Naomi Wolf's End of America and Orwell's Animal Farm

In 2007 Naomi Wolf published a book called the End of America. The book warns that the USA is devolving into a fascist state, and she analyzes 10 steps that are being taken to achieve this goal. She briefly explains her ideas in this article. Wolf has not abandoned her idea, as is clear from this 2014 talk. In 1945 George Orwell published a book called Animal Farm, in which he analyzes the development of the Soviet Union, from the time of the revolution to the terror of Stalin's despotic rule. This book is widely read in schools, and I have been teaching it for a number of years, and it seems to me to be very interesting not just because of the historical context, but also as an astute analysis of power relations, the malleability of public opinion.... this makes it a classic.

It may seem really odd to compare today's America to the USSR of the forties. Or is it? After giving the steps that Wolf presents in her idea it seems to me that this is not as far fetched as we might think. In what follows I will present the steps that Wolf has posited and relate them to Animal Farm (her illustrations of them in the current American context are better found in her own work).

Step 1: Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. A key element of the Pig's strategy - the external enemy being the humans, and then of course the internal enemy being Snowball when Napoleon takes over. And in this way the whole business of the windmill is eerily reminiscent of 9/11.

Step 2: Create a Gulag. Now, Stalin killed many of his enemies and sent some to the Gulag. America has Guantanamo. Napoleon basically sticks to the more basic approach, so those animals found guilty of dissent are killed on the spot.

Step 3: Develop a thug caste. This is clearly an important part of Napoleon's strategy from the start when he takes the puppies to raise them as skilled killing machines.

Step 4: Set up an internal surveillance system. This is clearly achieved by having a system of informants among the animals and creating an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust.

Step 5:  Harass citizen groups. When the hens try to form an alliance and act in defiance the crackdown is very harsh.

Step 6: Engage in arbitrary detention and release. I am not sure this fits exactly, because not many are released in Animal Farm, however the general confusion and how the rules, and indeed history, is constantly changed creates this kind of atmosphere of chaos and fear.

Step 7: Target key individuals. Snowball.

Step 8: Control the press. The story about Snowball devolves through the mouth of Squealer, the animals have no way to verify the reality of what their only media outlet provides them with so this one fits very well.

Step 9: Dissent equals treason. Again, when the hens do not want to give their eggs to benefit the pigs, their action is labeled treasonous.

Step 10: Suspend the rule of law. Not that the rule of law is ever really established on Animal Farm, the law that they do have is taken and manipulated to suit the ruling elite: Some animals are more equal than others.

...to be fair there are elements to the situations that are very different. The relative affluence of the American is one thing, and there is no 'Strong Man' behind the End of America, but a hidden manipulative and inconspicuous elite. They use the same sleazy methods as their predecessors, but avoid basking in the luxury and the limelight ... possibly making them the most terrifying threat to humanity yet....

new concepts (for me i.e.) - a very short blog

You live and you learn. An interesting idea about philosophy (from Deleuze) I believe is that the role of philosophy is the creation of concepts.

Maybe. If you want to make something you also need to have a fair grasp of a lot of such things. It amazes me how I still keep coming across new concepts and ideas all the time, often connected with something that I've had great interest in for most of life....

Wabi-sabi is an example. A Japanese ideal of aesthetics (with roots in Zen, which has always fascinated me), or lifestyle or something (vague and slippery as is wont for Eastern concepts) .... celebrating simplicity, asymmetry, chance and transcience and diametrically opposed to Western ideals of grandness, immortality, symmetry and pomposity .... so the grand European churches and symphonies would be as far from Wabi-sabi as you could get... I think there is a great deal of it in stuff like ready-mades, generative music and such like, maybe I'll get back to it, maybe not. I think me and Ringo are Wabi-sabi drummers, but, well, yeah.... A film on Wabi-sabi. 

Another connected with evolutionary theory, a pet interest of mine, is 'eusociality', which is when species live in highly organised, multi-generational systems. Mostly seen in insects. One of the guys behind this is one E.O. Wilson.... he sees humans as exhibiting some of the features of eusociality, which has brought him into serious conflict with many biologists, including Richard Dawkins. I really don't like Dawkins so intuitively I side with Wilson - but I can't claim to have looked into this deeply enough to be sure. Sure, Dawkins's idea of the meme is very interesting, but this whole new-atheist thing is just way over the top, far too pompous and uninteresting, lacking all nuance and elegance....

The conclusion eludes me.

Aliveness

I talk a short course in boxing at a local gym, Mjölnir, last fall and it was an interesting experience. It was really difficult and I think I need to retake it...  I enrolled alone which I would not do again, since most of the participants came in pairs and the course was based very heavily on pair-work.

Being a teacher it is always valuable to experience the other side of the table, and especially when you come as a complete novice and a rather weak one at that. I felt that the going was really fast, and I had a hard time following - and missing classes was a serious bummer! However, there was a very distinct pattern to the training. A punch or movement would be introduced, then practiced and then put into a live context with a partner.

This is in line with the Martial Arts idea of aliveness. Aliveness is based on timing, energy and movement; and it involves training with a partner who shows resistance.

This idea has been fermenting in my head and it seems to me that this concept could have applications for a number of different activities.... music, lanuguages etc. I am reminded of the discourse methods employed by Oscar Brenifier in his Philosophical Practice. There the energy, timing and mobility apply on the mental and emotional plain.

My idea for this in my English classroom would to raise and maintain higher energy levels in the room. It seems to me that the mental energy state of classrooms is often way too low. It also means resisting the students and having them resist each other, for example in debates. It means using pair work extensively and it means having students move around a lot more, and moving around myself more also.

My practice has been moving in that direction anyway and I am confident it is a good way to go. This approach also means that preparing for class can mean a number of things besides knowing the stuff you are going to go through - your mental and physical presence and energy levels are probably just as important a variable...

Sports and organised religion

well well... this blog came to me at four o'clock one morning as I lay awake.... it's sort of in the genre of the 'list' that seems to be a very important way to express oneself these days...

Anyways: (organised) sports and (organised) religion have a lot in common, good things and bad things. I probably focus on the bad more (and neutral) - it's more fun, here goes

Services once a week (games/ mass)
Places of worship (stadiums/ churches)
Rampant corruption on every level (self explanatory)
Overt moral message, but in practice .... (covering up priests' behaviour/ 'sportmanship' vs. cheating and doping)
Extreme and dangerous followers (hooligans/ suicide bombers)
Incomprehensible jargon
Martyrs and saints

....and followers very sensitive to criticism on both sides, as will probably be evident in recations to this post....

Note: this is just semi-serious and intended to provoke critical thinking - I am fascinated by both sports and religion and I have no doubt that both have benefited mankind in many ways

Fantasy, sf and the avant garde

Maybe this is a repetition, maybe it isn't.
I don't really mind.
I've been designing my game and finishing my master's thesis, working with Björk's Biophilia, teaching and attempting to learn how to box, and much else since my last blog. I've also been enrolled on a few courses at Coursera....

Now I'm doing a course, ModPo, which I enjoy (I'm not very deeply engaged though).... now they are doing the Beats and I enjoy the talks about Ginsberg and Kerouac. And soon they'll be doing something on Cage, a guy that truly intrigues me,

Anyway. It seems very interesting to me how the world of fantasy, sf and gaming seem to have existed completely separate from and often diametrically opposed to avant garde writing, art and poetry; both concerning experiments with language, political radicalism and much else.

It seems to me that my man China Mieville seems to be unusual in forming a bridge between these two worlds. I also think the Icelandic poet and writer Eiríkur Örn Nordahl has roots on both sides, though the fantasy sf element is not very apparent in (what I have read of) his work.

Another example of these cultures meeting up is of course Nordic Larp, which is a very important and interesting phenomenon though it seems still to be pretty obscure.

That's it for now, just like a vague start of something, and then I'll go off on another tangent I'm sure....

Participactor, -student

Here goes - a new blog every couple of months, not so bad I guess. Bad.

I had some trouble deciding whether this one belonged here or in my Icelandic blog on education - it landed here and will therefore be

well at least in English.

I recently had a very interesting artistic and spiritual experience participating in Djöfulgangur, a piece of participatory theatre by the group Kviss Búmm Bang. I have been looking around to see if anything resembling Larp is ongoing in Iceland, and this is the closest I could come.

This will not be a blog on the piece which was very interesting.

Anyways - I asked them afterwards about where their inspiration came from and they mentioned Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, he coined the term in the title. An interesting interview with that fascinating character here above.

Finally in connection with my work on my master's thesis on games in education I discovered a little system by Icelandic education theorist Gerður G. Óskarsdóttir where she analysis classroom work according to the level of teacher vs. student control and correspondingly whether projects are open ended or have single given solutions.  Finding in Icelandic schools a huge predominance of teacher control and closed assignments. Naturally.

Now - I wonder why when very strong tendencies in art, theatre and education point towards increased democratisation and power to the audience / student -  traditional art contexts, theatres and schools remain so thouroughly autocratic for the most part? And (very ironically) participatory forms are avant garde and in some sense form a kind of elitist minority on the fringes of both the world of art and education?

I have some ideas, but still it is mind blowing that a hundred years after Dada and Dewey things have not really changed that much....

More in two months.

Or less.

Or more.

Tolkien, technology, philosophy, landscape and whatnot

Watching / listening to this very interesting documentary on JRR Tolkien I had a few thoughts.

1) Tolkien's distrust of technology, bordering on the Luddite, seems to me to be in harmony with Heidegger's ideas in the same area - and also to be in tune with views of high modernists such as TS Eliot. Usually equated with being almost reactionary, the quote Cristopher Tolkien reads from a letter on Tolkien's analysis of how the 'Machine' (remember the Pink Floyd song? ) supposedly saving labour would actually make the work more disgusting and invisible, by locking it inside the factories (and now sending it to distant lands!) is interesting - providing a more nuanced and interesting intellectual image of Tolkien, to me at least.

2) Landscapes - the idea that Tolkien preferred green and cozy English landscapes is countered strongly here, in another quote from a letter - where he confesses to a strong preference for the barren - but first and foremost for space. It seems that he would have felt very much at home in the Icelandic highlands....


3) The story about the way he wrote letters from Father Christmas to his children, keeping their fantasy world alive for years made me feel more at peace with the shoe business in my native land's customs and my enthusiastic participation in those rites (oblique on purpose).

4) The English spoken by Tolkien's children, and indeed all those is involved in this documentary is beautiful.

5) Last but not least I must around to reading Leaf by Niggle.

6) Thank you.