The day a woman vindicated the sexual revolution before men.
It happened on August 1, 1969 at the doors of a department store located on the corner of Market and Montgomery, in the financial district of San Francisco.
Pure Hedonism
In a society like ours, western, you have terrible pressure towards conformity, to patterns, to lifestyles, but, at the same time, you have a terrible pressure to be yourself; There is a tension between the individual and society, which has been exacerbated since the 60s. In those few years, everything that is now being explained has been conceived.
And above all the idea that the world that you control as an individual, the one you want and design, is possible as a real life option, without the need for any kind of collective, political or cultural mediation, but rather it is the open door towards completely individual expansions. Very historical, by the way, because the 60s were the great historical break, culturally speaking.
The 60s are inscribed as the historical moment of the invention of youth as a space for the realization of the human being. From the theme of youth, from that decade, it becomes the other great pillar of Western society that is the idea of eternal youth.
The Faustic Longing
But in the most brutal way we could imagine. If any of us had been parents of one of the boys of the 60s, imagine the terrible envy that life could have produced them: the enjoyment of life to the fullest.
Pleasures are what best define the identity of the individual. The funny thing is that it is a paradox, because we can not admit that nobody forces us to be happy in their own way. If there is something that happiness implies, it is precisely the possibility of choosing how we are going to make it.
Happiness linked to certain paradigms of youth's survival is hell. It creates an anguish about the rise of cholesterol, the prohibition of smoking, in short, and other considerations according to which my well-being depends on these prohibitions, that is, a world in which a kind of hedonistic asceticism is demanded of us.
A Contradiction
Hedonistic asceticism, and, moreover, in contradiction with a third edge of the triangle, which goes through consumption: it consumes happiness; to achieve the happiness of prolonged youth you must consume.
Happiness goes through a number of mediations, not only objectively but also disciplines. Disciplines of the body, and those disciplines also become then imperatives of how to raise children, because you have to leave them in inheritance the ability to be happy.
There is another approach that does not underlie this and that is that we do not know if happiness exists as an absolute paradigm. During the 60's a change in morals was contemplated, especially from the perspective of the emancipation of women.
It was a break, of men and women and of the family, of the duties of the father towards the children, of the family structure. And the family is nothing but a structure of reproduction of the cultural tradition, that is what it is. But what happened? What was it that they created instead of what existed? What are we in?
I think we are on a level of historical transition to the idea that the woman is a thinking human being, who inserts herself into society with the same ...
... yes, I know, that's not a new idea, the West is full of examples of women who have had power, who have been ... but let's be honest, they are very isolated cases.
What seems to have happened is that the idea became widespread, freed her from the family burden. And definitely, because it is completely independent of the sex of the family, and that completely changes the perspective of the role of women, but it is not because we change the mentality of the woman. The contemporary world thanks to a technical invention, product of the technological development of society, contributes to this, since contraceptive methods have always existed.
Thus, with these new techniques, a new way of life was articulated, a new form of relationship between people and generated thousands of other consequences, including a different conception of pleasure, of the body, for example.
These technological changes, such as the digitalization that we live, generate the great drama of creating new social practices, but they do not create the capacity to think them automatically. The ability to think, the impact of techniques and their meaning is much slower.
In moral terms, as Federico Nietzsche said, sometimes changing a moral scheme can take many years and generations.
The crisis of power over women is very old and a tension inherent to the family issue, of how family roles are structured. But, the drama here is that this technical process precipitates a series of social processes and practices of relationships between people, which have no space for immediate reflection. That is, we think a posteriori, a bit like many are thinking, as effects of power.
It's the same thing that happens with the issue of computers: they changed our lives and we are the generation that saw that change and we are paying the price of the technological transition of the late twentieth century: we have dedicated a lot of hours to move from a technological model to another, paying a very high price in time and money. And it is not due to planned obsolescence, it is due to the vertiginous advances.
It is the digital dynamic. We change the typewriter with two fingers to another dynamic and a relationship with knowledge that gives us a tremendous advantage, because we get into Google we are organizing knowledge, because we know that knowledge has a logic and has an order.
But a boy born in the world of Google does not see that, sees rather the infinite grid of knowledge and that of a terrible fear.
The teenagers of this era live in terror, they are afraid and they are right. That is, they are afraid of knowledge, they know nothing, they feel completely lost, drowned in a sea of things and levels of realities that they can not control.
Returning to a kind of encyclopaedism? or better said Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the medium, but the content is written by anyone, so it contemplates an abysmal amount of inaccuracies that distort reality or truth.
The opposite in fact to the encyclopedists. The sages said: "Gentlemen, we know the world and we know it so well that we are going to make this gift to humanity. We are going to put everything we know into these book volumes and you will not happily have to go through this story of love and pain, which is of knowledge ".
That is the reverse of what happens now. What is happening is that the wise are not precisely those who produce knowledge, but that knowledge comes from anyone and therefore ceases to have value; there is an inflation in knowledge, the common currency of the wise, which is of knowledge, it is no longer worth anything.
We are in the situation of knowing what we want to know and how we want to know it.
Yes, a kind of absurd freedom, a freedom of the vile because everything is knowledge; everything can be in Wikipedia and anyone can have a different version about the same phenomenon; therefore we do not compete in terms of which version of reality is better, but they all coexist in a kind of world of absolute relativism.
A tabula rasa, a reductionism of all knowledge without difference in substantial weight. Without depths: without different densities.
Too much information, too much potential knowledge. Then, in view of the fact that we can not encompass all of the referential framework of knowledge that appears to be infinite, people are becoming more selective.
It is no longer the age of encyclopaedism. It is exactly the opposite, you are very calm in your house and the knowledge rushes at you. This phenomenon is completely nullifying your ability to think, to choose, your possibilities for reflection because it simply overwhelms you, covers you as if it were a sea.
Perhaps the human spontaneously generates defense mechanisms. I do not know if they are archetypes of the current behavior of young people or if it is an exception. But I see, on the other hand, that young people are grouped in subcultures as defense mechanisms. do not?
Perhaps more than knowledge are identities, that is, knowledge is placed at the service of the construction of the lifestyle or identity, and as they are fluid identities, they move within the flow; Those who like subcultures, are experiencing that, but from there they pass for the best to be something else.
And I can not help thinking that it seems a by-product of what was invented in the 60s as a youth culture, that is, a set of practices that are exclusive to what we call youth. With the exception that at that time perhaps there was no such diversification.
What there is now is a kind of big mall, where you can buy or consume identities and move from one to another quite easily. Before the society was harder, consistent and also associated with very specific practices. Now, it is more fluid but it is the same idea, that you have to work from a very young age to build an identity in a world that offers you an excess of them.
"Let us not be convinced that it is absurd to try
change the "established" order and the "objective" laws.
Let's try to build a global civil society.
Insist that politics is not a mere technology of power
and it needs to have a moral dimension."
Václac Havel
The gifs are from https://giphy.com/
And the images of https://google.com/
Previous articles
THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER I - WHAT IS THE SENSE OF CONSUMPTION?
THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER II - THE NEED TO BE VALUED
THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER III - NON-PAINFUL ABSTRACTION TO WAR
SOCIAL PROPENSION TO THE CONFESSIONAL - THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER IV
IMAGINATIVE FREEDOM OF ELECTION - UNCERTAINTY OF PRESENT - CHAPTER V
THE STAR SYSTEM, THE CATARSIS OF ARISTOTLE - THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER VI
I Am the One I Am - I Am My Master
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Sunday, July 8, 2018
Alberto J. Tang H.