Moods #5

 

got this image from here

This image is so interesting, Rodin's the Thinking man is in the middle ground of this spread. If you can look at the foreground, we can see the different armies taking charge to attack a territory. We can also see an image of the Great Wall of China, believed to be one of the best defense wall ever built by men, aside from the wall built around Constantinople. Anyways, this image evoked in me what I have been thinking about for a while now, most of the history of great walls ended in its failure to protect what's inside it. Too bad for the institution and for the civilization contained within it. But then, every ending will always have a new beginning. Let's wait and see if there will be a new regeneration after the fall of institution/civilization. But in the mean time, let's lament the reality of the fall.

This is why I don't believe in the power of institutions over our individual personal lives.

Institutions rise and fall, it is organic because it depends largely on the people and their trends in a given time period. And because it is organic, it is continually changing, transforming, developing, getting destroyed, until it annihilates. Then another system will take over, and we will start the cycle again. If we really want institutions lording over our lives, then it will really take a lot of hard work from the people it purports to govern. The people must be relentlessly vigilant and must take an active position in shaping the institution, but do we have that energy every single day to do that? Eventually, if we want to follow this logic, the people will elect councils to be the ones to dedicate their lives in the shaping of ever changing institutions. These people who will populate the council must be wise, ready to give their all to their duty, somehow removed from the humdrum of every day life. Just like how Plato had designed the stratification in society through his treatises. There will be philosopher-rulers, there will be the artists and the business people, and then there will be armies, well we must read The Republic again to get the gist of this.

Anyways, all I am saying in this post is that we are responsible in living our own lives but we are also part of the human population so we also have a duty to our society. And as we face all kinds of destruction, natural, societal, governmental in our everyday lives now, isn't it time for us to face the reality and scrap the old institutions because the earlier we start doing it, the better the chance to build a stronger foundation in our lifetimes (we still have the fresh despair of how the old one is painfully inconvenient, let us use the pain to imagine a better one now). Of course, in reality it will take many decades for it to become deeply entrenched in our lives, I may not be even here when it starts to take root, but we have to start somewhere and isn't it the right time to do it now?