RIFLE RANGE BOY: hierarchy

Showing posts with label hierarchy. Show all posts

Friday, 5 May 2023

No perfect system!

Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Director: Ruben Östlund

This is a black comedy, a satire of modern society, sniggering at the changes society has been undergoing over the years. At different parts of the film, it shows us how we fit snuggly into our roles with only one purpose (or maybe two) in life - to usurp lots of money. Power will come rolling in with moolah.

It hints at how gender roles are reversed, with ladies earning more than men. Despite their demands for equal rights and equality, they conveniently use the 'damsel-in-distress' card and chivalry when it suits them. Sex is used as a bargaining chip.

We are told that beauty is on the inside, but seeing people making a fortune from their external appearances is illogical. The whole of show biz, the fashion industry and even influencers on social media are centred around aesthetics and exhibitionism to a certain degree. They do not bring anything 'value-added' to the table of human civilisational progress. Coincidentally, the movie's title refers to a medical term used by plastic surgeons to demarcate the area between the eyebrows that carry the 'worry wrinkle', which is treated with Botox.

The movie's second part showcases the opulence of the super-rich, their wasteful actions and their overindulgences in basic necessities of sustenance. Just being at the right place at the right time, their fortunes changed. With a little bit of quick thinking, they seized their opportunities and paved the path of the aristocracy for the next generation. In the film, a capitalist Russian hit a business 'landmine' when he packaged chicken droppings from his chicken farm into a mega fertiliser industry. Paradoxically, the cruise captain the characters travel on is a drunkard Communist American. Ironically, the American thinks capitalism is flawed, whilst the Russian says down with Communism.

We are shown how the crew on the Cruise, including the unseen and unheard workers in the engine room, cleaners and kitchen staff, literally break their backs to dance to the whims and fancies of every wealthy oligarch on board.

A side joke is about an elderly couple who made a fortune making grenades for third-world countries to bomb each other into pieces. Their characters were aptly named Winston and Clementine, with reference to the UK World War 2 Prime Minister and his beloved wife, of course. In a poetic justice style, they die when terrorists hurl a similar grenade at their ship.

In the final part of the movie, only a few people aboard survive the bomb blast and are marooned on a deserted island. Here, the role reverses. The pompous rich people have no survival skills. They have to live on the fishing and outdoor skills of a lowly Filipino housekeeping manager. Money is no more the equation here anymore. The Filipina tries to rule the roost with her knowledge of providing meals. The hierarchy is broken. Now, she tries to garner favour from her special status.

The ending is purposely left hanging. The real reason for this type of ending is precisely this. No system seems to be fair to all of mankind. An obviously top-down approach will create resentment. The people at the top will utilise whatever means available to them to stay there and to ensure similar lives for their offspring, no matter how dumb and uninitiated or lazy they are. True talent will be lost.

On the contrary, a genuinely equal system will not make the cut. There must be some kind of motivation for people to look forward to. Altruism, a good afterlife or some sort of existential reason will not sell. Pol Pot and Lenin tried and failed. The Money God will just do the trick. China, under Mao, preached true Communism and see what it brought them - famine, imprisonment and low morale. Once Deng Xaio Peng opened the country to capitalist practices, we saw China becoming a threat that even the poster child of capitalism, the USA, had to retaliate against.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thursday, 30 July 2020

Rules for life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018)
Jordan B. Peterson

Life is easy when you are living it with your eyes closed. For an idiot, life is a bliss. He does not analyse or overanalyse things that happen to or around him. He lives for the moment. There is in the now and the past; no future to worry about. In his eyes, everyone is good, and they mean well.

In reality, life is not so straight forward. Inherently, we build a hierarchical pyramid. The occupants at the top perpetuate their positions by merely being there. Their positions ensure continuity of power and status, much like the analogy of lobster that Peterson often quotes. The hierarchical order in any society is exemplified by our crustacean friend. The lobster, a remnant of our ancestral past, illustrates how any societal structure works.

The higher up a hierarchy a lobster climbs, this brain mechanism helps make more serotonin available. The more defeat it suffers, the more restricted the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin is in turn associated with more negative emotions – perhaps making it harder to climb back up the ladder. Serotonin gives one courage and confidence to fight for better, mate and territory, which will consequentially attract better food, healthier partner and subsequently better genetic pool in the offspring. In other words, society ensures that the occupants at the top of the pecking order and the ones at the bottom find it hard to move up.

This is one of the books that try to answer difficult questions in life. The problem is readers with a short attention span like me tend to forget the questions as he starts reading the answers as well as get lost grasping the answers too. Everything is a rollercoaster of circumlocution. Nevertheless, the discussions surrounding the answers are quite engaging, even if your answers are not obvious out there.

It seems that we are re-exploring what our elders once taught us, but we thought that it was old fashioned. When we were young, our parents insisted that we rise early in the morning. We did not see the relevance then, but we now know that it makes a lot of sense. We thought following a timetable was madness. Now we realise that Man needs a fixed routine to maintain sanity. Following a religion gives them a tuft of hope when the going gets tough. Rudderless without a set of rules for life, their life goes asunder.

The following rules of life as set by Peterson would make more sense after reading the book.

Rule #1 - Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Rule #2 - Treat yourself like you are someone responsible for helping
Rule #3 - Make friends with those who want the best for you
Rule #4 - Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who others are today
Rule #5 - Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Rule #6 - Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Rule #7 - Do what is meaningful and not what is expedient
Rule #8 - Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie
Rule #9 - Assume that the person you’re listening to knows something you don’t
Rule #10 - Be precise in your speech
Rule #11 - Don’t bother children while they’re skateboarding
Rule #12 - Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

This YouTube video gives an excellent summary of the book in a summarised and animated form. This type of advice is targeted towards the younger generation who are keen to turn their lives into something worthwhile. Unfortunately, these types of information do not excite the younger ones as they are eager to enjoy the spring of their youth and utilise their freedom to the limit. To them, philosophy and doing the right thing can wait. He has a large following in his native country, Canada.

P/S. We think we have it all under our control. How wrong we can we. Dr J Patterson recently recovered from devasting complications of benzodiazepines which he started to consume them to deal with the stress of caring for his wife's ovarian cancer and his daughter's debilitating juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

P/S/S. Peterson became popular among the conservatives for his vehement opposition to the demand of transsexual to choose a pronoun of their choice.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Wednesday, 31 October 2018

You, your Master!

Yes, I do my job but I am not your slave!

They tell your vocation is God. They tell you stories of postmen clinging on their mail-bags like it was their dear lives they were holding on to in fatal motor-vehicle accidents. You have seen simple men giving their whole lives away doing repetitive mundane jobs to bring food to the table. You have heard of Men of God or self-appointment saviours of mankind in obscure places performing seemingly meaningless rituals that garner no worldly gains but only personal satisfaction. To the uninitiated, it may appear that they are just deluding themselves into doing something worthwhile for the rest of humanity. You, the simpleton, may not visualise it. In short, in the old world, a person's job was viewed as their purpose for living. You are born, you do your part for the continuity of species, then you wither away.

The thinking man, however, looks at it from a different angle. Sure, everyone is answerable during his assigned time and scope of duties. He is a worker between a particular time. He is at your service at the ping of your call. Beyond that, he is not going to lift his finger to do anything for you. Outside his pre-designated roster, he executes his other duties - a father, a husband, a friend or just to indulge in his recreational duties. For him, the purpose of life is to achieve personal development besides doing his part in the continuity of the species. There is no dichotomy between the upper echelons and the plebeians. Everybody just plays their part to oil the cogwheel of life.

The first model may be viewed as a fatalistic one. It is easy to compartmentalise people into pigeon holes to ensure the smooth running of a society. Manpower shortage will not arise. Individuals are born to do their designated jobs but there is no upward mobility of people. A cobbler's offspring will stay a cobbler. Aptitude and passion for other vocations are killed but there is plenty of room for specialisation and knowledge for the obscure.

In the second prototype, there is space for the common man to expand. Man has the opportunity to determine his own destiny, away from dogmas of archaic rhetorics. The downside of such an arrangement is that there would be many jacks of all trade but master of none.

Albeit its ups and downs, the majority of a certain locale would decide which one works best for them. Newcomers, whether they like it or not, have to conform. perhaps, that was the reason for their migration to the new found land in the first place. And their old system failed to protect them and pushing them away from the land that they tried to build their legacy, traditions and footing.