A Technologized Life to Make Your Day

BIMBO CABIDOG

You get the hang of the day scrolling on your social media wall for eight hours or more. It’s called information (or in many cases, disinformation) overload. What is it about?

Overload in information or hogwash is same as having gobbled so much stuff from movie marathon viewing five or ten films on a dogged weekend. While at it, you lose yourself to the unnatural realm, disturbed calm.

You absorb the characters, like you are they or they are you, especially the hero ones. You pack yourself with self-identities more than you can be. Your brain groans about to puke.

The online newsfeed churns an engulfing stream of thought that streaks into cognition, like rapid rays from a laser gun: five-paragraph stories, chopped two-sentence narratives, broken hugot (sentimental pull) lines, and short-phrased emotions out of the irrational

The sum of the whole stuns the brain dead with rude electric shocks. And as the laser assault zeros on the core, and you give each of the status feed your energy of thought, you sizzle out like a burnt gunpowder.

What havoc the technological self-knowledge wreaks, rather than organize the mind. So much of it, you forget where you stand and whirl into air. Then from a dizzying height, you swoosh down to the horizon below like a deflated hot air balloon, with absurdly nothing inside.

From all the characters that you wear, you now have to go back to the true you: momentarily the identity of a terrified mortal noticing the ground approach at the speed of light. It is you nauseated as the earth dances around you seeming to go out of balance and smash.

Snap back very quickly or you stay permanently… in nightmare dreamland. Escape from the painfully banal world has been easy. But returning to real life is now about pushing frenziedly the button of a remote commander to switch channel, but the battery is gone.

You have to be where you were, back to friends and loved ones, and the familiar lanes and byways of concrete being. You can’t suck forever from the bytes technology processes. You cannot for so long keep getting informed by the virtual, until elan freezes in dream state.   

So what the hell is information? Understand that even the untrue can be information, for to be simply informed is different from to get the fact. You may be told by a piece of fake news that the president holds office in Mars. That by itself is information, but utterly not the reality you can believe with what you use to know.

Do you live fully or more fully to have alternative reality make up for what life seems short of? Or is it time now to pull off the technology plug? Do so. Stray out of the daily grind. Get off the usual and expected. Tarry a while, look elsewhere, and notice what you did not care to throw attention.

It may be a wildflower in bloom on the roadside that you nearly even trample whenever you walk to work, but finally behold in full splendor. It may be the young kid at play that you eye every day, but do not look at. It may be their extraordinary ordinariness­­ melting your uncaring attitude that will realize what the full or the good life truly is.

Do not be technology-driven and slip into overdrive. Don’t give yourself a harder and harder time to process the finest out of mundane experience. What is peddled in the marketplace is not what you always have to buy, for actually the best things in life are free.

Finally, technology does not produce meaning from data, or wean facts from lies. It just offers the confusion of following either way. It does not raise awareness to the level of enlightenment, half-truths to correct assumptions.

Yes, it can manipulate you to the road of perdition with wrong outputs from presumably right inputs. Break out in no time at all from the slavery of conviction in its superiority to life.

Better sometimes are the uneducated, for they have this immune system against technologized education. They regurgitate out of their mental digestive track its alien falsities. They blow into the limbo of suspicion the feed that their mind does not swallow, because it smells and taste a rotten lie.

No worse turmoil the world may ever hatch than the addictive bowing of freely thinking men to the unthinking machine.

Does Man Own the Earth?

BIMBO CABIDOG

According to science, the earth is not a man’s world. The planet has been existing for 4.5 billion years. Humans have only been here for about 200,000 years.

Earth does not belong to man. It is the habitat of all life forms, many of which have existed hundreds of millions of years before humans first appeared. They, including the Homo sapiens, belong to it.

But since man began to have control over nature, and manipulate it for his ends, he has been acting as if the Earth is his possession. He even has foisted on all of its other habitues, as well as his fellow Homo sapiens, the queer concept of land being private property.

Studies say that there are around 3,000 or more species in a soil environment alone. Does man claim to own them, those that crawl on the surface, the water that slithers through the terrain, the nutrients that feed every form of life from the microscopic germ to the water buffalo, and the flows of energies linking each and every one in an interconnected whole that will probably continue to exist long after humans have been gone? Amazingly, he acts so.

Common sense will tell that the land and the natural biophysical elements present in it are not his, simply because they cannot be bought and could not be made or created by human hands. Their existence and continuity also do not depend on him. In fact it is man with purposes alien to theirs that poses danger to them.

“What arrogance of man to own the land when it is the land that owns man,” Macliing Dulag, a tribal chieftain in Kalinga Apayaon in northern Philippines, chided. He was killed by the minions of the Marcos dictatorship for defending the Kalingans’ ancestral domain against its demolition by the planned Chico River dam project. The kind of arrogance he denounced shed his blood.

What has made humans think and act as if they own the earth? The ownership of private property that society guarantees, especially the acquisition of land as provided by law, somehow reflects the mindset that the world belongs to them. 

Such posture emanated from the time humans began to observe characteristics of nature and discover how to manipulate it. The development immensely changed the way they live. They no longer just abide by what nature provides, but took control of it and used it. Control fostered and firmed up the concept of ownership.

Since humans learned how to control and manipulate nature, around 10,000 years ago, the earth would never be the same again. They harnessed and directed it to achieve what they want. The sea change made the world one virtually shaped by human hands.        

Literature and history portray in innumerable narratives this power of man to make nature pliant to its desires. Hereon, he fashions his own reality from the artificial world he creates. The newfound power gave him not only dominion but domination (or the appearance of it) over creation. This would be the source of his presumptuous idea that the earth or any part of it is his.

Subsequently, man changed himself after the artificial world of his making. He no longer just watches, wonders at, and enjoys the things around him. He could not rest content until he does something to them. The drive or spell of restlessness dogs him no end. 

With reinvented man, the world changes not because of its nature or essence to change, but because of what he thinks it should be. It must be shaped and reshaped after his likeness and desire. It must be subject to his purpose, not that of the creator.

The insatiable impulse to remake the world he lives in necessitated and led to ownership, first as a thought, later as law. Man must take possession in order to control. Although it was merely a product of a certain stage of historical social development, over a long age of practice, ownership of property would become as natural as if it was ordained right at creation.

With ownership, man arrogated to himself the power to do to the natural world as he pleases. Now, the devil is in the thinking that he can do whatever he wants or desires to do with things that have thrived in their natural course long before he came, because they are his. It proceeded to destroy the very earth that supports his life, because he must rebuild it.

No matter how excellent man already is in his ways, that excellence is only limited to the particular role he plays: lawyer, doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, chief executive officer, most of all contributor as well as beneficiary  to the dynamic interactivity of all living and non-living members of the planet. On the other hand, the knowledge and information beyond these roles that he lacks is vast and unfathomable.  

Man’s limited capability cannot even produce a chunk of soil with all the biological and mineral elements present to nurture plant life. Yet, in the single-minded drive to build real estates that later become concrete jungles he so easily destroys it. The destructive character of the alienated man stems from the paradigm of ownership.

Does man think that it is for his own good to own nature, so that he can do with it whatever he wants to?  Well, it is a narrow and dangerous thinking, because its premises and conclusions are confined to what he only knows. It does not comprehend the complex interrelationships, intricate dynamics, and purposes for which each of the myriad components of a natural biophysical environment is there. For all he knows, his destruction of some of them already amounts to the destruction of the very means by which he lives.

There has never been a perfect invention. By experience, everything that man has invented must yet be modified and remodeled unendingly. The internal combustion engine is one example. Its first prototype would soon be deemed inadequate, fuel inefficient, and leave much to be desired. The shortcomings spurred off the crafting of new and better models.

The diesel-fueled version emerged. The reinvention settled many of the nagging issues on the previous models. But every time an upgraded model came up, it would later be found wanting. And so, the dogged work of improving and perfecting went on and on with no end in sight.

Today, the ICE itself is headed for the dump with the invention and eventual mass production of solar and electric powered motors. But long after it has gone, man will yet reckon with the harm it has done to the environment by polluting air, land and water, and by despoiling the natural systems that have sustained life on earth for ages, because of the burning of fossil fuel. The damage done by the sway of the ICE may already be beyond repair.

Despite the unprecedented breakthroughs in scientific research and technology development that make man’s control of nature almost absolute, he still succumbs to fates he doesn’t chart nor expect. Who knew beforehand that cars, once the craze of humankind and symbol of enviable progress, would be a principal culprit for the carbon footprints that are dimming the prospect of human life over the next 100 years?

The pursuit of an elusive, indeterminate being is a fate that hounds man. No matter what he does, there is still always something lacking, something wanting, to complete life. In this instance, he shows not only to lose control, but to be lost himself. He pretends to own things in the natural world, yet he could not even own himself. 

There are a lot of instances beyond his control that pushes him to do things against his will, and even against his own good. He presumes to have nature in his hands, but lies utterly helpless when it lashes back with profoundly catastrophic effects, like the much powerful typhoons due to climate change that devastate communities.

Alexander the Great, Agamemnon, Darius the Great, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar, Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, etc. have had the power to crush tens of thousands of people in the way of their conquests. But they could only stop the conquest of age by a youthful death.

“This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.” The passage is from Ecclesiastes 9:3. Does that seem to be man being unmistakably in control of his fate?

Harry Truman came into possession of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction, the freshly hatched atomic bomb, in his term as president of the United States. With it he held power of life and death over millions of people across the globe. One day, he decided to give the go signal to the dropping of the A bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The successful mission instantly vaporized thousands of ordinary folks in the blinding flash of the horrifying mushroom cloud.

Pity the man who has that terrific power, and yet must be slave to supposedly rational decisions that kill people en masse. Where is Truman? The butcher and the butchered have met the same fate. The most powerful man of the world joined later the hapless citizens of the two devastated cities, as all men must go there, the kingdom of the dead.  

The atom bomb has not secured Truman’s generation, and for all times his countrymen, from going the way of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even with such lethal power in their possession, when it is their turn to face the wretched human lot of ending up in the grave. “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Again the Ecclesiastes tells.