So, I read Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" today. It's a crazy story of an ape who learns to act like a man so he can leave his cage. He never experiences "freedom" but be claims it's not what he's looking for. I guess he just trains himself to act like everyone else, so that he can just exist, instead of existing as someone, as an individual. It's really interesting and everyone should read it. It's 9 pages or so.
I've been reading lots of stuff about social convention lately, both for my Kafka class and for my Peace and Conflict Studies class. Much of the reading right now is trying to establish that warfare is a learned custom, just like marriage, or dueling, and therefore it can be unlearned. Or, better than being unlearned, peacefulness can be learned. It can be effected through attempting to root out both the impulse towards violent action to solve conflicts as well as the structural violence that causes one to receive that impulse in the first place. Structural violence as in racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, etc. With increasing globalization, the world is losing these distinctions. However, right now, the numbers of deaths in the world due to structural violence are the highest they've ever been. For example, when someone died 150 years ago of tuberculosis, that was just life and death, but today when some dies of polio, even though a vaccine exists for those fortunate enough to live in the "first world," this death can be attributed to structural violence. We must work to make a world not just free of war (negative peace), but also a world free of structural violence (this world is referred to as one of positive peace).
Well, those are some of my own thoughts interspersed with some terms i've learned and a few new concepts. I really love the fact that I'm at a place in my life where I can look at the world and see problems, but positively think about changing them, instead of thinking that doom is inevitable.
I really enjoy life.
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