Survival of the fittest?

Written on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 by Amruth

Capitalism, free trade et al - are often claimed to perpetuate processes and human activities that create the fittest of beings. I often see people draw parallel between a free market and a natural ecosystem, arguing that a free market helps the strongest economic process survive over less efficient & crude ones just like how natural selection helps the strongest species dominate and survive over the lesser life-forms.

But I seem to miss a point or two here - in natural selection, every organism has a variety of elements in their environment that pose a threat/challenge. It is this evolutionary stress that "selects" the best characteristics in organisms of that environment to survive & propagate. Whenever, such an evolutionary stress has been absent for an organism or a colony, the group has ALWAYS accelerated towards extinction by over-specialization - I am yet to come across an exception.

When it comes to humans of our age, we seem to control most natural factors of 'evolutionary stress' or environmental stress. That leaves us with the evolutionary stress self-imposed by humans. Again, unlike what is popularly claimed this self-imposition of constraints on our species DOES NOT come about by collective forces of all the human thoughts and ideas about life. Instead it seems to come from the top of the power ladder of our species. i.e. what matters is NOT how many people support an idea of life BUT how much power do all the people supporting an idea of life have.

When this is the case, almost always the power house of a system supports an idea of life that helps them amass more and more power at the expense of those who are on the other end of the power balance. In other words: over-specialization due to the self-imposed evolutionary stress becoming weaker and weaker at the top of the power ladder. Why is it bad? Look at where it brought nature itself. As soon as the agent of evolutionary stress was changed from nature to humans, nature started decaying.

In our world, another similar change is already underway. The agent of evolutionary stress is changing from humans to an inanimate concept called 'money'. Just like how humans escaped the control of nature, I think the concept of money has escaped the control of humans. In that sense, a concept (in this case, the concept of money) can be as "alive" and creepy as living beings themselves.

Once upon a time, "Genetic fitness" was the metric for life. i.e. the fittest organism was the one with fittest genome. Then came along humans who made "Cultural fitness" the metric of life. i.e. the fittest organism was the one with the fittest culture because while a gene can only be passed to a few offsprings, a culture can be passed on to millions of individuals. Moreoever, a culture can store almost all relevant information about "how to live" as that stored in the gene and more. Genetic fitness took a back seat and gradually withered away. Right now, I think "Economic fitness" is the metric of life. Cultural fitness has already begun to wither away. While a culture can be spread to millions of individuals, money has proved to be a force that can penetrate all humans alike since it is a zillion times more tangible and easy to understand than genes or culture and hence is more likely to be propagated amongst humans.

The only problem is - when genetic fitness was displaced by cultural fitness, we replaced a completely natural criteria with a completely human criteria. Nature was not important anymore. Similarly when cultural fitness is being replaced by financial fitness, we are replacing a completely human criteria with a completely non-living, inanimate criteria. Does this mean humans are not important anymore?

And if the answer is YES, then what I love to hear is not an explaination for why it is so, but the answer to the question that we are all silently screaming out - "ARE WE REALLY COOL WITH IT?"

I'm not. Are you?

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Yes, but...

Written on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 by Amruth

Posted in Pic-blog | 0 comments

Con...

Written on Sunday, June 28, 2009 by Amruth

Some people are too sure of their abilities. And some are too sure of their limitations. I admire them both!

@Others: Wish you all the luck in the world!

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A Brave New World

Written on Saturday, June 20, 2009 by Amruth

Q: Ms. Quinn, How do you think we should go about creating this new world that you talk about in your latest work?

"I have always believed that anything that we create should manifest as a phenomenon of nature. Somehow, things that are created by pressing ourselves against the natural flow of things seem extremely complicated and... dead to me. Yeah... dead is the word."

"...Five, if ever asked to look at yourself, dont. Six, never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand. And finlly seven, never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life."

"I believe, the world has 3 kinds of people; the world 'needs' 3 kinds of people. The first type are the creators, or the architects. You give them randomness, they give you the truth. The second, are the stabilizers. You give them a world, they will put it in a box and never open it again. The third kind, are the disruptors. They are the agents of chaos. They do not ask you for anything, they give you randomness. They give you chaos."

"I think creative freedom is like... well.. it's like creative freedom. What sort of crap do you want me to say to that anyways. If you are standing here, asking me about my idea of creative freedom, you are neither creative, nor free... So yeah... you see what I did just now - that's creative freedom. fuck!"

"The only thing missing from the picture, is honor. No one knows where they lost that piece of the jigsaw puzzle. It was the only piece that we could not create."

"I think it takes 6 seconds for a boy to grow up into a man. Well... I think it shouldn't take any longer for an idea to turn into a story. Ofcourse it takes longer to tell the story. But the creation part, the first coming of the story, I think that is always like a flash of lightening. Comes much before the thunder storms into the scene."

"...It's just a piece of shit. When it needs to come out, it will come out."

Posted in Interviews, NextisWhat, Quote | 1 comments

Once upon a me...

Written on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Amruth

Someone reminded me of a post I had written in my 3rd semester of college... I don't even remember what made me write it back then. Here it goes:

The way of the world...
November, 2005

I donno whats makin me write this on a pleasant morning. But i've been feeling the same for a while now - What is it that the world around us values? - Seniority, willingness to accept things the way they are, to be one among the crowd...

Challenges hit you in face when you embark to do something which is least known to the world around you, something which is driven by a dream and vision seen by nobody but you. Its probably because the society fears the walks of life it doesn't understand, the walks of life whose end-point is still unknown.

But, what is the joy, thrill and pleasure involved in walking in a path already cemented and documented. A path where falling before reaching your destination means nothing but failure, a path where even after you reach your destination, you are just another kid in the block. A path which is so well supported and filled with directions that you have to do nothing on your own to reach your goal, which again happens to be set by your predecessors.

But, when you are making a path out of the unknowns, you are doing something unique at each step. You are a witness to all the surprises of nature, being thrown upon mankind for the very first time. And more than anything, out here, its the journey which is a source of joy, thrill and pleasure and not just the destination. Here is a world where there is no failure, because even if you end up doing something logically incorrect, you have learnt the reason and structure of a never seen before mistake, which in itself is a success.

signing off
Amruth

Sometimes, looking back tells you how much you have remained the same even when you think you have come a long way since then.

Posted in Journal, Light | 0 comments