Personal Opinion on Terry Eagleton "After Theory"

Postmodern culture tends to deconstruct the theories of the past and at the same time obscure the truth. It is inevitable. Even if you try really hard to prove that you are different, that you do care about your roots and about those values that made your parents and the parents of your parents able to make an impact in their era, somehow you find yourself gasping, sucked into what it is the unavoidable tornado of pop culture. After the demolition of the puritan dogma, which stated that ‘seriousness is one thing and pleasure is another’, one cannot help to wonder whether popular culture could make you a better person. Can pop culture awaken your inner instincts and drive you to be a better person?

If we consider pop artists it is mostly clear how incredibly well it all worked out for them. Lady Gaga for an instance constantly claims how stardom and fame has always inspired her to become that mix of fashion-music-art phenomenon of the 21^st Century. What it desperately needs to be addressed is the reasons why individuals, a concept that has become so strong within the postmodernist times, lack of single capacity to detect if the values they’ve been brought up with are correct. Instead they seem to passively accept them, becoming part of the intoxicating unrolling of what has become the capitalism lifestyle.

Fortunately not all individuals are the same. Usually the frustrated and sad ones are able to detect the lack of moral values that the contemporary society is filled with, and eventually begin a meticulous research of what is authentic. Where is the truth hiding? What is the truth?

I personally think that it doesn’t take an extraordinary sensitivity to perceive that there is something wrong with modern theories that have been inculcated in our brains from modern society. Just try to spend one day fulfilling the postmodernist keystone rules. By that I mean to visit expensive restaurants, shopping malls, sipping cocktails at the Soho Hotel and flipping through pages of gossip magazines whilst talking to your close mate about the latest TV show that everybody seemed to be getting into: “The Only Way is Essex” a painful and tacky tracking-shot of bad actors and crazy make-up artists. If at the end of the day you won’t be frustrated by the lack of values as well as feeling as sense of emptiness then you are silly and superficial.

And to be honest, I am not sure what is worst: being oblivious to what is really going on, or on the contrary being able to get underneath the surface in order to discover the real, getting to the bottom of human culture, raising questions regarding the unbearable difference between rich and poor, the climate change, technology taking over the world, and the evident economic exhaustion of the financial systems. Terry Eagleton states that ‘innocence and amnesia have their advantages’. Just like a child who is unaware of the realities that surround him, people that ignore tend suffer less than people that actually do realize what is going on. But why shall we be oblivious to what is around us? Isn’t the ability to analyze things and formulate our own thoughts what makes us different and, most of the times, better than animals? So, shall we keep leading our lives with no sense of belonging and community? The answer is obvious to me.

Personal Opinion on Mike Davis "Fear and Money in Dubai"

Stories such as ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Lord of The Flies’, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, or yet ‘The Beach’, narrate how people unexpectedly thrown in, apparently heavenly, parallel universes, gradually come across the real essence of these places. A secret secured under sands, behind exotic trees and protected by wild animals and ferocious aboriginal tribes.

I am not stating that millions of individuals are thrown against their will every year to the capital of visual excess that Dubai has become. In fact most of the people that set foot on the land of ‘architecture on steroids’ crave opulence and look forward to stuff the city’s malls, hotels and restaurants with their money.

Of course that’s true up until the point we talk to a local taxi driver or we consider a regular workman. Both freely decided to leave their hometowns, most likely to be located somewhere in Southern Asia, to enthusiastically embrace the slavery lifestyle.

Dubai stands to labour just like ‘The Island” stands to the characters of the books previously mentioned. Everything seems to be magical and convenient to begin with, and then day-by-day the darkest and cruellest sides are revealed. Behind the shining facades of luxurious hotels and shopping malls hides an army of bare workers, mostly from Pakistan and India, that live in the poorest and most deplorable conditions, often falling ill out of hunger or due to the lack of clean drinking water.

For some people there seem to be nothing really to fear in a city that offers entertainment that goes beyond imagination but if start peeling off the first few layers that enclose Dubai’s essence, you may come across illicit goods imports, prostitution rings, slavery, and the delicate balance between royalty, petrol and the rest of the world. Perhaps we should all stop and consider how Western Civilization, and especially the unrestraint consumerism that comes along side of it, allowed oil to become the most valuable raw material. All the economies depend on oil and its derivatives: petrol, diesel etc. And having neglected the use of alternative energy for too many years has made us in fact dependent on United Arab Emirates and other major oil producers.

One wonders how long this situation in going to last, and how many more souls will suffer its regime, as the oil deposits are not eternal. And especially because sooner or later despite the opposition of large multinational companies of oil producers, the world will stop depending on oil favoring the use of cheaper and less polluting forms of energy.

Personal Opinion on Alain Badiou "This Crisis Is the Spectacle: Where Is the Real?"

Alain Badiou wants us to pay attention to the fact that the contemporary world is about to collapse and that a return to the real is absolutely necessary to save us all. I don’t mean to pride but, isn’t it typical of intellectuals to be against capitalism? Unfortunately capitalism is a form of society that is not, and it looks like it never will be, able to satisfy the intellectual needs as well as their sense of fulfilment in life, driving them to a constant, and sometimes irrational, search to a new solution; in this specific case “the communism”.

I personally don’t think that Communism is such a brilliant idea after all.

As Paul Hollander, professor at Massachusetts University stated after years of research, study and understanding; ‘the deception has survived the failure of the bloodthirsty regimes and still dominates the liberal intellectual’s hearts and brains’. The deception being that cultural and psychological trick that induced poets artists and philosophers to actively line up with the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro and Che-Guevara’s Cuba against western civilization and especially the United States which represented the vanguard. Western intellectuals guided by fantasy and presumption to build the perfect society, heaven on earth, simply wanted to be deceived.

Hasn’t communist already proven to have a bad effect everywhere that it has been tried? All communist countries have either suffered economic collapse or have modified their system in order to allow more free-market transactions over time. It has proven wholly unworkable and against motivation for improvement in any process whatsoever.

On the other hand, I do believe that each individual should be given the same opportunity to succeed in life and therefore the resources necessary to pursue that success. But I do also feel very strongly about human freedom and happiness and it has been historically testified that communism as well as other dictator forms of govern have never respected and provided these values.

I also believe that if capitalism didn’t exist communism would not been identified and vice versa. They both are two concepts that wouldn’t exist without each other. Therefore when you are talking about communism you are implicitly talking about capitalism too.

That said, we all must accept the fact that the capitalist lifestyle is at the end of its days. I think it is of vital importance that governs try to improve social equality within each nation, and also try to decrease their differences in order to loosen the political and social tensions and therefore, hopefully, decrease people’s inequalities.