I am starting to pack and taking the morning plane back to Sweden. This time I was here I started to appreciate Sweden, it's ain't such a bad country and it is still some way ahead Latvia. I don't know if it is really getting worse or it is just the problem of my changing perspectives, but hell what's the hell is going on in this country (Latvia)? Ok, politicians were thugs also before but they seem to be getting too rude and too sure they can get away with it. Not talking about this mystical social construction of "crisis". I don't say that there is no crisis, but you can definitely sense the social construction of the idea of crisis (read Hacking "Social Construction of What?"). The same as there was a social construction of "inflation" here which was much above what was realistic levels of it and getting into such ways, talks, interpretations etc. where it did not have to appear at all and being used as an excuse for everything (mostly increasing prices (heh :)). Now crisis is used for the same purpuse (hehe - increasing taxes, prices, firing people, reducing salaries, making people work more, hehehehe... oh so logical). And what can we do - we have a crisis!
Maybe my current mood also has something to do with Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" which I am currently dutifully finishing. I am still skeptical about this book, but I cannot fail to notice that it is influencing the way how I look at the things. When the plane from Dublin landed in Riga with one wheel (well, was not really one, in fact only one blew up while taking off), my mom was saying almost with tears in her eyes (I have a very sensitive sentimental mom, which ain't that bad but is a fact) that they were lucky. So I attacked the word "lucky", because the pilots simply did their job and did it well. But I have never been really into superstitions anyways, and in big lines her code of moral is my code of moral. And for me it is just so natural and childish almost like my ex-boyfriends principles. Well, Ayn does a good job putting them down onto a paper and filling with them more than 1000 pages... still I think I enjoyed "Sophie's World" more. And she really sounds a bit too much in some places...
Well, but just it is curious to read it exactly now, in the current "times of emergency" and see these stupid faces described by her so well among the Latvian top leaders.
Ah, I will discuss the bugs of holes in Ayn Rand when I meet Katya, maybe I need to make a list. For the beginning, the same science has proven that our 5 sences can easily mislead us (don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that), 2ndly - we cannot replace our morality with rationality. Killing can be rational sometimes and it is not rational at all to feed those alcoholics, which are not freezing on streets at minus 15 and sooner or later gonna freeze anyways. If we did not have these centuries-long built moral feelings, we would not feel bothered maybe. Then it would be totally rational to leave them to freeze to death. Now because we have this irrational morality, it is rational to do something about them because otherwise we will feel guilty. So there is some kind of contradiction and vicious-circle-egg-chicken thing... I am a simplifier, naturalist, rationalist, objectivist, but I am still aware that Dr. Stadler is also true: "what can you do when you need to deal with humans..."
Celine Dion - Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
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