Words, Music, Philosophy, and Politics

Deep thoughts rarely arrive like thunderbolts. Instead, they percolate and simmer until they demand outward expressions, either orally or in written form. They bear signs of rumination and repetition and slow digestion. They sometimes ferment and give off strange odors; they could also emit delightful fragrances. A man is about to die. All he will behind are his thoughts. That's why most literate men want to write.

You looked at the raucous, tumultuous, cacophonous scenes of demonstrations against tyrants and dictators in North Africa and the Middle East and you felt alive and privileged. You are living in exciting times. Revolutions of all stripes are taking place. Technological revolutions are transforming modes of communication and information diffusion; cultural revolutions in music (rap), club dancing (lascivious and openly sexually suggestive gyrations while wearing tight, body-hugging attires), recreational drug use, widespread tattooing and body piercings; economic revolutions ( rise of China, India, Brazil, and Turkey, and relative decline of Europe and the U.S., not to mention China's audacious challenge to the U.S. as a military and world power); and political revolutions (disintegration of the Soviet Union, collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and now the overdue collapse of autocratic Arab regimes).

You imagine you are part of the freedom-loving, democracy-seeking Arab standing in a downtown square, shouting slogans and expressing deep-seated human longings for fairness and dignity. And there they are, brave men and women jump to the platform, arms waving to the crowd, exhorting it to repeat to repeat the slogans and whipping the crowd into the frenzy and enthusiasm because they know a quiet and unemotional gathering of demonstrators would be likely to fizzle out. These brave men and women on the platform are the leaders, who stick their necks out in this moment of history, in this decisive moment, to lead the revolution to its triumphant outcome. It is not the moment to be cautious, to hide among the anonymous crowd for the sake of safety. This is the moment for the brave and the bold, those who believe in themselves and in the rightness of their cause, and in their fellow men who will follow them to the right and correct destiny.

This is also the moment you discover the true dynamics of life, which in its most naked form, is the pursuit of power because power drives everything else, including food, shelter, and sex. Without power, one's existence becomes precarious. Politics is the drive for power, for the ability to allocate resources for survival. Once the allocation of resources becomes grossly unfair, humans will rebel and will fight for fairness and justice. But with humans, a complex and restless species, things are never simple. To humans, power is more than just the economic allcation of resources, as with lower and simpler forms of life. Power takes on the ability to determine and sometimes to legislate what others think, say, and believe. In other words, humans go for total domination. Thus, we see a fierce fight among humans over what is right or wrong (values/ethics), whose version of God or lack thereof is correct (religion) and even what is acceptable or not (definition of madness/sanity). Human history is thus a history about power: power over oneself, over one's neighbors, and over nature.

Those philosophers who are sensitive to the notion of power begin paying attention to history: Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and the risk-taking son of a physician, Foucault who had unprotected homosexual encounters in the bathhouses of San Francisco and died of AIDS as a consequence.

Talking about history is visiting the raging conflict of the two opposing views about the nature of society: one, mainly embraced by the fiercely individualistic British and American--and decidedly quaint and ludicrous notion, in your estimation---that argues the individual and the individual self-interest form the basis of society, and that society itself, is simply an artificial concept or idea. (This attitude is the core philosophy of the curiosity that calls itself the Tea Party Wing of the Republican Party); the other insists that there is indeed society/tribalism where the members are bound and tied together by blood lines or moral, cultural, and even religious beliefs.

The will to truth is indeed the will to power, at least with men who are attracted to knowledge and thus truth. Yet at the same time those men recognize for each human as well as for each society, and of course for each religion, there is a "general politics of truth" (Foucault's phrase) where only a certain discourse is accepted as true. Meanwhile these men seek refuge from the tumultuous nonsense and meaningless noise made by ignoramuses or self-declared scholars, in the power of evocative and harmonious sound called music.

Roberto Wissai