Apologies for the delay. In this entry we’ll revisit some of our Russian and North European experiences, make a general observation on the world as we’ve been seeing it, and since much of the Western world is fast approaching XXX-mas, we'll throw in Nika’s bonus essay on Capitalism.
Moscow: 8th Oct. - 8th Nov.
We met with Losha, a specialist in the healing arts, trained in the shamanic traditions of Siberia and adjacent regions of the country. Not your average highschool guidance counsellor, Losha nonetheless works a lot with youth. He also introduced us to Olga Garanina, a telejournalist, one time editor of the magazine, Russian Style. Olga related how often she was researching stories on teens involved with “Istoricheskaya Rekonstruktzia.” This is a huge movement, translated roughly as Historical Reconstruction, underway in many parts of Russia these days. Largely fuelled by young people, it has many faces, from the revival of indigenous martial arts and crafts through to spiritual practices and folkloric study. Ancient traditions like Lubki (Love of life, Love for Life) are mined for relevant and uplifting lessons.
In Moscow and St. Petersburg we visited, interviewed and generally just chilled with more than two dozen young people. On their minds was their future as well as the past, present and future of their country.
Riga, Latvia: 9th - 16th Nov.
Old city architecture worthy of fairy-tales and more musicians per square meter than anywhere we’ve ever seen. Not many teen encounters since this was the first visit with my older brother (surprise, another musician) and his family in over five years. Their ten year-old son, Diz wears the Adolescent Sublime T-shirt well though, and he did have this to say: “Limp Bizkit are a very cool band.”
Kopenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin: 17th Nov. - 17th Dec.
Work in progress. Interviews, interviews… Kids kickin it after school in the bohemian quarter of Copenhagen. Kids kickin it in reggae clubs in Hamburg. And Berlin’s still got graffitti art like nobody’s business.
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Four months ago, we set out to get to know some of the world’s more than one billion adolescents. Walking (and filming) the streets of cities like San Francisco, Montreal, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Berlin one observation persists: Young people everywhere are people eager to discover and express just who they are. Anxieties about wars, about the environment or their own lives at home might distract them. Society itself may seem predicated on an altogether different project: the “progress to success” project. Still, it was the desire for time and freedom to discover themselves that emerged most regularly during our interviews.
Even those of us who receive “good” educations learn mostly lessons of how to do things; rarely are we encouraged to consider the ‘why’. Two-dimensional images of success are offered to us daily, in Rolex ads, in sunny two-week paradises for the successful couple and their superachieving child. To quote our young friend, Tish from Redwood City, California: “You can’t buy love, and you can’t buy happiness… but you can rent it.”
Who was it that said, “ a life unexamined, is not worth living”? In the modern world, wired for success, how do we afford this luxury of self-examination? When we talked with Lisa in Hamburg, this was her main problem in life, (in fact she is making a film about it). Examining our (inner) lives rarely figures in accepted programs for success. Lisa wants to make the most of her life. And for her, the most means the most human. It includes seeking the sun and spending quality time with people for the pure mutual pleasure in it, no agenda of getting ahead, no in-crowd cachet.
At the risk of sounding like complete dreamers, I’d like to say that we are people in love with the idea of a “free world” and all that commerce has done to speed it onward. Hell, Nika grew up in the Soviet Union, then spent almost three years in Asia – the Asia of self reflection as well as geographic Asia – and she still ended up in business! Most of her financially successful colleagues, consider those three years as a total waste of time. Her own professional success depends on how convincing and motivated she sounds to people at the helms of large enterprises. Why should they care about her existential quest?
We all participate in the dominant economic order, capitalism. Some of us are older, with years of professional experience. Yet can we give a simple answer to the simple question: how to live comfortably in the modern Western world? We usually end up feeling we’ve traded precious time and energy for the grub and grab of ‘getting ahead’. How to lead a conscious life, one that won’t end in bitter regrets, and all along provide for oneself and family? Ah, the sixty-four billion dollar questions.
In the past four months, we’ve asked many young people how they define success and what they view as most important in their lives. Here are just a few responses:
1. Alyona , 21 yrs old: “If my life was a film, it would be titled, “Through thorns to stars.” For me that’s becoming equal to Gods, finding my own path towards my star. It is easy to lose optimism because of the feeling of powerlessness in the world of warring nations. I aspire to feel harmony with the world and realize my full potential.”
2. Ivan, 15 yrs old: “ Hmm. Receive everything I wish for! Success in life is to have harmony and inner comfort. I don’t know what profession I am going to choose yet but I would like to have work that brings me joy, and have a good family.”
3. Helen, 17 yrs old: “One can’t have success all the time. It would only cause pride and make one lose passion for achievement. Success is when you taste an achievement, a first experience that you can do something. For me the most important is my spiritual development. I want to learn about my soul through the different experiences in life. It is a process of learning not a singular event.”
4. Kolya, 18 yrs old: “Success is when everything happens in a way you wish for. For me art and music are the most important things in life. To feel content I need to feel harmony, not only for myslef but for everyone around me as well.”
5. Ana, 16 yrs old: “I have a few dreams, like I would like to swim in a sea with many dolphins, but I do not have one Big dream. There is no success in life, it is all 50:50. I would be happy having a loving family and work that I enjoy.
Capitalism
Business is the most transpersonal of all activities invented by Man.
To be a successful businessman, one has to be passionate about achievements and detached from the object of your business dealings. Do oil magnates wake up in the morning feeling all warm and fuzzy about the thick brown liquid flowing through the pipes they own? Could you agree to “corporate restructuring” if you personally had to tell to every wife, husband and child of the redundant workers that their loved ones will live in fear and anxiety for the next few months, before finding another way of selling their time for money?
Modern capitalism became possible with the invention of a corporation. A corporation is a legal entity with the rights of the physical person but without the responsibilities borne by every mature human adult. The corporate structure facilitates aggregating huge sums of money, sums sufficient for the pursuit of activities unimaginable in the past – from the British East Indian Company to today’s telecom and aerospace conglomerates.
Most importantly, corporations have created distance between “owners” and “managers”. This gap is where the emotional component of enterprise dissapeared to. (Remember the bakers, butchers and builders of past centuries, who knew customers by name and couldn’t die happy without passing the business down through the family?) With “love” taken out of the equation, many other human attributes of enterprise fell away like dry leaves. Corporations don’t get sick, they don’t have elderly parents, and “future generations” appear as cute babies in slick annual reports. Balance sheets rarely reflect loaded issues like the environmental impact of corporate activities; to the degree they are addressed at all, these remain tucked well away in thick consulting reports shelved in the CEO’s offices or mitigated through a purchase of appropriate insurance.
Large corporations have become integral to policy making in every country we’ve passed through on this trip. Corruption tends to be well dressed in the “civilized” world, but monthly in Brussels another EU chef gets caught thinning his nation’s soup. Every German knows that their autobahns are paved with gold. From beurocrats to their cronies, lucrative repair contracts proliferate where repair is needed or no. Why is beer sold in Latvia every day of the year but sales of other alcohol, including wine are restricted? See: beer lobby! Need to re-distribute your nation’s wealth among a chosen few? The golden road of reconstruction in war-torn countries has fast become a favoured route. Patriotism is the cheapest currency of unity. Taking to heart historical lessons, heads of state, from the great USA to impoverished Zimbabwe, are funneling their people’s discontent into easily manipulated patriotism. Japan sends non-combatant troops to Iraq despite the widely expressed disapproval of its population. This is a small price to pay for the opportunity to be on the “good” side of the Americans and participate in lucrative reconstruction efforts.
The disengagement of corporate owners from corporate managers is mirrored by the gap between “Servants of the people” (elected officials) and the people themselves. Governments end up servicing the corporations, these perfect mechanisms for deploying capital and producing goods in the most profitable manner. More goods produced and consumed = more progress say the corporate-owned media. And here again, of course, all aspects of being a fully realized, compassionate human being are simply dropped out of the equation.
Posted by sublime at December 17, 2003 08:17 AM