The system--good or bad?

Here's something Miami says in the Filth, " You were all gonna destroy the foundation stone of the world. The system is perfect, Ned. It has to be perfect; it’s all there is. Attacking the Hand is like fighting your own immune system." and on the next page, "Nobody’s special. We occupy our roles in the system until it’s time to go and the next one just like us steps right up to do what we did."

How solid is this system? Is the system really all there is, like she says? Throughout the Filth I was unsure about whether the Hand was good or bad. As a reader I obviously identified with Feely/Slade, so when he realized he used to be one of the rebels and then started questioning the Hand, so did I. But now it's all unclear. Is the Hand a necessity that fairly regulates good and bad, clean and dirty? Or was Feely and his gang onto something by trying to undermine the Hand? What would have happened if they succeeded?

I feel like this connects to real life in a lot of ways. There are a lot of "systems" that are "necessary" and that we are oftentimes forced to adhere to, even if that means changing ourselves. There are also rebel groups that oppose these systems. So I suppose the question is, is the system just the way it is and we just have to make the best of it, or should we be shaking things up more and breaking free of the system? The plot line about the Libertania makes me think that even if we did upset the system, a new system would just end up forming out of the dust and we'd be right back where we started. So maybe Miami had a point about the inevitability of the system. We're all just doing our part in the system and when we're done someone else exactly like us will just take our place, so it's pointless to resist. 

This is no way to look at life though. Most of us don't really want our life to add up to being a blind sheep just working as a part in the machine. But making everyone into "a world of Buddhas" or "self-made super heroes set loose on the world's problems" like Max Thunderstone's ideas doesn't seem like the best way to go about changing the system. Maybe we need to start with smaller things to break down the system a bit. We were talking in class about how gender-specific language is and how trapped we are in a 2 gender system because of this. I hadn't really thought in detail about this until then. From a very young age we are taught to think in terms of 2 genders, and that the male gender is the normative (due to all the words that label generalized groups as male: mankind, etc). This is one of the many systems we are stuck in. Breaking down this system by refraining from using so many pronouns, or coming up with gender-neutral terms might be a start.

Another interesting part from the quote from the Filth is that "attacking the Hand is like fighting your own immune system." If the Hand is like our 'immune system', it probably shouldn't be drugging it's 'body parts' with para personalities and misleading and using those body parts. But when I think about it... This is kind of what an immune system does. It labels the anti-person, or the virus or bacteria or whatever that doesn't belong in the body and then it attacks those bad cells and converts them into just another normal part of the body. Which is kind of like how the Hand recycles people. The Hand is sort of like a massive immune system for all of humanity, but when we think of each cell as a person, a character in this book, we see both sides of things and we see the sacrifices that sometimes have to be made. When our body is fighting off a sickness, we ourselves have to suffer and feel sick in order for our body to fight it off and win. Feely was a sacrifice in order for the Hand to do it's job and keep it's body (humanity) healthy and that's just the way it is from their perspective.

So is the system good or bad? I suppose it's all about which side you look at it from.

reflections on the filth thus far

It seems to me that the Filth just got a bit more complicated in the last little bit, and i'm excited to see how it all comes together. I'm really interested in the whole Feely/Slade identity and how he changes when he goes back and forth between them. Why does he like Feely's life so much? or his non-life i should say since he is just a fictional character, or so the others of the hand keep telling Slade. But how fictitious is Feely? I don't think he is really fictitious at all. Slade (or the essence of him that goes back and forth) makes Feely alive. Feely is real as long as the person living as Feely believes he is real. As for why feely/slade prefer's feely's life better... I'm not really sure. Maybe there's something to be said for the simple life. There's a lot of pressure and stress that comes along with being an officer of the hand. Even though he can't remember a lot of things about the hand, maybe he knows somewhere in him that he didn't like that life.

I also think it's interesting how he's the same person, but is so different when he's feely or slade. As feely, he's weak, dependent, and only concerned about one thing (Tony). As slade he takes charge, shows authority, and is strong and independent. As feely when he's trying to show authority, (when he's arrested and is trying to tell the officers he's above them) he just looks pathetic.

Another thing I was really interested in is the Libertania--A supposedly utopian society that ended up divided despite its efforts to avoid just that. Hughes was right by saying it's a mini model. It's a model that shows that we truly are a survival species that turns everything into a ladder to climb. We step on anything and anyone to get to the top and even when things are designed to eliminate the ladder, we just find other ways to create levels or standards of living and success and achievement. Hughes says, "in the end humans always pick themselves up, organize into roles and start piling up the building blocks of culture again. But what you saw downstairs was a super-organism. The next stage in the evolution of human civilization."

This brings up a couple good points. Humanity has survived endless traumas: war, famine, disease, genocide, deaths of leaders, things that you would think could end up in a purely chaotic mess. But somehow through it all we always reorganize and rebuild. Hughes was taking advantage of this tendency by creating the destruction himself and then molding the reconstruction process to his will. This seems similar to Hitler, after WWI, molding Germany into what he wanted. The country had been hit hard by war and was desperate for some sense, some emerging leadership, and Hitler provided that and the people were willing to follow because their instinct is to rebuild. It's an interesting notion that it's nature that people will reform and rebuild, but what exactly people will re-form or rebuild into can by controlled by someone.

Will the next in evolution be a giant super organism, as Hughes suggested? I think not. I feel that humans are becoming more and more unique, not alike. New technologies allow for individual needs, wants, and fantasies to be met. Like in Ribofunk where the new technologies gave rise to new species, new body parts, and gangs of humans that each had a unique lifestyle and physical body/skills. I don't think we're going to become a super organism like the one in the filth, that breathes, dresses and moves in unison. If we do become a super organism, it will be a very diverse and multi purposed one.

change is in the air

Seasons change. People change. Everything changes. I just happen to not really like change. I'm getting more and more used to it though and am beginning to accept it, and sometimes even want it. When people and relationships change, we tend to hold on to them. No one like break ups, no one likes losing a good friend. But I've been through several break ups and lost a few friends and although they were terrible at the time, looking back on them I feel a lot less pain that I thought I would. And I've come to actually appreciate the new things that those losses led me to. So should we fight change if that's not what we want? Maybe some people are just naturally inclined to run around, jazzing up their life, changing things on a whim, and others (like myself) take comfort in constancy and like it that way. Or should those of us who don't like change just suck it up and changes things anyway, counting on the fact that we'll look back on the changes and be grateful we did them?

I guess I'm thinking about all this because my best friend since 6th grade just got back from traveling in India for 9 months. And she has changed. And so have I. But the thought of not being friends any more is too sad to even think about. But then I start thinking about all the amazing experiences she had from that one dramatic change: taking a year off to travel to a foreign country. Do I need this kind of change in my life? If I don't push myself to make extreme choices will I end up dying at age 80 with little to show for myself and regrets at not leading a more adventurous life? I feel like maybe life needs to be filled with differences and changes and vast experiences in order to be full. Or does it? I think I would actually be genuinely happy to just settle down and not make a lot of changes, but just live my life and have a family and love those around me. My best friend wouldn't--especially now that she's had a taste of a different life. But maybe there's some people who like change and others who don't, and you're allowed to do whatever makes you happy even if it means avoiding that inevitable change.

Some things i've recently thought about and discussed with people

If you have a living brain that's separated from a body, does it have a consciousness? What is that beings experience if there is a conscious inside that living brain? We judge death by the moment your heart stops, but should we judge it when the brain stops?  They say that after your heart stops, your brain keeps going for a bit. If hours in dream time can be merely minutes in real time, could those few minutes of extended brain activity by your eternity? Could you live a kind of extended lucid dream that becomes the rest of your infinite existence?

In Ribofunk...

Humans have figured out and mapped out exactly how the brain works and people consume drinks that have a wide spectrum of results. Some of them sound like they have the effects of some of the hard drugs we have today. However they don't really seem like drugs in Ribofunk; they're actual molecules and proteins and whatnot that affect your brain in a specific way. Today we have legal and illegal sets of drugs and in the book there's legal and black market juices with varying levels of affects. Both sets of juices are on a whole other level than the drugs we have now though, and I think it's interesting that we all freak out about the conscious altering affects of several current day drugs, and in Ribofunk these alterations of being are perfectly normal. In the future will we learn to tap into the great unused portions of our brains and of our conscious'? How much of a greater scale of thinking and existing is there that we just haven't accessed yet?

The idea of one giant north american union is really interesting. and from the sounds of things so far, Brazil seems to have dominated south america. Nearly all unchartered land has now been claimed in our world. Where/when will the next power and land shifts take place? There's no where to colonize so will the most powerful countries end up taking over the smaller countries around them? How would North America function under one government? It seems to me that too large of an area usually means a big difference in the types of people living there. Too many different people with conflicting wants and needs will not lead to a successful government. the US on its own is already divided. Someone told me that the read a poll where 50% of americans said yes they think the country is divided and 50% said no. Ah the irony. We're even divided on if we're divided. How would a large mega continent government manage to function?

The part of Ribofunk that has really stuck out to me so far was when a white man and a black women were conversing about how they are free to interact now because of the splices. The fact that there's a lower level of being had made blacks finally equal. The black woman commented that the splices were less than human afterall though. But this rings a bell since slavery was justified with the assumption that africans were less than human and therefore meant to serve man. It's interesting how Ribofunk projects this into the future and shows the pattern repeating once again.

What is normal? What is abnormal? Normality is just a concept we made up to organize people into categories. "normal" is a fluid concept though because what is normal changes with time and location, and also just from perspective to perspective. What about people with disorders like ADHD. Are they normal the way they are? Or when they're on riddilin or aderol to counter their "abnormalities" and conform them? Would the world be better if were all just some form of abnormal? Or would that just become the new normal? Are we trying to make everyone "normal" like in Vonnegut's story where they handicap everyone to make them all equal? Who says abnormal people are necessarily at a disadvantage and need to be made normal to have a real life? Maybe they are the normal ones and the unaccommodating society they live in is what's abnormal.