Arquivo para a ‘Social Network’ Categoria
How to live a crisis and the stable plateau
27
Jul
Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret wrote in 2010 “How to live in times of crisis” 
(Portuguese edition of 2013), and they certainly were not considered a pandemic, but they are already being seen as a potential horizon for humanity, and that horizon has certainly been aggravated .
Thus, philosophers and other types of visionaries who try to have a peaceful future have no foundation, or may even have, but based on philosophies and thoughts already overcome, a pandemic that demands even more from the great strategists and humanitarian thinkers.
On page 37 of the book it shows the symptoms of the crisis: “Wall Street knows only two feelings, euphoria and panic”, even without knowing it is what they think or promise “happiness”, but it is false and it follows depression, once analyzed more sensible can prepare for the next challenge.
The stable plateau has arrived, in terms of deaths, because the infection data are inaccurate, shows these peaks, now it is moving towards a stable plateau not only in Brazil, but in the world as a whole, it is because the infection cycle has reached the whole world, and in Brazil an entire country.
The cycle can be perceived as not as isolated poles of infection, even countries without new cycles that can be affected, but note that New Zealand and Taiwan are islands, so isolated by sea, they are more controllable, but trade can also reduce these countries.
Edgar Morin and his collaborator published in the book “Three mutations” important in the crisis and which are valid for a social situation of the pandemic, as they represent the ancient world, the world “nation states, industrial society, a segmented organization (see conflicts in the USA x China)… or the ecological challenge poses a question about what we are going to do with our planet ”(p. 57).
An industrial revolution put life in a frenetic way of life, “a classic industrial society that organizes itself in the classic sesame that you make of your life?”, And that remains a question that questions everyone, or recently launched in Portuguese “You have to change your life” by Peter Sloterdijk puts this around anthropotechnics, bringing to the debate a technical question.
MORIN, E.; VIVERET, P. Como viver em tempo de crise? (How to live in times of crisis?) Tradução: Clóvis Marques. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand do Brasil, 2013.
The goodness and the power
23
Jul
The goodness is that which is a common good, it is practically irreconcilable 
with the temporal power, the one that submits the other by force, in whatever way this submission, collective practices of imposing values, subtle ways of making exclusion and especially the exercise of force gross.
A definition by Max Weber is worth: “how each chance to impose, within a social relationship, one’s own will even against reluctance, no matter what that chance is based on” (Weber, 1922) is in the first chapter of the book “Economics and Society ”whose German edition is from 1922, another interesting definition is that of Hanna Arendt:“ Conceptually speaking, this means: Power is, in fact, essential to all states, including all types of organized groups, whereas violence is not ”in his 1960 book which is about “Active Life”, but which in the translation into Portuguese and English became“ The human condition ”.
If it is possible for the common good to be established, accepting the condition of Hanna Arendt, it will not be through violence, but through nonviolent power, and a brief look at history can see the consequences of violence as a form of power, almost always new forms of exclusion and submission of some parts of the population, as unanimity is impossible, it is necessary to live with difference, this is the formula that precedes any good worthy of the name and sustainable.
The resurgence of nationalism, ideological polarization, and especially the return to forms of violence that seemed to be gradually banished from society, show the crisis of humanism, which did not start today, but at the beginning of the last century and witnessed two wars.
To imagine that some common good can be established by force is therefore contradictory with what legitimizes some form of reasonable power and capable of influencing the conscious portion of society, every other form is destructive and can hardly be sustained, but the limits of force are today scary: the nuclear possibilities and the use of “smart” machines.
Betting on confrontation and conflict proved to be in the past of two wars and several colonial wars disastrous and unsustainable, and in the near future the one that brought the most violent and truculent leaders to power.
In times of pandemic, and with a visible future for a vaccine, one could think of total disarmament and who knows with the billions spent on wars we would have funds to reactivate economies and the dangers of a dark future could be removed.
The lessons on nonviolence and solidarity have not yet been learned, even in the common struggle against the pandemic, although there is always hope for such clear and definite warnings
Evil and humanism in crisis
22
Jul
Idealism continues to defend its ideology of State, of Ethics (morals and virtues
are other things, for example, ending corruption), now defending nations, a stronger State (left and right in the bottom want this) and for this reason one can speak of the zoon politikon, Aristotle’s political animal, then it is necessary to understand what the political animal is.
There are two conditions that may not become political: being degressed (we would say excluded today) or being superhuman (or divine, thus of a higher order than human laws and rules).
This is the first premise to understand “Rules for the Human Park – a response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism”, it is not, therefore, about seeing man as a “bug” in the zoo, but as a “natural” animal but that his humanism is in check.
The controversy that followed his speech at the castle of Elmau in Bavaria meant that the attempt (from the schools of Plato and Aristotle) to program history and humanism through social engineering failed, another important issue is the “domestication” issue.
Domestication is also not new, the philosopher received a direct influence from Nietzsche, and Foucault also addressed the topic, his proposal at the Conference that later became a book, was to reverse Heidegger’s priority of the ontological dimension over ontics (Sloterdijk, 1999,).
The controversial cause is because the philosopher wondered if we would not pass from the fatality “from birth to chosen birth and prenatal selection” (Sloterdijk, 2000) which was the main point of the controversy trying to show this the Nazi and fascist ideas of the war period .
The issues of genetic manipulation, which in Germany suffered strict restrictions until 2002 and the leadership of the Frankfurt School by Haberrmas were the background of this controversy, but what is fundamental is the humanism of Heidegger and Levinas, the theme of the Elmau conference is a main aspect, forgotten by many commentators, because humanism is really in crisis.
As for Sloterdijk’s response, he himself returns to the theme of in Spheres I differently when speaking of an aortic manifestation, the inorganic over the organic, after all, man came from Earth even by the biblical metaphor, so from the inorganic clay God “blew” the nostrils and introduced the spirit, like it or not, the theme is metaphysical and not religious, and if something aortic happens.
Time will not be the first time in history, man came after the heavens, the earth and the waters, again also in the various cosmogonies (even non-Christian) and the earth itself has already had other manifestations, such as the one that eliminated the dinosaurs, because a new one cannot occur, and it helps us to face the period (or civilization) crisis that we face.
The weather is different from ours; the comet returns after 6,800 years to visit us, we didn’t even have a record of it, and when it returns after another 6,800 years what it finds, only God knows, now is neowise (see the picture).
Civilizing evil, beyond the symbolic
21
Jul
We have already commented in a post on “Symbolic Evil”, a work by Paul Ricoeur
that should be read together with “Evil: a challenge to philosophy and theology and“, symbolic evil exists and can become structural, but in a good reading of philosophy means becoming a personal or social addiction, as well as virtue.
Philosopher Aristotle says that virtue is acquired through habit, practiced again and again, until it becomes a natural or social attitude if many people practice it, when social and human values are confused, evil spreads, and thus a society or civilization falls into disrepair.
To return to the virtues is to return to our roots as human beings, that is why it is not a question of Manichaeism, a perennial struggle between good and evil, but if symbolic evil is installed, we must return to our deepest root as human beings, that almost all contemporary philosophy recognizes a civilization malaise, in psychology Freud (Freud, 1969) and Jung (JUNG, 1988), even contemporaries like Sloterdijk and Byung Chull Han, almost everyone also in this pandemic warns of attitudes in a civilization crisis.
In a quick reading of Freud, with the possibility of being somewhat superficial, the malaise of civilization is equal to that of culture, says the author that there is a dichotomy between the instinctual impulses and civilization, that is, individuals and society, thus the good of civilization the individual manifests in drives and experiences a malaise.
Jung, on the other hand, points to the massification of Western man, crushed by the State, and to the defense that each one seeks through their own personality or religious attitude.
Morin’s work since the 70’s is all linked to the idea of a new humanism, and this specific text on the subject, he deepens what he considers an ethics necessary for this return to humanism, his work essentially points to the lost foundations, the institution of the complex method and a vision of planetary citizenship, in this text about the personal responsibility of each one.
FREUD, S. O mal-Estar na civilização (Edição Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicológicas Completas de Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21). Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1996.
JUNG, C.G. Presente e futuro. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1988 (tradução Márcia Cavalcanti).
MORIN, E. “A ética do sujeito responsável”. In: Ética, solidariedade e complexidade. São Paulo, Palas Athena, 1998.
The struggle of good against evil, weaknesses of good
15
Jul
The evil in Augustine of Hippo in book VII of the Confessions, is the absence of
good, just as the entire universe is ordered, although now we discover a universe with energy and dark mass, black holes, semi-new and galaxies disappearing and appearing, and many laws new in astrophysics, even so, there is a hierarchy, where some things stand out from others, and that is what Augustine drew attention to, and there was already in Augustine the question of free will.
But a tough lesson even for religious like Augustine, who abandoned the Manichean philosophy, is the struggle between good and evil, and this still dominates part of the philosophical dualism, where being inferior is not being evil, there are inferior good things and things more superiors, so the important thing is the loss of sense of what is good or bad, what Hanna Arendt called “The banality of evil” (Companhia das Letras, 1999), so someone can do something “inferior” without being “evil ”.
Those who want to give life pure delight, or who claim that it makes sense in a life well lived if we are “productive” and “active”, inspired by myths like a superior IQ or fortuitous inheritance, fortune in the Greek sense is different, even if this is done by oppressive means, where arguably the racial argument is the most disgusting of all, but where do these myths come from.
One of the great myths that has arisen since antiquity is Odyssey of Odyssey and Iliad (chants VIII of Odyssey and IX of Iliad), which means a symbol of man’s ability to overcome adversity, although there is the character Odysseus (the Greek name of Ulysses), would be born in Ithaca, son of King Laerte, who reigned in Anticléia.
Although James Joyce’s Ulysses, written from 1914 to 1921, speaks of a character Leopold Blum, considered by the author to be a modern man who is both strong and weak, cautious and rash, hero and coward, in an attempt to create a human being representative of humanity, however, is actually the modern lonely hero, an exquisite Don Quixote.
The contextualization of the Greek epic hero and the modern “hero” are, however, different, so to read Ulysses by Joyce it is necessary almost a script, which even some were made.
It was the psychologist Carl Yung who called attention to the “monologue” aspect of Joyce’s Ulysses, although he looks like an “ordinary” man, he is a single man and his “struggle”, warned Yung: “What is so scary about Ulysses it is the fact that, behind a thousand veils, nothing is hidden; of being neither turned to the mind nor to the world, but, as cold as the moon seen from the cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being and decay to take its course ”, this is the modern myth.
The heroes who appeared in the pandemic are not heroes of “war” or immortal myths, they are not immune to the pandemic themselves and live with fear, and even family isolation, what they should think about is the life worth living. for everyone, for the planet and for health.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Ulysses: A Monologue, UK: Haskel House, 1977.
A pandemic with many outbreaks
13
Jul
Although the large centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro States in particular, registered
declines in the number of infected and deaths, the pandemic has internalized and now reaches the innermost part of the country, which includes small poor cities, indigenous villages and regions with little access. Restroom.
The general graph (of deads) shows a stabilization around 1200 daily deaths, but it does not mean the control of the disease, nor any indication of a fall, since the expansion into the interior and deprived areas can cause new explosions, allied to an innacute opens of trades without criteria.
We present the general graph above just to indicate a general graph, since the policy under the responsibility of the regional governments and mayors (it was determined by the STF) does not allow us to say that there is a national policy of combat, although the regional health secretariats communicate and governments make state laws, such as the one that obliges the use of masks, with some regional control.
Another controversial issue is the use of medications, hydroxycloquine, the initial controversy, and now azithromycin, ivermectin and nitazoxanide are not recommended by medical criteria, the drugs in the background are given on a case-by-case basis, for example, for infectious conditions, depressive symptoms or respiratory problems that are acute, but each patient may or may not have conditions that prevent the use of a certain medication.
At the international level, some measures on economic weakness are beginning to be considered, such as helping the unemployed, how to articulate joint action plans between countries, the great example of which is the euro zone.
Preventive measures must continue for a long time, which I prefer to call social distance, because flexibility is already growing and little controllable, wearing masks, maintaining a certain distance in transport, walking even considering that they are done in airy areas are necessary and are part of of the so-called new normality, it is enough to see the countries left the peak.
At the social level, measures to prevent the worsening of the social crisis should be considered in the world.
The veiling of knowledge, night of thought ’
09
Jul
Arrábida’s Charter of Transdisciplinarity, written by the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi,
the Portuguese serigraphist Lima de Freitas and Edgar Morin, points out the process (prior to the Web), where excessive specialization and an impoverishment of Being created a veiling of thought, says the letter :
“… The contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
The problem then is how to create a knowledge that unites and a worldview that expands the impoverished and brutish human spirit, according to Morin’s own recipe: “it is necessary to replace a thought that isolates and separates with a thought that distinguishes and unites”.
All polarization and barriers between different thoughts are the root where dialogue is ignored, even if sometimes stated, the semantic closure of thought, whatever the principles and often moral, religious and even cultural are important, must exceed the pre-conceptions (in sense of Gadamer) and meet the positive in the Other.
The Letter of Arrábida says in article 14: “The opening involves the acceptance of ignorance, the unexpected and the unpredictable. Tolerance is the recognition of the right to ideas and truths contrary to ours ”, this is the meaning of replacing a thought“ that isolates and separates ”with another that“ distinguishes and unites ”, having a difference does not mean isolating or even separating.
It is the totalitarian idea of the single truth, even if religious, pragmatic or scientific, that often isolates and does not unite, in grounded dialogues there are always new elements to be considered and rarely are they properly heard and respected.
Physicist Barsarab Nicolescu, one of the signatories to the Arrábida Charter, in his own Charter of Transdisciplinarity, regarding quantum physics wrote: “… where does this blindness come from? Where does this perpetual desire to do the new with the old come from? The irreducible novelty of quantum vision continues to belong to a small elite of leading scientists ”, although the physical reality proves and surprises it.
Barsarab said in that his Manifest about “reality”, “In our century, Husserl and some other researchers, in an effort to question the foundations of science, discovered the existence of different levels of perception of Reality by the observing subject”, more than that the observer is part of the experiment, of the whole, and is not neutral.
All of our logic and actions are based on three axioms: The axiom of identity: A is A, The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not non-A; and the third is called the axiom of the excluded third: there is no third term T (T for “included third”) that is both A and non-A.
What Nicolescu says is what would happen if we became the included third, that’s what Stefan Lupascu (1900-1988) did when creating the logic of the included third (tertium non datur), including the T-state that is neither “current” nor “potential”, they replace the classic logic of “true” or “false”, and create a more generalized level that includes physics, epistemology and what is “consciousness”.
NICOLESCU, Barsarab. Transdisciplinarity and Complexity : Levels of Reality as Source of Indeterminacy. Available in: https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b15c4.php access: July 2020.
Tribute to Edgar Morin, 99 years old
08
Jul
July 8, 2020 Edgar Morin turns 99 years, with an impressive lucidity, recently
described the current pandemic as: “We have to learn to accept them and live with them, while our civilization has installed in us the need for certainties each time bigger about the future, often illusory, sometimes frivolous ”, the same frivolity that Peter Sloterdijk states:“ In this frivolous sphere, we thought we were able to control nature with sophisticated technology, but the virus brought us to our knees. Will our way of being in the world change?”.
Of Sephardic Jewish origin (Jews who settled in the Iberian peninsula), with the original name of Edgar Nahoum, was born on July 8, 1921 in Paris, his father Vidal Nahoum was a merchant from Salonica (the former Thessalonica), and his mother Luna Beressi, passed away when she was 10 years old, adopted the code name Morin during the French resistance struggle and remained.
In 1978 she married Edwige Lannegrace, to whom she dedicated the book Edwige, the Inseparable (2009), after her death in 2008, about him, she said a sentence by Montaigne: “It was him, it was me”.
He is currently married to the 61-year-old Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam.
He wrote 1956, Le Cinéma or l´Homme Imaginaire, Minuit, Paris. In Portuguese: Cinema or the Imaginary Man. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 1997, had previously written Year Zero of Germany (1946) and Man and Death (1951).
Among other books, the second book of great impact is The Lost Paradigm – for a new Anthropology, Zahar, Brazil, 1979. (French edition of 1973).
But his great work will be the six volumes of Method 1, the first “The nature of nature” publishing in 1977, the second of Method 2, “The life of life” (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” ( 1986), Method 4 “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – humanity of humanity: human identity (2001) and Method 6: Ethics (2004), the years adopted are from the original French editions.
In total he published more than 30 books, in 1983 he held a debate in Lisbon where he put “The epistemological problem of complexity” which became a book in 1985 published by the publisher Europa América Portuguese.
His central ideas in addition to the problem of complexity are the return to the human (which is called the lost paradigm), the transdisciplinary thought present in almost all of his work and was a signatory of the Letter of Transdisciplinarity of Arrábida by the serigraphist painter Lima de Freitas, for him, the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi, written in 15 synthetic articles, where we highlight:
“ … singly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
In 1985 he wrote “The epistemological problem of complexity” (Europa America, 1985), which was conceived from a debate held in Lisbon, in December 1983.
The essence of his thinking about complexity can be thought of in three new concepts, among them: the dialogical operator (understood differently from the dialectic operator), the recursive operator (which means to understand the consequences of the acts, in a continuous cause-effect relationship because the effect produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, so do not separate the part from the whole).
So we must unite separate things, namely: reason and emotion, sensitive and intelligible, real and imaginary, reason and myths, and, science and art, another essential thing is to consider that we are 100% nature and 100% culture, the old nature paradigm X culture that philosophy asks about what we are, from contractualists, through evolutionists to socio-Marxists (wrote My left), Morin answers in a new way (from Pena-Veiga: The ecological awakening: Edgar Morin and ecology complex).
He has many questions about our future, the following lecture explains this dramatic moment, that the pandemic can demonstrate that this is how we should perceive it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3t7UFTpDHE
Covid 19 in Brazil and the plateau
29
Jun
The analysis based on the number of infected cases is not feasible because
testing in Brazil is still small, done by companies or hospitals but only in cases where there is a suspicion of the need for hospitalization, and the estimate that 5% of deaths would correspond to the number of infected is not true because the isolation measures are different in several regions.
The plateau that started from the middle to the end of May has lengthened because the regions with the highest number of infected people were widening and in the case of Brazil going inland, called the epicenter, the name would be inappropriate if there was isolation, thus the contamination spread.
In addition to there being no isolation from the regions where infections started, which has been done in many countries since China where it started and the Wuhan region was epicenter, in this case the name is justified, both local measures and isolation regions were hard to contain the spread.
The second question is how to look at the graph and the numbers, the graph that at the beginning was an exponential and although it is necessary to look at making a logarithmic scale of the curve to see the degree of slope (for example, at the beginning, the number doubled every day and then every other day, etc.), now that the curve no longer has an exponential behavior, it is necessary to make the logarithm.
Looking at the logarithmic scale of the curve, the plateau is clearly perceived (graph above) and the numbers are rotating slightly above the thousand daily cases of death, the degree of infection as already said is not necessary, and thus it is perceived the plateau that has been going on for a month.
The reason was the initial analysis done here, with no isolation from the regions, the virus spread to more inland regions and the new “epicenter” is the interior of the country, and so it should continue into the month of July, either because of the ineffectiveness of isolation policies , or for the winter period
Corona virus: flexibilization and the endemic
22
Jun
Several countries in the world are preparing for a second wave of the corona
virus, Brazil has not left the first and seems to be stationed on a plateau around a thousand daily deaths, many analysts claim that Brazil is different due to its territorial extension, social inequality and density population, very well, but India and China too and control the infection with harsh measures.
Several specialists and infectologists point out that the flexibilization policy can be adopted if the possibility of reversion is admitted, that is, where the number of cases worsens returns to quarantine, but the depletion of the population after more than 100 days no longer allows.
Aline Dayrell, professor and coordinator of the UFMG (Brazilian Minas Gerais Federal University) Epidemiology course, says that we will only have total security if 70% becomes immune, see that the same indexes of social isolation are desired, and Prof. Carlos Fortaleza infectious disease at UNESP-Botucatu (Paulista State University) says the second wave is the possibility of any communicable disease, as long as the population is not immune.
India with more than 2 months in April, after the first case of infection had 800 and 27 thousand infected, being more populous than Brazil, but the numbers accelerated and 4 days ago it registered 2 thousand daily deaths, showing that even the measures harsh were not enough.
China and New Zealand, which apparently had controlled the corona virus, already admit that it is an endemic, that is, that it is not possible to completely eradicate the pandemic without a vaccine.
“The risk of spreading the epidemic is very high, so we must take resolute and decisive action,” said Xu Hejian, spokesman for the Beijing city government, the epicenter of the second wave of covid 19, in New Zealand. two people who came from the UK to attend a funeral, an exceptional case that the government admits and will review.
