The rejection of masses
I remember the first time I looked up the word “Nirvana” in the thesaurus: “The unification with the essence of being. Inner transformation to a state of mind, free of all passions and suffering.”
I was a young boy fascinated about the idea. But soon I found out that the world is not a friendly place for another young messiah. The western society rejects all the spiritual and supernatural, as naïve and primitive.
Once you start talking about Utopia, people usually respond with the same negative reaction. Generally you will be considered an immature and dreamy person, loser with unrealistic goals, with childish vision of the world.
But there is something about the utopia that many people do not realize. Utopia is just a perfect state of society, where everybody is contributing to it’s growth and development. Nothing less, but nothing more neither. Utopia is not promising eternal life, nor miracles. Utopia is essentially agnostic. It is not a faith to believe in, but a template to follow.
If we look at the physical world , material or organic, we can see one common feature for all things. All things are related, self organizing and evolving to always more and more sophisticated forms. If humanity survives the current age of moral decline, ecological catastrophe and its atomic self-destruction ability, there is only one path for it. Utopia and the Stars !
Utopia is a logical outcome of human history, if this one will not come to an end following the other 3 tragic alternatives:
-Nuclear Apocalypse
- Biological or chemical apocalypse
-Complete disintegration of natural environment (before we can run away to the stars)
Seriously! Looking at the other options, ”Is it really so naïve to hope in Utopia?”
In the fabulous book of Roger Penrose, “The road to reality”, the author is talking about the three realms of reality. The Platonic mathematical world, the physical world and the mental world.
Last 200 years brought an immense increase in our understanding of the first two of them, but in the same time we witnessed a terrible degeneration of traditional moral values and social institutions. The propaganda, tool used by emperors and rulers for millennia, acquired a new weapon in form of mass media. Only radio and movie propaganda allowed the rise of the National democratic party in Germany (and other parts of Europe) in the 30’s of 20th century. The first experience of mankind with mass media finished with its biggest tragedy; The Holocaust and the 2nd world war.
Communist parties around the world also used media of all kinds to manipulate the masses. So did the capitalist corporations. The Century of education (that was predicted after the invention of radio and mainly television), sadly became a century of lies, propaganda, mass manipulation and death.
I believe social media and other “democratic” Web 2.0 technologies have the power to re-define our beliefs and our understanding of what is possible and ethical. As soon as We move beyond the MySpace whores, desperate girlfriend finders and crazy Emos uploading their tacky photos, we will find out that there are other truly incredible opportunities hidden in that new fantastic tool we’ve got. Now we have the power to dream together, to shape the world to come and to create the virtual templates for future Real World Utopias.
“The new hope”
Social Media may have the same role in history of society, as Gutenberg’s printing machines had for history of science. Gutenberg allowed information to be reproduced in great numbers, and thus elevate the general level of education. He allowed the information to multiply in great numbers and flow for the first time in history.It rocket-started the quick advance in natural sciences and our understanding of the physical world.
Social Media will start the same revolution in field of social sciences. Now there is no authority to censure and distribute the printed material. There is no hierarchy distributing the copies of always the same content to the masses. The content is created by the masses. The new media is creating opinion, instead of imposing it, (yet again) for the first time in history.
The Bloggosphere is organizing itself and it is organizing the chaotic data all over internet with it . Education is slowly liberating itself from rigorous, centralized influence of establishment and it follows a new model: Citizen to Citizen.
As the technology becomes increasingly user friendly, more and more individuals are becoming capable of expressing their opinion and share it with thousands if not millions “internauts” out there. New alliances are formed and a widespread popular creativity is growing on unprecedented scale.
This may be a beginning of Humanity 2.0, if we just understand that the frontiers of “naïve” and “impossible” have been pushed to the stars already.
