December 2001 Archives

I don't know why it took so long for me to write about this subject because I've been reading his books for several months (finally finished the last one)...

I only knew Noam Chomsky as a brilliant linguist who contributed greatly to the analysis of the English language. I didn't even know he was still alive, let alone about his political views.

Right after the September 11th incident, I read on the web, a public letter by him. The article itself was rather unremarkable, although its arguments were rational and reasonable. It was when someone on a BBS called him the "final conscience of the U.S." (or something to that effect) that I got intrigued because I myself occasionally had some questions about some of the U.S., the governing entity's decisions on the world in the past. That recommendation also mentioned that Chomsky was one of the foremost critics of the U.S. policies.

So, I looked through Amazon.com and found The Chomsky Trilogy: Secrets, Lies and Democracy / The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many / What Uncle Sam Really Wants, a three-(short-)volume collection of his interviews.

It was actually quite an interesting read and a lot of his explanations of the world events involving the U.S. took me a while to digest due to their "extreme" leftists' views. I'd say if you can handle those, I'd recommend reading at least one of his books. I was a bit in shock the first few days, but ever since I've been thinking a lot more about the world portrayed by the media, the governments, etc. I think I was sarcastic to start with, but after his books, I might have become even more so. :)

Anyway, although his arguments seem reasonable, I don't think I can fully go along with them because those aren't the analysis and conclusions that I myself came up with. However, they gave me another angle to view and interpret (at least, try to) the happenings in the world that I exist in. And hopefully, it's a good thing. :p

His critics call him an anarchist and I can see how his arguments can be used by anarchists. But I don't think he is one. He is more of a socialist (like some of the Western European socialistic nations). Just because he's criticizing the U.S. governments' decisions, it doesn't mean that he is all for no government at all (at least, in those three volumes).

Actually, his arguments of the multi-national investors controlling the U.S. and the rest of the world make sense a lot if you think about it. I don't know whether all of his analyses and theories are correct (probably not) and I doubt that there actually is a fixed group of few who has the world on its strings (a la X-Files). However, I think it's possible to think that a few people with the "extreme" capitalistic goals can, for a while, try to direct the world toward a certain direction when they are compatible with each other.

In fact, the "pure" form of capitalism is closely related to the Darwinian theory of evolution: the survival of the fittest. In recent years, I've come to realize that a lot of what happens in the world is driven by our biological imperative for survival, as much as some of us would like to think of ourselves being more than just "animals". A lot of our everyday decisions are to secure the survival of oneself or one's group (e.g., families, neighbors, countrymen, etc.).

And since the distribution of power (i.e., the power to effect the world) isn't even close to being even (and it will never be), some get to better the odds for themselves. (These include big investors who have power in this capitalistic economy, top government officials who have power to effect policies, top military/intelligence people who have power to inflict violence, terror and confusion, but as with everything else in the world, there are a lot of gradients to this scale.)

Also since this distribution of power is not guaranteed to stay the same, I think the collective group of power will consciously or subconsciously try to make it easier for them, which we already see as an example of ever increasing gaps in the economic "classes" (or disappearing middle-classes), which make it harder for "the others" (it is in a way related to this previous article) to cross over and danger their own survival. (On a related subject, I've started reading Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.)

Anyway, it feels hypocritical to be critical of these extreme "survival"-oriented results because I definitely belong to the upper class (barely so, I should say) and have never experience the real hardships of "power"-less. That's probably why I can easily "forget" about it and move along with "my" life. I really think that the survival imperative is something we can't get rid of (without it, we will soon no longer exist). It's just that we should try to inject compassions and decencies as much as we can into our lives (probably without dangering our survival as in the Asimov's Rules of Robots). I don't particularly think that we need to "maximize the profit" all the time... (But as in the concept of entropy, once the ball starts rolling toward degeneracies, it is really hard to turn them back.)

Also, this might be a shocker to some, but I am beginning to realize that the capitalism and the democracy fundamentally don't mix well. I mean, what we have right now is something of a compromise between the two extremes. If you push the both concepts to their extremes, they cannot possibly co-exist. One is for maximizing (one's) profit while the other is trying to make everyone happy. One will inevitably draw the power to a few while the other is trying to keep it evenly distributed among everyone. I don't quite see how they can work together.

I think, because of the current dominating system of compromised ideologies led by the U.S. economy, a lot of people are confusing the two concepts as the same (or compatible). I think that seems to contribute even more to the confusions of the world.

Anyway... I have been, am and hopefully always will be a man of moderate ideas. I don't like any extremes because distribution-wise there are a lot more people in the middle in terms of the idealism scales and it makes a lot of lives harder trying to force people to conform to the extremes. I just feel that the world seems to be heading toward extreme bipolar systems, which would eventually have to collapse to release the pressures built up. I am sure our race will "survive", but... Is that just a part of life? Am I "worrying" too much needlessly?

Okay, let's get back to a more metaphysical analogy rubbish by yours truly... I like analogies, good ones I mean. Although they might not be the real things, they definitely help understand them.

This is a concept that I've been bouncing around in my head for a while. As with any other ideas I have here, it must have been influenced by ideas of others and is utterly incomplete at this stage. However, I think I have a concrete enough picture of it to attempt to write about it.

I think ever since my teen years, I have been a relativist: I believed (and still do in a way) that "everything" is relative. I came to this "conclusion" because I noticed that everyone was interpreting what he/she experienced, relative to their situation at the moment and that these interpretations, or "filters", are something we cannot remove from the whole equation because of what we, humans or any sentient beings, are.

The obvious problem with advocating "absolute" relativism (you will easily notice an obvious oxymoron) is that this credo, "everything is relative," itself has to be relative and becomes self-conflicting. It is logically flawed and it will never be more than a incomplete belief.

Not only that, as much as I could not ignore the seemingly pervasive relativity caused by the interpretation filters, I felt uneasy about completely dismissing the idea of the absolute truth (or a god as some would say). Even a relativistic (or cyclic) belief such as Buddhism has an absolute concept such as Nirvana. So for a while, what I've often told was that if there was an absolute being, it must be the universe itself...

But recently, I've come up with a better explanation (it's just a rhetoric anyway...): the relative truths/gods as projections of the infinite dimensional absolute truth/god. I really don't care whether it's called the truth or a god. I will just say "truth" to refer both from now on.

If you had taken some geometry classes at school, you might remember hearing about dimensions and projections to a lower dimensional space. For example, if you have a cube in a 3-dimensional space and project it onto a 2-dimensional space, you can get a square, a rectangle, or a distorted hexagon, of varying sizes depending on the positions of the object and the projection plane, and the projection methods. Another example... If you have a triangle in a 2-dimensional space and projected onto a 1-dimensional space, you will get lines with various lengths depending on the condition.

The thing I want to stress from the above examples is that although the original objects in their native dimensional spaces might have well-defined, fixed shapes, their projections onto lower dimensional spaces can take various, sometimes drastically different shapes. From the perspectives of the lower dimensional spaces, those objects look that way (nothing wrong with this), but they have no way to know for sure what the higher-dimensional original objects may look like.

So, applying this analogy, I am going to say that there is (probably) an absolute truth, but it's in a higher dimensional space (actually, in an "infinite" dimensional space as discussed later). The "truths" we understand (or written down, talked about, etc.) are only its projections (or "filters" as I called above) into our lower dimensional spaces. Since our "positions" in these lower dimensional spaces are different from that of each other (and even from one's own from different time), the projected shapes of the truth may and will differ.

For some groups of people, their positions maybe close enough that the projected shapes are similar. But the point is that these projected truths are relative to the projection planes, i.e., individuals, and that for us the actual shape of the truth in the higher original dimensional space is beyond our understanding.

One thing to note is that when I say a n-dimensional space, I am not just referring to the "popular" dimensional space of x-, y-, and z-axes. I don't know exactly what each axis measures (it could even be a concept as vague as "love", "happiness", etc.) but it is something that will define each individual within its own understanding.

On a similar line, if you actually think of this dimensional spaces as the popular time-space continuum and its extension, we can think about "superhumans" and "gods." To us, a being that's bound by a higher dimensional space would be considered as a superhuman or a god since it can overcome the restriction of our time-space continuum. But to them, another being in an even higher dimensional space would be considered as a god. And if you keep following this, you will reach at a concept of a being in an infinite dimensional space, which one can say is the absolute god. And the truth there would be the absolute one.

Anyway, in one respect, the absolute truth may exist (in the infinite dimensional space). However, as far as our understanding goes, everything is still relative (as its projections onto lower dimensional spaces). So, this is how I "resolved" my relativistic beliefs with a concept of the absolute, and felt a bit better. :p