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Culture is God

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Culture is God

For over 3000 years art has been an effective instrument utilized to instigate and propagate propaganda. To communicate wealth, kings would have their thrones custom made in gold. They would have statues of themselves erected to signify dominance and unadulterated power. Art was grand and bold. Art was truthful. Art was forever. Propaganda means to tell one side of the story great. For that to be achieved, we need theatricality and a truckload of charisma. We need the narcissistic and egotistical character to impose himself on the world and lay claim to being a god. We need symbols with meanings, paintings of portraits and parades on the streets with people exhibiting their skills in an art form known as dance to communicate a feeling of happiness or to spread fear and flex muscles in the form of a military parade. Art is emotive. It makes us feel, it engages our feelings and regulates our emotions. Art is powerful. Art is dramatic, it has flair. The best utilization of art as propaganda can be found in history. Particularly in the 1930’s in Germany. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party were at the helm of Germany. The aim was to restore Germany’s status in the world as a powerhouse. It had been crippled in World War one, and Hitler had ambitions of restoring it. To do this, everyone in Germany had to pledge allegiance to Hitler. Everyone had to be loyal to Hitler. Everyone had to give their lives to Hitler or simply run the risk of being killed. Hitler had a minister of propaganda who would propagate the word in the form movies and music. Children in primary school all the way to tertiary institutions started off the day singing a mandatory anthem about Hitler’s greatness and how he is Germany’s savior. Hitler proclaimed his book “Mein Kampf” as the bible of Germany and passed a law that every household in Germany should possess it and study it with great rigor and enthusiasm. The Nazi symbol (Swastika) bombarded every street and corner of Germany – it was all that people saw, all that they knew. With the aid of art, Adolf Hitler transformed himself into a literal God. He had real power, he was respected and he was feared. His military parades were so majestic and grandiose with the image of Swastikas in a form of flags and big posters everywhere; with the crowd cheering and saluting with their right hands in the air. Hitler was propaganda embodied and being an artist himself, he made it an art form.

Adolf Hitler is not the only person to use art as propaganda. Religion institutions like the Catholic Church are one of the best to ever do it. The statues they have erected are so beautiful. The architecture of their churches – it’s so sublime, so extraterrestrial and yet calming, conservative and reassuring. The inside of the church is spectacular – they have mini fountains, statues of personnel in the bible and the most beautiful paintings. Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the artists who contributed in the churches art. He painted one of the most remarkable and beautiful paintings ever, notably the last supper – it was realistic, alive, animated, spirited and energetic. The picture is exactly what God and bible were conveying. Leonardo Da Vinci did it, he hit the nail right on top of the head. The church has this impressive aura, from their paintings, the churches architecture, their statues, their props, the congregation – they are magnificent! In 2019, we still see propaganda propagated in widespread areas. In Gauteng, Sandton resides a bronze statue of first democratically elected president Nelson Mandela. It is huge and commemorative. Like the Grand Canyon, tourists from all parts of life frequent it to take pictures and busk in its glory and magnificence. There is also a majestic bridge located in Newtown, Johannesburg that is named after the great man. It is a beautiful piece of architecture that draws tourists in. It is grand and sublime. At night, it lights up in a way that almost takes your breath away – it is so beautiful. Nelson Mandela was a great man, however mortality meant that he was limited. Art and culture has elevated his name in the realm of immortality and gods.

Religion was created to help us with fundamental issues of existence namely ethics, morality and values. Like Philosophy it taught how to live – but in a reserved and calculated manner. It helped with nihilistic thoughts and depression. It gave us a reason to live. By negating the material world in favor of a Heaven or Utopia, it unloaded the burden on our shoulders and made us strive for an ideal. It was beautiful, subtle and effective. The world had an order. People’s behaviors could be predicted. There was harmony in communities. Conduct was born, to be different meant a transgression to society, so that was avoided by all means. Everyone strived to be a “good” person. Religion created that culture in communities, in all parts of the world. It created the culture of empathy and sympathy – the essence of being a good person, it created a culture of order and it created a culture of submissiveness. As a crowd management system, it had its frailties that were exposed in the dawn of the industrial revolution. People in their numbers now lived in the city. The city was confined and restricted with no trees or an ecosystem that supported life. Life in the city was stressful, demanding and expedient. Religion had protected people from the notion and truth that life was suffering and now everything was unfolding – people’s lives were falling apart. Religion did not have the tools or answers to help people deal with their demanding lives. Heaven as a consolation prize for the suffering evident and prevailing was not enough. This resulted in people having nihilistic thoughts. 21st Century philosopher Nietzsche professed that “God was dead!” on his amazing work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. It was a fair assessment of reality and the future.

Now in 2019, on the 4th industrial revolution with the emergence of artificially created life, we see the evidence of god’s death. More and more people now live in cities as opposed to small intimate villages in a community where everyone knows one another. Life is on the fast lane and church isn’t even in the car. It is trailing behind, losing a drag race by miles. Life is even more demanding, life is more stressful and life is more expedient. Thinking is a luxury! Loneliness and depression are the epidemics of the world. Suicide rates are skyrocketing. Crime at an all-time high and Capitalism – the new culture of the world destroying religion making sure that we feed on one another like cannibalistic life forms. The capitalistic system is god. The capitalistic system is culture. It has devoured religions ethics, morality and values leaving the population confused about their self-identity, about a self-campus on where to go. We are about in the wild chasing novelty after novelty. Lost. Empty. The song “No Church in the Wild” by Jay –Z & Kanye West explores our reality in great detail. It is about how everything is permitted in a world where god is dead. The visuals for this song is the most powerful thing you will ever see. Both Jay –Z & Kanye West are exempted from the video, instead we see a movie where there is a lot of chaos, fighting and death. It is the artist’s job to reflect the world to the people, a job Jay –Z and Kanye West did remarkably well with high distinction. It is a piece of art that will immortalize them. It is brilliant.

Kanye West is one of the few artists in the world to understand the role of art, to understand the power that it has. He is an intelligent man who aligns himself with the outlandish and provocative. He does this because he understands the order of the world. He does this because he knows culture, rules. To shift culture, you have to be unconventional, mysterious, unpredictable and a loose screw. Being unpredictable makes you powerful. This is a skill that Kanye West has mastered all his life. In 2007, Kim Kardashian released a sex-tape on the internet with then boyfriend “Ray J”. It was a strategic ploy on her side to attain power. It was a bold move, it was gritty, gutsy and it was scandalous! She became an instant star. She had a great body and her boyfriend was a celebrity. She was all the internet talked about. Fresh from the release of his mega successful album Graduation in 2007, Kanye West started courting Kim Kardashian. With the trajectory of his career on the ascendency he saw an opportunity. Kim Kardashian’s public persona was too good for him to pass up on, it was scandalous, promiscuous, bold, gutsy, sexy, forbidden and phallic. Kim Kardashian was extremely powerful and he (Kanye) knew this. Ultimately, he married Kim and Kim Kardashian married a successful, rapper and entrepreneur who graced the cover of “Times” magazine thus legitimizing her brand and image. The marriage was a perfect fit. As a couple, they had influence, they had power and they would be the talk of popular culture. 2013 saw the release of his sixth album “Yeezus”. Once again, he had aligned himself with a powerful figure “Jesus Christ”. It was typical Kanye who freed himself from all the barriers and boxes that contained everyone else. From that move, naturally he was all that people could talk about. With the aid of art, he became mythical. It was propaganda, by aligning himself with “Jesus Christ”, a cult-like following emerged and started creating pictures of him as Jesus. It was a frenzy. It made him powerful. Soon enough, everyone was imitating him – now the world had artists like “Reazus” and “Teezus”. Kanye West was idolized and worshipped.

The internet has bestowed on to people the power to be gods. Art is something we could use to improve that god-like status. The danger of the internet is that it has also created illusions. Being headstrong is a requirement. The “death of god” has to have a powerful effect on us. We have to do things for ourselves and have the courage to live life in its totality. We have to be brave and venture out in the world with a strong belief in ourselves and our abilities. God cannot do anything for us because everything was fabricated by culture – and culture is made up of people like me and you. Everything in the world is made up of culture and influence. Love is cultural invention – initially it was an escape from our loneliness and boredom. The internet has gifted us the opportunity to be better, to be influential, and to be gods.

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Mr. Entrepreneur

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Mr. Entrepreneur

This is a 2am post. I couldn’t sleep. I am haunted. I hear voices in my head. That creative demon is possessing me again. Bringing this out in the world will make me feel better. It will enable me to sleep. I intend to post this. Well done Internet, you even have my most inner thoughts, you know me better than I know myself. I try to not identify with my ego because that’s not who I am. I don’t have to pick a side, I can actively choose to be a bystander, to just look and have no opinion. I am not what people say I am. I am not my mind. I am not my possessions. I am not my status. I am not my wealth. I am not the number of followers I have on my socials. I am not my past. I just am, alive, existence. So maybe you don’t know me Internet, because how can you? I am spontaneous. I don’t even know what I am going to do next, the future is uncertain and that’s the element I love the most. I try to be present all the time. The present is all we ever have, everything else is all just an illusion. So why not give the present moment everything you have? Afterall, there is no such thing as the future and the afterlife is a hoax. Time is a man-made concept and so is religion. Everything is all in your head. There is no such thing as time, everything is just what it is, everything is everything! Oh, Lauryn baby, I love that song, congratulations on the great album, I heard it went Diamond! “Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” is timeless like the structure of reality. But I digress. Even though I try to not identify too much with the ego, I have to. Simply because it holds my perceived identity and reality. It is my name, my family, my friends, my social class, my environment, my past, my future, my everything. For without my ego, without time, who am I? What am I? Do I even exist? I can’t just be life, I am being. The essence of being is meaning, a purpose and the ego provides that. This is the great comedy of life because I am something and nothing at the same time. Striking the balance between this nothingness and something is the key. Zen philosophy teaches this beautifully with its insistence on the middle ground, Hu Wei which translates to none doing, don’t force things, stream with what flows easily in life. Take the middle ground and flow. You can’t not do anything, that is a feeding ground for nihilistic thoughts and a unsustainable life. That is hell. Life has to mean something. You need to have meaning in your life even though it’s derived from an ego despite the fact that you are not your ego! Being present in the eternal now is everything because you are simply life, no different from the trees and lillies in your garden. This is what I mean when I say you are not your mind because it seeks meaning from the ego and the ego is generated from external phenomena. Yet you are at the same time, it’s confusing, what a paradox existence is, life is a dichotomy. You are not what the world says you are although lines might be blurred and you might think you are. You are simply life, something spontaneous the universe created. You are a living organism in its purest form, energy, an absolute miracle, the universe experiencing itself. We can’t talk about consciousness because we can’t account for it just like we don’t beat our hearts, it just happens to us. We need the ego to function in daily life because it provides labels that can help us navigate every day life. Being mindful of your thoughts is key to understanding this.

My dominating ego is that of the entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is philosophical for me. It is my mode of existence. I derive meaning from my entrepreneurial endeavors. It is what I am to the core. It’s what I did in the past, it’s what I do in the present and because I am a creature of habit it is what I will do in the future. I love entrepreneurship because because it allows me to give everything I have to the present moment. It’s in the things I do unconsciously, what I like subconsciously. It’s in my dominant personality trait. I read Hitler with an open mind and Toy Story makes me tear up. I am a creative who has told stories all his life. I worship all art forms and content is my life. I started doing poetry when I was 8 years old. I started doing ads for television when I was 9. At 10, I was in the school choir. At 12, I started selling sweets (fireballs) at school to raise money to buy myself a PSP (Playstation Portable) and I SUCCEEDED! In Highschool, I was a football coach that coached a team that went on to dominate the district. I did it with Kay, the team we started dominated Ekuruleni for two consecutive years, went undefeated for 3 years. Still in high school with my other friends, we created a cult in the form of a concert that lived on for many years after we had graduated. The entrepreneurial spirit is engraved within, again it is who I am to the core. I’ve always been self-sufficient, self-reliant and independent. I am open-minded, creative and I start things. I have the right energy. I create beautiful things. I am passionate. I question things. I am not scared of failure. I don’t live life with fear. Not even the Coronavirus at its peak affected me, I never wore a mask. Not because of my issues with authority but because I am a fucken hero, Mr. Entrepreneur, I risk it all, I risk life! And it was a lot of noise from the media, that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to oblige because they dish out fear to keep us enslaved and in line with an agenda. People are a product for the media and authority figures. Besides, you can’t tell me what to do. You can’t control me! I live, breathe, entrepreneurship. I gave my whole soul to the process. I sacrificed everything for the process, have been ridiculed and laughed at for the process. I have cried for the process. My character has been slandered for the process. I have lost friends and acquaintances for the process. I went to hospital for the process. I am willing to die for the process! And while I am not my ego, I am an entrepreneur, that’s my spirit, my soul, the one thing that has been a constant in my life, I am a creator, I am a creative! I am unemployable, I intimidate my employers, I am too good, I am too ambitious, I am a star, a five point pentagon that cannot fit in a square, a box. Mr. entrepreneur. My time is coming, I will rule, nothing can stop me. I am inevitable like death. This is destiny, it is what must happen. This is God’s plan. I have to replace the previous generation of entrepreneurs. Someday, I will be replaced too. It’s simply my turn to serve. Sorry Devil, I know all of your tricks, you can’t make me drift. In the end I’ll win because I am the best everyday of my life, Mr. Never Change, Mr. Consistency, Mr. Entrepreneur.

Because The Internet (Life as a troll)

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Because The Internet (Life as a troll)

Popularizing the internet was met with a big problem, that it would generate an existential crisis within the population. The internet would unlock so many dimensions and doors for the mind that it would struggle to distinguish reality from fables. Not that the internet would cause a cognitive decline but rather that the lines would be so blurred and so thin that reality and the internet would objectively constitute as one. Unsupervised, the internet would be a black hole, sucking humanity off its roots into an abyss – uncharted territory, for the mind to find its feet in a world of subjective space. However, the internet had been humanities greatest achievement. Our denial of death resulted in the concoction of forever. With the advent of the internet we could do whatever we wanted. It was a terrific tool. Communication barriers would be bridged. Entertainment widespread and rife and instant gratification would be the norm. Not making this available to the general public would be the greatest injustice in the history of humankind. It would deem us primitive in the context of time. Humanity needs this leap to fulfil what our soul’s desire the most – immortality.

In 2013, Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino released an album titled “Because the Internet” and it is about the struggle between real life and the internet. The album sounds like it is staged on the internet, like a blog – it is subjective yet crowded, authentic and reflects the times of this recently constructed timeline of the internet. It is scattered with different sounds and music, indicating the vast and different worlds on the internet. On the song “II. Worldstar” Gambino, mocks people who spend most of their time on the entertainment website (worldstarhiphop.com) watching fights instead of engaging with life. The album explores existentialism, the meaning of life, death, boredom, depression, love and fabricated happiness. He uses the internet as a metaphor to contrast it with life, especially with the notion that life is a loop. To communicate this point he makes the first track of the album and the last seconds of the last track on the album the same. The album loops and ever ends indicating the subjects covered in the album form part of a repetition in the game of life and the internet. Lupe Fiasco testifies on this sentiment on his hit single “Old School Love” when he states “Your future is somebody else’s past”. On the last song of the album he makes a bold declaration indicating that the internet and life is one of the same thing and that there’s no major distinction – life is a troll and the joke is on us. His words echo Horace Walpole who once stated “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” Glover extends his sentiments on the comic nature of life when he states “Funny, the day you born that’s really your death sentence.” The internet has the power to preserve and immortalize your spirit but once you are gone, your spirit is looped in the realm of time creating a pathological order in the world: so much for immortality, the joke is on you, for if you elevate your perspective you’ll see yourself as a grain of sand on a dessert. There’s no such thing as immortality.

You have to marvel at Glover’s intelligence, the album is a masterpiece. The internet has devoured reality perceived through our senses. What constitutes as reality is no longer objective but subjective. The Internet used to be abstract but it’s a very real thing now. Reality is blurred. The internet has immersed itself with our senses. We have become cyborgs – one with our smartphones that are connected to the internet and artificial intelligence. We cannot live without the internet. It has opened up doors that are impossible to close. Galaxies that are impossible to count and personas that need to be fed. We feared the internet would turn illusions into reality, we feared that it would leave us disconnected, we feared that it would make our minds passive, we feared over indulgence would lead to addiction, we feared that it would leave us lost – and it has, it has done everything and more. But it is still one of the coolest things we have invented. Life has improved, we have developed into a multifaceted species with god-like powers! When we finally get the meaning of life it will be because the internet – just kidding! There is no meaning.

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