"Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what

"Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what kind of technology, made by whom and why, used how and why. > War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. -- George Orwell There is no "Western psyche". Only individual people have one, and I for one write dystopian rap lyrics as a way to cleanse myself, to uplift myself -- and it works, too. You cannot polish a turd but you sure can make a shiny painting of it. It changes nothing, especially since in my case I don't much care for an audience, but it changes me. It reminds me to not give in when too many people around me do the opposite. If you are more shocked and depressed by being called an accomplice and tool of murderers than by all the countless people being dead, that's too much sympathy with the aggressor and too little with the victims. Not buying one bit of it, except I would agree that "The West" is not terribly special, just ahead in some respects, and that poor people can be dicks, too. It goes through all strata and all continents, but yeah, I'll just say it: most people aren't good enough, they haven't been given enough or didn't have the freedom to take enough as a child. They are like bonsai trees to the actual tree they should be, and that's why we get the results we get. Too big groups of too little people. And while I can't prevent what people do, but I can change my own habits and think thrice about whom I am loyal to and why. And you know, if everybody did just that, that would be more than enough. IMO one has to decide between the people who are and the people who should be, you can't serve two masters. > A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery. It really depends on what that knowledge and bravery are. I'm thinking of all sorts of action movies that are really just a glorification of fascism winning against "fascism plus $nasty_thing", and essentially just sits on the receptors for non-bullshit without not being bullshit. In contrast, the kind of things that leave me with a bad ending force me to resist, and to develop my own knowledge and bravery. Think "The Wire", for example. Too many happy endings, and you have bubble gum, too little hope, and you have a mouthful of dirt. But still: > Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. -- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27th 1904