Blog 27 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012



The Saw Cross as a Marker for a Axed Tree



One of the intellectually and morally most important questions facing Latvians is why is it that a people whose total number is less than two million cannot create a goal oriented society and nation among themselves?

I realize that to aim for and get a goal takes determination and long practice. So, let me replace the word ‘goal’ with ‘vision’. Why are Latvians so visionless? Why is it so difficult for Latvians to see ahead?

Another no less important question facing Latvians is why the Latvian Saeima is so supportive of inequality and uncritical of pro neo-liberalism? After all, as emphasized in most of the previous blogs, Latvian geographic history is based on people living in the forest, who, when they emerged from there, become farmers. The typical Latvian farm house in the not so distant past was located in the middle of a squre of trees, evidence that once upon a time the farmhouse started as a ‘sokle’ a clearing in the forest.

While Latvian history records the presence of boyars, large land holders, the boyars were soon replaced by Germanic barons. Both boyars and barons were the equivalent of oligarchs in a landscape populated by small farm households.

A third question belongs to this same cluster of questions, i.e., why is the Latvian information media mute as to the above two questions? Why does the arm of the Latvian government lie so heavily on the shoulders of the Latvian media as the following article contends: http://politika.lv/article/valsts-roka-uz-mediju-pleca

In so far as the above questions are rhetorical, they all arise from the central question asked in my previous blogs and is the central theme of this blogesay—Why is self-sacrifice among those who belong to the Latvian government lacking, but is so incessantly demanded by the government of the Latvian people?

Let us start off with the question about ‘vision’. As the following shows, visualizing the future today has been reduced to ‘visual analytics’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVL2Y6nfGiM&feature=related . This is all about data streaming out of a given system, but it has little to do with human beings, who are never central.

However, what Latvia needs is, let us be frank, a Copernicus—an individual or team of individuals who can bypass the analytical and political jungles, both; and see that the future is not flat, but in every sense very different from the present given system.

This takes lots of imagination and redundancy, because imagination needs to be assimilated before it can turn itself into a projection. Take for example my insistence that the future has more to do with the horse than space travel. For me the horse is not horsepower in the sense of how much work an engine may do, but how well a gelding may draw my wagon. [When I was very young, I had my hair cut by a barber, who saved hair to make horse collars.] I see the horse draw, at best, a plow with two knives, not ten or more as my neighbor’s tractor does now. In the former world (as well as the one to come), the countryside has many people, whereas the latter has seasonal foreign workers.

In my projection of the future, I see less inequality, whereas visual analytics sees, more than likely, cheaper labor and greater disparity in individual income. Indeed, in a reforested environment, my projection enables one to visualize a society with more democracy, whereas great income disparity is just a hair’s breadth from a picture that shows a clerk bowing to the baron http://iflizwerequeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Screen-shot-2011-05-21-at-11.04.24-AM.png .

When visualization cannot get past visual analytics, one may be sure that democracy for all is blocked by a democracy for relatively few, which is the very definition of a ‘parliamentary’ http://www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/parliamentary.htm  democracy. Moreover, a democracy for a relatively few will attempt to block democracy by attempting to control the information media and down talk populism http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/279529 , because the public at large knows in its animal gut that it is being lied to.

Indeed, this ‘lie’ is at the root of the Latvian tragedy and mystery: why there were so few Latvians who overtly resisted the Bolsheviks http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/referenceencyclopedia/g/blbolshevik.htm , when the Soviet army arrived in Latvia and let the country’s leadership be decapitated http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/279452 , so to speak.