Awards Are Weapons of Mass Influence

Awards as Weapons of Mass Influence and Our Award Vitiated World

 

“Government awards, honours and titles only serve to distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior and get disgraced by the inferior.”– George Bernad Shaw

Awards are part of colonial legacy
Awards are part of partisan politics

Awards are creating establishment-friendly experts, writers
Awards are sub-standardizing writers, thinkers

Awards are the bribe that the State/globalists pay to the RIGHT to certify their WRONG as RIGHT

Awards are the investment of the State/globalists on the WRONG to convert them as celebrity opinion makers

 

 

Nowhere in history has we found even a single instance of the evolution of certain new ideas or development in the cognition process that is being rewarded, encouraged or sponsored by the establishment. Wisdom or truth actually emerges first as blasphemy even today. The thought of Socrates, Sri Buddha, Jesus Christ and even the mechanical ideas of Galileo and Karl Marx were all suppressed by the respective establishments of their time because every new stage of wisdom or new idea is certain to emerge as truth and it is always pro-people and anti establishment. “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”, wrote the great German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.

Then suddenly, how come the modern society is being described as the unique pioneer in developing new wisdom, truth, new knowledge and new ideas? Because it is all a sort of ‘domesticated’, ‘harmless ‘ and marketable truths (half-truths) that are being churned out today. The wholesome truths, thus having come to undergo degeneration under the domineering impact of modern science, started to devolve to their simpler form, as some sort of linear truths or half-truths. There cannot be a more damaging and fraudulent fad in the intellectual ingenuity as this fallacy of giving prizes/awards to thinkers, scholars and scientists. Who would have dared to award Socrates, Jesus Christ, Rousseau, Swami Vivekananda or Gandhiji? Only a superior society that existed above the values of Socrates, Jesus Christ, Rousseau, Swami Vivekananda or Gandhiji could have awarded them which neither existed then nor even today. All these add up to the conclusion that this very concept of award, prizes or sponsoring greatness is unnatural, mechanical and plainly fraudulent, and the whole society itself has degenerated to less complex or mechanical system that can understand and accommodate only half-truths.

Further, this only helps to mechanize or linearize (singularize) an otherwise multidimensional and integral cognition process in the budding. Knowledge dissemination is a social behavior of the social man; to treat it as a business or mechanical venture amounts to virtually throttling this vital trait of social man in the bud. This can otherwise be described as conspiracies of ignorance that was being built up over the years of a faulty evolutionary process in modern society.

The farce of awards and honors: Post-modern scientists are largely a Nobel Prize-towed lot. Being a competitive and linear process, the participant can only think of the next building block that can be put on the steadily building edifice of the linear structure, called modern science. Be the subject matter pertains to the micro or the macro world of science, only those at the top can engage in scientific research, as the whole scientific structure is a linear edifice. This is true of all fields including art and sports all of which are ending up as the purpose-lost, meaning-lost business or competition ventures.

The concept of giving awards and prizes presupposes the very donor or institutor of such awards as reigning at a higher social/spiritual/intellectual level or that these god-fathers are supposed to be above good and evil, right and wrong in society and that they can judge independently as to what is good and valuable in society. This however is quite unusual and abnormal development in a highly democratic and scientific society today.

This concept may be natural on a setting between the children and parents or between kids and the grown-ups, the immature and mature people and the like, and the practice may be considered as part of the confidence building measures to the kids and the immature people. Normally we encourage kids and children to show prowess in their activities, sometimes by giving them certain prizes and other appreciation so that they may grow in self-confidence.

However, by the practice of giving awards and prizes to purportedly grown-up and matured people, especially experts and scientists, society is only promoting the ever growing immaturity in society, especially in science and other intellectual fields. Even otherwise, awards and prices, in the form of artificial growth boosters, to writers and intellectuals are what chemical fertilizers are to plants, or are like hormone-feeds to the broiler chickens.

 

This process is also similar to developing hybrid product like the coke or the cloned species like the broiler chicken or hormone injected baby girl who suddenly develops sex organs of a mature lady. Reportedly, the brothel keepers in cities like Taipei follow the practice of injecting baby girls below 10 (bought from debt-ridden parents) with female hormones and these baby girls soon develop the features of mature ladies in a couple of months, only to be soon sold to rich old men who will take their virginity and use them for a short period.

 

Here we can also equate the modern society itself to an artificially hormone-fed and suddenly developed ‘lady’ whom many like to exploit. Now suppose the very patrons, donors, god-fathers or institutors of such awards are indeed fakes of the highest order, and imagine the sort of awardees and prize-winners they choose. Well, that exactly is what is actually happening in modern society. Today such self-styled professional ‘philanthropists’ and forces however are functioning as the literal rulers and runners of the present human society while the sort of awardees and prize-winners are functioning as the dutiful service providers (experts, scientists, consultants, brokers and the like) and as “authoritative” defenders of such a world. Today the organized religions, modern sciences and arts, and the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy are the self-styled leading major institutions in the world that are literally the UNDEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS and they literally run the present ‘democratic’ nations and the world today.

In the prevailing culture, every patron or award donor fully knows the fact that they can, in the process, rule the roost in their respective sector. In the same way, the god-fathers behind the biggest award in the world – the Nobel Prize – can literally rule the world. This indeed is the strategy of the global corporate click that rules the world from behind the Nobel Prize and who operate from behind scene – undemocratically. Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator said:”It’s not the people Who vote that count; it’s the people Who count the votes”. The moot question is as to who appointed them to their supposedly preeminent positions in the first place.

It is another matter that in the meantime they also play games with prizes and awards. A string of controversial Noble peace prizes, such as the one for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chief, Mr. Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Mr. Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 had some critics asking if the world’s most coveted award has become one of politics, instead of peace.

Awards being used for creating popular images and trend to convenient angles in politics and economics has been the hallmark of this concept, particularly during the 80’s and 90’s. They include harsh dissidents of opposing systems like the erstwhile Soviet Union, China.

These developments and the halo that the Nobel laureates acquire in the struggle have led to the debate on the norms and the impact of the Nobel prizes. It is clear that this ‘prestigious’ award provides not only international and moral support of the cause, but also protects the individual working for it. This makes matters difficult for the local government. There is also the criticism from the “affected” Governments that the Norwegian committee is “influenced” by some Western powers, who want to assert their supremacy and strength and their hold on the third World.

“The Nobel peace prize isn’t the granting of sainthood”, said the non-voting secretary, Mr. Geir Lundestad, Yesterday. “There have been many winners with dark things about their past, but they have managed to raise themselves above them. That is the point.” (Times of India, Oct. 15, 1994 reported quoting Associated Press).

But why then is this game of one upmanship be confined to the super power players alone? Some in the third world too do this but in their own style as they cannot afford the way super power play it with their super rules and sophisticated strategies.

 

Some scientists have also manipulated the ‘Padma’ awards to make it appear that they are big personalities. A group of Indian influential scientists, who occupied key managerial positions and have left science for over two decades continue to share awards among themselves. An agricultural scientist who retired in the mid Seventies was selected for the INSA award in 1993 for his work in plant disease. In another case, a scientist was given the G.M. Modi award for his services to the cause of Indian science after he held the position of a Union Minister. In 1991, he was selected for Dr. Y. Nayudamma Memorial award for 1989 for his contribution in physics, says an Indian newspaper reports.

The Indian Supreme Court has criticized the way the awards are being given. The court observed that the system of giving awards “is getting degenerated with the passage of time.” The court suggested that one way to check this degeneration was to reduce the number of awards so that only deserving persons were honoured.

A study of the Indian National Science Documentation Centre has shown that a few top Indian scientists had cornered most of the science awards during 1980-93.

However, when the very concept of award/prizes is unnatural and fought with many dangerous “side-effects” and “after-effects” this sort of manipulations only amount to be just another fiction inside bigger fictions, the creation of one more vicious circle inside bigger vicious circles. This is like the selling of adulterated synthetic medicines the side-effects of which become less (because of the less contents inside due to adulteration). Sometimes as the genuine medicines often end up as more side-effect prone, more dangerous than the disease against which it is being used and getting subsequently banned, a frequent practice in the west which then find their market in the rest world, third world. Thus India having scientists and writers at the top with awards and honours and who are really inferior comparing to those getting no awards and honours is indeed a blessing in disguise, for genuine science is more dangerous than take science.

Having been the adherents for the last 100 years of what they consider as their gospel, namely, the game theory, the management gurus of market economy has set this planet on this abstract delicate equation of mathematics on which it rest through data processing analysing and margin extraction. In practice it comes close to the concepts like parasitism, brain drain etc. It is all about out-guessing the other and getting the better of a bargain. Today wealth, let alone knowledge, is no more generated, only exchanged or converted in different forms. And the margin always going to the middleman whose only genius (success-story) revolves around manipulations and to extract the maximum possible margin. The process being mostly scientific and mechanical, the result is that almost all natural wealth is being converted into synthetic wealth––synthetic products (waste) and money that glut and pollute today.

 

INTELLECTUAL PROSTITUTION IN MODERN BOOK CREATION

 

Truth is not market friendly; falsehood is. Today every development or what we call progress in every field turns out to be smart, sophisticated attempt to sell imitations of good, right and truth with all sorts of market support and expert service to look real. The world today ropes in every modern expertise and talent to correct and glorify the imitations, the wrongs and the falsehoods. What is already good, right or true does not need any support or service and therefore there is no much market margin in dealing with what is really good, right or true.

Thus market always shun and abandon what is actually good, right and truth often by falsifying them in their effort to sell imitations, wrong and falsehood with all sorts of market support like world class packaging and tantalizing advertisements in the forms of mega show business like ‘Beauty Pageants’ ‘Award Nights’ Noble Prizes and other stagecraft by the market-minded state establishment and its elite corps. Great vicious circles created by these faulty or aberrational developments are fast feeding on themselves and are all about to burst. The bubble called modernity is getting bigger and bigger and it may explode any time. And one of them is called the modern book world.

There are tens of millions of modern books, all of which are strictly the products of the present book world norms of the global market economy. And these market norms and practices are all about presenting the already fragile truths and realities as marketable truths and marketable realities, which in the process end up as anti-truths and unrealities.

Today we have books in every branch of knowledge that offer compartmentalized and specialized knowledge and expertise to all sections of society, each according to their respective taste, trend and culture. The trend only proliferates as science and market helps open new frontiers of ‘knowledge’.

Even as experiments using high profile twists like ‘new ideas’, multi disciplinary approach’ alternative thinking etc. are doing land office business in the world of books, book sellers and libraries face a new problem: shrinking readership due to the widespread paralysis of the thinking mind. Why has this man-to-man dialogue become almost a feeble exercise and man has entered a stage of chronic passivity with his taste for life and capacity for pleasure touching their nadir?

“Perfection of means and confusion of end seem to characterize our age,” Albert Einstein wrote in his later years. An increasing obsession with technique and competence, a growing narrowness of vision has tended to replace that sensitivity to the human condition.

Today man has no other option with regard to the total dependency on his tools (the hi-tech science-market systems) and the tools’ growing omniscience and omnipotence. The trend gained such ascendancy that all sorts of duplications, versions and appearances of tools and their effects began to be created. The world of imagery (communication and mind-management) took control with the help of expert version–makers, appearance-creator, taste-makers, make-believers, computers and artists.

Under these conditions, how can we accommodate truth or reality which, of course, is not at all a bed of roses that may be chased so passionately? Today it is sheer helplessness and optionlessness that rule the roost in the timid world of truth and reality. Here it is interesting to read what the American philosopher, Allan Watt, had to say on this extreme difficult situation for realities to make even a fragile appearance before the people which, as an example, he says how difficult it is to make people understand the complicated proposition that the modern methods of making money destroys real wealth.

All these point to the conclusion that man today can only be fooled and cheated, that no well-meaning human dialogue is possible in the present book world if one is to fallow its methodology which is solely a big business affair and which no ordinary man can think of doing, let alone any writer can undertake by himself.

But is the present leadership which is invariably floating under the juggernaut of the global market force––even the American elections are turning out to be the costliest ever with the giant companies pumping billions for all the candidates in election––capable of undertaking this highly complicated and always ‘thankless’ job of protecting truth which practically means saving the mankind from many imminent known and unknown dangers? Let alone the globally publishing fraternity and the media mugals, every modern oligarchical sector is commercialized to the brim. Telling the truth, of course, ensures the long-time credibility of every intellectual pursuit, which is supposed to be the responsibility of all, including the market and government. But the problem arises when truth and realities are going to be detrimental and even catastrophic to their own business and professions. Under such condition, as in the case today, there is more ‘sense’ or worldly wisdom, they think, in withholding or evading truth and reality than in spelling the beans. This is the secret of all business and professions including that of the political leaders. Nobody is going to sabotage their own statusquo or positions. Mickhail Gorbachev learned that lesson the hard in recent history.

All these means that the prevailing helplessness and optionlessness which had first gripped the ordinary and the intellectual bloc of the society have also now gripped the whole gamut of the present population, including the leaders and the oligarchial section. The world today realizes with shock that its leaders only have feet of clay, even when the trying times comes to their profession as leaders.

The whole modern society has been reduced be a big market engaged in fooling each other, the book world being no exception. Looking ahead in solving the catastrophic problems facing the mankind the leaders appear more helpless than the led; the exploiters appear more helpless than the exploited; the ‘developed’ have become more of a liability to the ‘non-developed; the experts and professionals appear more helpless to do away with their expertise and professions than the laymen. The long sophistication and the ignorantism process have all however, hit the bottom, the misled, the victims, the laymen and the common men can now no further be misled or victimized without a correction. And the more pathetic is the fact that the leaders, the developed, the experts and the exploiters too find themselves being misled and victimized in the long sophisticated and aberrational evolutionary process which too has become as natural as any other modern realities.

I think the biggest problem man faces today is his helplessness to distinguish good from evil, harmless from harmful, necessary from unnecessary, pleasure from pain, peace from war and fact from fiction. The problem to value the real and the good, the harmless and the necessary is indeed a Herculean task today. All that modern man is left to do is that he follows the mainstream which is nothing other than what the market follows or what the money ‘values’.

All this is the end of the story of an age, the pathetic story of a species called man who is being swallowed up by what we love to call ‘progress’ or ‘development’. Modern intellectual or cognition process, as we have now seen is all a big business affair, which has spread its tentacle to all branches and their tributaries. One cannot take on it without getting himself familiarized with its basics and their latest trends. To understand its wheels-within-wheels play one has to master not only the million plus artificial symbols spread over hundreds of volumes in various disciplines and branches but also the expertise to make use of these information and data mechanically––electronically––by computers. Even if one may prove the whole exercise not only worthless but also highly damaging even in the short run now––let alone in the long run earlier––and which is what really is going to happen. One cannot, however, do so without mastering the diverse techniques and expertise which otherwise means that hunting truth is an ‘undoable’ or an unattainable task for any honest seeker of truths and realities. There are reportedly dozens of research papers and thesis on how to write an “irresistible” query letter, the techniques of which the fragile author is supposed to master if he ever want to make an inquiry with his prospective publisher boss.

And when at last, we have learned much of what the world has to present with great effort and peril we only end up contradicting what we have thus learned––that our heroes are zeros, that the modern facts are all fictions, that our science makes more nonsense than sense, that we are all fooling one another, that we have become poorer in learning the world, that modern learning in reality is a de-learning process––that it only helps to generate ignorance––that modern progress is actually decay and decline. Under such development who will come forward to help publish such work?

Now, what is this very concept of writing? Man lived of millions of years without ever having a botheration to write or reflect. In this connection refer the topics on memory boosting, overprocess, middlemanism etc. in this book. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live”, Henry David Thoreau wrote. Man lives, machine (professional) writes; writing to live is not manly but machination––mechanization.

Further by insisting on a particular methodology, idea or style (Times style book varieties) they force the author to make his product as popular and tantalizing as fast food. This simply is an act of intellectual demography which, in my opinion, only helps to generate intellectual pollution, as its byproducts, side-effects and after-effects, just as the case of industrial pollution generated in the factory production of any industrial product. Today man gasps for want of fresh air in almost all major cities; the widespread intellectual pollution has left modern man passive leading to the paralyze of the thinking mind as has been illustrated for example, in recent best sellers like the Defeat of Thought by the French philosopher, Alan Finkielkrant, or the Closing of American Mind by the famous American philosopher, Allan Bloom. Perhaps Thomas Hobbes (1588 –1679) detected such intellectual social aberration as early as in early 17th century that he condemned democracy as demography in politics and sought a ban on it. He wrote “A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press.”

This also is a pointer to the fact that these types of dangerous outcomes of professionalism and expertise in the cognition process are the result of the razor sharp prowess of the budding induction methodology which developed the new analytical science and the new analytical philosophy and which were also born as the brain-child of equally raiser sharp prowess of ‘pure reasoning’ by Francis bacon, Descartes and William Shakespeare in the highly fertile womb of the perverted Elizabethan era in the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ (market economy era in its infancy). The great Indian poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) described this sort of ‘pure reasoning’, reasoning for removed from their natural context (logic without soul or humanity) like this : “logic is like a knife with both sides blade, it bleeds the hand that uses it”. And all the modern scientific developments have only proved the great Indian sage right: modern science is bleeding the society to death that exclusively uses it today, and man is shrinking in every field and is awaiting the final crunch any time––we can call it the big crunch.

Here it is noteworthy that although printing was an old Chinese concept, the inductive exploitation of this invention as newspaper and the first press was the British idea. The first newspaper came out in print in 1670 in London.

In modern society the most maligned and polluted part or area is its cognition sector, and the more frightening fact about this is that the cognition sphere happens to be the father sphere of all other spheres of the human society. Here the true knowledge process thus having been a long taboo what is being imparted or allowed is the sort of second-hand knowledge. This synthetic or the controlled knowledge which is piling up as know-how and which having long become the norm has ended up the only ‘real’ knowledge today.

The evolution of trained writers, sponsored intellectuals, professional writers or knowledge workers seems to be the worst calamity that has befallen the intellectual process today. The concept is like a scientist taking out a fact or formula from a particular natural phenomena after isolating it from its natural context and applying it generally with added special effects (mixing it with other ‘convenient’ facts or equation to sharpen the new products) or like a cunning journalist separating a news item from a particular context and applying it as a plot in a bigger general context with special effect of prowess and other expertise.

The trained writers or sponsored intellectuals are to follow the strict code of conduct with regards to the propagation of particular ideas, developments and their widespread application the way their paymasters, award/prize givers want them to do. “There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink,” wrote Plato of the sophists of his time whom he regarded as intellectual perverters who, on the other hand, successfully conspired with the establishment to poison his mentor and the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, who, they thought, was infringing their ‘intellectual property rights’ and ruining their ‘business’ by influencing the minds of the Athenian youths. Plato seems to have visualised WTO’s intellectual property rights doing land-office business in the 21st century with the mass evolution of knowledge workers and modern day sophists taking charge everywhere. With regards to the emergence of market economy as the leader of human society at the time of its crunch Plato’s prediction has surprisingly come true. “Ruin comes when the trader, whose heart is lifted up by wealth, become ruler,” he wrote in Republic in the BC.

As the inner demons of the society ‘thinking’ machines are taking over the charge from man. As he loses all his resistance one by one, both in the material and spiritual sectors, he seems to be succumbing to all sorts of machinations of the mechanical world.

 

CONCLUSION: The winners, however, are always the smartest and the most sophisticated whom or which, of course, the owners of the chains (market) decide. Therefore, though invisible, market is the prime constant, winner here. Here, even the Nobel prize awardee too is a market player for the single reason that this exactly is what the award is for. And the only certain losers here are the crowd. As the crowd or mass has many heads and no brain -–thanks to democracy – anybody working his individual brain here is considered an odd-man-out and as going against the mainstream and thus ends up a far cry in the din or in the wilderness. Only the mechanically loudest and the most superficially ‘technical’ can win the day.

 

 

Note: A related article: 

PROFESSIONALISM: THE BANE OF CIVILIZATION: http://www.humanfirst.in/essays/professionalism-the-bane-of-civilization/