Change, fashion and mass production

The picture here (by Terres) is merely a suggestion of the kind of applique that a Syai individual might attach to his or her standard mass-produced robe. Everyone has their own design, and some like this one might use the insect-emblem of the Syai Empire, an insect most similar to our dragonfly.

"Fashion" and its rapid changes and the way it is exploited is part of our civilization's ills. We on Earth are in a period where everything is moving too fast!  That includes the pace of economic, technological and electronic change, while some "human" changes are not happening fast enough. It is not so much the lagging-behind old but the young that we should worry about. Children weren't designed to grow up in a whirling current of change, pushed from outside themselves to compete and keep up or outstrip "the Joneses" children. 

Everyone wants to express their individuality and uniqueness, even if it is very much within a tight group or culture. But they don't necessarily want to do it through being fashionable or famous. One does not need to be successful. It often seems that parents, teachers and students are desperate for success!  The simple truth, however, is that success and achievement (within the present socio-economic, political and educational system) is weightedly relative. By that I mean, that the person striving for success only reaches that state at the disadvantage and weighty mass of the many other persons who do not reach any such state, not matter how hard they strive. G&S in light opera says: "When everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody."  For the maximization of general happiness, I would propose that first of all we all just work on finding ourselves as a "somebody" according to our own lights 

How Syai society looks at all this has something to do with how the Syai people dress. 'Fancy fashion' is shown in the applique that is the size of one's hand sewn on the front of the mass-produced robe (sized for the individual). One has a robe for the wind and cold, and apart from that one wears close-fitting comfortable stretchy clothes to suit various purposes in various locations.  

Almost everything in the Syai civilization is mass-produced, excluding what nature produces from soil, water and sunshine. The caravan-cottage that every adult has is the same design for everyone, with its components mass-produced and put together the same way. This has enormous benefits in eliminating waste and inefficiency caused by duplication of effort and constant change to keep up with fashion and fancy demands. Nevertheless, it means that change in the Syai world is very slow.  Innovation is not hastened by war. But if research indicates that a change would be beneficial to all, a big change and adjustment can happen, expensive though it might be in energies and resources to bring it about. Engines that run on liquid fuel have a long-term life in the Syai world, because it is hard to beat the convenience of that kind of fuel. Our Earth society may have appeared to change that kind of motor vehicle frequently, but really it is mostly fashion changes and very gradual slight improvements in engine efficiency. The internal combustion engine still pollutes our environment and causes wars over "black gold".

The Syai "culturally modified" version of The Lord's Prayer.

Overshadowing the Maori language are the anglo-european language and culture. Maori was better than the English language for description and function in Aotea NZ before the country became drastically changed by anglo-european mass-settlement (added to now by settlers from Asian cultures). To survive, a language's culture must assume dominance and success. It could well be that a fictional culture that has the luxury of assuming success, and has a well-defined separate purpose, is in a better position to last than some of the "real" languages and cultures that are today so submerged in the globally prevailing languages and cultures.

Placing Syai alongside Maori would be a false comparison, but there's a point to emphasise about the mention of both together. Any language, real or imaginary, derives its authenticity and vigour from the culture it belongs to. If you were able to go to Feishoafeis or any other planet with a human-like civilization, you would hardly be likely to find anything that much resembled our Western and Middle-Eastern culture of Christendom and its related God-religions. Some similarities, perhaps, would be found in basic moral precepts, but the claim that Christianity is a universally valid bulwark of good social behaviour is bogus, well disproved by  history. Christianity and related religions "inform" our culture and language because of their long traditional monopoly of symbol and myth.  There is no high moral ground for one established religion over another. Everything depends on how it is interpreted and modified through historic changes, and subsequently practised by its adherents.

A direct translation of The Lord's Prayer, therefore, would make little sense to the Syai world of listeners or readers. What I present here is The Lord's Prayer modified to give it affinity with the Syai culture. It then has correspondence while at the same time expressing something very different at its spiritual foundation. It is a little like the Chinese on being pressed to convert to Christianity having no suitable word in their language for 'God'. You may have the material and missionary power to impose a faith-system that suits you, but it only ends up damaging the psyches of those you impose it on.

To make the point and to allow visitors to this blog to view a page of 'native' Syai writing, I have pictured such a page at the top of this blog, and will now translate this "Lord's Prayer" as it would be appreciated in the Syai world of myth-religious ceremony and seasonal festivals:

" Divine First, sacred beginning of everything.
Let-be that the sign of the divine One shows ever in our skies.
Let-be that the holy grand-children of the divine One bless the lives of us all, and let-be that our small planet-world simulates the great twilight-land of The Sacred Mountain.
Let-not-be that there would be destitution and hunger; but let-be that we, children of the Great Quaternary, always give and receive the bounty of the world with generosity and forgiveness.
Being-as-thankful we should be, that the the Great Quaternary sacrificed easy return to Its sacred homeland for-to make a worldly home in our bodies."

Be-blessed

The price that has to be paid for the re-construction of society to be just and fair.

I don't know where I got this picture from, but one might imagine it as of First Empress Fahraa, founder of the Syai movement established over most regions of the planet Feishoafeis (formerly known as Okraalom). The man behind her in the shadow might be her general, the commander of the forces that had to use minimal violence to impose the New Order that created the just society and banished war forever. (Fahraa herself was very distressed that any military action at all had to be used.)

Why would a 'Utopia' need a government and a legal system - let alone a military general - to start with? Wouldn\t a 'utopia' be just full of happy well-behaved people? Not what you might call a real utopia that takes account of evolution and our basic animal nature. Utopian realism is only an aspiration of balance: a lessening of fateful blows whether by natural or h(r)uman antagonists; coupled with fair governance based on experience and reason. It offers no cure for existential angst - distress such as in facing old age and death.

The leaders in wealth, power and influence in our Earth-societies have managed to maintain, even increase, influence and control over the ordinary citizen under their various jurisdictions. The resources and energies of those they are supposed to protect are used in their jockeying for power between themselves, dragging the ordinary citizenry into their quarrels and providing what they take to be justification for military power and expansion. The power-elite protect ownership rights and freedoms of individuals and groups, but in such a way that genuine justice is not served; the 'fruits' of the protective legal and financial system are progressively captured by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. How does this happen?  Not because the rising super-wealthy are more ambitious, industrious and smart than the rest of us. Many of them, of course, are indeed well-educated in working their way through the arcane, tortuous maze of the global financial system. The rest of aspiring citizens must struggle against the inherent advantages of the better-off few at the top.

What makes the basic injustice or out present system happen, is that most of the very rich and super-rich are served by opinion-leaders and the media to uphold a system that has two 'mechanisms' to put, and keep, them there, well on-top. Secrecy is one of these, often misguidedly defended under the guise of protection of privacy. Secrecy drags us into leadership quarrels between groups and nations that are constantly eyeing what resources are left out there in the wider world. The other 'mechanism' is basically the right that the legal systems in general gives to semi-monopolizing giant corporations to behave as if they were individuals, with the rights that individuals normally have, or should have, to satisfy a genuine flesh-and-blood individual's modest needs. But the corporate individual does not have comparative modest needs. They have gigantic, voracious needs and voracious cravings to try to satisfy an ever-expanding catalogue of  'needs' dictated to them by their stake-holders and overpaid chiefs, with their demands to exploit for maximum profit  a 'consumerist' market driven by viciously competitive and misleading advertising.

To be as personally private as you please when you please is freely granted under the Syai system as described by Terres. But, beyond that, there is no transactional and public-affecting secrecy. You have the right to know all about the other person or group, and they have the right to know all about you, apart from the really important aspect of privacy just mentioned. That is the pre-requisite of a genuine justice system. If the "less important" privacy-come-secrecy is not sacrificed to justice, the system will evolve toward what we presently have on Earth. It will become more and more depressingly unjust, not just to ourselves but to our descendants and all persons and fellow-creatures that do and will in the near future inhabit this planet.

(This is probably my last blog for a while: Terres and I are at a fairly crucial stage in the study of the Syai language and the adjustment of it for presentation as a viable language for this planet.)

How Syai links ethics to how a society of well-being and sustainability can be maintained.

A happiness ethic requires a clean, pleasant natural environment (see picture).

Is there an ethical standard to all our variety of belief about what makes an action right or wrong (morally speaking)?  The founder of Syai (according to Terres, our visitor to the Syai world) formulated such a standard in a line of only a dozen symbols. Something like that line is set out here as best remembered:

I=g --<  K(t.S)=G.

Of course this won't mean anything without explanation. The symbol '--<', for instance, is only my made-up symbol for "if-and-only-if". What Fahraa, the founder, pointed out was that 'Good', writ large, was not to be derived from the same word with a missing 'o'. We are lost if we try to relate right action with our particular culture, religion of collective gut-feelings. We then start exchanging blows about what's good, what's bad, what's right and what's wrong. The law of the land guides us, but it can be an ass, as can some of the guidance given by the moral precepts that come from ancient traditions and individuals who have set themselves up as 'God's interpreters'. 

According to the Syai, the 'Good' which reliably guides our actions can only be established by what they call "The Naturalistic Axion".  It states that we, as a species, have the power to destroy our world and ourselves. Naturally, at the same time, we have within us the instinctual desire to continue to survive (as a species) for as long as the changing universe can allow us to, although we can subvert that desire by giving priority to other, more immediate ones. Furthermore, survival on that scale is only possible if we flourish. Furthermore, the condition of our flourishing is a care for ecological balances with consideration for the species we share the planet with. Given the appeal and rationality of this axiomatic approach, we can interpret the symbols as follows: I = the individual as active agent; g = what he needs (ethically) to consider good;  K = our state of collective knowledge based on everything that objective observation and the scientific method can reveal to us; S = 'Survival' but as a function of  't', time, which must be taken into account as we can make good predictions based on present knowledge but can only speculate as to the more long-term future on what it will take for us to survive. All these considerations a process that add up to the best notion possible of what is the good that we must strive for - 'G', the greater good for all.  Because of the 't' factor, there is a degree of uncertainty inevitable about 'G'. Unfortunately, we cannot invent a time machine to bring persons back from the far distant future, to test whether the ethical guidance that our formula gives us is absolutely reliable. But there are no absolutes in real life.

Picture by Severin, 6 y.o.

What's good and what's bad about religion.

The illustration is a rough impression of a Syai  temple-theatre.  The material world is the lower hemisphere, the spiritual is the invisible upper. On the far side is a stage and open-air tiered seating for 'sacred' dramas. Titans, gods and spirits perform on the flat roof, sometimes descending to the stage.

A human-like culture of a planet like Earth would hardly have a religion very similar to our main ones. (Read  'The Sparrow' and  'Children of God'.)  Giordano Bruno was executed for saying something similar. The Syai religion is really a mythological story performing the task of teaching basic ethics and psychological understandings. The object of the story is to guide us along the survival-path of empathy, conflict-solving and co-operation despite differences; but also to raise awareness of the potency of the dark side of our natures. The myth with its mysterious 'Prime Mover', its power-hungry egotistical titans and the creative, struggling gods that revolted against them - in the final analysis - is simply a 'picturing' of  archetypal personifications that in the end reside in our individual psyches.

No Syai person would fall to believing that these spirit-entities and the sacred mountain with its surrounding four spirit-lands are 'real'. Nevertheless the story has power just because it is not a stagnated faith in some past revelation by a pretender to a direct line to God. The painful past can be moved by spirit-mind into a better present, and that betterment can be maintained, improved upon with universal enhancement of our lives despite universal mortality. Suffering need not be so exaggerated as we find it in a world like ours. So it is that what's right about Religion is so well summed up in this paragraph written by Anthony de Mello:

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue, about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is just a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.