Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

Drifting, he was drifting along the steady current that pulled him south, towards the edge of the world.  He knew it was south, because he knew how to read the stars, to use their faint glimmers as one might use the signs at a crossroads.  He lay upon his boat, a looked up into the fastness of the night, listening to the growing rumble of the falls at the edge of the world. 

In the forest, there grew a single tree that had sprung from an acorn that had been hidden by errant sprite.  This tree had grown for the sole purpose of fulfilling its destiny of becoming the spot where a knight died with his back against its trunk.  On the place where the knight had died, his blood poured into the ground, staining it with the color of bloody-rust.  In time, flowers grew over his dry bones, and his armor rotted.  But the knight had died in order for his sword to be hidden among the tall flowers that grew around his bones.  In time, a young woman came here, and found the sword, lying untouched and unspoiled by the ages.  She found the strength to carry the knight’s blade in her own hands, and she swung it with all her might, and felled the single tree with a single blow.  But the felling of the tree was only the beginning, and she became the Golden General of that land, leading her people to great victory.  Yet, the true ending of this story is in the tragedy that befell her, upon learning that in spite of all her power, she had not the ability to cure the illness of her beloved, and in despair, cast herself upon her sword.

The 44th floor of the Huntington building was haunted.  The spirit of child, they said, lived there, causing no end of mischief and hair-raising encounters.  Doors would close, giggles would be heard in empty halls, security cameras would pick up strange shapes dancing on the far end of the corridors.  Some of the employees said they had seen her, the little girl in a white smock.  What they didn’t realize was that it was several children.  They liked company.

He hung his head in his hands, feeling his heart collapse.  It was absurd, because this was dream, and she wasn’t really saying those things.  But then again, she could very well do it to him again, couldn’t she?  But when he woke up, everything was fine, or something like it.  And when he thought about it, he realized that it wasn’t because she didn’t love him; it was because he missed her.  That was all.  He knew that waking up alone wasn’t fun anymore. 

What do I want to study?

The transformations occurring in today’s society are both dramatic in nature and widespread in scale.  For the first time in the history of man, our understanding of basic concepts like identity and relationships are undergoing rather severe changes.  The cause of these changes is primarily found in how technology is shaping human activity, and consequently, human consciousness and realities.  This doesn’t come as a surprise, because historically, major paradigm shifts in human society were brought about by technological revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution, which shifted societies from hunter-gatherer kinship networks to land-based, hierarchical units of sovereign states; and the Industrial Revolution, which changed the older models of land systems into commerce and manufacture, mechanization and resource exploitation.  Today, I believe, society is again on the verge of another major shift: the Creative Revolution. 

I think anyone who is active enough online to be exposed to the blogosphere, real-time streaming news, file sharing, virtual online communities etc. can easily grasp the gist of the Creative Revolution.  Describing the nuances and dynamics of this shift is, however, not what I am primarily concerned with.  What I am concerned with is the question of the direction the paradigm shift is bringing society, and what potential dangers and problems could possibly be posed by such a shift. 

This concern stems primarily from an understanding of the problems faced by human society in the 20th century, where unexamined and irresponsible industrial development has led to the disasters of climate change, ethno-religious wars, and widespread poverty.   

But I do recognize that many social scientists are concerned with such questions. I also view the plurality of study to be the key towards finding proper solutions for real-world problems posed by another paradigm shift.  In the desire for plurality, it is then necessary for a young researcher to strive for some kind of new perspective, a different angle at which to approach the field, and consequently, contribute something fresh to subject of social change.

Biology and mathematics make strange enough bedfellows with socio-political theory.  However, organic systems and the field of chaos math provide a perspective to view society as a dynamic and complex entity.  By using evolutionary biology and chaos theory as frameworks, I hope to explain how social and political systems change over time, and how these changes might increase or decrease risks to human societies. 

I need a place to start when it comes to such a broad and integrative field of study.  Let’s begin with a few baseline assumptions:

The first premise to my study is that human society is primarily constructed of power relationships.  This implies that the focus of the study is to describe shifts in the way power flows through a society. 

The second premise is that power dynamics are discursive in nature, that the nature of power in a society is not found in definite institutions, but rather in the linguistic devices and cultural manifestations. 

The third premise is that because of this dynamic, free-flowing and complex way that language and symbol create power dynamics, the principles of evolution and the framework of chaos theory can be used to create mathematical models and computer programs that can simulate the effects of discourse on power dynamics. 

Each of these ideas has a broad range of implications and each raises particular questions in terms of validity and evidence.  It is in my research that I hope to address these issues in a scientific manner, and at the end of the day, bring a new and useful perspective to the table of socio-political theory to aid policy makers and discourse shapers of the next century of human development.

It’s difficult to find a word to express the emotions I felt sitting through the thing we watched last Saturday.  It was a strange combination of irony, fright, hilarity, and severe physical pain due to a wracking attack upon the senses.  I’ve never had to go a theatrical performance and actually say to myself, "Can they please go to intermission?  I don’t think I can take this anymore."  If I use this as part of syllogistic construction, where:

Plays are performances where I don’t want an intermission.
This thing made me want an intermission.

Then therefore:

This thing is not a play.

The producers of the performance entitled "The Witches of Oz" tried to skirt out on paying royalties to the original production "Wicked" by mixing in songs from the Broadway musical with the storyline…wait, SCRIPT… of the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz."  I’d say that it was quite an exercise in the concepts of bastardization, creative theft, and hodge-podge-headache-inducing mismatched musicals.  One moment, the characters are frolicking through Oz to the tune of "We’re Off to See the Wizard", that’s as jolly and carefree as an episode of My Little Pony.  In the next, we get a blast from "One Short Day" where Oz is likened to New York City.  In the process, the script-writers managed to commit nothing short of artistic rape on both the classic Judy Garland movie and the critically-acclaimed Broadway musical.

I don’t know what to call this abomination, maybe "non-performance" or "non-play" might do.

I really don’t know where to start with this non-performance.  Let’s run through a few problems:

1) With their stage design, the play should have been entitled: "The Void".  There was no effort at all placed into stage design, and the stage for EVERY scene, from Kansas, to Munchkin Land, to the Wicked Witch’s Castle to the Emerald City… all had the same layout, featuring a single piece of architecture: a long ramp.  Try to make me believe the stage is Oz with that.

2) The sound system made the performance about as attractive to listen to as a b-level AM radio station while a child played with the equalizers.  For God’s sake, it’s a MUSICAL!

3) How can I tell if the singing is bad or good if the sound system makes everything sound like its a whale taking an underwater shit?

3) The characters were about as bland as a loading screen.  Throughout the entire play, the actor who was supposedly playing Dorothy maintained the same dumb smile throughout every scene, no matter what was going on.  Scrunching up your face and pouting is not acting.  Neither is flopping your arms around because you don’t know what to do with them. 

4) The attempt to spin the characters by using pop-culture references (The Wizard as Elvis)… do I need to say anything more about that?

I don’t want to go further with this, I’ve already found closure by watching an amateur recording of the Broadway "Wicked".  I never thought I’d see the day when I actually think that a tiny, badly copied, shaky handed pixelated performance was INFINITELY better than something I saw performed live on a stage.

Please, someone, stop those people from ever trying to put on a show again.

(NOTE: The actor who played Elphaba must be commended for attempting to carry the play with professional acting.  A bit too much evil laughter, but then again, you have to try to cover up the statuesque performances of your colleagues.  Word of advice: Put as much distance between you and them, mediocrity is infectious.)

The problem faced by the feminist movement is cultural, specifically, the culture of the patriarchy.  From my understanding of De Beauvoir’s writings, the problem of the patriarchy isn’t necessarily that of men being in charge of things, the problem of the patriarchy is the institutionalization and socialization of the phenomenon of objectification.  It doesn’t matter who is in charge; what matters is that society has categorically alienated and marginalized an entire class of people because they are women, and for this reason alone. 

It adds up to no reason at all.

Tonight, the Miss Silliman pageant was celebrated, as part of the university’s culture of tradition.  Here we see young women paraded in front of a cheering, screaming crowd, being rated according to a set of criteria that purportedly allows judges to set aside one young lady as the epitome of the Silliman Woman. 

Bullocks.

The very heart of the matter is that the beauty pageants support a backward discourse.  It forwards the culture of the ideal woman– of woman as idea, not as individual.  We perpetuate the reality of woman as a linguistic mechanism that confines a human individual to the box of a category.  She is not allowed to define herself; the society defines her.  Simply because of her biology, the society creates an entire reality for her to exist in, delineating the figure of her body, the words that come from her mouth, the professions she can choose, her role in her relationships. 

This categorization exists for men as well, but men are not defined by women; rather the definition of man is as a creature who has a direct relationship to the world around himself.  As a man develops, he creates a reality between himself and nature.  Woman, however, is not understood as directly related to nature.  Either she IS nature, or she must mediate through man in order to relate with the world around her.  Ultimately, she is a stranger, an object created out of man’s understanding. 

This would be the heart of patriarchy, the categorical definition of people.  It ultimately sabotages the values of personal freedom and self-dignity. 

Ultimately, patriarchy is a cultural aspect, and therefore is contingent upon prevalent agents of discourse.  Language itself is the mechanism through which this reality is perpetuated, and unless the language is shifted, the patriarchy remains.

What have beauty pageants got to do with all this?  The ritual of the beauty pageant, as with all rituals and institutions that exist within the culture of a society, are agents of language.  They are little bubbles through which a student can glimpse into the heart of the prevalent landscape of the discourse.  As long as we can tolerate a person being paraded in front of everyone like a piece of merchandise, to be judged according to certain definition of what this person should be, we continue to support a discourse of objectification.  And I simply can’t allow that, not when I feel that each person should be able to choose the realities they live in, and have the power to actualize that decision in concrete terms. 

Look at this screen.  Why can’t they invent a writing program that makes it feel like you’re really writing?  Something like a parchment background, like when you’re in the mood for scribbling strange tales of magic.  Or, when you have a thought that you think is particularly interesting, you can modify the word processor to look like a page from a moleskin notebook.  And if you feel like no-nonsense writing, switch it to something spartan, maybe like this page, but with less gray rectangles, and more white, so it looks like MS Word. 

Writing an entry would feel like so much more of an adventure if the text box was more personalized.  Look, its cool that we can personalize our preferences for what other people see, but what if I want to personalize things for myself?  Why can’t I do that too? 

Leads on to what I really want to talk about tonight.  Isn’t it a bit odd that after over 10,000 years of technological advances since the Agricultural revolution, people’s lives can still be quite difficult?  We spend a lot of time standing in line, or cleaning the house, or cooking… little mundane tasks that we really shouldn’t have to think about.  Something fishy is going on, when my day doesn’t have enough hours in it, and too much time (appox. an hour) is spent having to cook food when I could be doing something else more productive.

Modern life is about squeezed space-time.  I believe Alvin Toffler mentioned this in Future Shock.  The idea goes along the lines of the idea that our realities are shaped by the information that we have.  Towards the end of the 90’s, information technology exploded, and realities expanded, creating the "global village" effect of McLuhan and Fiore.  Let me jump to Einstein’s relativity and use that as the frame to describe the process through which space and time shrink in relation to the expansion of information (and consequently reality) available to an individual.  The effect is manifested in call centers, international stock markets, blogs, text messaging… pretty much everything that makes globalization work.  I don’t have to go into a whole discussion of how different, in terms of space-time perception, a modern human’s life is as compared to someone from, say, 1200 AD. 

The problem occurs in the region where you find incompatibilities between the squeezing of realities and the existing technology, lifestyles, institutions and discourse.  There really needs to be an analysis of cultures that have developed over thousands of years, and how they are being forced, sometimes violently, to evolve and respond to rapid changes in information and its effects on realities.  For example, the blogosphere is having definite effects on the dynamics of human relationships.  A friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend over a misunderstanding of someone’s blog. A single misinterpreted text message can shatter a friendship. Ten years ago, these things would have been unthinkable.   What’s going on there?  What is the science behind all this?  How are we going to measure the extent to which information technology has begun to influence the dynamics of human relationships and the dynamics of society as a whole? 

There’s a lot of things going on behind the television screens and HTML pages.  Everything from cartoons to YouTube to the CNN newsroom in Atlanta to the streets of Baghdad… it all has something to do with the evolution of a society that is unconsciously creating itself.  It doesn’t really know what’s happening, and that’s the scary part.  Universities, politicians, columnists and private R&D departments are spitting out new ideas and new technologies without really knowing how these can strike the fundamental level of human societies. 

The point is this:  After all these long years of human development, it remains difficult to really point out what "advances" have actually wrought.  Sir Ken Robinson was right: For all our knowledge, our skill, our education, we still have no idea how to predict the future. 

Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan hits us with the idea that things really can’t be predicted, and that the act of predicting sets us up for surprises.  But I won’t know for sure until I’ve seen how the data adds up for myself.  Because I think that we can tell where society is headed, what the overall trends are setting us to.  Sure, there will be flukes, but as any scientist can tell you, there is the factor of scale.  The 1997 financial crises in Asia may have been a huge surprise at the time, but ten years later, economies have bounced back.  What’s ten years relative to the lifetime of a human?  Enough for a kid to grow up, yes, but also not enough to finish a formal education.  Taleb need to keep in mind that black swans are still subject to scale.  And on the whole, having a framework to work with is better than not struggling to understand anything at all for fear that understanding be mistaken. 

It takes courage to figure out an idea for yourself.

She gazed into the Void, her soul reaching into the depths of space and time, bending the paths of fate to her vision.  Drawing upon the magic of her ancestors, and the spirits of her kindred, Farseer Illavris sought the counsel of the yet-to-come.  The chamber she stood in took on a deep blue hue, and pieces of earth spun around her form, reacting to the surge of psychic energy, as her unseeing eyes took her to the fate of her mission.

"Exarch Kaltain?"
"Your bidding, Farseer?"  The aspect warrior knelt, his helmet cradled in his arms, his sacred weapon held upright by one hand.  Exarch Kaltain was the leader of the Warp Spiders, and he had seen more than his fair share of battle against the mon-keigh. 
From this vantage point, one might be able to see the entire battle, unfolding before one’s very eyes, Illavris thought to herself, not missing the irony of her words.  This was where she would lure her prey, to the peak of her warrior’s hidden shrine.  She turned to Kaltain. "You must take your squadron to the western pass.  Await my further orders there."
"But Farseer," he spoke towards the ground.  He did not have to raise his head to know that an eyebrow was being raised, ever so slightly.  "The battle is to the north, where the mon-keigh gather their soldiers and machines of war.  Would not my warriors be better employed against them there?"
"Your doubts are not without reason, Exarch," Illavris explained. "But the same applies to the strategy now at hand.  We must be cautious of our enemies, we have underestimated them before, and we shall not make the same mistake again.  It is from the west that we are vulnerable.  For all their primitiveness, the mon-keigh will know this, and it is because of this caution that I send you to your post.  Now go!"
Exarch Kaltain nodded his head, understanding the wisdom in the Farseer’s words.  The defense of the shrine was paramount.  He rose, and with a thought, activated his suit’s warp drive, disappearing with a blinking of space and time. 

In a distance, the familiar sound of the mon-keigh’s cannons began to roll across the icy landscape.

Farseer Illavris took a last breath of fresh air as she placed her helmet over her face, the space in the back allowing for the flow of her auburn hair.  This alone would identify her, because her slender face disappeared behind the passive mask of a black helmet, her eyes peering at the world through the optic-enhancing eye pieces, that glowed an angry red.  The time had come.

Col. Ravik Galbraith of the 118th Volistad regiment suppressed an impulse to feel reassured as the Basilisk cannons began their opening salvos.  The earth shook around him with every shot that spewed fire and smoke into the gray sky.  The sound, this close to the mouths of the cannons, could have been deafening, if not for the sound-dampers he had fitted in his helmet.  He had seen fit to provide his troopers with the same equipment, considering that their staging area was right next to the artillery batteries.  Spoiling the boys, that’s what your doing, Ravik, he could hear his wife saying it, her voice ringing quite clearly in spite of the racket of the cannons around him.  The last time he had heard that voice had been ten years ago, when he was still a lieutenant in the then newly-commissioned 118th.  Ten years, three campaigns, and about twelve hundred parsecs separated him from his wife.

"Thinking about home, colonel?" the static-punctuated minivox-link interrupted his thoughts.  The colonel looked up.  Commissar Silas had his head turned away, his good eye giving a critical glance at the line of troopers under Col. Galbraith’s command.
"That’s where most my thoughts are these days, Commissar."  Galbraith said evenly.  The commissar turned to him.  Little was left unmarked on the surface of Silas’ face.  Part of that face was covered in bionic enhancements, compensating for the wounds that had gouged his left eye and torn through rest of what had been a face.  A red shine focused on Col. Galbraith, who looked right back at it.  "It would be better, colonel, for you to turn your thoughts to the task at hand.  Your role is vital in the coming battle.  For your sake, and for the sake of your men, I hope you find time to dedicate your thoughts to the Emperor’s will and our divine mission here."
"Ridding the planet of Xenos," Galbraith tucked the image of his wife away into a safe corner of his mind, as he conjured up the hazy memory of his enemy, the flowing hair, the slender build of the Eldar. 
"Exactly, Colonel.  Gather your thoughts, and lead your men."
Col. Ravik Galbraith of the 118th Volistad regiment hadn’t kept himself alive for over ten years of almost constant fighting because he was fool-hardy.  At most times, he would take the fanaticism of his regimental commissar with a grain of salt, but at least this morning, Silas was talking a bit of sense.  No use wasting it.

I’ll keep adding to this over the coming weeks, as I feel like it.  If you guys have suggestions or you like what’s going on, please leave a comment.  -Rj

Realities repeat themselves, don’t they? 

Baghdad, 2006. The young man, lying in the ditch at the side of the road, clutches his automatic rifle to his chest, sweat and blood dripping across his brow.  His ears ring after the explosion, and the chatter of enemy machine guns seems distant, though it is coming from a building fifty meters away.  He sees a hand, ripped from someone’s arm, a pink and red fleshy thing barely a foot from his nose.  Bits of dust get into his eye, kicked up by a hail of bullets peppering the dirt in front of him.  He wipes out the grime, and hunkers down, whispering a prayer and cursing God at the same time.

Danang, 1966.  The young man, lying in the ditch at the side of the road, clutches his rifle to his chest, sweat and blood dripping across his brow.  His ears ring after the explosion, and the chatter of enemy machine guns seems distant, though it is coming from a well-camouflaged bunker fifty meters away.  He sees a hand, ripped from someone’s arm, a pink and red fleshy thing barely a foot from his nose.  Bits of dust get into his eye, kicked up by a hail of bullets peppering the dirt in front of him.  He wipes out the grime, and hunkers down, whispering a prayer and cursing God at the same time.

Brussels, 1916.  The young man, lying in the ditch at the side of the road, clutches his rifle to his chest, sweat and blood dripping across his brow.  His ears ring after the explosion, and the chatter of enemy machine guns seems distant, though it coming from a trench fifty meters away.  He sees a hand, ripped from someone’s arm, a pink and red fleshy thing barely a foot from his nose.  Bits of dust get into his eye, kicked up by a hail of bullets peppering the dirt in front of him.  He wipes out the grim, and hunkers down, whispering a prayer and cursing God at the same time.

Just a weird dream I had.  I hope its a premonition of sorts. 

The class description was “Re-Introduction to Physics:
Themes in the Archeology of Physical Science”, and the professor was something
of a quintessential example of the physics instructor: a short Indian man,
wearing a brown sweater, glasses and a wiry mustache, with a bald head that
reflected the classroom’s white fluorescent lights. On the overhead, he flashed the courses’
title, and he turned to the class of twenty-some students.

“To what extent can a system describe the component?” 

A low murmur rippled across the students. I shifted in my
seat, organizing my thoughts, my eyes moving from the professor back to the
overhead. Scientific inquiry, in the
classic sense, has always been inductive: a generality derived from a
particular case. But the flow, in terms
of describing systems, has always been a deconstruction of the whole to
describe its various component parts: A car engine is studied in terms of
parts, a computer program in terms of its algorithms, and a society in terms of
its institutions. 

A young woman from the back of the class echoed my
thoughts. The professor nodded. 

“You’ve described the current thinking about science, what
we know works, or we think works, in the field of physics. But what I’m driving at is how we can
determine that a particular component, given that systems are considered distinct
entities that are more than the sum of their component parts, can be
interchanged with the study of the total system. We can describe a total system in terms of
its parts, but we aren’t in the business of describing parts in terms of the
total system. Can we know something
about the liver by studying the total
human being? Can we know something about
a planet by studying the total solar
system?”

I raised my hand. 

“Yes?”

“Dr. Chandra, I have an idea of what you might be trying to
point out. In studying themes, it becomes possible to relate the component to
the overall system. But the themes, or
underlying patterns, that describe the total system can be determined at the
component level. For example, the
liver,” I took a breath to arrange my words, “displays a level of
self-organization as well as purpose within a larger framework. The same principle applies to human beings,
at least in how they act within the larger framework of the society.” 

“Go on.”

“And so, when we study over-all themes, underlying patterns,
we are actually describing multiple levels within the system itself. Attraction, for example, is present even at
the quantum level—although manifested by different forces—it still remains a
principle to govern quantum particles.” 

“What then would be the value of knowing these underlying
themes?”

The young woman at the back of the classroom answered. I turned to listen. 

“Besides the aesthetic value of knowing that there are
underlying patterns to the behavior of systems and their components, it also
helps unify our understanding of the field, giving us a critical framework, a
tool to understand various levels of, in this case, physical phenomena.”

“But isn’t it potentially limiting?” I asked. “If we’re
preoccupied with themes, we might dismiss other insights or new observations
because they don’t conform to the preset themes.” 

She frowned. “No. That’s only if you’re
limited in your thinking as well. That’s
where science is supposed to come in: if there’s a doubt, it needs to be
tested. What a thematic approach does is
provide a framework for that testing. Going back to the example of quantum attraction, you wouldn’t have
recognized the forces if you didn’t have a framework of electromagnetism and
gravity.”

In studying the evolution of discourse, as with most studies, I found myself following several distinct phases.  Just to note, these phases are in no way progressive; in other words, I find myself shifting from one to another, in an organic way (by organic, I refer to the shifts being brought about by intrinsic forces of adaptation ie. "going with the flow", rather than external policy) as the overall study progressed. 

The first phase, or first level of study is the objective phase.  This is when the study is focused on the description of what is being studied.  In the field of science, this would be referred to as the gathering of empirical data in order to describe the naturally-occurring state of a particular event.  For example, an equation to describe the way forces of gravity between two distinct masses. If one is studying philosophy, say, of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (I don’t believe in referring to it as simply "Marx", it does injustice to Engels’ contribution), the objective phase would require a descriptive understanding of the ideas contained in their works, such as historical materialism in Das Kapital, and the downfall of capitalism in the Manifesto. 

The second phase is what I call the inductive phase.  Here, the focus of the study is on derivative functions, that is, the study of logical implications of what has been observed.  In keeping with the above examples, an inductive conclusion from Newtonian physics would be that objects in the solar system move in a circular pattern as required by their force vectors to keep from falling into the sun, in other words, they have to move at a particular speed in order to maintain a particular tangential inertia to overcome the gravitational pull (think roller coasters and apply that to the solar system, where the planet is the person in the roller coaster and the sun is the ground; the person doesn’t fall out of the ride because of the tangential inertia acting upon her body as she accelerates with the roller coaster).  This same principle applies to any satellite body in space.  We know this, not because we observe it happening, but because we conclude such from our observations and our study of the present phenomenon.  In the realm of social philosophy, one might induce– from the theories of communism– that the present trend of globalization is really a mark of the spread of international capitalism, which in turn, will bring about its antithesis in the form of popular movements fueled by the ease of internet communication.  The inductive phase of study is an interesting part, because it allows for the play of the mind, the creativity and the testing of various hypothesis derived from the objective phase.

The third level of study is the normative phase.   The normative phase, premising on the logical inductions, is when the student (in a broader sense of the word) seeks to actually influence the event to bring about a desired result or conclusion, or take advantage of the knowledge in order to generate something socially relevant or useful.  A clear example of the application of the theory of gravity is the development of artificial satellites, used in all forms of digital communication.  As for the social philosopher, the next step is to start an online movement of labor unions. 

The normative phase is, for me, the most risky and challenging of the three.  The student actually takes on a different role, and moves away from the purity of exploration and into the realm of hazy social discourse.  Rather than learning about the world, the student becomes involved in the world, and can no longer view things from a wider framework.  In other words, the philosopher we were referring to becomes an ideologue, the scientist becomes a technician.  The field of knowledge, in this state, is narrowed down in order to make science into technology, what we know into what we can use. 

Engaging in the normative phase reminds me of the story of a young swordsman, who had mastered a deadly art in isolation.  He was only a teenager when he finally learned the art of delivering high-speed swordsmanship with the objective of killing.  He understood that a sword could be used to change the world.  Against his master’s wishes, he descended from the mountains, and joined a revolution, placing his prowess and skill in the hands of an ideology.  His perception narrowed, his own ideals of right and wrong now aligned with the ideals of a revolutionary faction.  At the end of the bloody revolution, after having killed hundreds of men, the young swordsman, now a battle-hardened assassin, vowed never to kill again and to repent for the tragedies his sword had wrought. 

But even if the story is sad, and it paints a rather bleak picture of those who wish to use their knowledge to improve the world around them, it also reveals a very human and very real sort of experience: in order for any sort of story to become real, in order for the drama of life to take on a life of its own, in order for the individual to truly find individuality, the risk of the normative must be faced.  The young swordsman would never had truly grown to become the hero he was unless he had faced the true demons of war and profound contradiction within himself.  Likewise, the scientist who forwards a particular technology and the philosopher-turned-revolutionary would never find within themselves the real deal about their knowledge; their beliefs would never had been tested and they themselves would only remain on the superficial level of the pure academic. 

Like all things, it is only through testing and trial that the real value comes through.  Knowledge and discourse mean nothing within the confines of a classroom, within the words of a lecture.  Rather, when knowledge is thrown out into the world for people to use, to test, to take advantage of, to critique and to appraise, only then can the study be shown for its true worth.  The university remains a breeding ground, a hive for the generation of new ideas; but it is only the ideas that survive the test of discourse that will really end up doing some damage and changing the spin of the world.

I believe in the Night.  I believe in the pulse of the world around me, the soft touch of the earth, the spilling of water, the sparks of flame and the blowing wind.  It is the death of thought, the sacrifice of articulated logic, on an altar of instinct, summoning the demon within. 

It is the expansion of the senses, the hearing of soft steps on the forest floor, the smelling of sweat.  Touching the freshly churned earth, seeing the out-of-place lines in the pattern of trees.  It is tasting water, feeling its coldness. 

In this state of mind, people are not thought of, they are felt.  They are sensed.  They do not have names, they do not have identities.  The humans are to be hunted, because the Hunter does what is good for his instincts.  They do not belong in his wilderness.

When darkness falls, and there is no light in the jungle, the Hunter feels life rising within.  By the dappled light of a moon, by a sense of mere touch, he stalks through the forest, knowing his prey is somewhere near the scent of smoke.  A light penetrates the shadows, and the Hunter averts his gaze, keeping his night vision.  He crawls forward, inch by inch.  An hour passes, and still the humans do not see him.  He waits, until the fire is low, and they begin to sleep.  He can kill them, silently, quietly, death on a whisper.