Dear my T2 friends,
How is your week?
This week I’ve been listening to a very interesting podcast series about anarchism from my favourite podcast “Philosophize this”.
Anarchism, you know, those guys who are crazy enough to not only think about, but actually advocate a society without a government.
However, what’s interesting is, when you really read and do research about their work (like what Stephen West did for this series), you’ll see that they have quite a few very legitimate arguments, especially in our era, where so many troubles seem to come directly from the impotent and corrupted governments all over the world. More specifically, I was struck by Noam Chomsky's idea, that every single source of power must justify its own necessity. It's made me think a lot about how we seem to accept things just because we're afraid of change. Also, with the case of Vietnam, where there's only 1 political party, we seem to create an extremely vicious system, so corrupted that every politician who successfully gets into it must turn bad with greed and desire for more power.
And their main solution of forming many small but engaging communities reminds me a lot of the book “Small is beautiful” by E.F. Schumacher – one of the few economics books that I could highly recommend to people.
However, this task seems to become more and more difficult, as people nowadays often spend the whole day alone with their phone, their laptop, their netflix, and their airdrop. I guess it’s not an exaggeration to say that many do not have even 1 real touch or connection with anyone or anything in the world around them for the whole day.
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Anyway, for reading, this week I’ve gone through the first 30% of “Open” by Andre Agassi - such an interesting autobiography of a person who doesn’t really have a childhood, who is treated like mold for his father to shape into a tennis player - through terribly hard work in terribly long hours from the very young age. Reading what he’s gone through to become the champion, the best in the world, I can’t help but feel terribly grateful for my own childhood, where my parents at least allowed me to have playtime and didn’t force me to fulfill any of their dreams.
Really love how honest Mr Agassi is, in recalling all the struggles he’s gone through, especially in his adolescence, with a lot of disobedience and rebel. To be honest, it’s eye-opening for me, and quite touching as well, the part where he wrote about how, by making all the weird hairstyles and wearing colourful weird clothes, he’s actually trying to hide his true inner self, full of hatred, bitterness and resentment.
“It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice”
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For fiction, unfortunately I’ve had to quit “In the first circle” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after the first 10%. Quite ashamed to admit that my English is not that adequate to fully comprehend this book. I don’t know, maybe it's actually that complicated in the Russian original version, or it's the translator who does a bit of show-off for his rich vocabulary, but it’s just beyond my level at the moment, even though I’m deeply intrigued by the content, especially some of the philosophical discussions.
Hence, I've decided to postpone it for another try in 3 or 5 years’s time, when, hopefully, I’ll expand my vocab enough to fully digest it.
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Finally, a quote I've been pondering this week:
To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge
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Thanks for reading!
Would appreciate any comment/thought you have on it.
Have a lovely Sunday! :D
