• Articles

    Our Lynchian world

    January 21, 2025 - By 

    A brief tribute to David Lynch (1946-2025)

    Whatever you think of his films, David Lynch was no doubt an interesting character, as well as one of the last true artists of the modern age.

    Now, having recently died, he is being widely celebrated, but it was not always so. For years many dismissed him as an eccentric creator of artsy fartsy nonsense, and he had trouble financing many of his projects.

    His last two feature films had to be finished with European funding, as American studios cancelled them before completion, and in fact he did not make a feature film since 2006’s Inland Empire, which was independently produced. (His last major work, however, Twin Peaks: The Return, from 2017, was financed by an American TV channel).

    His work was not everyone’s cup of tea. I personally find some of his work endlessly fascinating, while there are other things that I can’t bring myself to like.

    The first film of his I saw was probably Dune (1984). I watched in the cinemas when I was just 12 or 13 and had just read the book. I remember liking a lot of it, even if the whole felt a bit choppy and incoherent. I re-watched it recently, and, despite its defects, caused mostly by the producer’s cuts, I still like it much better than the current version by Villeneuve, which I couldn’t even finish.

    I also like Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead. Those are probably his masterpieces, in particular the last two, one made at the beginning of his career and another towards the end.

    I don’t like so much Wild at Heart. In fact, I hated it the first time I saw it, but it takes courage to appreciate anything with Nicholas Cage.

    Lost Highway and Fire Walk With Me are interesting, but a bit too dark for my taste. Not among my favourites, even though both have great moments and characters.

    Twin Peaks, the original from the 1990s, is amazing and revolutionary until the forced revelation of the murder mystery, then it becomes increasingly silly. But, like in Dune, the producers are the ones to blame here, more than Lynch.

    I am a bit more ambiguous about Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). It has some great things and some pretty bad things, an uneven pace and a few scenes that feel (to me) more like a caricature of Lynch than real Lynch, as if they were directed by an evil doppelganger of the director. Perhaps it would have been better if it had been kept to the original planned length of 9 episodes instead of 18. But there are many scenes and at least one full episode, “Got a light”, which is pure Lynchian brilliancy.

    Also, considering the Twin Peaks universe as a whole, which includes all three series plus Fire Walk With Me and perhaps a few other references in other movies, it is a certainly a tour de force that includes much of the director’s best work.

    It is a cliche that his films follow the logic of dreams more than coherent plots. This is true, but not in the way most people think.

    Take Mulholland Drive, for instance. Many interpret the story to be a “dream” in the first two thirds, and “reality” in the last third.

    But, in fact, the whole thing is a dream. It’s just that the second part is a nightmare, but no more “real” than the first part. It’s just two sides of the same coin.

    By the way, for those who don’t know, Mulholland Drive is a road full of curves that goes across the Hollywood hills, where many stars and former stars’ houses are located, and from which at its highest point you can see a wonderful view of the city. It can also be a bit scary: at night it is usually empty and silent, but it is also pretty narrow and curvy and dark, and you never know if a car might be coming at you at full speed on the next curve. When I lived in Los Angeles, in the early 2010s, I enjoyed driving at night along Mulholland Drive and pretending I was in a David Lynch movie. (And who’s to say I wasn’t?).

    Lynch’s main theme, repeated in several films, can probably be summarized as this: nothing in the world is really what it seems. There is something beyond the purely material universe. There are many supernatural entities — call them demons, ghost, angels or fairies — who interfere in our Earthly reality, and there is a constant cosmic battle between Good and Evil.

    Years ago, such view might have been dismissed as a fairy tale.

    But just watch the news, look at what’s happening out there. Look at what they are selling to you as “reality” and at what they’re labeling as “conspiracy” or “fantasy”. Look at the freaky, nightmarish creatures in the upper echelons of our society and political world. Look at what’s behind the red curtain.

    It is increasingly clear that Lynch’s movies were more realistic than we gave him credit for. It’s a David Lynch world, we’re just living in it.

  • Articles

    Merry Christmas!

    December 25, 2024 - By 

    The other day I was looking for a Christmas card with a Nativity scene to send to a more religious friend and I couldn’t find a single one. It was all trees, presents, Santa Claus, reindeers and even penguins. But no Nativity scene.

    Now, it is true that Christmas since the beginning adopted many pre-Christian symbols, in particular the tree that came from Nordic culture, but it is also true that there has been a more recent push to completely remove all religious symbols from Christmas. Perhaps it was simply that as the culture became more and more secular, those elements slowly fell into disuse, although it feels more like an artificial push than an organic movement.

    Symbols change, it’s true. The early Christian symbol was a fish (Ichtis), not the Cross. Santa Claus (Saint Nikolaus) didn’t always wear red nor lived in the North Pole, but was portrayed dressed more like a bishop. Most customs and symbols that we associate today with Christmas are fairly recent, from the late 19th century and later. But they do have a root in earlier traditions, even as everything became more commercial and the party became more about gifts and food than anything else.

    And yet, without the holiday being about a miraculous birth, there is not much point to Christmas celebrations. I suppose some people still celebrate winter solstice these days, but it’s not really the same thing. What is the point of giving gifts if it’s just about the sun being at one place instead or another?

    In Rome, where I visited recently, in the Basilica de Santa Maria Maggiore, you can see an altar that supposedly contains four slabs of wood from the original manger in Betlehem where Jesus was placed when he was born. Who knows if it is real, but it is a nice symbol and remembrance of the real motive of the celebration. The birth of Child, and the birth of a new era. Peace on Earth to all men of good will.

     

    One of the earliest Christian symbols, 2nd century AD. Roman Museum.

    Slabs of wood from Christ’s manger, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.
  • Articles

    Merry Christmas!

    December 25, 2024 - By 

    The other day I was looking for a Christmas card with a Nativity scene to send to a more religious friend and I couldn’t find a single one. It was all trees, presents, Santa Claus, reindeers and even penguins. But no Nativity scene.

    Now, it is true that Christmas since the beginning adopted many pre-Christian symbols, in particular the tree that came from Nordic culture, but it is also true that there has been a more recent push to completely remove all religious symbols from Christmas. Perhaps it was simply that as the culture became more and more secular, those elements slowly fell into disuse, although it feels more like an artificial push than an organic movement.

    Symbols change, it’s true. The early Christian symbol was a fish (Ichtis), not the Cross. Santa Claus (Saint Nikolaus) didn’t always wear red nor lived in the North Pole, but was portrayed dressed more like a bishop. Most customs and symbols that we associate today with Christmas are fairly recent, from the late 19th century and later. But they do have a root in earlier traditions, even as everything became more commercial and the party became more about gifts and food than anything else.

    And yet, without the holiday being about a miraculous birth, there is not much point to Christmas celebrations. I suppose some people still celebrate winter solstice these days, but it’s not really the same thing. What is the point of giving gifts if it’s just about the sun being at one place instead or another?

    In Rome, where I visited recently, in the Basilica de Santa Maria Maggiore, you can see an altar that supposedly contains four slabs of wood from the original manger in Betlehem where Jesus was placed when he was born. Who knows if it is real, but it is a nice symbol and remembrance of the real motive of the celebration. The birth of Child, and the birth of a new era. Peace on Earth to all men of good will.

  • Articles

    Love is the answer, but I forgot the question

    November 20, 2024 - By 

    Loneliness in the modern world

    The algorithm works in mysterious ways. 

    I spent almost a full year working in a documentary film about Finland, taking the trouble to create complicated stop-motion scenes to represent dreams, and hardly anyone watched it. I think not even the people who appear in the film watched it. Maybe it was too long and too boring. Too artsy-fartsy. I don’t know.

    Then I published a quickly made video about my nostalgia for old technologies, and it had 3,000 views in a day. Weird.  

    But today I want to talk about something else. About love and friendship. About our relationships with others, and about how they are being affected by the strange world in which we live. 

    • (Note: You can also watch this in video version, above. Some people prefer it)

    I think it was the pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer who said it, but it could have been somebody else. He said that people are like hedgehogs. If they get too far apart, they feel lonely, but if they get too close, they prickle each other with their thorns.

    It’s true, but it’s also true that we cannot live without human connections. And while we may have thorns, we also learn to love each other despite them. We accommodate to each others’ thorns. 

    But the world were we live is against all kinds of human connections.  

    Forming a family has become increasingly hard for young men and young women. Birth rates are collapsing in most of the world.

    Even friendships are becoming more difficult, sometimes for reasons no one can understand. It’s hard. 

    Weird programs of social engineering have been created to set people increasingly apart, or to make them suspicious of each other. In no other age as in the modern world have there been so many people living alone. 

    It’s not just families. All kinds of social relations are being affected. People are increasingly hesitant to engage with others. 

    In Bowling Alone, written 20 years ago, Robert Putnam talked about how people were reducing their social interactions with their fellow citizens. There were less and less people joining clubs, joining the church choir, playing sports, organizing charity events.  

    Now, it’s much worse. Connections are mostly virtual. Even dating has become a completely online phenomenon, and everybody hates it. 

    And increasingly they want us living alone in pods, or locked inside a virtual world. 

    Covid was the worst. They forced families to be apart, made nonsensical rules about social distancing, and in some countries they even forbade people to go out and socialize with friends if they didn’t have a vaccine pass. 

    Now the Covid operation has been forgotten, as if it had never existed, and while the extremism of the policies has passed, the bad feeling caused by them remains. 

    And they continue with other policies to separate people, maybe not as extreme, but no less insidious. 

    It’s hard to live like this. But we must fight against this order that wants to destroy not just the family but any form of human relationship. They want atomized consumers, not humans. And so, even if it’s hard, we must rebel.  

    We must form communities again. We must form families again. We must form churches and clubs again. Even if it has to be outside the system.

    We must learn to love one another again. 

    And we must not feel anxious if things don’t always work.

    It’s going to be a slow process. 

    Remember, there is a reason for everything, even if we don’t always know it.

  • Articles - Featured - Memories

    Love is the answer, but I forgot the question: Loneliness in the modern world

    November 20, 2024 - By 

    The algorithm works in mysterious ways.

    I spent almost a full year working in a documentary film about Finland, taking the trouble to create complicated stop-motion scenes to represent dreams, and hardly anyone watched it. I think not even the people who appear in the film watched it. Maybe it was too long and too boring. Too artsy-fartsy. I don’t know.

    Then I published a quickly made video about my nostalgia for old technologies, and it had 3,000 views in a day. Weird.

    But today I want to talk about something else. About love and friendship. About our relationships with others, and about how they are being affected by the strange world in which we live.

    • (Note: You can also watch this in video version, above. Some people prefer it)

    I think it was the pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer who said it, but it could have been somebody else. He said that people are like hedgehogs. If they get too far apart, they feel lonely, but if they get too close, they prickle each other with their thorns.

    It’s true, but it’s also true that we cannot live without human connections. And while we may have thorns, we also learn to love each other despite them. We accommodate to each others’ thorns.

    Hedgehogs are very cute, though. Cuter than most humans.

    But the world were we live is against all kinds of human connections.

    Forming a family has become increasingly hard for young men and young women. Birth rates are collapsing in most of the world.

    Even friendships are becoming more difficult, sometimes for reasons no one can understand. It’s hard.

    Weird programs of social engineering have been created to set people increasingly apart, or to make them suspicious of each other. In no other age as in the modern world have there been so many people living alone.

    It’s not just families. All kinds of social relations are being affected. People are increasingly hesitant to engage with others.

    In Bowling Alone, written 20 years ago, Robert Putnam talked about how people were reducing their social interactions with their fellow citizens. There were less and less people joining clubs, joining the church choir, playing sports, organizing charity events.

    Now, it’s much worse. Connections are mostly virtual. Even dating has become a completely online phenomenon, and everybody hates it.

    And increasingly they want us living alone in pods, or locked inside a virtual world.

    Is it just me, or this image feels extremely creepy?

    Covid was the worst. They forced families to be apart, made nonsensical rules about social distancing, and in some countries they even forbade people to go out and socialize with friends if they didn’t have a vaccine pass.

    Now the Covid operation has been forgotten, as if it had never existed, and while the extremism of the policies has passed, the bad feeling caused by them remains.

    And they continue with other policies to separate people, maybe not as extreme, but no less insidious.

    It’s hard to live like this. But we must fight against this order that wants to destroy not just the family but any form of human relationship. They want atomized consumers, not humans. And so, even if it’s hard, we must rebel.

    We must form communities again. We must form families again. We must form churches and clubs again. Even if it has to be outside the system.

    We must learn to love one another again.

    And we must not feel anxious if things don’t always work.

    It’s going to be a slow process.

    Remember, there is a reason for everything, even if we don’t always know it.

    And old-style gathering in Italy in 1935.
  • Articles

    Benefits of an analog education

    November 17, 2024 - By 

    The world you were born in no longer exists. 

    When I was a child, thousands of years ago, the world was still mostly analog. 

    I listened to vinyl records and tapes. 

    I had a walkman. That was considered a great innovation back then.

    Sometimes the tape got stuck and you needed to rewind it with a pen.

    We had rotary phones at home. We used pay phones when we needed to call someone if we were outside. 

    We took pictures with film cameras that you had to take to the lab to see how they came out. We did not have social media, so we could just show the photos to family or close friends. Nobody else saw them. 

    I had the privilege of shooting short movies with a 35 mm camera, and working with film projectors.  

    I still love the sound of film rolling. 

    The first computer I had, you had to load the game by playing a tape. 

    That had an interesting sound too. 

    The second computer I had, you had green letters on a black screen, and no Windows. 

    Today, all that is gone, of course. 

    Social media, smartphones and now AI have changed things.

    But is it good?

    First of all, I would like to make one thing clear. Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. There is no intelligence involved. Certainly no conscience or volition. I think automation is a better term. 

    In some ways, automation will make things easier. But in other ways, it will make things more complicated. 

    Of course it will also end with a lot of jobs, especially for people in the low end of the curve. 

    It’s interesting that at the same time that they develop AI, they are bringing in a lot of uneducated migrants for jobs they will no longer have.

    Or will they? Some jobs still cannot be made by automation, or it’s cheaper to hire people at very low costs. 

    One effect it will have, I think, is that most people will no longer know how to write properly. It will do for writing what calculators did for math. You need a letter or a paper for school? Let ChatGPT do it. 

    Now, I don’t think that’s a very big problem, because most people can’t write anyway. Before, students would copy from encyclopedias or from each other, now they use ChatGPT. Garbage in, garbage out. 

    I think the real problem, and you see that already, is a huge proliferation of bad-quality writing. Lots of people who, not knowing how to write, try to create an essay or even a novel using one of those automated systems.  

    Lots of things on the Internet are already texts written by bots. It’s possible that a lot of journalism will be replaced by AI, if it isn’t already. There’s not a lot of skill involved in writing news.

    The same goes for AI art. It’s proliferating everywhere. I don’t think it’s good. 

    But I think one good effect of AI art is that it also creates a backlash. It is bringing back people interested in the traditional arts. I recently started oil painting, and there are quite a lot of interesting videos right now about classic painting, and lots of people interested in them.

    One of the things I liked about the recent Beetlejuice sequel was that most of the effects were practical. Masks, puppets, even stop-motion. 

    I think a lot of people enjoyed that. 

    But back to the topic. I think that the real main problem with automation is that it will most likely lead to a new form of autocratic government. 

    Technologies such as facial recognition will be able to track you and pinpoint you everywhere. 

    With digital cash, they will be able to see everything you spend, and freeze your accounts if such is needed. 

    Other technologies will track everything you do, write or even think. 

    It’s simply inevitable. There are already cars that, while not yet fully automated, won’t allow you to go above the road’s speed limit. If you do so, it will automatically send your data and location to the nearest police station. 

    Technology does many things, some good, some bad, but in general it does not lead to greater freedom. Most people were freer when they lived in the countryside or in the middle ages.

    It’s not a coincidence that most dystopias, such as 1984 or Brave New World, involved some form of technological control.

    But things are what they are. I’m not sure you can put the technological genie back in the bottle. 

    As, for me, sometimes I think, what would have happened if technology had simply frozen to what we had in the 1980s or 1990s? Would that be so bad? Is life so much better today than it was back then? Are we happier? Are we more productive? 

    I don’t know. My own impression is that life was better in the 1990s. But it could be just nostalgia.

  • Articles

    The Internet is dead

    November 8, 2024 - By 

    “AI” killed the Internet star

    You know what, I miss the 1990s. All the way up to the early 2000s. And not just because I was young in that period. It’s not just nostalgia. Those years were objectively better. There were great movies (too many to list), great music (many great bands from the 1980s still active and many good new ones), even great sitcoms — I’ve recently re-watched “Spaced”, a classic British sitcom from 1999-2000, and I still found it funny and endearing, although in that case it could be just nostalgia: I did live in London in those years, after all).

    But, more importantly, in those times the so-called Internet was just beginning to show its vast potential.

    We called it the “world wide web” back then. I think no one uses this expression anymore. (I know the “web” and “Internet” technically refer to different things, but anyway, the point is that no one says “world wide web” or even “www” anymore.)

    Up until 2010 or so, the main form of publishing was blogging. You set up a blog with Blogger or WordPress, and voilà. You could get thousands of readers. Sometimes friendships were formed. And you could find a lot of free, interesting and uncensored information.

    No one uses Blogger or WordPress anymore. Now there’s mostly social media: Facebook, Instagram. Even Twitter became “X”, one of the worst rebrands ever.

    It’s not the same thing at all. Now everything is controlled, spied, branded, censored.

    For former bloggers, there is Substack, but it’s also not really the same thing. For one, it is really an email newsletter, not a blog. And two, perhaps because of the competition with the other companies that monopolize searching, most Substack sites are really hard to find.

    Speaking of Google: it became much worse. It is really hard to find anything useful sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s because their search engine got worse or simply because there is a lot more material online these days.

    Youtube got much worse too, especially since they started to censor people heavily during the Covid era. The most interesting creators migrated to other platforms. A lot of the videos now are very commercial. Gone are the days when any Youtuber could become a star just doing random videos without any major corporate support.

    But all that was before “AI”, of course. The new type of software that some misname “intelligence” was the killing shot.

    If “video killed the radio star“, then AI killed the Internet.

    I am not sure of the exact percentages, but a lot of texts you find online today, probably the majority, are written by bots. Just google any article about anything. Everything seems written by ChatGPT or a similar software. And as such, everything reads exactly the same. More than once I located two articles in different sites but with an identical text. I guess both authors used the same bot. Lots of commenters are bots, too.

    Image search was also contaminated by the so-called “AI art”. Google “baby peacock“, for instance, and at least half of the resulting images will be ugly, unrealistic digital images created by one of those bots.

    (The other day I watched “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, the sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988’s classic, and one of the good things about it was that most of the effects were, like in the 1980s/90s, practical effects, make-up or stop-motion. Little CGI, and certainly no random “AI art”.)

    Alas, “AI” is going to be ever more present in our lives. It is going to “curate” all of our online experience (and not only), so that you don’t risk running into some dangerous “conspiracy theory” blogger, or, God forbid, a text or an image created by a real person from scratch, and not merely recycled from data fed to a “software language model”. You’ll have to get used to use facial recognition to get into a self-driving car that you will pay with a scan of your retina, the whole shebang. It is sold as a utopia, but those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s know better. We watched all those old sci-fi movies. We know how they end.

    While I decide what to do with my own personal creations in a new Internet that has little space for them, I leave you with two little gifts.

    One is my recent documentary about Finland, “Dreaming of Finland”, linked below. The few people who have followed this blog — or well, newsletter — know that I visited Finland last year and wrote about it. Well, now there’s a film about it too. It even has some 90s style stop-motion.

    The other is Geist magazine, an independent (very independent!) magazine of literature and art that I occasionally publish. There is a new issue, number 6, Fall 2024, that just came out this past Halloween. You can read a preview here or just order an old-fashioned print copy in full colour and quality paper at our online shop here.

    Thank you.

  • Art - Featured - Memories

    “AI” killed the Internet star

    November 8, 2024 - By 

    You know what, I miss the 1990s. All the way up to the early 2000s. And not just because I was young in that period. It’s not just nostalgia. Those years were objectively better. There were great movies (too many to list), great music (many great bands from the 1980s still active and many good new ones), even great sitcoms — I’ve recently re-watched “Spaced”, a classic British sitcom from 1999-2000, and I still found it funny and endearing, although in that case it could be just nostalgia: I did live in London in those years, after all).

    But, more importantly, in those times the so-called Internet was just beginning to show its vast potential.

    We called it the “world wide web” back then. I think no one uses this expression anymore. (I know the “web” and “Internet” technically refer to different things, but anyway, the point is that no one says “world wide web” or even “www” anymore.)

    Up until 2010 or so, the main form of publishing was blogging. You set up a blog with Blogger or WordPress, and voilà. You could get thousands of readers. Sometimes friendships were formed. And you could find a lot of free, interesting and uncensored information.

    No one uses Blogger or WordPress anymore. Now there’s mostly social media: Facebook, Instagram. Even Twitter became “X”, one of the worst rebrands ever.

    It’s not the same thing at all. Now everything is controlled, spied, branded, censored.

    For former bloggers, there is Substack, but it’s also not really the same thing. For one, it is really an email newsletter, not a blog. And two, perhaps because of the competition with the other companies that monopolize searching, most Substack sites are really hard to find.

    Speaking of Google: it became much worse. It is really hard to find anything useful sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s because their search engine got worse or simply because there is a lot more material online these days.

    Youtube got much worse too, especially since they started to censor people heavily during the Covid era. The most interesting creators migrated to other platforms. A lot of the videos now are very commercial. Gone are the days when any Youtuber could become a star just doing random videos without any major corporate support.

    AI killed the Internet star

    But all that was before “AI”, of course. The new type of software that some misname “intelligence” was the killing shot.

    If “video killed the radio star“, then AI killed the Internet.

    I am not sure of the exact percentages, but a lot of texts you find online today, probably the majority, are written by bots. Just google any article about anything. Everything seems written by ChatGPT or a similar software. And as such, everything reads exactly the same. More than once I located two articles in different sites but with an identical text. I guess both authors used the same bot. Lots of commenters are bots, too.

    Image search was also contaminated by the so-called “AI art”. Google “baby peacock“, for instance, and at least half of the resulting images will be ugly, unrealistic digital images created by one of those bots.

    (The other day I watched “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, the sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988’s classic, and one of the good things about it was that most of the effects were, like in the 1980s/90s, practical effects, make-up or stop-motion. Little CGI, and certainly no random “AI art”.)

    Alas, “AI” is going to be ever more present in our lives. It is going to “curate” all of our online experience (and not only), so that you don’t risk running into some dangerous “conspiracy theory” blogger, or, God forbid, a text or an image created by a real person from scratch, and not merely recycled from data fed to a “software language model”. You’ll have to get used to use facial recognition to get into a self-driving car that you will pay with a scan of your retina, the whole shebang. It is sold as a utopia, but those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s know better. We watched all those old sci-fi movies. We know how they end.

    While I decide what to do with my own personal creations in a new Internet that has little space for them, I leave you with two little gifts.

    One is my recent documentary about Finland, “Dreaming of Finland”, linked below. The few people who have followed this blog — or well, newsletter — know that I visited Finland last year and wrote about it. Well, now there’s a film about it too. It even has some 90s style stop-motion.

    The other is Geist magazine, an independent (very independent!) magazine of literature and art that I occasionally publish. There is a new issue, number 6, Fall 2024, that just came out this past Halloween. You can read a preview here or just order an old-fashioned print copy in full colour and quality paper at our online shop here.

    Thank you.

  • Articles - Books - Featured - Russia

    “Everything is allowed”

    October 22, 2024 - By 

    There’s a lot of doom in the Internet, especially among the alternative news crowd. People can’t get enough of the “end of the world/end of the West” type of thing. While I do understand that we are living in highly worrying times, with war expanding everywhere, economic downturn, birth rate collapse, mass migration, and radical technological and social changes, I try to avoid falling in the trap of looking only at the collapse, as there are occasionally good things too. Besides, it’s a bit depressive to only having to write about doom, gloom and conspiracy theories.

    Recently I’ve been doing much more reading than writing — I haven’t published a text here in months — and I decided to revisit classic novels, reading or re-reading them. I started, where else, with the Russians. I’ve recently finished Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” — it took me only forty years. I kid, but in fact I started reading this novel when I was 16 or 17, and never finished it. Then a few months ago, I found the book in my local library and decided to pick it up again, reading it all from the start. It took me just a couple of months. I really enjoyed it, so much so that I am reading Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” now.

    The following is a somewhat disjointed digression about a famous sentence found in the Karamazov book — the text can also be watched in video form, perhaps it works better this way — and how it could apply to our current reality. Or not.

    “If there is no God, everything is allowed.”

    This sentence that became famous appears in the great novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamázov”, one of the greatest novels in the history of literature. A great, great book which I’ve only recently read. Without giving any spoilers, let’s just say that it is the story of three brothers with three very different personalities and destinies. Dmitri is the impulsive and reckless one, Alyosha is the moral and good-hearted one, and Ivan is the intellectual and cynical one. And Ivan is the one who says this sentence.

    But what does it mean?

    It means that without God there are no moral rules, and man can do anything he wants. Rape, incest, murder.

    “Do what thou wilt, that shall be the law”.

    There are two consequences to this. One is that moral notions of good and evil have to come from God, from above. Otherwise it just comes from one man to another group of men, and it becomes merely a question of power.

    The second part is that you should have clear, inflexible rules.”Thou shall not murder.” “Thou shall not covet thy neighbours’ wife”.  Otherwise, you have relativism. Or things like utilitarianism: “the greater good for the greater number of people”.

    But then, if you have four people and three of them don’t like the fourth one, they can kill him, because that would be “the greater good for the greater number of people”, right?

    And so we are back to “Everything is allowed.”

    This idea comes, a bit, from Nietzsche’s sentence that “God is dead”, and the growing nihilism that was already at the time very noticeable in society, not just in Russia but in Europe in general. We are talking here about the late 19th century, when science was advancing, society was changing and more traditional notions of behaviour were starting to disappear.

    The 20th century saw even greater changes, with feminism, the sexual revolution, the rise of modern democracy, and the further secularization of society, as well as incredible technological changes.

    Today, things have gone much further. We live in times of extreme moral confusion, or maybe we should even say moral inversion. Good is called bad, and bad is called good. Black is called white, and white, black. Women are called men and men are called women.

    Since we can’t even accept Nature as it is, the rules of society have become increasingly nonsensical.

    As people are increasingly stabbed in the streets by foreigners, governments worldwide react by banning knives. Or scissors. Or hammers.

    Or social media posts.

    Newspapers were always full of lies, but, with the rise of modern digital mass media and now what is called, incorrectly, “Artificial Intelligence”, which further increases the possibilities of image manipulation, we don’t even know what is real and what isn’t. Perhaps we never knew. History was always written by the winners. Not everything we were told in school and history books was true.

    Our leaders, the ones who should rule us and protect us, have become our worst enemies. There have always been tyrants, but this is probably the first time in history where there’s a whole worldwide government system that hates its population, or, at most, sees humans as replaceable cogs in a machine. Animals with no souls, to be hacked by vaccines and gene manipulation.

    Even religious leaders offer little solace. Most of them are also part of this global system that wants to destroy traditional society in the name of a new global order.

    What to do? How can we get rid of this evil global that seems to increasingly control everything and lead us into a global technological dystopia?

    In Dostoevski’s novel, there is another character, called Father Zossima, a monk who is the mentor of the young Alyosha. And he says some interesting things which may be worth repeating.

    At one point omeone asks him, “How can you prove that God exists?” And he says, well, you can’t. But if you love everyone and everything, if you spend your life actively loving your neighbours, one day, you will understand. But he warns that such love has to be active, real love.

    Because the truth, as Dostoevsky observes in the novel, is that many people love humanity in the abstract, but they don’t really love humans. They just love a certain notion that they have about humanity, or perhaps they just love the idea of being considered a “good person”.

    And so you have a lot of what we call virtue-signallers. People who like to appear as if they are noble or good and are always fighting for the right causes. But it is just status-mongering. It’s not real love. They love humanity as an abstract concept. But loving real people is hard. Most people are annoying or ungrateful. They lie, they cheat, they stink. When Jesus said that you should love your neighbour, he never said it would be easy.

    Father Zossima also asks: “what is Hell?” And he says something very interesting. He says, “I maintain that Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.” And if we think about our rulers — and I don’t mean just the politicians, but the billionaires, the bankers, the real rulers behind the façade of the state — we see a lot of people that have a lot of power and riches. They have yachts, mansions, cars, women. But despite that, many of them don’t seem happy, and in fact many seem really wretched.  “What does it profit a man to win the whole world and lose his soul?”

    They may have power, but they are unable to love their fellow human beings. And as such, they are in fact already living in hell. Because Hell is the suffering of being unable to love. If God’s love is the hidden grammar of the Universe, then Hell is being permanently away from it.

    So what is the answer to our current troubles? The same one that ever was. Reject excessive materialism and consumerism. Try to avoid mass media, or, if you can’t at least be skeptical about it. Work, love your family, love the people close to you, help your community. Try to change yourself before attempting to change the world.

    The current system is based on lies, and, as such, it can’t last long. It will end at some point, perhaps sooner than we all think. As Yeats said, “All things fall and are built again.” When the time comes, we have to be ready to build them again.

  • Articles - Featured - Italy

    Notes from the end of the liberal order: Firenze

    October 22, 2024 - By 

    Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande,
    che per mare e per terra batti l’ali,
    e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande!

    (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI)

    The Americans

    After Spain, I came to Florence, for a brief course. I’m staying in a monastery of benedictine nuns that rents rooms, located right at the edge of town. Wonderful place with a wonderful view. The only thing ruining it so far is a small group of young, loud, obnoxious American tourists staying here as well.

    If I had my way, I would impose a moratorium of ten years for American tourists anywhere in Europe. Maybe a hundred years just in case, although it’s pretty unlikely that America as such will still exist in a hundred years.

    I may sound prejudiced, but if it wasn’t for America, Europe would be not an Uncle Sam colony, the Middle East would not be constantly being bombed with its refugees ending up in Europe, and extreme liberal ideas would not kept being pushed everywhere.

    Twice in my life I saw American tourists breaking spaghetti in half to cook it, under the horrified look of an Italian. I also saw once an American cooking spaghetti in a frying pan together with the vegetables and the sauce.

    But it’s not that they commit such culinary heresies. It’s their attitude. Ignorance is forgivable, but Americans believe that they are right even when they are wrong. When an Italian points out their mistake, they don’t really accept that it is a mistake, or perhaps they don’t even understand it. They laugh and think that the Italians are oversensitive foodies.

    They just cannot understand that things in other countries are done for a reason.

    Americans will not drink tap water in Italy, or anywhere outside of the U.S. It’s unsafe, they say. But, outside of India and Pakistan, it’s probably in the U.S. where tap water is the most dangerous.

    It’s not that it’s unclean. It’s not what they take away — it’s all that they put in. From fluoride to lithium to who knows what else, American tap water has more chemicals than the periodic table.

    While in the U.S. water fluoridation has been ongoing since the 1960s, polluting our precious bodily fluids (under the excuse of fighting tooth decay), in Italy, tap water has never been fluoridated. Nevertheless, according to a recent report, Italian children have less cavities than their American counterparts.

    What was the true motive for water fluoridation, then?

    Who knows, but don’t ask an American. He still believes in the official stories of 9/11, JFK, Covid, the moon landing, and, of course, water fluoridation.

    The Africans

    There’s a park in Florence where African migrants hang around, loitering, listening to loud rap, selling drugs and counterfeit bags. There’s probably a similar park in most European cities nowadays.

    In Barcelona, Latin Americans and Moroccans comprised most of the non-native population, but in Florence, after the American tourists, Africans seem to be the most visible foreign presence in the city. But, alas, unlike the former, the latter won’t go back to their countries as summer ends. Italy is stuck with them.

    Of course, there are also other Africans who integrate into the formal economy and work as waiters, bus drivers, nurses, lifesavers, and so on, but still, each day a new boat arrives and there’s no room for all, so some overflow into the parks.

    I mean, they are not dangerous, at least not so far, but they don’t seem to contribute much to the local economy, unless selling cheap counterfeit bags made by the Chinese counts as a contribution.

    The Chinese

    Which brings me to the Chinese. They are also numerous, but, being less loud than the Africans, they are not so noticed. They also concentrate in particular regions. It seems that Prato is almost half Chinese now. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been there yet, but I can believe it.

    The Chinese at least are industrious and don’t tend to idly hang around in parks. They are good at doing business, and they do it from morning to night. The Jews of Asia, they say, although that might be an unfair characterization for both sides.

    It seems that a lot of “Italian” trinkets sold in souvenir shops, even if they say “made in Italy”, are made by the Chinese. In this case, Chinese migrants in Prato.

    But I like the Chinese. Once, and I told the story here before, a Chinese migrant gave me a ride to my hotel when there were no longer taxis or other form of transportation in town, and wouldn’t even accept money for it. I don’t think an American tourist would have done that.

    Also, I was confident enough to take a ride with a random Chinese migrant, but I don’t think I would if he was from any other nationality. Chinese and other Asians are trustworthy in that sense. I mean, I suppose that there are Chinese robbers, rapists, murderers or serial killers, but it’s not the first thing that comes to your mind.

    The Italians

    Now, first of all, let’s admit it, there is no such things as an “Italian people”. They don’t really exist. There’s Tuscans — subdivided in Florentines, Senese, Pisans, etc. — and Lombards, and Neapolitans, and Sicilians, and Sardinians, and so on.

    Don’t tell me that all of those groups form a single, unified people, regardless of what Garibaldi said.

    The Tuscans, and, in particular, the Florentines, are considered snobbish or arrogant, a bit like, say, the Parisians in France. “Hanno la puzza sotto il naso“, they say here. —they have their nose always turned up.

    There might be something to it, even though I haven’t noticed it. Curzio Malaparte, himself a Tuscan from Prato, wrote in “Maledetti Toscani” that Tuscans are the smartest people in Italy and that they do not suffer fools gladly, and that makes them hated by all the other Italians.

    That has not been my experience at all. If anything, the Tuscans I’ve met have been pretty kind, generous and even humble, very far from such stereotype.

    (I do think that might be true of the people of Milan, though.).

    The Liberal (Dis)Order

    Like in Spain, the Italian birth rate is also collapsing. Feminist propaganda is also very present, almost as much as in Spain. Wherever there’s feminism and liberalism, there’s birth rate collapse. Of course, there are many other reasons for it, as the phenomenon is present today in most countries, not all liberal democracies, but feminism, late marriages (or no marriage), abortion and birth control certainly play a role. After all, it’s women the ones who have (or do not have) babies.

    But the real problem of modern liberalism is simply that it doesn’t have an end or a goal — it just evolves to and further further radicalism, at the same time that it describes its critics as “radicals”.

    For instance, “Pope” Francis recently excommunicated his critic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom the media characterizes as “ultra-conservative”. But Viganò’s position is simply the same of any regular Catholic priest in 1962, prior to Vatican II. There’s nothing “radical” or “extreme” about it. It’s society, and the Church with it, which became more extreme, and continues to do so.

    And remember when Meloni was characterized as “far-right”? That didn’t age well.

    The other strange thing about the liberal order (some may call it the “new world order”) is how omnipresent it is. There is little room for variation. From increasing censorship in the name of “misinformation” to strange and possibly fake election results, it follows the same pattern of tricks everywhere.

    And yet, also here in Florence as in Barcelona, collapse does not seem to be coming any time soon. The city, despite the heat in these infernal summer months — certainly an inspiration for Dante — is bustling with activity and tourists. Not just loud, obnoxious Americans, but also obnoxious Germans, obnoxious Australians, obnoxious French.

    Dante wrote ironically that Florence’s fame grows even in Hell — in fact his Inferno is basically a list of famous florentines — and predicted that a great calamity sooner or later would strike the city as punishment for its many sins.

    Well, I suppose we’re more or less in the same situation in the West as a whole. Punishment will come, that much is certain. But who knows exactly when?