growth would fuel the economies for decades to come. And then…

And what happens when someone gains more than 50% ownership of another person? Can he tell her what to do, where to work, how to live? Or would this bring us back to square one, back to those glorious days of empires where a handful of fortunate had a right to tell masses of unfortunate how to live, work, and die? Could all this never ending wave of financial innovation lead to a postmodern form of slavery?

It can, if you ask me, if it has not already done so…

One of the editorial reviewers of Culpa Innata said that “What also sets this novel apart is the wonderful world the writer has created, which is unique enough to make us wonder, and yet familiar enough to have real-world lessons for readers.” This is an excellent way to sum up Culpa Innata’s World

Union… And it’s not as far from us as one might think. Just think about the current financial fluctuations in the globe, and how a break-up of the European Union project was unimaginable only five years ago.

Furthermore, in the post-modern era of the World Union, all of the hotly debated issues of today’s modern world are solved. From abortion to the educational system, from failing marriages to child raising, from inflation to job markets. The World Union, a global power that arises in the aftermath of a devastating Global Financial Meltdown, is neither a nation state, nor a country in the conventional meaning of the word. It claims to be a free trade area with no traditional governing bodies. It has no central bureaucracy, no president, no government, yet there is an unprecedented level of public peace. Public service is entirely voluntary, as there are no taxes. On the other hand, everything from armed forces to foreign policy is outsourced. Guidelines of powerful civil organizations determine the contemporary norms. The standing of a person in the society is determined by her Human Development Index, and anyone who can improve this number above a certain level has the right to live in the World Union. In a sense, the World Union is a members only club, where a member is expected perform according to the norms of the club and pay its dues. Otherwise she is expelled.

Expelled to one of those rogue nation states. The creators of this World Union have done an excellent job in their diagnosis of deeply rooted modern problems. And their prognosis… Well, their prognosis is radical and revolutionary, but nonetheless fully compatible with universal human rights, at the cost of an “innate sin”.

The “how” is within the pages of Culpa Innata, waiting to be discovered!

With exhaustive comparisons to the Roman example, many political scientists and historians argue that the US is in the verge of becoming an empire, if not already. Ignore the popular comments made in the media about how powerful a few other nations are emerging in the absence of a global superpower nemesis like the Soviet Union.Those nations may possess a growing economic power, however they lack the experience and expertise to act in the global arena.

The rules of political engagement were set by the West centuries ago and are still the same perhaps since the Roman times. How much any US president can challenge stark facts, national reflexes, and century old policies after her/his first State Department or NSA brief, or the domestic agenda amid the resistance from the congress? Perhaps deep down most voters are well aware of this truth and don’t seem to believe in solutions to the age old issues anytime soon. Could this be the reason behind one of the lowest voting rates in the world in the birth place of modern democracy?

During each election campaign, we watch the candidates rip each other apart in public debates, defame the other with smear campaigns and listen to their endless explanations on how to fix the unfixable. But the truth is, the establishment makes the calls and it’s up to the politician how to market it to the public. The truth is, it is the politician’s job to be the hero with these establishment driven successes and take all the blame with the failures. The truth is (using video game jargon) in the Western world the game rules are always set by some unknown Dungeon Masters, while the political leaders are just role players.

Perhaps this explains all this admiration and interest in superheroes; the public’s longing for real leaders who can make a real difference.

Now, how about skipping the existing empire and checking out the next one, the one in Culpa Innata? It’s a popular belief that our past is a reflection of our future and that we can take many lessons from it. How about looking at this the other way around? Could a possible future of ours have a reflection on our present? Could we learn lessons from a projection? Perhaps?

I invite you to check out Culpa Innata and decide for yourself…

http://www.amazon.com/Culpa-Innata-B-...